Brain Dump + Blog Break

I’m writing this just before midnight on a Sunday because I can’t get to sleep.

I had a whole week of blog posts scheduled (hooray!), but I’ve moved them all back to drafts and will be taking a little bloggy break for the next week or so.

(For anyone in my Patreon community, those posts will still go out on Tuesday and Thursday!)

What a week/month/year.

Gracious, things feel overwhelming right now.

Saturday morning John had an event to go to. I rolled over and dozed off and on UNTIL 9:52 am. I cannot remember the last time I was in bed that long. And I had to force myself to get up; I felt like I could have slept for hours more.

In the last few days:

• I’ve learned the husband of a dear friend has been hospitalized after a long battle with various health issues.
• I’ve learned another friend’s family member has a terminal illness.
• I’m meeting up with a friend who is battling aggressive cancer.
• There are some ongoing complications in terms of helping my parents navigate recent health issues.

A few hours ago, we came upstairs after watching a family movie and I stepped in a puddle.

On my kitchen floor.

I thought the kids must have dropped a glass of water or something.

If only we were so lucky.

We looked up AND WATER WAS DRIPPING FROM A LIGHT FIXTURE IN THE CEILING.

Turns out, in the wind/rain storms over the weekend, we lost some roof shingles. (Apparently Indy noticed this while he was out on the trampoline but didn’t figure we would want to know??)

So we have a leaky roof. Like an actual water-coming-into-the-house (through a light fixture, with actual electricity involved) leak.

Great.

(And, of course, John is headed off on a work trip.)

I am feeling overstimulated and overwhelmed. The floors are constantly dirty (or, apparently, wet).

I feel like I must be doing something terribly wrong to feel so busy. I have an actively involved husband, a fully flexible part-time job, and financial stability.

(If you’re wondering how I find time to read so many books, that’s actually a bit of a tell: I stay up way too late to compensate for feeling overwhelmed/overstimulated and read once everyone else is asleep. So it’s a canary-in-the-coal-mine sort of thing, but also a form of self-preservation.)

Tonight, when I couldn’t get to sleep, I pulled up BBC and one of the top stories was about the mental load carried by women, especially mothers. I just about started to cry.

YES.

Even with loving, supportive partners—and even when the actual physical work of running a household is shared—the mental load can feel crippling sometimes. I followed a rabbit trail and another article on the topic says the mental load carried by many mothers “never really switches off.”

So true. It’s there when I go to sleep and it pops up when I wake up.

Here’s a definition I found of “mental load”:

The mental load is the invisible mental and emotional labour behind handling life’s never-ending to-do lists, including caring for others, managing a household, and delegating tasks. It’s the energy we spend thinking about and anticipating needs and tasks, organizing them, and following up and ensuring they’ve gotten done.

In the context of our homes and families, the mental load can affect parents, adult children caring for ageing relatives, partners or family members managing households, and people dedicated to the well-being of their local communities.

I can shorten it: it’s being responsible for making sure there’s toilet paper in the house. (This will make more sense in a minute.)

And right now, my brain feels like it’s carrying a LOT of tabs:

• I took a kid to an orthodontist appointment last week.
• And a hair appointment.
• There are two medical appointments coming up. (Neither stressful, but yet another thing to manage.)
• I NEED to figure out and schedule dental appointments (and while I’m at it, get one of my kids to floss… like more than twice a year).
• I had to log on and pay school fees. The first time I signed in, they weren’t accessible, so the task had to stay on my list. Paying the fees itself was no big deal, but it sat in my brain for weeks while I couldn’t actually do anything about it because the website hadn’t been updated properly.
• I went through two piles of school forms that are standard this time of year. They are not even remotely hard to fill out, but I need to check health card numbers and make sure all the emergency contact information is correct (etc, etc) and sign my name and the date about forty times.
• There have been so many playdates and hangouts and requests for “Can you text so-and-so’s parents to see if they’re free?” from Indy. That child wants to be surrounded by humans at all times.
• We are mostly eating like crap. There is a smattering of fruit and veggies, but the kids have been living off dry cereal for breakfast (think Froot Loops, not Shredded Wheat), and occasionally for dinner, too. Two nights in a row I had packaged ramen. I WANT salads for dinner; I just don’t want to have to think at this point, and boiling noodles and pouring them into a bowl with delicious MSG-laced powder is so easy.
• We are down to two rolls of toilet paper in the house. Toilet paper is easy to come by. But I manage buying TP and staying on top of when it needs replacing, and I’ve known we’ve needed it and just haven’t gotten around to buying it because there are so many other things going on and it keeps slipping my mind BUT NOW IT’S KIND OF CRITICAL I GO BUY TOILET PAPER.

