I know I am prone to exaggeration.
I know I am prone to melodrama.
(I keep telling David that it adds to my charm.)
But it is not too much to say that I have been drowning. To busy trying to stay afloat to even write a distressed SOS. The waters are just now finally starting to recede, leaving me exhausted and mildewed.
It all started when I thought it was a good idea to take a class on writing and force a few deadlines on myself.
Which would have been fine, if it weren't that I forgot that the last time I took a class I did not have four children and two church callings and one large, full-time job feeding, clothing, and cleaning a family.
Which still might have been fine, if I hadn't forgotten that I also do volunteer work on a committee to raise funds for cancer services and our big event is just a couple of months away, and my sister and I also spend much of our free time travelling and teaching a class on body image.
Which still had a microscopic chance of being fine, it I hadn't also said "yes" to various other people and commitments, which didn't seem hard at the time they asked, but impossible by the time it was time to deliver.
And so it has not been so fine.
(At one point amid the hosting of a dinner/dance for a hundred people to celebrate the latest minor-holiday and helping Caleb sift through 80 pictures of growing petri dishes for his science project and trying to finish my round robin late again, I told David that I was having fantasies about getting cancer so that the only thing on my to-do list was "go to chemo." He made me take that back.)
Yesterday my family ate cereal for breakfast, lunch, and dinner and I took a two-hour nap in the afternoon.
I had gone as far as I could go.
This morning Caleb asked in a hopeless voice if we were having cereal again for breakfast.
I said yes.
And then I turned to David and whispered that I am failing. He just smiled at me and nodded. He loves me anyway, I suppose.
Now for a story. About the best part of the last two weeks.
A couple of weeks ago I had to turn in a manuscript, either a short story or a chapter, for my writing class to review. We workshop the piece, which means you make a copy for everyone in the class and they go home and read it over the weekend and make all kinds of marks and suggestions and comments on it and then on the following Tuesday we talk about the piece.
After I turned it in, David said that if I could let eighteen strangers read it, I could surely let him.
So I did.
When he got done with it he only made one comment. And it was, apparently, not the right one.
David took me to In and Out where I cried into my milkshake and asked him hundred times what I was thinking and what I was doing with my life and what was I going to do now and what was the worst part, the writing or the story or both.
Because, let's be honest, if there's one thing I really excel at, it is self-doubt.
(I keep telling David that it adds to my charm.)
When my blood sugar and my emotions were more stable he drove me home.
By Tuesday morning I had given up the dream. Determined to be content reading and enjoying the writing of other people, to drop the class and get back to my laundry. I decided to let it die or kill it off myself, and then I considered the funeral arrangements. (Adele would sing, I would say a few words, the kids could do a reading of Steinbeck or Tolstoy to put everything in perspective and remind us that we weren't losing much, bagpipes at the end, etc.)
But my professor resurrected it with three little words and one punctuation choice written at the bottom of my manuscript: "April, absolutely brilliant!"
Note the exclamation point. You can bet I did.
I could not be unhappy the entire day.
When David got home from work I still had the smile on my face. We did a little celebratory dance in the kitchen. And David told me how frustrating it is to be my husband but smiled at me the whole time he was saying it and I did nothing but grin back at him.
Because of course I know that. I live with me too.