I’m in a place where I’m very tired. I’m hoping to come out of that place soon. I feel like I’ve got more to do than time and that I just want to stop doing everything for about a week, or a month.
It feels like I’m swimming through soup, or wrapped in wet wool. I am hoping that if I get out from under a pile of things that should have been done months ago, that I can not let them pile up again (I’ve never let things pile up this way but then I’ve never navigated working full time with a kidlet before). I think I handled it the first six months by sheer will power, but then got tired. This last year more home things/personal care things/car things/family things—just all that stuff I did for everyone (and me) that I haven’t figured out how to shoehorn around work—it all got beyond me.
I haven’t figured out either how to get across to J that some of the organizing/planning/doing has to be his too. It’s tough to do that because he makes the bulk of our money so I feel like I should do everything else, but it just isn’t getting done and I’m feeling constantly under water, swimming furiously and never catching up. I don’t think this has as much to do with him though, except that he is the original absent minded professor and I haven’t figured out how to get around that. I’m the one running around with lists in my brain and he doesn’t do that and I don’t know how to get some of my list into his head and get it completed on time.
I guess this is what they mean when they say that relationships are work, that being an adult is work. It isn’t impossible, insurmountable, but you just never think about having to negotiate these sorts of things when you think about growing up and getting on. I guess I thought in broad strokes—get a degree or two, get a job, find someone wonderful, have a child—but there are all these eddies and currents that are in between the big waves. And those are the things that can drag you down if you don’t keep swimming. When someone asks you to marry them—well that by the point it comes up is an easy decision—it’s the one before that—say buying furniture together or getting a cat together that may actually be harder. All the steps leading up to the big one.
And I’m in the middle of all the small steps right now.