I feel like I’m running in circles lately. The great hamster wheel of life.

Took the baby to the pet store the other day, and we watched some mice in their cage.  One was running and running on the wheel, and the other was clinging to it, going around and around, upside down, just hanging on for dear life.

Or maybe he was enjoying the ride.

I needed a break today. I spent most of last week trying to get ready to host a toddler’s birthday party which I’m sure was more for me than it ever was for her. I dunno.  I can’t help myself. If I’m going to do a thing, I want it to be special.

But it meant a week of giving up work time to clean and bake cupcakes, and RE-bake cupcakes after they failed, and cook some more and clean some more, and put up decorations.

And then I got a really weird email from an editor that made me feel like either a total failure at my job… or that she was really, REALLY missing something.

Either way, not good.

This week won’t be much better.  Thursday and Friday I am at a conference all day, and Monday and Tuesday of next week I’m at another one. I already feel guilty because the baby will have to be at daycare all that time.  I already feel pissed off because my husband refuses to take time off to help me out (despite the fact that he has MONTHS of paid time off saved up, much of which will be lost in June when it doesn’t roll over).

I hate having to feel like I need to get his permission, his help, his blessing to do my job.

I hate feeling guilty that I can’t do my job as full-time mommy some days because I need to be a full-time other person.

And yet.

Today, I left the house at 8:30am because I needed a break. I went to a coffee shop and worked for a few hours, then ran an errand to the mall, then worked in a different coffee shop for a few more hours before going to a work function.  I got home at 4:30pm.  And it was good to be away.

I needed a break.

I could put up with the demands to be held while I cooked dinner.  I even let her help with dinner.

All while my husband sat collapsed on the sofa.  When I asked him why, he said he was just tired and didn’t know why.

I know why: she’s two years old and she makes me feel like that almost every day.

Welcome to my world.

I don’t want to give up that world, but some days I need a break, and I hate feeling like I have to ask for permission for that, too.  I don’t know what the answer is.  It isn’t even him that necessarily makes me feel like that.  It’s me.

Anyway, how sad is it that for my “break” I went and worked for about four hours straight, and it felt great? That’s my idea of escape.  But it really is, because that’s four hours of stuff that won’t be hanging over my head this week, when I’m trying to get ahead before I fall behind while I’m away from my work, working at a different kind of work and not doing my mom work.

You can’t pre-schedule hugs.

Round and round we go; where we stop, nobody knows.

When she cries, I am a failure.

It is my job to be her mother.  I have other, part-time jobs, but this one is full-time, twenty-four/seven/three-sixty-five/for the rest of my life.

So when I fail, it’s a big ass deal.

It’s my job to make sure she learns to read, and goes out for a team sport at least once in her life, and goes to the dance even if she doesn’t have a date, and graduates from high school, and finds a committed relationship, and has her own family, and finds a job that lights her up, and finds purpose in her life.

But none of that can happen if I can’t get her to go to sleep.

And if I can’t get her to go to sleep, how will I get her through the first betrayal of a friend? Her first break up? The death of a pet or a loved one? Algebra and physics? When she doesn’t get the lead in the play? Middle school?

How will I possibly be able to be the mother I’m supposed to be if I can’t comfort her and help her fall asleep? How will I make all those other things more bearable if I can’t convince her that the bad dreams won’t hurt her?

How can I possibly succeed if the one most fundamental part of my job description—soothing my crying child—eludes me?

If that isn’t failure, I don’t know what is.

I need more days when I feel like I can conquer the world, and fewer that feel like the world is conquering me.

I need more chocolate, and less angst about chocolate.

I try to remember how incredibly, ridiculously, embarrassingly blessed I am in this life.

Is happiness an act of will?  Sometimes I think it is.  We make the choice, whether we realize it or not; whether we admit to it or not.

I can choose to wallow.  I can choose to feel sorry for myself.

Or, I can choose to do those things for a moment, then pick myself up and soldier on.

I make resolutions.  I make lists. I make plans and schemes.  There’s nothing I love more than a good plan—before I have to implement it.

This year is a little different.

I spent New Year’s Eve consoling my sick baby before going to bed early at my in-laws’ house.  We had just flown from Dallas to Albuquerque with a toddler with a head cold who, for the first time in her life, cried miserably for the last 20 minutes of the flight, as I’m sure her sinuses threatened to explode with the changes in pressure and altitude.

We had just flown from Dallas where my best friend took us to the airport because my mom and dad were at the hospital.

