what day is it? a day late weekend ramble. I guess.

You know how on vacation you forget what day it is?

Or how, during Christmas break, you can’t recall which day is a week day and which day is a weekend?

Sometimes I feel like that every day.

My life certainly has routine and rhythm – a heavy and sobering dose of it really – but still, I forget what day I’m on many many times.

I like my life.  But I’m also tired.  That’s okay.

I drop the ball some days.  On big projects.  On follow through.  On words I should have said and calls I should have returned.  On opportunities with my children.

Some days I hit the ball out of the park.  On big projects. On writing assignments. On being a good friend.  On listening to my kids.

Always a mixed bag.

Just enough good to keep me going.  Just enough bad to keep me trying harder.

This weekend and this week I have a lot of irons in the fire.  (That analogy is an old one – and hardly has any point of reference in our real lives, right?)

Sometimes I think of my life as being divided into several spheres.  And in some ways, those spheres overlap – like the Venn Diagram.  (I dislike that diagram – what do you guys think?  I just think there’s never enough room in the center to write all the things stuff has in common.  The shape is too limiting.  I’m definitely more of a regular old list sort of person.)

Anyway – the spheres are these: Home life (parenting etc). Wildwood (my homeschool). This blog.  Travelers Rest Here.  Meadowlark Collective (the co-op my friends and I began this year).

This week we opened up registration for new families and students to sign up for Meadowlark.  It seems to be going really well.  What a humbling experiment and undertaking it all is.  Terrifyingly humble and wildly beautiful.  Who knew?

Also.  I’ve signed on to work with a new magazine being published in TR.  This week is the deadline for our first issue.  I’ve never worked to put together a magazine before.  I’ve had individual articles printed in magazines before – remember Family Fun?  I loved that magazine. But this is an entire local magazine and I’m the editor and it’s exciting – and also a little overwhelming.   

And I’m teaching my own children and we’re learning about World War II and also do you have any idea how many presidents I have never even heard of until this year?  Who are those guys?  And Piper is playing soccer and two of the kids are doing some cross country conditioning and I can never find the time to exercise my own body faithfully and currently both tables in my house are covered with school books and papers and tonight I made steak fajitas at home for the first time.  Bergen and I spontaneously bought a wok a few weeks ago and I don’t know why I haven’t owned one in a decade or more.  The kids told me recently that my time has maybe finally arrived because apparently a gap toothed smile is trendy and wavy hair is in.  So – at 45 – I’m on point for fashion for the first time in . . . ever.

These are the ways in which my spheres overlap.

This is how my mind races and rests, panics and settles.

I’m in a reading slump – I have started three books that I don’t care if I finish.  Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Tender is the Night. Uninvited.  I have several others I’m reading with the kids that I know we’ll finish because we’re doing them together.  Jane Eyre. Just So Stories.  The Singing Tree.

I just finished Nathan Coulter and it hurts me a little to say that it was not my favorite Wendell Berry work.

I don’t know if this post even qualifies as a weekend ramble or more as a brain dump, but its all therapy for me.  

If I could manage to make this sphere of blog writing more financially profitable, I have to admit – I’d quit almost all the other things in the blink of an eye and just string together words all day long.  (I mean, obviously I wouldn’t quit the whole motherhood gig, but that’s what you already knew.)

As it is, I’m still making do with filling up small notebooks with scratched out words during in between spaces and making mental notes and jotting down ideas for when time is friendlier.

And that’s alright.  

Sometimes those spheres line up.  Sometimes one gets dropped for a season.  Sometimes they bounce all up against one another and leave me dizzy.

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