My life is out of sync.  Here’s why:

I work until midnight five nights a week.  Sunday nights, I work until 1 a.m.  Saturday night, I’m off.

When I finish work, it’s usually later than my official quitting time.  If I blog or do anything else on the computer, suddenly it’s late.  For instance, right now, it’s 2:00 a.m.

So I will trudge upstairs and slip into bed, trying not to wake my slumbering husband.  If I’m lucky, my brain will turn off and I’ll be asleep within thirty minutes.

At 6 a.m., my husband leaves for work.  I usually sleep through his morning routine and departure.

At 6:30 a.m., my son showers and gets ready for school.  He leaves at 7:30 a.m.  Sometimes I don’t hear any of this.  (He’s such a responsible boy for an almost-12-year old.)

At 7:30 a.m. or 8:00 a.m., my daughter wakes up.  She appears at my bedside to talk.  She showers.  I crawl from bed and pull on a sweatshirt and yoga pants that never match.  I give her breakfast and drive her to school before 9 a.m.

Then I return home and sometimes crawl back under the covers, telling myself that I can sleep just one more hour to bring my total hours of sleep to seven.  And then I fall into a crazy sleep full of hallucinatory dreams.  I sleep longer than just one hour and wake up with enough time to shower and get dressed and start working at noon.

I rebuke myself for wasting my mornings.  Shouldn’t I be cleaning or grocery shopping or cooking or hand-sewing outfits for my children?  But no.  I sleep.  I sleep because I cannot function on six hours of sleep a night.

I work until 5 p.m., interrupting my five hours at the computer only long enough to pick up my daughter at school–it’s a 10 minute round-trip.

I finish work and head to the kitchen.  I clean it up and then cook dinner.  I might do some housework, get laundry going.

At 6 p.m., my husband is home, usually.

We spend some time together.  I exercise.  Sometimes I read.  At 8 p.m. or 9 p.m., it’s time to work again until midnight.

And the cycle begins again.

Do all working moms feel like they just don’t have any time?  I am so grateful for my job.  I work 40+ hours a week (at home, on my computer!) and have full medical and dental and vision benefits for my whole family.  I have vacation time and sick time and occasionally, I fly to New York for meetings in the main office.

This week, just for kicks, I have to renew my driver’s license in person (so I can get an enhanced license that will get me across the border if I ever want to visit Canada).  Yeah, that will be fun and will take all Wednesday morning.

(Now, it’s 2:15 a.m.  This is ridiculous!)

Here’s how it works.

I write a post.

A few kind souls leave comments.

Those comments appear in my email box where I read them and then fail to respond to them, but NEVER delete them, just in case one day I”ll find time to email a note back.  Occasionally, I answer my comments.

But for the past few days, no comments appeared in my email box.  I puzzled over this, but didn’t have a chance to investigate. But it was sad.

Then late tonight, comments from the last three posts appeared in my box.  Some needed moderation.  (I have no idea why.)  Cyberspace must have held my comments in limbo.  Weird.

The belated appearance of those comments made me SO HAPPY.  So, thank you, kind commenters and hearty band of readers.  I really appreciate it.

In other news, today I did not grate off my thumb at the knuckle.  (I did that yesterday.  Almost.)

You are lucky that I am utterly unable to post photos on this blog because otherwise, I’d be tempted to post a picture of my grated thumb knuckle and my very bruised purple and blue foot.  (I fell the other day in my boys’ room.  I hope I tripped.  Otherwise, such a tumble is inexplicable.  I thought I broke my foot–that’s how much it hurt.)

And now, happy Wednesday!

Time to share:  What’s the worst injury you’ve ever accidentally inflicted upon yourself?