My mom and dad were at the hospital because, a little over 24 hours earlier, my dad had been admitted with a shadowy, murky, looming diagnosis of leukemia.

It only struck me a day or so ago, but this is two Christmases now, with two diagnoses of leukemia for someone I love.  Please, God, let that not be a trend we repeat again.

He got the diagnosis of leukemia after going to the hospital for what they suspected was double pneumonia.  Scary enough on its own.  But leukemia changes everything.  It changes everyone around you.  It changes the conversation.  It colors the way you look at the past and the way you plan for the future.

And I got on a plane and left.

There was really nothing else I could do.  I sat on the end of my daddy’s bed while my mom told him that the doctors wanted him to go to the emergency room.  I packed his overnight bag.  I put his shoes on for him.  I hugged him and said goodbye.  Please, God, not for the last time.

And then I cleaned.  I swept and cleaned out the refrigerator and picked up and put away.  I took out the trash and emptied the cat box.  My aunt said to me, “Grandma said you were going to clean the house,” and I replied, “I can’t do anything besides vacuum, so I’m damned well going to vacuum.”

I spoke to so many people on the phone.  Bad news spreads like wildfire.  I cried so many tears.  And I told my mother I would stay.  And she told me to go.

So I got on a plane and left part of my heart in Dallas.

And now, four days into the new year, I am still struggling.  Every day is a roller coaster.  I cry fresh tears and find fresh hope. Unlike so many Januarys before, I try not to make plans, not to think of the future.  Every resolution I wanted to make before seems so silly and trite in face of such personal disaster.  Although I know in my mind that it will do no one any good, I feel the strong urge to put everything on hold, to take a long sabbatical, to pause my plans and goals until we know… what? I’m not sure.

This disease he has is fickle. It’s fast—ridiculously, horribly fast.  He could succumb at any time, or he could be like his father and survive long past what anyone thought possible. There’s no way to know.  Every moment changes things.

I feel like I am in limbo somehow.  I don’t know how to move forward.

When we got home, our house looked like a giant had picked it up and shook it.  Well meaning family had showered us in gifts—a car full of stuff needing to be unpacked, needing to find a home.  I couldn’t even seem to pick a place to begin.  I felt so overwhelmed just looking at it all.  It’s just so much stuff.

And I thought, I would give it all up—I would give up every material possession I own—to have my father well again.

But there’s no storefront where you can make that bargain.  There’s no exchange where you can heap your grief and barter it away for better days. All the stuff is still sat here, staring at me, already gathering dust.  And all those gifts that were meant to give us so much joy just make me feel heavy and gray.

My daughter has a pile of unopened toys sitting on the sofa.  I don’t know what to do with them.  I’m thinking seriously about returning them all—but for what? Credit to accumulate more stuff.  I can’t ask for a refund on days to spend with her Pop, and that’s all I really want.

Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.
Elizabeth Bowen

I am sitting behind this glowing screen tonight feeling jealous of the successes of friends.  They are more immediate, and therefore seem more real than any successes I have had lately, or indeed ever.

I am feeling alone amidst smiling friends.

I can wallow in this, or let it spur me onward.  I can believe that voice which tells me I am nothing, I am a failure, I will not live up and should not even try.  Or I can try to break through it.

When I was a young teen, probably 11 or 12 years old, I went on a weekend retreat with the youth group at our church.  Lots of youth groups converged on Sky Ranch for the weekend.  We stayed in cabins.  It was pretty much the closest I ever got to summer camp.

And it was an awful, awful experience for me.

I remember being excited to go, but I didn’t really fit in with the other kids.  I didn’t have any friends in the group and was easily left out.  I often found myself hanging out with the adults or by myself.  When we went canoeing in the lake, and needed to pair off, two to a canoe, I was left with one of the middle-aged chaperones as my partner.

Still, I was having an OK time until we all gathered as one huge group for the evening.  They had a motivational speaker.  He passed out wooden boards, about an inch thick and the size of a sheet of paper, to everyone in the group, along with markers.  We were supposed to write or draw our greatest fears on the boards.

I don’t remember what I wrote, but I remember that I wrote it in code so that no one else could read it, and I wrote it with great gusto.  I filled the entire board with small, cramped, coded text, pouring out my fears to a piece of wood.

Then, we all stood up and watched as the speaker demonstrated how we could all break though our fears—and karate chop the board in two.

