I landed the jackpot when I married Danny. He just pulled the three year old off me. She was yelling I want chips and nachos! I am laying down drooling into my pillow. Before I was laying on the family room floor. I get to about 4:00 every day and I'm just so exhausted. So exhausted. I feel like...
It's just so unfair that by 11:00 I'm wide awake again. Nearly every night I'm thinking or talking or full of ideas or plans or just... Talking... And it's time to sleep again?! What!
It isn't always like this. But I have been pregnant for a lot of years. And so it seems it's been like this forever.
It's nice to hold on to memories of me in a pretty body when we were traipsing around the Czech Republic a few months ago. Good memories of good people and interesting things to see. I could not move there permanently unless I became an expert in cooking Mexican food first. That should be somewhere on some priority list somewhere regardless. Sounds delicious.
My kids are all playing outside and they are so loud. But I don't care, I'm so tired. I just want to wake up and have it be nine months later.
I'm constantly reminded about how other people manage routines and schedules better than me. In a perfect world that would be something I'd have mastered by my freaking early thirties. But it isn't. And fog brain makes that harder. Things like scheduling dentist appointments and especially responding to emails. I am very bad at these things. It is so difficult to force myself to do something which doesn't sound fun.
So childish! It's lucky the things I think are fun are weird and helpful and productive. I think it's great to accomplish something worthwhile. But I'd only ever start projects if I weren't also strongly and deeply motivated by my personal feelings of connection with the people I work with.
Like, there's no way I would have worked so focusedly and exhaustively for Judith's genealogy problem if I didn't care about her. The relationship was motivating. The desire to please her and help her specifically. To do something right for her. To be praised and adored for solving the problem. Some combination of motivations all related to my relationship with her. I guess I'm not just motivated by admiration alone, but a complex intersection of thoughts and feelings that originate from my relationships. I'd move mountains for the people I love, without hesitation. If they tell me good job I'd purr in stupid illogical satisfaction like a kitty cat.
I want my friends who I collaborate with on projects to blink in stupefied amazement at my awesomeness. I want them to be pleased with both my personal progress and my objective progress. I want them to smile when they open a document and notice there are some hundred or thousand edits on something. I don't want them to feel like I'm destroying their work, but mostly I pick friends with thickish skins who are ok with criticism and discussion of ideas that they don't agree with. I want them to feel a deep sense of admiration and I guess respect is part of it. I guess I'd go more for awe. But these are all ridiculous aspirations that are not actually that worthwhile. Anyway friendships aren't built on wowing and awing an audience. But maybe there's something to the interesting discussion part. Maybe my currency is more simple than I thought: maybe it's just lots of shared words spent on anything at all. Ugh the love languages call that words of affirmation I guess. But it's hard for me to see where I fall in those categories. Too much fluffy psychobabble.
It would be better to focus on the service aspect of working together to build something great. It would also be better to set a schedule and work on my projects steadily. But I'm not a steady person like that. I am a sprinter.
I really am a sprinter. Except in real life I ran the distance races in cross country and track because I'm not really athletic enough to be a good physical sprinter. But the part of me that lives in my head is a sprinter. I take breaks. And I go all out. And then I take more breaks. I'm not a plotter, I'm a pantser.
It is very important to me to not sprint alone. I need meaningful friends in many different contexts who can help me to persevere until the end of a project. I want to finish things but I'm much better at starting them. I need the extra motivation of strong relationships to help me stay focused enough to see my goals through. It's immature probably, but it's also the truth.
I think I'd be a very lonely person without Danny in my life. He doesn't generally work on most of my projects with me, per se, but he listens to me talk and talk and talk and talk about them, and about my friends, and about my conversations, and about my dreams. He is a good man who is very steady. But we both can quite easily escape together to a mental jungle gym where we discuss things from every corner of the universe, which is such a great place to be. Like a virtual world where I'm a gorgeous avatar running around fighting dragons, not an old mom in need of a shower, in yoga pants and a t-shirt who nowadays gets sore in the pubic symphysis from a pathetically short walk around the block.