I’m sitting here on another sick day. I’m subsisting on Happy Camper pills and Kind bars, though they have made me neither happy nor kind. I’m wishing for my husband to be home to either share in my misery or pull me out of it. Either one. But being the only decision-making adult while being sick is a bummer gig.
My decisions aren’t all bad, but it somehow doesn’t feel very good. I’ve decided to rest; there are 6 baskets of laundry to fold. I’m making easy food; there is a tray of now-or-never chicken thighs in my fridge. The tv is easy entertainment; everyone is irritable and bored and overstimulated. That one feels like all-bad, but it is my most constant choice.
Why is everything on a screen? Friends, family, recipes, advice: all from a screen. Access to my husband while he travels; screen.
I’m thankful for the easy access, but I’m also so tired of thinking about screen time limits, and feeling guilty about taking the phone away from my kids, because it feels like I’m limiting their time with their dad,while I’m really just wanting to stop them from being overstimulated by holding a super computer in their chalk-stained hands.
• • •
Taking a Tech Break
It’s been a couple months and I’m still overstimulated and bored. So I’ve ordered a handful of books and I’ll take the kids to the library as soon as I can.
I am craving something real. Something practical and knowledgeable. Something with wisdom, grit, and tenacity. I’m tired of being numbed by entertainment. I’m ready to not be irritated by being interrupted by my kids, as if my phone were the important party. It can’t be the lazy days of summer because public school only let out yesterday!
I guess I don’t have something soon to look forward to. I often lose motivation and go limp when there isn’t an event coming down the line. In these instances, I sometimes manifest a goal and a deadline. Like planning a garage sale, lemonade stand, or party; planning back-to-back days of play dates; or trying to push myself and my home to become less full, detaching from things, decluttering from a place of boredom and not necessity.
What I want my life with little kids to be like and what it currently is are not the same.
I want to bake with my kids and teach them to eat good foods. But I don’t want three kids on the counter because one always ends up soaking wet and in the sink, and my most common lunches are from the freezer or a box.
- Romans 7:19 “For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing”
…
Continuation of Survival Summer
It’s been hot. My gut aches. I try eating so cleanly to avoid disruption and it does nothing to help. So I eat macadamia nuts and banana chips so at least I will feel warranted feeling sick. I know what sugar does to my health and my mood, and it isn’t good for either, but it feels like I don’t have to make much of a decision so it fatigues my brain less, in the moment.
The gut ache continues and adds some dull kidney pain. “Can’t I eat anything?” I think. Some days feel impossible as if there are no right answers: every path is a losing one..
Do I cut out more things? Grains? Nuts? Red meat? Sulphur? What is going to make the difference?
These days feel easy to also cut out Hope and Obedience. As if all the wisdom and knowledge I’ve gained over working on my health for the last three years no longer apply.
Is it a supplement? I tincture? Too much or too little? How am I supposed to figure out what my body needs if I don’t have respite from symptoms from any changes I’ve already made?!
I know I have stress right now, but I don’t feel it. Has my base level of stress risen so high that this feeling is my new normal?
I don’t want my normal to include rushing to the bathroom, being cranky from blood sugar crashes, and being in pain so often that it isn’t worth mentioning.
….
A couple more months gone by
I’m sick, again. Jeff is gone, again. And I’ve spent the last three weeks trying to force myself into a keto-box in hopes that it would help me be happier and more level-headed: I’ve screamed more in the last few weeks than I did the entire summer. At least, that’s what it feels like.
The last week with Jeff gone is always the hardest. Add on to that being sick and all of us are socialized-out from me over-scheduling our days last week, and we have a household heading for a meltdown.
“Let’s go on a hike!” I said this morning. It was met with a vehement “NO!!!” from one burnt out 4-year-old-with-parrot-face-paint. What did she want to do? Nothing. And scream about it.
“I want to go to the carrousel!” comes from her also-painted-like-a-parrot-6-year-old-sister. Honestly, that sounded quite attainable.
So we went and ride the carrousel and played at the park beside it. And somewhere along the line, I picked up a germ that gave me worsening peppery sinuses and post-nasal drip.
Why aren’t fun things just able to be fun? I know that I’m whining, but must there always be a negative to a positive?
But you know what, everything is ok. I get sick. Then I get better. Jeff goes away. Then he comes back. The kids go through screaming phases where they are trying to have control after being over scheduled. Then they have quiet days where they can knead cinnamon roll dough to their hearts content.
Balance. It’s a buzz word because we all want it.
But what if instead of balance looking like a straight beam, it was a teeter-totter? With one end being so good it seems perfect, and the other end being what feels like an unfixable disaster? We all wish it would stay balanced in the middle (but really we want it at the “perfect” side, if we’re more honest), but life has some of everything in it. Good, bad, bored, over scheduled, full of loved ones, loneliness, and memories with a spectrum of emotional colors attached.
Life isn’t about always being perfect. In fact, there really is no such thing. Why, this week I actually got to the point of having my whole house clean! but I stayed up until midnight from making it happen and the next day I was so draggy that my clean house didn’t seem worth it.