Your intentions are good. You believe you are doing the right thing. You tell yourself it is about providing your children with enrichment, with experience. You tell yourself it is to broaden their horizons.
So you sign the ones who are interested up for a play. Then the one who likes music gets piano lessons. The ones who like to sing want voice lessons. The one who leans toward mayhem gets pee wee football to channel the destruction so your furniture is protected. The girly diva gets baton.
The next thing you know the school is sending home Fall Festival flyers and everyone wants elaborate homemade Halloween costumes. Oh and by the way there is also a pressing need for items for the school bake sale.
And you think "Yeah, I got this, piece of cake!"
Add just a dash of "The Vortex of Crazy" for some spice and "piece of cake" it is not. (For the uninitiated, The Vortex of Crazy is an interdimensional space that surrounds me at all times that causes otherwise normal people and circumstances to explode spectacularly in insanity. It is best described as Murphy's Law having a love child with The Twilight Zone, but stranger and often with more dire consequences.)
You thought you had it all together. You thought you could keep all the plates spinning while also keeping all the balls in the air. And then you look up and you have 37 unfinished projects, a mountain of laundry to fold and to add insult to injury you can't even find a dirty coffee mug to wash and you find yourself drinking your luke warm caffeinated life's blood from an old jelly jar.
Nothing YOU wanted to accomplish has been done. Upon close inspection it becomes apparent that several things YOU needed to get done fell straight through the cracks with all your wants.
And your eyes wander to your family and there seems to be a faint shimmer to the air...and then you really see them...there they are reclining on over stuffed silk pillows while gnawing on legs of mutton and being entertained by dancing girls and jesters....they're laughing, and tossing bones on the floor...and motioning to you to hurry up and clean up the unsightly mess they are creating because it is harshing their bliss and something really should be done about that.
You may or may not develop an unattractive nervous facial twitch. You may or may not start Googling how to run away and join the circus(Which, by the way, is not what it used to be...they want your SSN and treat it like a real job these days.)or even what it takes to become a citizen of another country. (It's really hard to get into English speaking countries, but Ireland will extend citizenship to anyone who can prove one of their great grandparents was a native of the Emerald Isle. Damn my Colonial roots.)
Or you might just go on total strike and lock yourself in the bed room for a few days demanding that someone else worry about meals and laundry and make them regulate their own intake of oxygen for their very own selves while you catch up on things that you wanted and needed to do that have sat in various states of unfinished when others froliced and cavorted while they sucked the very marrow from your bones for funsies!!!!
Not to be dramatic or anything.
And at the end of your time of solace, you just might be caught up on enough that you can actually see your work space and it's no longer a holding zone for all the things that got put on the back burner. Just in time too.....Christmas is coming.
Oh....God....Christmas.........
