I’ve been reading, discovering, planning, and sewing every day for the past few weeks. I made a beautiful project that I’m looking forward to sharing here, except I can’t seem to get around to taking photos of it completed.

I can’t gather steam to make any one of these activities come to anything.

I can’t read enough of any book to finish it. I can’t get past my sewing indecision to make the next project. The pressure coming from within to make something and prove my worth is ridiculous. And I mean ridiculous because of the pressure’s intensity, and also ridiculous that I feel I have to prove my worth.

Of course I know I don’t actually have to prove anything. But somehow the need to be not just OK, but an over achiever is strangely still here, even in the midst of a pandemic.

No time to sit and feel sorry for yourself, this. This is a time to reach for your goals, be wildly creative, and try not to cry in front of your kids too much.

At least, those are the messages I’m hearing.

I’m experimenting with the idea of being mediocre in the time of corona, though.

I was watching a historical drama with the Chaplain last night and one of the characters remarked that middle management wasn’t so bad. I can’t remember his rationale, but I do remember thinking he was right.

So many of us were told we were amazing as children only to realize as adults that we are solidly average. Not geniuses full of natural talent, but regular people who have a set of gifts we have to decide what to do with, unique gifts, but not exceptional.

It’s hard to accept this regularity of adulthood. Especially with the added pressure of a pandemic where we’re expected to care for our families by keeping a safe haven for them, cooking good food and making sure our kids feel safe and understood in this scary time, all while educating them properly.

Except sometimes we need a break from that, but there aren’t many breaks anymore.

The bursts of creativity I’ve been experiencing are a sort of pressure valve for all the pent up, overstimulated nerves broiling away inside me.

It’s after 11 p.m. and my oldest just came in asking for help to set up a window fan. I’d finally just gotten into a writing flow and it was the first time I had been alone all day.

That sums up quarantine here at our house. A fleeting moment of quiet, the beginning of flow state, and someone comes in to ask for something.

I don’t want to be girl, interrupted, but that’s what I’ve got. A series of frustrations. And honestly, it was like that a lot of days before the pandemic, too, but like so many other broken things that have been magnified by this tremendous shake up, my kids’ lack of respect for my boundaries and my own inability to enforce those boundaries are just another symptom of…

The way I’m not being the Pandemic Mom I always wanted to be?

I don’t even know.

I’m just frustrated and tired at the end of a long day.

And even so, there are small moments of joy sprinkled through every day that help me snap out of the ego haze that makes me feel like I have to be doing stuff and proving myself all the time.

At the end of a long day, I think, tomorrow will be better. But tomorrow isn’t always better.

It’s easy to fall into the trap that says things can be almost perfect. Yet mediocre would probably be just fine.

I’m not talking about mediocrity the way we so often use it – to describe something sub-standard. That’s one of the word’s meanings. I mean it in the sense that we let ourselves be what most of us are: Average. If we aren’t providing a high level of nearly everything to everyone in our lives, well, that sounds about right. How could we?

Will you be mediocre with me?