Things Fall Apart

I am having a hard time finding the thread of my own story lately.

Every day requires the complex navigation of set after set of high-speed, racing curves while driving a clunky station wagon built in the early 1970’s.

Every minute of my life is so full of responsibilities and obligations that they crash into each other like a massive highway pile up.

Tasks that I should attend to lay on their backs by the road side like over-turned bugs kicking their legs and refusing to die. As I go careening past them, they seem to call after me,

“You still have to do this, you moron!”

At work, a situation has arisen that I can only liken metaphorically to an oil spill of Exxon Valdez-like proportions.

Though I didn’t contribute to the creation of the mess, I find myself employed, day after day, for far longer hours that I usually work, wiping thick black goo from the individual feathers of once beautiful waterfowl armed only with a cocktail napkin.

[Oh, how effective and useful I feel!]

Every day at 4:30, I leave the flock of greasy, dejected birds to race to my own personal mom-a-thon and related duties, the foremost of which is the one where I endlessly repeat,

“Stop fighting with your (sister/brother).”

Yesterday evening, the kids and I careened through the farmer’s market trying not to hit the other patrons with our cart.

I didn’t have an actual grocery list because that would mean that I had time to think about groceries in advance.

I tried to think on my feet about what I might feed my family this week and simultaneously attempted to keep my two children from colliding head long into piles of produce.

I rounded the corner into an aisle full of melons when The Mayor, from way down the aisle, shouted,

“MOMMY, I KNOW BOYS DON’T GROW BOOBIES, BUT DO THEY GET KIPPLES? DO I HAVE KIPPLES? WHAT ARE KIPPLES?”

When the kids finally passed out in their little beds (or rather on the floor NEAR the bed in Rooster’s case), I returned to the endless bird cleaning and remained there long into the night until finally I couldn’t see straight.

These are my days.

Consequently, finding the space in my head to capture my usual blog-story-a-day has, like so many other things, fallen on its back as one of the overturned insects by the side of the road.

My blog waves its little insect legs at me each morning and I blow by it wistfully feeling like I'm being pinched in the kipples.