Day 4,561—Yesterday =Worst Day Ever—

 

        I started the day with little sleep and not in a great mood. I encouraged myself to get up and start the day by focusing on something I could look forward to, but it was hard to find something. Things felt like they were coming at me from all sides. At work, I was getting pulled in multiple directions to do this or that, but for me, what the kids want me to do takes priority, which is a difficult juggling act. At home, I keep stressing about one problem after another. I am in the unique place of having more money than I have had before, but it still isn’t enough to buy and make the repairs that I need, and I struggle to know what priority to focus on first. Is it my lawn, the extra room we need, or do I need to focus on throwing away stuff at my house and making more space?

        The run was something positive, but it was raining so much it felt like buckets of water were hitting me instead of drops. I was dodging puddles, but it felt like hidden ponds of water everywhere. I was soaked within seconds of leaving my house, and all I was thinking about was how I dealt with a lot worse in Colorado. There it was cold and wet. Here it was just wet so far. When I got home, I realized my basement had flooded.

        It wasn’t that bad, but mud was everywhere on my bathroom floor, and this is only after a little over a year of spending thousands of dollars to repair it the first time. This sudden flooding brought all of those problems back, and now all the other problems I was thinking about will have to go on hold while I repair that. The day was relentless, always playing catch up, always feeling unprepared, behind, and letting other people down, but I remembered what I always tell the kids: give it a day and you might feel differently about everything.

        Now, it has been a day, and I do feel differently about everything. It is not that the problems aren’t there, and it is not like yesterday wasn’t tough, but I also had a lot of people helping me in ways I couldn’t ask to be helped, and I had my son running around smiling, asking me to play with him, and I didn’t want to; I wanted him to understand I had grown-up problems to deal with, and I still needed to clean the basement, but kids in general asking me for help is almost impossible for me to resist, and when it is my kid, I am helpless. It is also just not the story I ever want to be part of. It might be an awful day, but that doesn’t change the fact that my son and daughter need me to show up and be present and play with them, and I wouldn’t be me if I couldn’t show up for that, so now I am reflecting on things, and I do feel differently about everything. Now, I can think of a day when everything went wrong, but I still could show up for the people that matter, and I had people who showed up for me to help out, and that’s a story I can look back on and be happy about.