We don’t use our dining room table so much for eating. Usually, the chair that’s there for me to sit in instead holds my purse and coat with the pair of shoes I just took off tucked underneath. On that half of the table, there might be a book or a folder or the grocery list or something I need to put in the mail piled on top. But towards the end of the semester, especially the one at the end of the academic year, the one that comes right before summer vacation, my side of the table becomes a holy mess — as does just about everything else.

At this point, I’m just trying to keep it together for one more week. If I can just get through next week, there will be more space, more time, and I can finally clear off this table, clean out the garage, balance the checkbook, fold and put away all the laundry, weed the front flowerbeds, dust off my meditation shrine, wash my car, clean up my eyebrows and shave my legs, breathe — but until then, this pile is what my life looks like.

Right now, Eric is texting me pictures from the hike he’s on with the dogs. I wish I was there with them, instead of here trying to not feel too bad about the mess and procrastinating because the next thing I need to do is go to the gym.

I just took a break from writing to call my mom, wish her a Happy Mother’s Day. I’d already talked to her a few days ago, and the present I sent her had already showed up, (although, the books I sent, she’d already read, and there’s a good chance that’s because I’d already sent her the same ones some other time). I’m so lucky to be able to just pick up the phone and talk to her, to open my email and have a message from her, to be thought of so often and so fondly. She can’t call her mom anymore. S. can’t call her mom and misses her every day. S. won’t get a phone call from one of her daughters, and that daughter won’t be getting a Mother’s Day gift from her son. J. is still feeling the ache of grief from the loss of her two tiny ones. C. wanted babies, tried but never had the chance. People I don’t know have lost their mothers in all kinds of ways, and many mothers have been separated from their kids for all kinds of reasons. I’m keenly aware that today isn’t just happy.

It reminds me of a post Anne Lamott wrote about the day, Why I hate Mother’s Day. Which then makes me think of two posts from Dash and Bella, I Know a Mama Who (2012) and I Know a Mama Who (2015). I love all three of these posts because they are honest, about the mess and the confusion and the joy. Whatever this day is for you, may you feel some of that mother love, even if you have to give it to yourself. ❤

“to all mothers, the motherless, the mothered well, the mothered terribly, to the ability to mother in any mammal, to mothers lost and mothers found. to the mother that is the planet. may we learn to lead with our hearts even through fire or dark.” ~Lidia Yuknavitch

A tiny library from our walk yesterday morning

One of my favorite things about Lindsey Mead’s blog (about the way she sees the world) is the poetry she finds and shares. This week, there were two in particular that made me pause, that I keep going back to. The first —

Be a good steward of your gifts.
Protect your time.
Feed your inner life.
Avoid too much noise.
Read good books,
have good sentences in your ears.
Be by yourself as often as you can.
Walk.
Take the phone off the hook.
Work regular hours.

~Jane Kenyon, A Hundred White Daffodils

I read this and thought, “could that be it? could it be that simple?” As you know if you’ve been reading my posts lately, I am trying to find some sort of “balance” in my life, balancing my effort with ease, but I’m not doing a very good job — and the fact that I would end that statement with that judgement, that I’m judging myself at all for how “well” I’m doing with this dilemma is at the heart of the problem. I don’t take very good care of myself, push too hard, don’t make room for rest or joy, and then make it worse by beating myself up about it.

I got a massage yesterday, and when my therapist asked me if the work I’ve been having done on my right hip was causing any issues with the left, I told her “no, the entire left side of my body is ‘normal,’ healthy, it’s just the whole right side that’s a mess.” She said, “well, there’s energetic reasons for that, that would make a lot of sense.” I asked her what she meant and she explained that often when we have issues with the right side of our body, it’s because that side is associated with work, working too hard, being busy, pushing ourselves, not getting enough of a balance between work and rest. Believe what you want about the validity of “energetic reasons,” but that sounds like a pretty accurate description of my current situation.

Add a heaping dose of anxiety, a bad night’s sleep, and three straight days of wet and gray, and I’m kind of a mess. I think about the too long to-do list for my day, feel the weight of it and want to crawl back into bed and hide. Then I go back and read A Hundred White Daffodils. Could there be another way to do this? Which reminds me of the other poem Lindsey shared,

The Thing Is

to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you’ve held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.

~Ellen Bass

To be honest, ever since Kelly died, I find myself getting trapped in a panic, a sense that no matter how fast I go or how much I do, it won’t be enough. I haven’t yet forgiven myself for the time before that now seems wasted, for the “mistakes” I’ve made. I’m still struggling under “an obesity of grief” that manifests in my physical body as well. I’m still trying to find my way in a world where so many bad things happen and so much goes undone no matter how diligent I am and no matter how hard I try.

For today, I’ll take out the trash, finish the laundry, put clean sheets on the bed, work on my Something Good list for tomorrow, read a little, go out to lunch with Eric, and the checkbook won’t get balanced, the windows won’t get washed, nothing will be dusted, the garage will remain a place to be avoided, and the weeds in the flowerbeds will live another day. But most importantly, I won’t give up.