Envy

There are too many kids in this tub.
There are too many elbows to scrub.
I just washed a behind
That I’m sure wasn’t mine.
There are too many kids in this tub.
-Shel Silverstein

That’s kind of how I feel right now. A little out of control. Getting things done because I know that they need to be done. Scrubbing on auto-pilot, but who knows whose tushy I’m scrubbing? And the only certainty is that I’m never going to catch up.

Every morning, I pass by this park on my way to work. Right after I graduated from college, there were a couple months when my older sister got really sick with pneumonia. As I had found out earlier that term that I had enough credits to graduate early, I had finished right before spring break, packed up all my stuff, and come home to a sister who was living by herself, and (I thought) was just a little under the weather. Turns out she was very ill with this awful pneumonia, and long story short—almost died, and I ended up spending the next few months living with her, working at a sucky job, pooling our money to eat (she had to quit working with children after she got out of the hospital).

Point of the story: It was a yucky time in my life, for obvious reasons, but I lived right by this park and went on almost daily walks. Every time I drive by that park now, I find myself getting extremely jealous of the college students and stay-at-home moms out walking and jogging. It’s not that I have any desire to go back to that time of my life in college when I could go walking in the middle of the day (well, maybe a little, but only if I could keep my husband and home ownership). Nor am I clamoring to get pregnant as soon as possible (although I am a little baby crazy after spending the weekend with my exceptionally cute niece). I certainly have no desire to go back to those post-college months working for the smarmiest doctor in this neck of the woods. I guess that the grass is always just greener on the other side. But I still think that a 40+ hour work week in a one-person office sucks.