Absence, Pneumonia, George Bailey, Rainstorms
/Have you ever just not shown up? For your own life?
Just kind of kept hitting snooze and hoped your own reality would understand?
I do this, often. I just get all busy about being busy and then I burn out and then I can't be bothered with my actual LIFE life portion of the program.
In college? I pretended to be sick for MAKE A DIFFERENCE DAY. Who skips out on Make a Difference Day? That's like saying, "I do not want to make a difference. I want world hunger to persist and I want my part in remedying it to remain unspoiled. It is more important for me to catch up on my napping because I am a college student and I do not nap nearly enough three times a day to interrupt naptime for a couple hours of service to my community for which I will receive a free t-shirt and many donut holes." I apparently skip out on Make a Difference Day. I pretended to Not Hear the voicemails from all of my earnest friends telling me they'd wait another 15 minutes for me...maybe I was still in the shower...or maybe I got the meeting place wrong or...
Maybe I just was an epic fail of a person at showing up for her own life.
In my home, you would not believe how often I fail to show up. Um, hallo. Clearly too busy here watching "House Hunters" and "Design on a Dime" to swiff the floor right now! Or paint a cream-colored wall covered in finger prints that I ruefully stare at every day wondering why I have lived here 3 years and still expect Kool-Aid man to come bursting through the wall and give me an excuse to give that wall some attention.
***
***
This week, I started showing up for my own life.
I did dishes and laundry and spent time cleaning a home in which the mess was not mine, all of which I have failed to show up to do for months and months and months.
I went grocery shopping with Little Man at 7 a.m.
I bathed Little Man at midnight o'clock, and then rocked him while singing to Baby Girl at dead tired o'clock.
I learned to redirect Baby Girl's petulant behavior. I schlepped Baby Girl to daycare even though she just started falling to pieces about going.
I prayed and I prayed and I prayed. For strength. ***
The strength came. It came from the recesses of places in my mind and heart that had grown dim and moldy from inattention. You know the part in "It's a Wonderful Life" when George Bailey scampers around the house just loving on his old dilapidated home with the drafts and shifty staircase? That's how I felt this week. I felt delirious from the exhaustion, but also delirious from the reminder that, Ahh, this life is just a mess, a great complicated mess, but how lucky I am with this gorgeously messy family to care for and this simple purpose: just to make sure there are bananas and cereal and clean cloth diapers and the crumby floors get picked up so that there are no ant picnics indoors.
Oh, this messy, simple, loud and gorgeous life!!!!! ***
Loverpants, please get better soon, though. I would make an awful single parent, and we know you are suffering and we miss you so.
***
Here is Baby Girl looking up at me. We are playing a game called "On your marks..." It is a very complicated game we invented, no one could possibly have come up with it other than we, especially since we made it up in a rainstorm.
Little Man. Love.
