Sick and Tired

Whew. It has been a month. Our family finally got hit with the latest wave of Covid and although it was 100% mild, it feels like two weeks of my life disappeared off the calendar and I am trying to play catch up with all the truly urgent stuff that has piled up. And this writing gig means that when I don’t get to it, the only person I’m letting down is myself. And she’s always the easiest one to make excuses to, right?

I got hit the hardest and certainly the longest in our family, and as I spent day after day barely keeping up and napping for hours, the fear that I would never feel the urge to write or blog again started to creep in. Whenever I’m down, whether that’s sick, or burned out, or simply emotionally exhausted, I worry that I will never get back my oomph. I’ve lost a fair amount of the verve I had in my 20s. I believe I strategically used that youthful energy to survive my early parenting years. It was a choice I would make again, and the loss of that energy feels like less a loss and more of a trade for increased wisdom. But still, the specter of obsolescence, of using up all my ideas and willpower and fire constantly sits on my shoulder.

In part, I believe it’s because I am in the do-it-all stage of my life and, despite all the different ways I’m told that how it has to be, I’m a steadfast refuser to do it all. I will not strive for perfection. I will let myself have a sick day if I am able to. I will not force myself to write for twelve hours a day and then also be a parent and a wife and a friend. I’m going to do the things I must and then do a little bit of all the things I like to and if I fall behind, I fall behind.

But the ageism inside of me worries that I will hit a day when I am no longer able to be thoughtful and vibrant. Maybe I have already hit that day. Maybe my best years are behind me, lost in a haze of diapers and spit up and so many episodes of Dora the Explorer. Maybe I have fallen behind so long ago that I can never catch up to the self I was meant to be.

And maybe that pause, those years, left me on a completely different path than that old self would have run to. That wisdom that I gained led me to veer pretty hard from my youthful dreams. I realized that a small life full of ordinary joys feeds me much more than the alternative. And that when I run on all cylinders, I’m stealing from my future self. I’ve done that, and ended up with ulcers, exhaustion, migraines, anemia. The piper has to be paid, either now or later. And when I pay him now, in all the little breaks that I secretly give myself, the price turns out to be a lot lower. In fact, those breaks are a gift of their own.

Because the urge to write came back this morning. But in the meantime, I got to spend the last two weeks snuggling my kids on the couch, playing video games with them and reading their books out loud and drinking copious cups of tea at the table while we took a small vacation from the school/work/sports treadmill that we are usually on. And I don’t think those weeks were lost. They’re in here somewhere, percolating. Reminding me that changes in plans are not always the worst that can happen. Softening my heart and bringing us all back to those little baby days when all I had to do was exist with my babies and keep them fed and rested.

And that gift - the gift to dip back in time and then jump forward to here - it reminds me that any stage - all seasons - have their unique exhaustions. And my only job is to hold onto the people who bring me back to life when I forget how to find my verve.