Starting Up A Brand New Day

Sleep schedule has been wacky for the last two months. Having the boys here and then not here, too much stress and mental anguish and uncertainty.  Then the floods and delay in school starting, which threw things off even more. I was sleeping an hour here, three hours there. Getting up at 3 in the morning or going to bed at noon. Not a great recipe for normalizing your life.

But today was the day!  Oh, frabjous first day of school!

So last night we did dinner, and then cleaned up and laid everything out for the morning. Nick was getting crabby, so I had him take a bath and threw in some lavender essential oil and eucalyptus epsom salts, telling him it would relax him. Whether it actually worked, or it was just the power of suggestion, he crashed early and did not move until I went to wake him up at 5:30.

Me, I crashed also. I was asleep before 10. Of course, I was also wide awake at 3:15. Instead of chasing sleep, I got up and just started doing shit. Cleaned out the fridge, cleaned the bathrooms, sorted stuff that was laying around and found a home for it. By the time I got the boys up, I was feeling sort of good about things. Which was a novel feeling.

This is a new thing for me -- after 27 years of being 24/7 mom, I'm going to be kind of a parttime mom. It wasn't something I wanted. You'd be shocked at how much I did not want it. But sometimes when someone is determined to fuck up your life, the best thing you can do is to give them exactly what they want. If you find yourself in an endless tug-of-war, just let go of the damned rope.

So I dropped the boys off at school this morning, and I'll pick them up after school on Friday afternoon. And I'll do that every week for the forseeable future. Terrifying. The big house is suddenly much bigger. And quieter. (And cleaner.)

But I'm going to look at this as an opportunity. For all involved. I'll finally get a break, and I can work and write without spending the majority of every day pulled in 12 different directions at once. The boys will learn how to adapt, how to be more self-reliant, how to maneuver without me. Their father will have the chance to be part of their lives again. At the very least, he'll have some idea of what I've done every day for the past 27 years, and how much of it I did without asking for a cookie or a pat on the head. How much of it I made invisible.   Hopefully we'll all learn something, and be better for it.

Of course, I'll be Skyping every night. I'll worry endlessly. (I'm a great worrier. And a bit of a control freak.) Baby steps. Lots and lots of baby steps.