Why Can't This Be My Life?

Today has been one of those good days when a kid is sick, but just a little bit. Just enough of a bona fide temperature to keep him home from school (and of course, me home from work) but not enough for any actual suffering to go on.

Here's what I did today. We were already dressed to leave for school when I kissed Brandon and discovered how hot he was, so we went on over to Publix and bought cold medicine and soup and stuff. We came back home and got into bed and I finished reading Revolutionary Road. After that I straightened up the house and took my sheets off the bed to start some laundry. I checked emails and fixed Brandon's lunch. The mail came. At 3 we went to pick Bliss up from school and to transact some business at the bank since ordinarily my weekdays are all tied up in golf ball hell. Then we picked up Bliss's new contacts that had been waiting at the optometrist's office, and came home.

See, now that's a life I can deal with. It would make perfect SENSE to me if my days were spent taking care of people and things I actually CARE about, and doing little things that would make life smoother for the whole family. It makes sense to me too, quite frankly, that there should be some time in there for things I want to do, at times of the day when I have the energy to do them.

I don't care if I'm 44 years old, I will never accept or understand who arranged the world in such a way that I have to spend all day every day doing something I hate, surrounded by people who irritate me, just to make enough money to enable me to get up and do it again. It makes me crazy to even consider the phrase, "spend my life." I'm literally SPENDING it--throwing huge handfuls of days at the least desirable thing I can imagine.

When I stayed home and lived off my severance pay for a year or whatever it was, it was one of the best times of my life. Life was just better for the whole family. I got the kids to school, I wrote, I took care of the house and the pet. If a child needed to go to the doctor, no problem. If an errand had to be done during business hours, I was on it. Brian came home to a meal on the table and no work waiting for him to do around the house.

And see, I'm not what you'd call high maintenance. I'm not a shopper, I don't need to get my hair and nails done, I don't care about driving a new car. All I really want to do is stay at home and have an existence where I'm not resentful and exhausted all the time. Why can't I have that?