Breathless

My life has left me breathless for some time now. I'm weary in ways I never dreamed, each day I feel I get a little further behind with life, and that makes me feel very frantic inside.

I like lists, goals, schedules. I crave routine with just enough unknown to keep life interesting. And the last four months have been so overwhelming that I still have not made a school schedule for 2010-11. I started homeschooling Ben on the fly because he was bored and I had to find something to keep him off the computer. But I still haven't even bothered with a couple of subjects and I have scraps of paper around my desk with notes on how I want to organize the school year. HA! And he's learning anyway.

Kyrie is suffering the most because she craves being part of the school scene. And unlike Ben who can sit down and do is math and spelling on his own, I need to work with her. She wants to learn to write and read and will get so frustrated that she will sit down and start scribbling on anything. And whenever she figures out a word on her own she will come to me and tell me. Recently she connected the "K" sound from her name to a number of other words and started sounding them out. She needs more of me.

Everleigh....Teething. AHHHH. Will it ever end? And now she is in to everything. She wants to CLIMB. So she climbs up on stools and chairs only to topple off. My nerves.

I have had several aha! moments recently. The first came when my friend Kim who works as a flight attendant was out for an afternoon/evening. Kyri and I drove her back to the airport and I had to pump gas. While I did she was talking with Kyri who informed her that her dad and brother were "silly" but her mother....Definitely not. Which made me a little sad. I would love to be a fun mom. And I am trying to rethink how I approach my kids.

Which is why we stopped everything tonight and watched a Charlie Brown Christmas movie, stayed up past bedtime and sipped hot cocoa. They loved it.

Another aha! moment has been working with Ben. Ben lives to check off the list, to be done with his "work" and move on. We've had many talks about the quality of his work lately. Ben wants his world to fall into a certain order and when things go wrong, he doesn't handle it gracefully. I overheard Mike explaining to him that his life was to be a student, to learn, and what I heard for myself is that I often miss the really important joy of the work in trying to get it done. Checked off. And the moments are beautiful. Mothering is my work. Laundry is just one of the things that has to be done along the way. But we have never had nothing to wear. My job is to rock a baby, even at 2am, and it is to help a little 4-year old with letters and learning to write and it is to play games with my boy. Life is not something that I should keep trying to check off my list.

And then I watched Brett Favre on the sidelines. The guy is old, older than me. He kept showing up for games, even when he didn't feel great and he played 297 games in a row. (More actually if you count playoff games.) And when they asked what he felt, not playing for the first time in a long time, he said he felt a little relief that it was finally over and he didn't have to keep wondering when it would be.

I checked something off my to-do list last night without doing it. I realized I was too tired, and I'm almost as old as Brett Favre and I've been trying to get to it for two months. I'm not going to. And I was relieved.