IT'S ALL BEEN DONE BEFORE


After working for a good two-thirds of a fortnight, I find myself completely out of whack. My laundry has gone up to a near unmanageable pile. The ref is near empty while the pantry is full of trash masquerading as food. Almost all of our provisions are in the red. And if not for my dear husband, there will be no decently cooked food in the house. Heck, we probably won't even have milk!

I have to schedule my doctors' appointments all within a week's time cause each one of them is overdue. I am once again unable to keep up with my inbox. Bills and receipts, notices and return stubs are waiting to be filed soon as they come out of their individual envelopes. Ironing clothes has become a thing of the past. My car is a moving dustbin. And if not for online banking, I will probably be late paying each and every one of my bills each and every month.

How one can live like this, I have no idea. I can't. I can't sleep very well with all these nagging me at the back of my mind. And could I be any more deprived? Hello... I work the graveyard shift, for Pete's sake! I am inadvertently in limbo until I have all these fixed and in place so technically, I am not even getting anywhere or having anything accomplished. And you know what the funny thing is? I'm in this rut because I believe I've been working! Catch 22? You tell me.

So I think about people like me and worse, who have two or three jobs, and a family to raise. There's E who sees her family back in Alabama only for a week in summer because the rest of the year, she has to work. There's J who lost her kids to her husband, now her ex, of course, because she can't be with them anyway because she's working all the time. So she and her ex has this special arrangement where she goes to their house to cook the kids breakfast and take care of their stuff and be a mom to them on her days off but she has to be out the door by the time her ex comes back from work. And then there's M who has been studying and working, and then working 2-3 jobs right after college, who has never married and has just broken up with her boyfriend for the 3rd time because at 46, she's still not sure if he's the man for her. There's D who's 53 years old and still tries to work as much as she can, which means once every 3 nights, because her arthritic hands won't allow her to work any more than that. And then there's L, once divorced, twice married, with 2 daughters of different fathers, who hasn't spent a single weekend with her family in 5 years.

I know, I know. It's a tough life and the way things are going, I should be thankful that I have a job and of course I am. How can I not be? It's just that I also wish we could always eat the right stuff, you know. That there aren't days when we have to settle for what we can throw together in a jiffy because that is all that we can manage. Or else we can always opt for the default... eat out, which is easy but not nifty. 2 weeks ago, I had some time to cook for Papa and I will not forget the look on his face... the look of satisfaction on his face... made more outstanding in my mind because I know I haven't cooked for him in quite a while. I long for mornings past when we'd wake up but we didn't really need to get up... we had time to reacquaint each other to how each other's skin feels to the brush of our fingers, to the softness of each other's hair, to the memory of each other's scent, to the fullness we have in our arms when we had each other in them. We had time to plan the day without finding ourselves finally getting caught up on the 24th hour. We had time to get on each other's nerves... and then laugh afterwards. In a nutshell, we had time to feel something... something else... besides being exhausted.

I am trying to remember if in my recent past I have wished for this, or at least for the part of it that was obviously appealing. We never do see the bigger picture, do we? We're never smart enough for that. We always seem to miss seeing the part where it says 'difficult' and I take my hats off to that part in the human spirit that will keep refusing to see that it has indeed become 'difficult.' I keep forgetting that our smallest decisions become vast by implication. They will always encompass our whole lives.

And yet tomorrow, we are going fishing... out in the deep, in a big rented fishing boat... something I have never done before. Ah life... you ole bugger!