Pin Ball Brain

My head is pinging and ringing and gaz-zing with a few lights flashing and a lot of bumper pads being called into play. Sometimes I’m lucky and it happens during the day, usually while I’m driving. But lately the pinball wizard has been invading my sleep. I guess it comes with back to school time and fall schedules and programmes and curriculum nights and full calendars, but I find I can’t keep up with all the things I should be doing, so the list keeps growing and growing and picking up the momentum of that silver ball that bings around dinging lights and screeching through point racking zones at the back of the arcade.

It doesn’t help that the Gaffer has pretty much quit sleeping through the night. She wakes up almost every night now between 3 and 4. It’s not usually for long, but it does require getting out of bed on my part and soothing the ailment…covers that have fallen off, dolly that has slid to the floor, a forgotten hug from tuck in time that must be administered. She usually drifts right back to sleep. Daddy, if he even heard her in the first place is firmly back in his zzzz’s and Momma is now lying wide awake, usually for an hour, trying desperately to calm the bells and whistles of what needs to be done, what I did badly the day before and what I’ve forgotten to do over the last 6 months. On a really bad night there are also a few minutes usually devoted to some heinous mean little kid, adolescent girl crime I committed at that age that still haunts me.

As the right side of my brain and I are sitting serenely at the the kitchen table, the left side is frantically calculating my day. There are 3 children to get off to school, the first of whom left at 6:40 for soccer practice and the last of whom seems to be stirring. Lucy, my lovely, lovely cleaning lady usually arrives around 8 and I like to be gone shortly after because a) I just get in the way and b) guilt!  I made the decision early on in this marriage/family game that I was willing to take on a part-time job in order to have someone else clean my house, and it is the best decision I have ever made. But I can’t stand to actually watch her do it and admit that to myself how happy I am that she does.

I have an exercise class at 9 that it is now too late to cancel because I will have to pay the babysitting portion at this point whether we go or not. My mom has a doctor’s appointment at noon I said I would take her to and I have one at 2 that I’m not so sure I will make. The kids roll back in around 4, I tutor in the neighbourhood at 5:30 and have to be at my school by 7 in order to speak at university night…one thing I perhaps should have obsessed about last night and didn’t because I forgot and for which I have not yet prepared my talk. My "so-not-a-book-club" meets at 7:30 which I could hit on the way home if I am still awake. I also need to read the next 2 chapters in the novel I am teaching and oh crap…hang on, just thought of something…ok, had to make a quick phone call that I only seem to be able to remember at midnight. 

In and around all this chaos, there is laundry to be folded, groceries to be bought, dinner to be made, fingerprints to get taken (oh yeah, our adoption documents are starting to expire and we have to do them again…gotta love the red tape!) and a host of things that I will not remember until the Gaffer wakes me at 3 tomorrow morning.

The tone of this sounds much more desperate than I feel, although I am quite exhausted. This is pretty much a regular day in our life, but I think my bumper pads need fluffing already and it is only the 3rd week of September!