Life can sometimes eat up every ounce of energy and motivation you have and leave you only able to focus on the few things that absolutely cannot be neglected. I’ve been in that space for the past 7 months. Between a major project at work, parenting, pregnancy and sometimes managing to make my bed here and there, I had nothing else left in me to give but I’ve missed this blog. I’ve missed giving words and shape to my musings.
So let’s call this the Season 2 kick off of The Well Adjusted Adult. Let’s say I planned it this way. Let’s pretend I had something more interesting going on than planning for effective dates of new accounting standards, complaining about the physical discomforts of pregnancy, and figuring out the laziest ways to feed my family dinner.
Pregnancy was a challenge I had not anticipated. I wanted this baby so badly and looked forward to a new life thriving inside of me, waiting to see that precious face for the first time. My first pregnancy was riddled with stress and anxiety as I was in a marriage that I knew would fail and kept hoping that the doctor would discover that I wasn’t pregnant at all but instead had a massive benign tumor that simply needed to be removed. This time I am in a happier place in my life, deliberately planned for a baby and just knew this pregnancy would be magical. I’d embrace it and love every minute of this miracle.
FALSE! I learned I just hate being pregnant. I hate the lack of sleep, the swelling, the hormonal rages, the fattening face and arms, the back pain, the nausea, the violent kicks to the bladder and the wait for the baby. There’s got to be a better way to make people in this day in age!! If anything, this pregnancy was physically worse because I’m almost a decade older. At 25 my physical discomforts were few and I snapped right back to my pre-pregnant shape. At 34 I felt like this baby was slowly killing me from the inside and my post partum body is just sad.
In the midst of physical misery and leading a major initiative at work, no one granted me a free butler, chef or housekeeper. Most grown ups can probably work all day, cook their family a meal and then also manage to keep their home clean. A direct reflection of how busy my life is can be assessed through how messy my house is. Cleaning is at the bottom of my totem pole of things I want to do so it’s what I do when everything else has been accomplished first. Obviously, I didn’t get to the cleaning much. I just learned to become one with the piles of clothes at the foot of my bed. I’ve turned a blind eye to the layers of dust, mounds of unopened mail and all of the items I dropped on the floor but was too pregnant to bother to pick up. Seriously, by the third trimester of pregnancy, insurance should just pay for a butler.
We also needed a chef. With me being achy and busy, all of us in this household gained pregnancy and stress pounds from the lack of energy I had to prepare decent meals. Months of take out and drive thrus and pizza delivery has taken its toll on each body. We have some major rebuilding, renewing and revitalizing to do around here now that things have calmed down a bit. We will get to it all, eventually. Bit by bit. At our own pace. I’ve learned that surprisingly, you won’t die from not having it all together all the time.
The Well-Adjusted Adult 