When did my life become unmanageable?

I keep thinking nothing much is going on in our lives, but then I talk to someone else and their response -- inevitably resembling a stunned ox -- makes me think I'm wrong.

So you can play along at home, here's what's been going on.

• My sister decided around the beginning of July to move to the city our parents live in by the middle of August.
• She then commenced getting her condo ready to sell, which involved a Saturday of packing up extraneous stuff and hauling it to the other end of the complex to the storage pod.
• My boss is out on paternity leave, meaning I'm both doing my job and pretending to be him, including shepherding a politically dicey project through to completion.
• My sister's nanny stopped showing up. A lovely cousin of ours offered to take care of the babies as soon as the bar exam was over. We set up a complicated schedule of taking turns working from home with babies, which, while possible, is really freaking hard.
• The "check engine" light comes on in the car. Ms. P enlists R's help and they take it to the spa, where it needs over $1,000 worth of work. Three days later, a tire goes flat.
• Ms. P is working really hard to improve her academic writing skills in accordance with her teacher's feedback, and proceeds to spend a week thinking about nothing other than her paper.
• Our parents are piling complications into the logistical process of moving my sister, and it takes several phone calls to come up with a plan that is least likely to make her head explode and yet gets her, her two babies, her car, and all of her stuff half way across the country without significant time away from work. For anyone.
• Lovely Cousin finishes the bar exam, and my sister and I spend an evening breaking into her apartment to leave her treats (complete with babies and Cousin's dog) and then racing across town so I can make an appointment.
• Eldest Cat is, still, again, unwell.
• Ms. P applies for and gets a hotline operator job, which will not only help our finances (goodbye, one salary) but will help structure her time and get her out of the house.
• Lovely Cousin commences baby-caretaking, but has learned only after the bar exam is over that her father has had a heart attack and she really needs to go home. And home is 800 miles away.
• Sister and I once again set up a schedule of working from home and taking care of babies.
• The current plan for getting her to New City involves her and I driving next weekend and flying me home immediately. The following weekend I go to Phoenix as part of my life coach training. The weekend after that SIL and Nephew 1 come to play. At some point I will supervise movers as they collect all of her stuff to ship it to New City where, hopefully, she'll have a new house that is NOT walking distance from my parents.

And I wonder that I'm overwhelmed?

Of course, all of this is also bringing up big feelings -- fears about my relationship with my sister, which has finally gotten good; complicated sadness about the babies leaving; residual crap about leaving academia as I work on the coaching business; stress about money -- and I barely have time to breathe right now, much less figure any of it out.

But it will all still be here when Labor Day arrives and I hibernate to recover.

Comments

[dale]

xoxoxoxo

Yikes. Remember, hang on to the raft even if it flips :-)