I go to sleep each night thinking of all the ways I’ve failed.  I failed to get my kitchen spic and span.  I failed to match all the socks and get all the clean clothes into their drawers.  I failed to write any more on my neglected creative projects.  I failed to eat enough vegetables.  I failed to do push-ups and bicep curls and sit-ups.  I failed to read my Bible and I failed to write in my flowered journal.  I failed to clean off the cluttered cabinet behind my desk.  I failed to floss.  I failed my kids in visible and invisible ways.

Is this normal?  Is it normal to measure your life by all the ways you fail yourself and your family each day?  Is it normal to count the passing of the days by the missed opportunities and the broken promises, big and small?

I begin each day already buried under the pile of expectations I failed to meet the day before.  I’m already behind before I begin.  The race begins and I have to detour around obstacles to even get to the course.

I can’t catch up.

I can’t recognize any successes in my life.  I’m blind to the good, deaf to the music.  All I can feel is the thrumming bass of all the urgent demands that I can’t ever meet.

And so tonight, I’ll crawl into bed, trying not to wake my husband, and think that tomorrow, maybe tomorrow, I’ll get something done.  I’ll achieve something that might last until darkness falls again.  But probably not.  And then I’ll think of all the things I wish I’d done, all the things I would have done if only I could get myself together, if only I had time.

Some people have a mental “To Do” list but I have this other list, this horrible list of “Things I Didn’t Get Done” and every day the list grows longer and I feel more desperation and despair.

This can’t be normal.

* * *

(Please, please who know me in real life, I’m just venting.  It’s okay.  This is what we writing types do from time to time.  It helps us think through things.)

No, seriously, I know there’s no such thing as a lurk.  But there are lurkERS and I think that there may be some lurkers on this blog.

Ha ha ha.  Really, I know I used to have a lot of readers and lurkers and now I’m just shouting into the universe–okay, just shouting into the backyard into the shadows where the raccoons lurk.  It makes me kind of sad because I used to feel surrounded by people who understood me or who empathized or who laughed at my lame jokes.  Now?  Just standing in my pajama pants shouting into the backyard.

As I said, sad.

So, what are you reading these days, Mel?

Oh, I’m reading Donald Miller’s Searching for God Knows What.  Whenever I read Donald Miller I always wonder what it would be like to be a single guy gallivanting around the country.  Then I’m sort of jealous and think that I could write books, too, if only I had time to gallivant instead of making dinner every single night and making sure everyone has clean underpants.  Oh, to have time to think!  The luxury!   I doubt he even has an inkling what a luxury it is to think and write and sleep.  (I know.  I sound rather bitter.)

Before that, I read Mary Karr’s Cherry, which I did not love, but I wanted to read because it bridges the gap between her first memoir (The Liar’s Club) and her most recent (Lit).

Before that, Jeannette Walls’ The Glass Castle.  I loved that story.

(Interesting tidbit:  Both Mary Karr and Jeannette Walls first memoirs were edited by Nan Graham.)

What are you reading?

And are you lurking?

Will you speak up?

And now, off to bed I go.  And it’s not even 2 a.m. yet.  My job is depriving me of sleep.

But I did send off all my Christmas letters, so there’s that.

So, last Friday I was working at my computer desk, intent on my Internet job, when Chestnut the Cat wandered close to me and meowed.  I said, “Do you want to go into the boys’ room?” and I got up, walked across the room and opened the door to the boys’ room, which leads to the laundry room which holds the cat food, water, litter box, washing machine and dryer and the big freezer where I keep extra food. The cat looked at me and, instead of going into the boys’ room, ducked under a coffee table.  Dumb cat.  I closed the door and returned to my desk.

A bit later, back at my desk, I heard a rustling sound.  I figured that Smokey the Cat was cavorting with the Costco-sized box of Cup o’ Noodles.  When the noise continued, I decided to check it out and rescue the noodles.  I’ve had to throw away some of the styrofoam cups before when the cats got a little too friendly with them and left toothmarks.  I didn’t want that to happen.  How tragic to waste any of those cheap noodly cups, right?

