Yesterday was The Longest Day. It happens once a year when we come back from our trip to Tobago. We fly in to JFK, then drive back up to Albany, and no matter how wonderful the weather is or how smooth the drive, it seems to take forever.
This time, everything went nearly as well as it could have. We made it through the whole process and home sooner than we’d hoped, on a beautifully clear sunny day.
At a rest stop on the drive home, I ended up stuck in a bathroom stall with a two-year-old who was terrified of the toilet, and discovered too late I was in a stall with no toilet paper.
We’ve all experienced this phenomenon in large and small parts of our lives. We know it’s unreasonable, but we expect things to keep getting better. We want the stock market to keep trending up. We want to keep earning interest on our bank account. We want to keep getting better at our jobs. We want to improve our weaknesses, hone our parenting skills. We want to stay connected to friends. We want them to stay connected to us. We want our romantic relationships to flourish. We want our spiritual lives to be rich and rewarding.
Yet sometimes we won’t be measuring up in a category or two. And the people who care about us will ask, “How are you doing?” But what it feels like they want to hear is that you are doing great, things are getting better, everything is OK.
My mom always told me I had a sensitive heart.
As a kid I was full of raw emotions and felt other people’s pain as my own. I cried freely when I saw others hurting and was easily moved.
The movie My Girl came out in 1991. I think I saw it the summer I was 12 or 13 – it was on VHS by then. *smile* I remember settling down in the living room of my grandma’s house to watch it one day with my cousins.
For years after I started homeschooling, I would start the summer with grand plans for activities, workbooks, and reading assignments to make sure my kids didn’t go brain dead over the vacation.
We did a page here and there, but the school year would start again and I’d find I hadn’t done much of anything I’d hoped to do.
Several years ago, I gave myself permission to stop making plans for summer learning. The kids needed a break, but more truthfully, I was the one who needed a break from having to oversee all the learning.
This summer has been tough again. I’m finding myself fighting guilt about not doing more with the kids. I’m not reading to them. The Littles can’t read to themselves. No one is doing math review. The Bigs aren’t reading the leftover reading books we didn’t get to from the school year.
I’m still trying to figure out how to be good at being married. As it turns out, that process is a lot less straight forward than I would like.
The harder I try to keep it together on the outside, I have a patch of eczema that’s like, “LALALA YOU CAN’T PRETEND YOU AREN’T STRESSED WHEN I’M HERE!!! And the more you pretend it’s ok when it’s not, the bigger I get!”
Today, I met the Chaplain at our riverside trail with the Littles after dropping Two and Three off at the dance studio. It was a long day with the kids. I felt like I had tried really hard all day and had still failed.
Starting way back at 11 a.m., I had made dinner for lunch since we would be out at dinner time. I’d fed the kids sandwiches before leaving for the evening. I’d brought water bottles and snacks so no one would be hungry. I started getting ready to leave the house long before we had to go so that we could actually leave on time.
The whole day, I had worked up to this moment, at the trail. All the kids had shoes on. We were ready. But I hadn’t had a chance to pee before leaving our house and there were no bathrooms at the trail.