The circle of kids and chaperones became one huge long line as, one by one, each person went up to the speaker and, in front of everyone, chopped their board in two.  Everyone was able to do it.  No one failed.

Yet I was so terrified of failing, of getting up in front of everyone and not being able to break my board, that I was almost physically ill.  I feigned actual illness to one of the adults and ran out of the room before it was my turn.

I ran out into the dark woods of the camp.  I found a tree and hit the board against it over and over and over again, trying desperately to break it, so that if anyone asked, I could show them the pieces and pretend I had karate chopped it in half in front of everyone.

It wouldn’t break.

I pounded and pounded on it, jumped on it over rocks, and cried my poor little heart out, but it would not break.

In the end, I hid the board under the mattress in my bunk. I vaguely remember that someone, an adult, came looking for me, to find out if I was OK.  They could probably tell I had been crying, but they left me alone.  No one ever asked me about the board.

No one ever asked me about being afraid to even try to break through my fears—because the fear of failure was even bigger than whatever I had written out on that stupid piece of wood.

It’s the story of my life. I don’t even want to try if there’s the slightest chance I think I could fail. Give me a challenge I know I will be good at, and I won’t hesitate to give it everything I’ve got.

Challenge me with something I might not excel at, and I will do everything in my power to avoid even getting started.

I’ve gotten better at hiding it, but this fear of failure colors everything I do. And so, even now as I feel the pangs of envy over my friends’ successes, I can feel them morphing into the ever-growing monster whispering in my brain…

…you’re nothing, you’re not good enough, you’ll never achieve that, you might as well not even try…

image by Ktoine

…in order to say yes to what I really want?

I feel like I’m at one of those tipping points again.

Things have been slow lately. Slogging.  Like trying to run through Jello.

My brain has been thick, foggy, fuggy.  My middle is jiggly and pudgy.

But every now and then.  Every new month.  Every new moon—I get this urge to start over, to start fresh, to try again, to get out there and oh my gosh do something amazing, be something monumental, change the world and organize my closets!

What do I need to say no to to make that yes feeling stay?

…depression…

…apathy…

…greed…

…gluttony…

…self-depreciation…

…phoney-ness…

…lard… (in brain and body form)

Just say no to all the thoughts that flash and receive, flash and receive: ANGRY loser not worth anything failure who would ever listen to can’t can’t can’t cannot and won’t because too hard not enough not good enough not perfect not enough not anything unworthy ungrateful and ugly.

Just say no to all those ugly words.

Who is that hateful person, anyway, and why do I let her in my life?  I need to dump her, cut her out and cut her off and say SEE YA.  You are poison.  Nobody talks to me like that.  Nobody is allowed to make me feel like that.

I want to meet the real me more often.  I want to say yes to her.  I want to take her hand in mine, look deep into her eyes and say, “Yes, honey.  This is real.  It is OK to be you.  A million times yes.”

image by ili Vieira de Carvalho

I have been attending a business conference this week, learning how to be a solopreneur.  It’s scary shit.  I don’t think it’s really meant to be scary in a haunted house sort of way, but I’m scared none the less.

They said I need to offer up my highest-priced stuff now, today.  Before I’m ready.

They said I need to be working with people one-on-one if I want my infoproducts to be any good.

They said I need to charge more.

All of this is scary.  All of this is probably also true.

I am tired.  I am brain-full.  I am lonely.  I miss my baby.  I am having serious moments of “I don’t WANT to work that hard!”

I am having serious moments of, “I can’t do this.  I’m not good enough.  I’m a failure.”

But I got up today.  I put on my big-girl panties and my sexy nude pumps.  I’ve got one more day of scary to listen to.

And then I have to make the leap.

Eu-friggin-reka.

Pick one dream and explore…

Three reasons why your dream is unreasonable or the odds are stacked against you:

1. It’s ridiculously difficult to break into publishing.
2. I haven’t been able to finish an original novel yet.
3. Even if I get published, there’s no guarantee that people will buy my book.

Three ultraoptimistic and positively affirmative thoughts that instantly dissolve the bad vibes associated with the so-called unreasonable nature of your dream.

1. I am a better writer than some of the most successful writers out there.
2. I did finish a novel-length work.
3. I have great connections to get an agent and a publisher.

Three persuasive, potentially outrageous actions that will create forward traction.

1. Give up TV in favor of writing.
2. Sign up for the mentoring program so that I have an external deadline to finish writing.
3. Remember how to play.