I feel a bit stuck, and being down to two rolls of toilet paper feels like a symptom of a bigger struggle. And yes I can delegate this task. John would go get toilet paper. I could give a child money and have them walk to get toilet paper. But delegating tasks is part of the mental load!

I did a giant brain dump the other day and expected to feel better, but mostly I ended up feeling more overwhelmed.

There are the big things:

• How do I help my parents navigate this new stage of aging?
• I need to get caught up on our business bookkeeping.
• So many people we care about are facing tremendously challenging situations. How can I best support them?

And then there are the quotidian things:

• Let’s start with the obvious: we need toilet paper.
• We need to get the roof repaired.
• I want to get back to cooking balanced meals.
• I need to call and schedule dentist appointments (but also keep an eye on their school calendar so I don’t create a scheduling headache in the process).
• I need to pick a paint colour with Indy for his room. Does this matter? No. Am I stressed the painter is going to reach out and I’m going to have to defer again? Yes. Would that matter? No. Do I want this room painted after eight years of staring at chipped, dinged, dingy walls? Yes.

Also, tangent alert (but related to my mental load/brain dump): Christmas is coming in just over 100 days.

I KNOW I don’t need to fret about this on September 7th, and normally I wouldn’t, but I think because I’m already feeling so overwhelmed, it’s looming a bit ominously this year.

Take Christmas cards, for instance. I want to make a photo card (sort of), but I have THOUSANDS of pictures to wade through. The thought of doing it feels overwhelming, even though I did it for over a decade and even put it on my goals list for this year.

Is the effort worth it? Will I regret it if I don’t?

(I didn’t make one last year and feel zero guilt, but it did make me a little sad to break the streak.)

I want to be a good, present mom, and sometimes I feel like I am just snappy and tired.

Other times, I feel like I am a good, present mom but get so little encouraging feedback from my kids about the positive things I do. I read chapters of books to Indy most nights before bed and drive kids to friends’ houses and pick up grocery items I know they like and take slow-mo videos of stunts on the trampoline and hem jeans with safety pins when someone asks me to and change sheets and make sure the hand towels in the bathroom get switched out and washed and, in return… I get mostly requests for more engagement, sighs, or complaints.

And I know it’s normal. I know it’s part of mothering. I have exceptionally good kids who probably show above-average gratitude.

And still… it’s exhausting.

I feel like everyone around me has a tank that I want to fill, but I can’t. And my own tank is feeling empty.

Not in a depressed, emotional way, but in a literal I’m running on fumes sort of way.

So! That’s where things are at.

Life is good. I am blessed. There are so many things I am deeply grateful for, and I need a little online pause to give me a bit more bandwidth offline.

I won’t be back in time for Happy Things Friday this week, so here are a few points of gratitude to round out this post:

• I had two horrible dreams this week. (That’s not the part I’m grateful for; the bad dreams were bad!) Not only were they horrible, they were realistic. The kind where you wake up convinced it was reality. What a unique form of relief/gratitude to discover it was just a dream.
• I loved the book of micro-memoirs Diane suggested, Textbook by Amy Krouse Rosenthal!
• Yes, we have WATER LEAKING FROM OUR CEILING, but… we discovered it before we went to bed. Imagine the damage that could have happened overnight while we were sleeping!!!
  • We were able to put a series of buckets under the main leaks in the attic, which will hopefully contain things.
  • We have the funds to cover repairs as needed. I hate the thought of repairs, but I realize it’s a tremendous blessing to know the money is there to cover the costs.
• A four-day school week (hopefully)! Barring anyone getting sick or some unforeseen cancellation, there should be FOUR complete days with the kids at school. My to-do list is so long right now. I have punted a variety of work tasks down the line and I must tackle them this week. At this point, Wednesday and Friday have nothing scheduled and I’m hoping I can be radically productive.
• I made up a veggie and sausage soup on Saturday and have some easy meals planned for the week ahead that are at least moderately nutritious and crowd-pleasing. Aside from when we’ve had company visiting, food has felt very haphazard lately, and I think this week will mark the official return to normal.

Life can be good (see gratitude list!) and also exhausting and stressful and, right now, I need to take a few things off my plate instead of figuring out how to carry the plate more efficiently.

Blogging can be one of those things for a week.

I’ll see you on the other side.