The Post Script to Two Weeks of Insanity

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. 

The Weekend Vices

On Friday night David and I went to dinner.

While we waited for a table we wandered over to the bookstore, my favorite place in the world to wander.

I started greedily stacking books into my arms, because I can't help myself.

David said, "Do you know I don't think I've ever read a book all the way through?"

I nearly died right there.

I told him, the best I could, about the kind of sheer joy he was missing in his life.  And then he said that if I ever write a book he would read that one and we joked that then he could say it was the best book he'd ever read in his life.

And he surprised us both by saying, "I want to read a book.  What book should I read?"

I was flummoxed.  That's a lot of pressure after all my high praise about the glory and magic of books.  And where do you start?

I offered a few suggestions.

He hemmed.

I found an author I thought he might like and offered that.

He hemmed again, and told me it looked too long, but this time I pushed just a little.

We left with two books for each of us.  Unheard of in our marriage.

On Saturday night I was working on my Sunday School lesson and David came and lay down by me.  He picked up his book.

I felt a stab of jealousy so pure and so thick I nearly cried.

"You're going to read fiction while I work on my lesson?" I asked, aghast and a little hurt.

He grinned at me and turned back to his book.

The longing nearly consumed me.

And then this morning as I got out of bed he reached for his book.

I teased him, "Wow, you've only been reading for one weekend and you've already found the vice...reading when you should be doing something else."

He just smiled and kept reading.  I walked out of the room to find breakfast and hair-do's and lunch money for my children.

I don't mind telling you that I was overwhelmed with envy that he was again enjoying one of the greatest of all pleasures without me, and I was nearly undone by a deep and hungry lust for the pile of books on the table by my bed.  It was only by exercising my strongest willpower that I was able to walk out of the room.

Just now, David came in and asked me to iron his shirt.  He's running late.

I bet you can guess what I said.

I'll admit it was mostly pride with a little drop of wrath and irony...all delivered with a haughty smile.

It was a very wicked weekend.

Mercy Me

I spent last weekend in Utah while my family tried to get by without me.  (They thrived of course.)

While I was there I met these two lovely lambs and we took a blurry self-portrait.  (I offered to hold the camera since I was the newbie, but I was so excited I couldn't hold it still long enough to get a decent picture.  I'm publishing it anyway...proof I am friends with blogging celebrities.)

On Monday morning I remembered how to do this.  (And had Rachel take this picture as proof for David that I look hot in any weather.)

It was a fast trip at the end of a long week, and by the time I arrived home on Monday afternoon I was exhausted and had only enough energy and willpower to start one load of laundry and make a lasagna for dinner.  Everyone stepped over my suitcase and the other ten piles of laundry I left on the floor, sat at the table for dinner, and told me how good it was to have me home.

Tuesday meant digging out.  And class.  And by two in the afternoon I was more overwhelmed than when I woke up.  Which is really saying something.

I knelt down in my sewing room.

Help me, I said.

The doorbell rang.

That was fast, I thought.

I was secretly hoping it was my Aunt Jane in her rubber gloves, who, I hear, is better than any emergency response team when laundry and filthy bathrooms are on the line.

It was the UPS man.  He wasn't wearing rubber gloves.  He didn't want to stay and help me muck out the sink.  He left his package and ran. 

I opened the box.

Inside was a tiny miracle made out of colored paper.  And just the help I needed on a difficult day.

My sister, Emily, did what I could not and made me a paper chain counting the days til summer. 

I stared at the chain, at the box, at the postage, at the thought, at the grand gesture.  And then stretched it out across my family room.

I thought, That is a lot of scissors and glue, That is a lot of time and energy, That is a lot of love and encouragement.

And then I thought, I can do this.  And I went and put another load of laundry into the washer and found the courage to clean out my suitcase.  Which is is proof that simple is not insignificant.  It is also proof

that (once again) my sisters are among the best blessings of my life,

that even when I'm drowning all I really need is a little encouragement (I'm not saying no, Jane)

that when all else fails (especially me) kindness doesn't.

Mercy me.