My Fall

I don’t know how your fall has been so far, but mine has been exactly that: a deeper than ever tumble into the depths of motherhood...ah, and just as I have sat down here to whine about it all, in comes a phone call from Zoe...and off I go to pick her up because she missed her ride - did I say too much?

Back again... So, on my way back from school, I also picked up Julian’s bike from the shop and a pint of milk from the store since I never leave the house for just one errant - I can’t, I virtually would have to quit eating a sit-down meal all together. As it is, I only have one of those a day anyway.

I have given up on breakfast ever since the daily fights over the bathroom began...I could have changed my routine a gotten up earlier to resolve it, but that would mean earlier nights on the other end and since I only get to see Matt in the evening, I decided to go for plan B...a protein-joghurt shake on the run.

So let’s see what else did I accomplished today...? After a brisk and very wet walk to school, I sold used children’s books at the canteen to raise $$ for the class trip and after 1.5 hours had brought in a whopping 17.00GBP!! When there was no further hope of talking an unsuspecting fellow parent into buying an almost new copy of Winnie the Pooh, I hauled the sad rejects back and decided that maybe class trips are over-rated anyway.

Next was the wash - three loads - the dishes, chili con carne and a futile effort to fix the recessed lighting in the kitchen, which ended up tripping a fuse and subsequently also blowing out the fridge which shrewedly went into defrost mode over the rest of the morning.

Next I wrote on a monologue for yet another fundraiser - this time to restore the clock house - an epic endeavor. But this one should be fun, given that it can’t possibly be any worse than the first one I staged. There came a moment during that performance when I actually thought that to cut my losses, I should just drop the microphone and put the house on the market. That was last month.

Since then, I had the flu, travelled to Lisbon for a reunion where nobody showed up except for Matt, watched the school musical five times in a row (because Zoë, after years of being cast and recast as a Viking, finally scored a female lead), and made lanterns, a dragon head, and seventeen calendars depicting every inch of our existence in order to quench any requests for pictures - forever!

I also made three sour dough Friendship Cakes that nobody wants to eat because they suck (don’t ever get talked into making a cake called Herman!), and nit-checked diligently every Wednesday as ordered by the school nurse...actually I skipped the last two times....

Anyway, my fall has been a blurr of maddening hyper-activity tempered only by a few hours of restless sleep here and there with my face esconded between seven downy purple pillows, that and a walk through the olive garden of São Jorge.

I don’t know where it all will end...it says pride comes before the fall but I wonder what comes after?