I entered the room in time to see Chestnut scurry away from a pile of poo.  IN THE DINING ROOM (which we filled with bookcases and store extra things like cups of noodles and bags of potatoes.)

“NO!  NO!  NO!”  I waved my arms at the cats and they eyed me as if I’d lost my mind.  I may have even stomped my feet.  This out of bounds pooping behavior is uncommon in our cats and I figured it was because their litter box was disgusting and needed to be cleaned–which I had told my boys the day before.  However, they disregarded my request to clean the litter box, so this pile of poo was the result.

I scooped it up with a handful of tissues and headed through the boys’ room to the bathroom adjoining the laundry room to dispose of it in the toilet.  Then, because I had nothing else to do (besides my job which I am being paid to do, hello?), I decided to just clean that stupid litter box myself so the cats wouldn’t resort to pooping on the carpet.  As I leaned over to scoop, I inexplicably turned my head to look at the freezer.

I don’t know why.  It was right next to my shoulder and maybe I felt a breeze.  All I know is that the freezer door was cracked open.

I abandoned the litter box and yanked open the freezer door to find most everything in it completely thawed.  This included a twenty pound turkey, a lot of beef that I purchased last summer from a farmer, leftover Jenny Craig food from last year when my husband “did” Jenny Craig, vegetables and did I mention the beef?

I hollered random non-curse curse-words and called for my boys to bring me trash bags.  I wept, I wailed, I gnashed my teeth.  Then I began to sort through the mess, discarding meat that was not only thawed but also room temperature.  As I worked my way down the shelves, I found that the uppermost shelves were the most thawed while the lowest shelf still held some frozen items.  Everything else was somewhere in between. Once I finished my salvage operation, I just closed the freezer again because I didn’t have time to defrost the whole thing.

Seriously.

I gave my neighbor the steaks.  (Four packages, including some cube steaks which I really have no idea how to cook in the first place.)

That night I cooked four pounds of ground beef.

Saturday, I cooked a twenty-pound turkey and a roast.

Sunday, marinaded flank steak.

None of that, however, was as upsetting as today when I left my desk (while still working) to pick up the kids from school.  It’s my carpool day.  I drove twenty minutes to the middle school and waited five minutes but my kids never appeared.  I finally called the other carpool mom and she answered the phone with, “Melodee, I’m so sorry!  I have the boys!”  My carpool day was switched back to Thursday but she forgot to mention it to me.

I believe I have now reached my monthly quota of frustration and alarm.  DO YOU HEAR ME, UNIVERSE?

In other news, I self-diagnosed myself with multiple sclerosis yesterday, just for fun, based on a comment someone left on my Facebook status after I mentioned how I occasionally (too frequently) fall UP stairs.  Dr. Google is a very scary practitioner indeed.

How was that for a post chock-full of unrelated information?

You’re welcome.

(Also?  I am mailing my last twenty-four Christmas-New-Year’s-Valentine’s-Day letters tomorrow.)

Last night I was up until 2:00 a.m. working on my “Christmas Letter.”

Yes, I am deeply aware that today is January 7.  I don’t know what happened.  Well, I do know what happened.  My husband didn’t harass me about writing the Christmas letter until after Christmas.  And even then it wasn’t harassment as much as wondering when I was going to get it done.  I am in need of harassment, I guess, to get things done.

But hello?  I had to shop and wrap and decorate and cook and clean and . . . oh, do I sound like a whiner?  A complainer?  Because I am not whining nor complaining but merely explaining.

I was busy.

That letter is my 19th annual letter.  I started writing letters after we moved (for the fifth time in three years) in 1990.  It’s weird, completely weird, and perhaps people are just lying to me, but throughout the year, people tell me they are looking forward to my Christmas letter.  Then when Christmas cards and letters begin to arrive, they have handwritten notes on them:  “Can’t wait for your Christmas letter.”  This year, on New Year’s Day, one of my husband’s long-time friends (from junior high!) called to ask, “Where is my Christmas letter?”

