I can’t say I’m having a bad week, per se, but something is definitely off. Even the weather has been all over the place. It was warm enough to melt the driveway ice (finally) and our poor two-faced snowman. I enjoyed the warmer weather (and the sight of grass in January), I won’t lie. But today it’s back to below freezing and the gains I had been making this week froze as well.
My “to do” list for the week was one of the smaller one’s I’d made in recent history and I was on my way to completing it when things just sort of derailed somewhere around Tuesday night. I think my inadvertent acceleration of a design job I’m working on was the culprit along with a few nights in a row of going to bed way too late (thanks to streaming video of one of my favorite shows Wire In The Blood on Netflix), but now I’m behind with everything. The cleaning didn’t get done, the laundry has piled up, K’s birthday present didn’t get made or shipped, and the work I was doing on our reward system has come to a screeching halt. My sitter for Wednesday night had to cancel so R and I didn’t get to start our girl’s night. My friend, H, had to cancel our weekly Thursday night dinner due to illness, and a meeting I had with Monkey’s teacher and Behavior Specialist got postponed to today. Of course, today, R may be home with her turn having a cold that started with Monkey last week, so I may have to change the meeting time again if I can’t get a sitter for the hour. I’m hoping R will be feeling better and want to go to school by the time I have to leave for the meeting. If she doesn’t go to school, I’m also going to have to figure out when I can go food shopping and run errands which is what I was going to do today while they were at school. Luckily, we’ve got plenty to eat still, so it’s not like we will starve and some of the errands can be run this weekend. I just hate when the threads of my tightly woven schedule start snapping.
Now, it’s not a-typical for my weeks to get blown off-course even when K is around. That part is normal. If K were here though, I probably wouldn’t be giving a second thought to the laundry, house cleaning, food shopping, or trying to find a sitter so I can go to a meeting. I would have built-in back up and someone to share the household chore load. So what am I doing about it besides make a slew of contingency plans? Well, I’m doing my best to stick with some of my new habits so I don’t completely fall off the wagon quite so quickly. I’m still writing every day, working out for a half an hour each morning, I’m doing extra academic work with Monkey before school, and I give myself some time to try to figure out how to improve the next day. Basically, I manage—just like every other single parent. I’m also trying to cut myself some slack, recognize where I’ve gone astray and try to correct when I can. And I look forward to the end of the day and the start of the next with more enthusiasm than I probably should. Nothing like a cleanish slate.
Probably the hardest part of all this isn’t the fact that I can’t rely on K or can’t talk to him about it (we do chat when we can, but those times are short and infrequent as you might imagine), but reminding myself to not get so wound up about snafu’s that are inevitable. Generally I can roll with it, but I can tell by the number of trips to the kitchen just how stressed these things make me even if I pretend they aren’t bothering me. It’s catching myself and altering my thinking before I undo all these new good habits that is the hard part. With all the mental acrobatics I’m doing to keep on track, my brain ought to be about 10 times larger by the deployment is over. And won’t that be a sight! I’ll look like a bobble-head. I’ll probably feel like one too. But, I’ll be a mostly stress-free bobble-head with her shit together and that’s fine by me.
It’s time to get moving and quit yapping. My vacuum awaits and the laundry won’t do itself. Here’s to the weekend and the ability to start fresh.
