The List goes on

Do you remember when you were a school child and the teacher would say, find a place to stop, then put your pencils down…

I really want to put my pencil down. I want to stop. But my most recent episode had me starting so many projects…. (My son also stole my pencil. Not my metaphorical pencil. The literal pencil I was just using to try and prioritize my projects with… yet… another list.)

And that visual clutter stress that I always have is just getting worse and worse because of the unfinished projects. And my son’s obsession with threaded metal textures aka screws and tools, well, it’s another added stress. (The pencil- it had metal attaching the eraser to the wood… You can bet the texture on that was lovely… I hope it was. I hope I find it again… It was a good pencil.)

He is a bit of a crow when it comes to collecting textures and shiny things. So, tools and screws, keep getting absconded with, sometimes in the middle of a project. Hence the rampant distractions. And my frustration.

Not at him. He got his crow’s attention for distraction from me. I’m really frustrated at the inability to move on from this episode…. Frustrated from this madness…

Historically, this will probably be a time of madness for a lot of people. I’m alive. My family is alive, so I am not claiming my madness over the grief of others. The financial burdens and pain that many others are just trying to survive at this time.

And there is good happening too… a painful, but necessary good. After all, the civil rights era was a time of madness, but without it… well, this isn’t the place to talk about that good though, in my To Do list, as a side note to my privileged life …

I want to stop and move on to other things.

But I can’t leave all these projects undone. It’s like my mind is still unraveling because I have not completed them. I cannot rest because I have not been able to create any kind of normal.

Because normal stopped months ago.

So I tried to tear abnormal apart and make something new, literally tore my house apart in places. But now, it’s hard to put it all back together again.

I’ve had a few injuries and illnesses as well, nothing too serious. Nothing like my unverified brush with the coronavirus. (Which has been cropping back up in the form of coughs and skin rashes for weeks now. Leaving me to wonder if this is something new or will I never really heal?)

My son also hit me in the head with his swing during the middle of a speech therapy tele-health session, while I was discussing programming his talker with his therapist- BAM right in the forehead. I’d like to think that it was an accident. But he gets very jealous of my attention. It wouldn’t be beyond him to literally kamikaze into the conversation.

Despite this injury, I still managed to put up his new swing outside:

I have hope. I have accomplished a lot, even with my little crow companion. I’ve struck many projects off this list. Some halfway, some almost done, very few complete.

Even with the chain of disaster to disaster, or just the feeling of uncontrollable chaos, I do think that we will come out of this ok. I hope that we will. I don’t want to tempt fate. So many people are so careless with their person, no mask, touching their faces, touching everything.

And I spend so much time in stores, waiting to pick up my son from his half day. No time for acting on my list, only waiting. Waiting with people who think this is over. Who think their opinion is more important than the lives of others. Who, so easily, easily go on about their lives.

And so, for me, the list goes on. As the abnormal becomes the new normal, and we all wait for “old normal” to return.

Either way, I still have a hole in my ceiling. But I’m working on it.