The pressure!  So, I wrote a Christmas letter a few days before Christmas.  Then it took me a few more days to edit it.  Another week passed before I got pictures done to tuck into the card.  And this week, I finally started printing letters and labels (you cannot even imagine how I struggled with that task).  Last night, I began to sign letters, fold them, shove them into envelopes with a picture–and that’s when I saw that the 20 cards (with slots for pictures) didn’t really fit into their envelopes.  So I trimmed each card.  What a delight.  Who sells a box of cards with ill-fitting envelopes?!

I had to handwrite some addresses and stuck labels to other envelopes.

(THIS IS SO BORING.  I’ll wrap it up quickly now.)

At any rate, it was 2 a.m. when I finally turned off the computer and printer and went to bed.  I took my daughter to school and went back to bed from 9 a.m. to 11 am. . . . bringing my grand total of sleep for the night to about eight hours.  Then I got ready and rushed to the post office so I could buy 90 one cent stamps to supplement my old postage stamps.  I bought a roll of new stamps.  (I cannot believe a first-class stamp is 44 cents.  I remember when they were ten cents.)

I still have twenty-four letters to either photocopy or print out.  Then more labels to slap on more envelopes before stamping them all and dropping them into the mailbox.  I only hope I manage this before Valentine’s Day so I don’t seem like an even bigger loser than I already do.

And that was my grand accomplishment for the day:  Bringing Christmas cheer to friends and family in January.  Because I’m tardy for the party.

(Better late than never.)

I have no patience for January.  Even though it’s my birthday month (forty-five coming up on the 28th–mark your calendars), I have never been particularly fond of this month.  After the Christmas decorations are put away, I want spring to spring forth and cheer me up with daffodils.  I don’t want to live through the grim gray days of rain.

But what choice is there?  You can’t wish away a whole month, nor a season.  I’ve never found a way to leap over an unpleasant monotony.  You just have to become conscious and walk through the day, sometimes inch by inch.  Whatever it takes.

I wish I were more of a cheery type, the kind of woman who bursts with optimism and celebrates the little moments.  That’s the person I expected to be when I read all those parenting books before I had kids.  I’d have a meticulous house with a calendar chock-full of events and activities and happenings.  And I’d wear a flouncy apron.

As it turns out, though, I’m kind of glum, especially during January.  Christmas is over and I start worrying about taxes and birthdays (three of my kids have upcoming birthdays) and remaking myself into the image of the Person I Ought To Be.  (That always involves exercise and often features self-deprivation.)  I dream of reading more, paying attention better and getting more done.

But really?  I’m just waiting for daffodils.

(Note to self:  Please get your Christmas New Year’s Valentine’s Day letter in the mail today.)

I have made resolutions.  I’ll let you know in a year if I succeeded in keeping them.

What about you?  Resolutions?  Or just hope in the general direction of better health and success in all things that matter to you?

Seven-year old Grace and I were returning from the grocery store.

“Hey!  My shirt says ‘live in peace.'”  She paused.  “Like that will happen.”

“Why?  Don’t you think it’s possible to live in peace, Grace?”  I was shocked by her cynicism.

“No.”

“Why not?”  I was suddenly consumed by dismay.  My child was born after 9/11–our country’s been at war her entire life.  Many of her friends have military parents.  Has my child become disillusioned by life at the tender age of seven?  Does she really believe that peace is impossible, that we are doomed to a world full of endless war?  “Why can’t you live in peace, Grace?”

She sighed, one of those “my-mom-is-so-dense” sighs, then spit out one word:  “ZACH!”

I burst into laughter.  She cannot live in peace because she and her 11-year old brother, Zach, are locked in constant battle.  I couldn’t stop laughing which made her giggle which made me laugh until I had to wipe my eyes.

As if a girl could live in peace when she has a brother to torment her.  Duh.