You know it’s really been an out of control couple of months when “Uh, I almost burned the house down last night while you and dad slept” isn’t even in the top 100 WTF moments.
Everything is fine, the house is still standing, and said offspring had an up close and personal lesson in the smoke point of sesame oil. And how high flames can leap.
But holy hell it’s been a rough several weeks. Not one thing in particular, just an infinite number of life paper cuts rubbed with lime juice and salt, with barely enough tequila for that amount of acidic seasoning. The sort of weeks that would find you slamming the tequila, then breaking off the bottle into a jagged sword to fight the world, only to collapse in a whimpering heap, looking for your blanket fort.
I’m mentally and emotionally exhausted, is what I’m going for here.
And I know I’m not alone in this. Everyone is suffering these days. Pandemic, economic instability, political three ring circus times infinity, irreversible climate change, social upheaval, civil rights…everything is at an 11 with no end in sight. That’s just outside my walls. Inside the House of Chaos we have one furloughed husband (to please oh god please return at the end of November as planned), one overwhelmed middle school band director teaching a performance based teacher led group project class over the internet with technology that struggles to keep up, one high schooler thriving with remote learning but refusing to start investigating colleges, and one college student starting his higher education remotely while living at home. That’s just the stuff I can talk about. When you add in the fear and uncertainty around all of the above, it’s a cauldron full of all the things chaotic, menacingly burbling away.
Sharing my three things every night gets more and more difficult but I don’t dare give it up.
I’ve chewed all my fingernails to ragged shreds, haven’t had a haircut in eight months, and am having a great deal of difficulty in losing my pandemic weight. My self-care toolbox flew open and my favorite tools either broke or rolled under something heavy. Not exactly living my best life here, and in looking at my last few posts, it’s been that way for awhile. I’d blog more, but it’s fallen into the “what does it matter” stack with almost everything else in my life, and it’s too much effort right now to start sorting that pile. It’d be easier to hand my kid some sesame oil and a stove.
I need someone to tell me it’s all going to be okay, but I wouldn’t believe them if they did. So let’s just remotely gather ’round our cauldrons and drink tequila in our blanket forts. It’s all I have in me to do right now.