Schedules are the invisible scaffolding of a sane life. We need them to approve our own sufficiency, to know when to wake up, when the coffee should be ready, and when the day finally ends. But it becomes complicated when a family is added to the equation. Suddenly, the plan isn’t just yours. It’s a…
As a mom, wife, caretaker, maid, driver, teacher, cook, washing machine and dish washer, and to add to the list of to-do’s, I still work in between the choas. Sometimes I feel too busy and to focus on some things I really want to do becomes a chore on its own. And sometimes, I drop…
It’s a phrase we see on coffee mugs and Pinterest boards, usually surrounded by glitter and pastel rainbows. It sounds easy when you’re reading it over a quiet Saturday morning brew. But on a Tuesday at 7:00 AM, when the laundry mountain is threatening a landslide and the school bags are missing, being a unicorn…
Tuesday began, as certain inconvenient Tuesdays do, at four in the morning. Guinea Pig woke with that unmistakable sense that sleep had quietly packed up and left without consultation. His body had decided that morning was already underway, though the hotel world, with its clerical devotion to proper hours, insisted that daybreak was still some…
Monday arrived and Guinea Pig was back to his involuntary waking hour. He felt refreshed. Much better, in fact, and this, he knew, was not a small thing but a signal. Sleep, when it had done its work properly, did not merely restore the body. It restored proportion. It returned the world to scale. As…
Sunday had not begun well. Guinea Pig had slept badly. The reasons were not entirely clear, though several candidates were circulating in the background: work, the persistent voice of Doodle Horse somewhere in the back of his head, and the growing suspicion that his internal batteries had been operating on reserve for longer than was…
He overslept. He got up at half past six instead of at his usual involuntary hour between half past three and four. But then the evening before had run later than was wise. He had been working on a report, and the mind, once engaged with duty, is not always disposed to release itself at…
Some mornings are for rushing, but the best ones are for coffee and quiet. I’m an almost 36-year-old mom currently attempting the great Olympic sport of juggling: work, home, school, a husband, a son, and the beautiful, messy blur of life in general. For some time, I’ve shared daily quotes and Bible verses on Facebook…
There is a particular silence that settles in when the house empties. Not loneliness. Not drama. Just the absence of observation. When departures have happened and trains have left platforms and the motherland has reclaimed its citizens, the house shifts. And I shift with it. I become lighter. Looser. Slightly feral in an intellectual way….
