Musings

Sometimes I look back on a weekend, and can hardly believe how very much I fit inside of it. Since Friday I had four performances, a husband to nurse through lithotripsy recovery, a daughter to whom to teach a firm lesson in What Happens When You Blow Off a School Project, a staff rehearsal for the one number they're doing in the middle school play, meals to prepare, groceries to buy, Family Movie Night to meaningfully accomplish, and approximately 37 loads of laundry - one of them twice, when Amelia left a blue crayon in her pocket.

Monday comes and it's a relief to *only* have to teach 6th grade for a little while.

And I'm not even complaining about it. Obviously, I like being busy, even need to be in order to feel that I am being productive and contributing to the world. But I feel recently that I have been caught in a maelstrom and can't quite get my head above the water. I'm looking for some places where I can just say no.

Plus, I really miss my friends, and my mom, none of whom I have seen very much at all lately. Pete and Liana came to see the show on Friday night, and brought me a plant which was delivered during our warm-up circle. I felt exactly like a rock star, and then proceeded to screw up during the Broadway Melody dance worse than I ever had...and that's saying something. Sigh.

In the midst of all of the craziness this weekend, though, I did manage to fit in a little scrapbooking, and even took an hour nap on Saturday afternoon, curled up on the couch with my Real Simple magazine on my lap. So there are moments of quiet in the midst of it all.

I had a dream last night that we had to make a quick getaway from some sort of major disaster (2012? Zombie Apocolypse? I don't even know.) I could take Ginger, but I couldn't take the two other cats that lived in my house, and one of them I had to kill with my bare hands in order to spare her torment. Horrible, and she was so tiny in my hands. I remember having to think carefully about what to bring with me, and I remember which of my books I grabbed off the shelves, the sweatshirts I couldn't leave behind, and that I remember to pack both the canned goods AND the can opener, something I surely would not have been likely to accomplish in real life. I remember thinking, too, in the dream, that leaving all of my journals behind was not as hard as I thought it would be. Still, I woke up sweating and whimpering and Patrick had to pet me back to sleep. This is not the first time I have had this dream, and in it, sometimes I have a family to save, and sometimes I don't.

I believe that dreams are meaningful, especially if you remember them so vividly. I wonder, sometimes, what I'm running from.