Look, Ma No Hands by Maureen Eich VanWalleghan

I always think of that expression “look, Ma no hands,” as the moment just before crashing. It’s how I feel today. Tired, sick kid, too much to do, whine, whine, whine and more whine. I just have one kid, but still I am tired. Tired of taking care of others. I have a stack of papers needing to be reviewed for my college courses. My bathrooms are disgusting. A sink full of dirty dishes are waiting for me and a ton of stuff needs to be brought into the house from the car. Somedays the sum total of my life is just about moving stuff around. Oh and did I mention we are broke. Yesterday we went to have our taxes done. There’s nothing like a lack of money to make you feel like s@#$.

I would like one thing to feel different.

Tomorrow I will feel better I am sure, but at the moment my work desires seem so far out of reach. I keep plugging away. I keep trying to relax and trust the greater universe. I keep sending work out into the world. But since I became a mom and wife I lack the confidence I used to have, where I would wind up my focus and take aim at the things I wanted. Of course this approach didn’t work in the “love” arena. Ironic really...I now have love and no career.

Maybe I just feel grumpy, since I spent three hours at a birthday party, with a group of people I don’t know and don’t really connect with beyond the fact that our kids are in school together. So little of my time is my own. This is such a shock to me. But after six years it shouldn’t be. I don’t know why I am still startled by this issue.

My life is dominated and dictated by other people’s schedule: my husband's and my daughter's. Funny, when I was single and working, I used to get paid a lot of money for that kind of total domination. To be on deadline for work projects was a way of life. The shorter the deadline, the more hours in a single day that I worked to make that deadline, the more money I made. Now I’m just a loser. I don’t make any money, but I have the same stress. Whine, whine, whine and more whine.

I have no insight here. No little epiphany, just a general wondering about where I am headed.