slippery ice

I returned to a wintery wonderland of a Montana. But things change quickly around here. The days warmed up. It stopped snowing. The snow turned to rain, the ground turned to ice. I was barely holding on.

I seem to hit these moment, luckily not too often, where I feel completely overwhelemed. I come in from an extremely long day at work where my brain seems to be firing in like 10,ooo directions at once. I'm super into my job right now. I love being at work. But I seem to be taking everything really seriously. There's never enough time to get everything done and I feel like I'm always trying to remember where I left off.

I work with my husband. So in the middle of observing a new teacher work with her middle schoolers, trying hard to be the best darn mentor I could be, Jeffy came in and told me that I had better hightail up the hill to pick up Els. Apparently she flipped her lid in the library parking lot after storytime, once again gracing the world with Wild and Scary Toddler Tantrum Elie. We've seen her up close and personal once so far. Apparently my in-laws had the astonishing horror of seeing her again this afternoon.

Poor girl. We had to wake her up to put her in the car in-time for our 7:30 meeting. This really is the worst. You open up the nursery door. You tromp around outside, making lots of noise, hoping she'll wake up on her own. You grind the coffee and run the water. She doesn't move. She is so happily passed out on her belly in her chocolate brown, fleecy sack, all her babies and animals nestled around her. Finally you really have to move and you pick her up like a heavy little bag of goodness. Her head falls back like it did when she was teeny. Her eyes are still shut, her breath is still heavy. You think maybe you'll actually be able to maneuver her into the car this way. But then her little eyes flash open. She is totally not happy to be awake. And the day continues to rush along.

Luckily my husband is a dream and drove Eliana up to her grandparents, even though he was running the staff meeting and had to be there on time. All I had to do was put a couple of trash bags on the curb, but I still managed to be five minutes late.

And when I walk back in the house this afternoon, it's like walking into the inside of a snow globe that's been all shook up, but the shit everywhere isn't snow, it's the egg pan from the morning and the laundry that never got folded and the puzzle pieces that didn't make it back in the box.

I used to not get too frazzled by this sort of chaos. The only area of my life where I am particularly OCD seems to be with regard to food. I really like things to be a certain way on my plate and in my mouth. I like a colorful, well-balanced, thematically cohesive plate. But otherwise, I could really give a damn if there were clothes on the closet floor.

But, for whatever reason, this seems to be changing. It's kinda in line with how seriously I seem to take everything post Eliana. I equal parts like this fledgling trait in me, and despise it. It made me batty this afternoon. Eliana asked for, "B, C, D?", aka the Baby Einstein video that has these little girls singing the ABC song on it. She absolutely loves it. And I am such a trashy mom to even admit that my kid has a part in a video that she adores. But what can I say? It's the only thing in this house that she'll sit still for. I know that for twenty solid minutes I can get something done while she watches the random images of blocks and cats and babies, all set to the poetry of Shakespeare. There could be worse things.

So while she's rockin' out to the ABC's, I'm running around the house like a total loon. I, fairly systematically for a newbie at organization, get the house together. But it's in no way satisfying. It's just causing me to curse under my breath at all the crap we've accumulated, making me wonder how in god's name anyone ever manages to go to work and be a good mama and cook dinner every night and actually manage to clean the dishes as well.

Walking to my car from work, I slipped on the ice and landed on my ass. I remembered this as I heard the credits rolling on Elie's show.

I turned off the TV and carried her into her room which I had just tidied. She immediately began to take things out of her basket and toss legos all over. I sat calmly. I put a lego back in the box. She tossed it out. I put a wooden cat back in a wooden puzzle. She tossed it out. I played a CD. She stopped it. And then opened the CD player and threw it on the ground, laughing with her big ol dimples. We had established some strange sort of pattern.

And this is just where she is. And sitting there on the floor, letting her just be, is what I need to do. It does me no good to hold myself to some insane standard of orderliness. I have never been that person.

My sweet husband made it home in time for me to get to a dance class. I wasn't nice to him when he came in. I was micro-managing and critical and yucky. As I rushed out the door, I lost my footing again on the hard ice beneath me. For the gazillionth time that day, I cursed. I felt tears well up in my eyes. I felt so guilty. Guilty for being mean to him. Guilty for leaving my kid after I had already woken her up way too early, left her for way too long, put her in front of a video. But I knew that the only thing at that moment that would make me snap out of it was to move my body.

Or maybe drink a lot of wine. And that never really helps. Well, at least not in the same way.

The class was hard on my brain. There were lots of directional changes and wacky floor transitions that eluded me. But it was just the switch up I seemed to need.

I came home in time to bathe Elie. Our bath made every guilty, overwhelmed feeling of the day totally wash away. She was snuggly and funny and beautiful. She was so happy to have me home. She said, "Nurse? No," with a smile on her face. I told her that she was such a big, independent girl that she didn't need to nurse anymore. She said, "I! Elie!" with such pride and confidence, that I knew, for at least one second, there was nothing to feel guilty about.