Another Post About How Tired I Am

(Are you as sick of this as I am?)

One recent Monday the girls didn’t have school.

Alyssa had to work at 4:30 that day. Olivia and Tom had to go to my mom’s to print some labels using her computer and printer.

I got home that afternoon and found an empty house.

Do you know how rare that is?

We’ve lived in our house for nine years and I can probably count on one hand how many times I’ve been alone in that house.

The joy of having a spouse who works from home, right?

I mean, okay, it’s nice that he’s always there but…he’s ALWAYS there.

So what did I do with my ten minutes of solitude?

First, I snapped Julie a video of my empty house.

Second, I started washing dishes because, hello, I needed to pack my lunch and my lunch dishes were dirty. And of course, the girls’ breakfast and lunch dishes were in there. Tom usually washes the dishes before I get home but I beat him home.

He and Olivia got home before I finished washing the dishes.

It was fine.

But then, I realized it was only 5:20. I asked Tom when O had eaten lunch because he almost always feeds her a very late lunch.

He confirmed it by saying, “She started eating at 2 and finished at 3.”

Okay then.

I took her upstairs and made her take a bath. I won’t say she was stinky but I will say that her hair hadn’t been washed since Thursday and it was Monday. I know, mother of the year over here.

She was bathed and shampooed by 6:15, in time for dinner.

Then, during dinner, my brother called me to tell me that our dad’s truck had been hit in a parking lot. The dude who’d hit his truck waited in that parking lot to give my dad his insurance information. Go, good citizen.

But of course my dad had to drive all the way from Angola to my house (about twenty miles) to tell me the same damn thing. He showed me pictures, he talked about the ‘foreigner’ who’d hit his truck.

Olivia and I finished eating while my dad was there and then we started her homework because hello, it was 7:15 by this point.

While we worked on homework, my dad talked…about himself, his truck, his phone. Each time I’d try and refocus on helping O with her homework, he’d interrupt with another question or comment in an attempt to bring the attention back to himself.

Once homework was done, I packed my lunch for the next day, washed the dishes AGAIN and finally, at 8:10, I sat down.

I’m tired.

You guys, I’m so freaking tired.

I get up between 5:30 and 5:45 every day of the week. I get myself together as quickly as I can so that I can wake Olivia up and get her around (she does dress herself but she can’t braid her own hair.) I go to work, I come home, I make food for my family, I clean the kitchen, I fill Olivia’s cup of water several times an evening. I go and go and go and still feel like there is so much left to do.

I wonder, sometimes, if this is just residual exhaustion from cancer and the treatments I endured in hopes of killing off the cancer.

I recently joined a FB support group for breast cancer survivors.

Reading what some of those women are going through, still, even years after treatment, reminds me of how lucky I am.

But acknowledging my luckiness doesn’t make me less tired. You know?

But maybe acknowledging my tiredness, my right to being tired, the fact of what I’ve been through, maybe just giving myself permission to be tired and angry and sad about it all, maybe that will give me some peace.

I don’t know.

Maybe I just need a nap.