I’ve been working too hard — it really hit me yesterday, when I was suddenly on the verge of tears for absolutely no reason around 7 p.m. And after Dr. Who, Anand made a joke about not bothering Mommy when she’s working or she’ll get mad, and I burst into tears. He was very apologetic (“I was just joking! You’re not a bad Mommy!”), but I’m clearly feeling like I’m working too hard (there were several 12-14 hr work days in the past week) and not enjoying my children enough.
I’ve been making good progress on the novel revisions, but it comes at a cost — the house has gotten messier again, without me around to direct the kids in their cleaning chores, almost all my front yard window box annuals are pretty dead, after my forgetting to water them for a week — I’ve been just getting up and going out back to the shed, and haven’t been walking around the front garden at all. Progress on the basement clean-up has completely stopped (often making it hard to find things I need), and there haven’t been any board games in a few weeks either.
Need to make haste a little more slowly, I guess, and not let the basics of house and garden slip off the task list, or I get super-cranky and sad. Dead plants = miserable me. I’ve just drenched the window boxes; hopefully some of the plants will revive. We’ll see.
The sudden time crunch is really three things coming together:
• trying to get this novel revision finished before the semester starts (while knowing I need to put at least two days towards a Wild Cards deadline in there)
• trying to bring on a bunch of help and then build out a set of modules for the Portolan Project before the semester starts (so teachers and at-home learners can use it this fall of e-learning)
• trying to prep for my own teaching; I’m still mostly in the learning how to use tech and reading about online learning stage, but the need to actually start building out content is looming and starting to stress me out; I’d better start on it soon, or I’ll start having nightmares about being unprepared on the first day of class (which I think translates to nightmares about forgetting to wear pants to a Zoom session…)
So, those three things are time-sensitive, but I also need to keep steady on the regular household stuff as well, or it starts to dissolve into chaos and that makes me super-stressed. Stepping on squished grapes that a child has dropped = v. irritating. I think the family mostly needs to help more, especially the kids, since Kevin has his own course prep and math research to worry about. I have them organizing the mudroom now, so that’ll help.
I gave myself permission not to write today, since I haven’t actually taken a day off since I started nine days ago. I might still work on the novel, if I feel like it, but it’s okay if I just wander around and take garden photos instead. 
That ‘get novel revised before semester starts’ deadline is purely self-inflicted, after all. Processing some e-mail will help too, get the looming anxiety eased a little.
Here, have some summer beauty allium and a happy bee. I love the crispness of those transparent wings.
