On Dropping The Ball

A short note written on my phone.

I can’t keep up. It’s summer and I’m dropping lots of balls. I’m exercising less than I said I would. I’m writing less than I said I would. I’m behind on responding to text messages, and I have a freelance project deadline I’ll hopefully (pray for me) meet by the skin of my teeth.

The sun seems to sit, not in the sky, but above my scalp. When I buckle my three kids into their car seats, the back of my neck is bacon on a skillet. I want to crawl inside the AC system. I want to live in there until I’m a block of ice submerged in your glass of water.

My car is not equipped for a toddler car seat and two boosters, but we’ve somehow squished them into one row. If you saw the arrangement, if you saw the huffing and puffing required to get my kids safely buckled in, you’d be appalled. Trust me on that. It’s a mess. It’s the opposite of optimized. The whole process is a recipe for chipping away at a mother’s sanity. Every time I swat around in the dark crevice between the seats to find the buckle for my daughter’s booster I groan “this is a pain in the butt!!!” in an effort to not scream and curse and fall apart completely in the 100 degree heat. Yesterday, as we started the process of buckling in, H asked preemptively, “mom, does your butt hurt?”

I keep getting this feeling that I’m not doing enough. It’s one of the recurrent feelings of my life except I’m older now, so it’s less weighty and shameful. More like a skipping record in my mind, replaying the same lyric over and over until it fades into silence.

The internet is valorizing 90s summer but nobody is talking about the internal deprogramming required to actually relax into one. Our modern brains are not comfortable with stillness, with shapeless days, with dilly-dallying and flow. We’re not comfortable with the perceived cost of doing less. We are scared of what’s on the other side of letting go a little.

Is it obvious that “we” is me?

I’m reminded that my one priority for this summer was to slow way down and hang out with my kids. I’ve done that, mostly, but not without a dose of worry — what will happen if I drop some balls in the process of prioritizing this one thing?

I’m always surprised by my own resistance to having less on my plate, even when I claim I want it. It’s like, I sit down for a second and that inner voice perks right up, summoning me to sweep the floors or pick up after my kids as soon as the mess is made. Or — let’s be real — move my thumbs through icons on my phone at a dizzying pace that generates absolutely nothing of interest or meaning. I can, sometimes, tap into my kids’ meandering cadence; nowhere to be at any particular time. The dishes will be there when we finish this game of bingo. That email can sit in my inbox until after bedtime. But it takes intention. An intention that’s rewarded with a collective ease, as if my system is wired up with theirs — the motherboard of the whole machine.

There’s this narrative for me that slowing down is hard, that peace is another thing I have to work toward, or achieve, but what if it’s just here, an energy to tap into in any given moment. What if I don’t have to “carve out time” or “sneak away,” “or steal a moment” to claim it. We are all deserving of alone time, yes, but maybe this language of extraction and stealth is shaping the way I relate to my life. I’m reminded of Oliver Burkeman’s writing, and I’m compelled to think of these summer days as a river, fluid, inviting me to be in time, instead of working against this season of life, instead of viewing time as a resource to control, manipulate, or ( cringe with me) optimize.

With three kids at home there is no neat compartmentalization. There is living alongside each other, doing squats in the yard while the kids play, writing this in the early hours of the day, while I watch the nursery camera for my baby to wake. There is constant interruption that, in certain light, looks like healthy integration. The boundaries of work and care - of them and me - are blurry in these early years. What if I let them be?

One of the things that gives me the dizzying feeling of too much is the sheer volume of writing I’m faced with on this app. There is so much here. I can’t decide what to read. It’s like trying to get dressed in an overstuffed closet. If you are reading this, thank you. I hope you derive some inspiration and connection here.

Love,

Stephanie

PS: If you like these weekly-ish essays and letters, it would mean so much to me if you clicked into the app to like, comment and share!