Something weird is going on. Maybe it’s the cold snap that came to an abrupt end. Maybe it’s the seven-planet alignment I’ve been hearing about. I think Mars is in retrograde; or maybe it’s ascendant. I forget how it all works.
Whatever the reason, I’ve got wonky stuff going on at my house. I have to drag my teenager out of bed. Worse than usual, I mean. The younger two are chasing each other around the house and yelling. Also, you know, worse than usual. Their fun tussling games turn into WWF brawls in a matter of seconds and the teenager awakens with a dragon’s ferocity when the younger two run up and down the halls, banging on her door.
When I picked the kids up on Friday last week, stories of fights as school spilled out as soon as they’d buckled their seatbelts. Three fifth-graders who are normally friends got into a shoving match on the playground. It ended in ripped clothes, blood and the entire class had to spend the last recess with their heads down on their desks. There was some shoving among the third graders, too, but the recess monitor didn’t see it. At the middle school across town, a rough game of dodgeball ended with kids crying in the locker rooms. Even our cows are doing this strange head-push thing, a reverse tug-of-war, on the feed grounds.
As for me, I feel the equal pull of staying in bed and jumping up with the frantic thought of all the things I need to get done. I’ve been trying to corral that energy with a to-do list, but I wind up with three times as many tasks as I have hours in a day. Trying to decide where to start makes me want to crawl back in bed. But I soldier on, making chaotic stabs at the list, rolling the undone tasks over at the end of each day so I can wake up again to push through the same hopeless exhaustion to pile more stuff on my list.
One of the tasks I keep rolling over is a post I wanted to write about Thermopolis, Wyoming, my favorite place on earth. Over President’s Day weekend, we’d soaked in the healing waters, and, as always, they worked magic. The kids fought a little less than usual; I set my to-do list aside; we all Zenned out.
When we got home, I wanted to write all about how my favorite place had fixed everything, only to find that it was only a temporary reprieve. Thermopolis was a nice break, but we plunked back into the storm, the teenager in bed, the other two are shrieking and me, with my never-ending to-do lists, trying to hold it all together.
We can go with the weather or the planets—what the hell, let’s go with planets. Doesn’t matter. I’m checking boxes off my to-do list, doing the yoga, the breathing, the naming feelings. Still we’re a mess. The planets are on parade; it’s out of my control. It doesn’t even matter whether I understand or even believe in astrology. I don’t need to work out the details. That just sneaks more back into my to-do list.
And the planets are in constant motion. The parade is about pass and my life will return to its normal state of wonkiness. In the meantime, I have a fight I have to break up and then I’m going to bed.
Vegetarian Ranchwife 