Happy

I have two sorts of happiness in my life. Mutually exclusive and equally perfect to me for different reasons.

The first one has to do with productivity. This one I don’t feel much really. But every once in a while, when I’ve made the beds and put away the laundry and started a roast pork for dinner in a delicious marinade…when I’ve volunteered at the school, played basketball before dinner, read to Jack and Nathan by their night light, talked to the older boys in that new commiserating tone we’re getting used to over popcorn and chocolate milk.

I fall into a deep sleep on nights like those, the sort that you get when you’re full of a kind of satisfaction at how you’re finally getting it done. On those days I feel like I’ve lived up to an ideal. On those days I feel like a Good Mother. I might even feel like a Good Woman.

Then there are days like today. When I give in to this cocoon I always want to build around myself. This selfish little space that’s only about me. When I sit in my favourite chair for the entire day drinking tea and writing every shitty little thought that pops into my head. I write in my journal and dig down deeper into myself so that when the phone rings it sounds like it’s in someone else’s house, it’s so far away. From nine until three I’ll be here, and when the boys come home it will confuse me a little. They will wake me up. And I feel more like myself the way I was probably supposed to, the way I was built.

I’m giving in to days like these more and more lately, despite the fact that they’re not doing a hell of a lot for my bank account. It’s one of the joys/dangers of being single. The lines I used to draw through my days - the half-pasts and quarter-afters and ten-tos- are dissipating. Which is frightening in it’s own way I suppose. No one is here to remind me to get off my rump and clean the bathroom or start dinner or make my bed. No one is here to say ‘What exactly did you DO all day?’ I still can’t decide if that’s good or bad.

It’s just…it feels like there’s a clock ticking. All the time. A clock that started up in my mid-thirties. A clock with no hands but with pictures of all the things I should be seeing, doing. A clock that gongs every hour or so that if I don’t figure out how to be happy soon, I never will. And I need, need, NEED to be happy. I do. We all do, really, but I think some of us are mature enough to understand that you don’t always get to be happy. Sometimes you have to make sacrifices so that you end up being happy. Eventually.

I’m not that mature. And I’m not that happy all the time,. I think. But here, in my little cocoon where everything I do is on the inside…here is where I’ll find it I think.

Because if I don’t find it…Jesus, what’s the point?