My life is not hard.
In fact, it’s downright cushy.
By about 3:00pm today, though, I had thrown in the towel. Ragged from waking up early with the Beastie, I read all morning for my latest dissertation chapter. When said toddler wouldn’t nap, I tried to force the issue for over an hour, to no avail.
I spoke soothingly, then sternly. I provided milk and trips to the potty. After awhile, that place between my navel, my ribcage, and my spine started to knot up, wringing my innards out like a damp towel. I was letting her damage my calm.
So I gave up for a bit, plopped her in front of the TV, and after a while took her to get ice cream with my mom, nephews, and a friend and her baby.
Beastie pin-balled between chairs and couches, fussed for grandma, fussed to get down, fussed to get back up. She wasn’t cranky, per se, but rather amplified, her natural exuberance and interest intensified by drowsy delirium.
I rode that tornado until about twenty minutes ago, when she fell asleep as soon as I turned out the light.
My sweet, funny, curious, headstrong little monster.
Apparently I need a little dose of perspective. I get bogged down worrying about my dissertation, about what I’m going to do with my doctorate once I’m finished. (And I will finish. I will. I will. I will). I stay up too late working and then pay for my lost sleep in hours of morning mental fog.
But I repeat: my life is not hard.
I don’t even know hard. I have a loving husband, great friends, and a supportive family. I’m working on a freaking dissertation for chrissake. On a topic I adore. I already have some teaching lined up for next semester. Sure, they’re comp classes, but that’s money.
I’m an educated woman living in a country where I can do all of these things. I’m safe. My family is safe. We are all, in fact, doing fucking fantastically.
I wouldn’t say that I’m “blessed” because I don’t know if I believe in God. Fortunate, maybe? Lucky? Whatever it is, I need to take stock of it more often. I certainly don’t deserve it. I need to step back from my little world, look around, and unwind that knot in my chest.
Because I have one stunner of a life.
3am Poetry: Billy Collins’s “Insomnia” | Thoughts and Sundry Things
[…] like I need another dose of that sense of perspective I recently wrote about. And some poetry. That always […]
It can be tough. We try to divide our time between priorities, when often we end up diluting our focus. Deep breaths. One step at a time.