The podcast episode I am listening to fades as I shut my car off and disconnect my phone from the adapter. I’ve just parked at the doctor’s office and before I walk in, I check my email only to see the kind of message I least want to see: my afternoon massage appointment has been canceled, and now all the plans for my day have come undone while I unknowingly spent the last hour driving my child to the sitter’s and then myself into town for a mammogram.
I am too young for a mammogram, really. I’m only 31, my first is still in diapers. But we’re talking about a second baby, so I’m getting this lump checked out this morning just in case ahead of trying to get pregnant. I do not want to be here, of course, because it’s a mammogram and they’re not touted as being the most relaxing of things, but also because Thursdays are the day I am supposed to work; the one day I get to work child-free for about 6 whole hours. And when I called to make the appointment as my primary care suggested, I knew the only openings they had would be on a Thursday. I was, of course, correct.
**
Two weeks ago it was a haircut that co-opted my one work day. I had an appointment for a Wednesday, early evening. The kind of appointment I could only make by reminding my husband for a third time that he needed to meet me in the salon parking lot — not his workplace — at 4:15pm so I wouldn’t be rushing in to the salon for my appointment out of breath and crazy-eyed. I would unbuckle the toddler from my car, watch him yell “dada” as he leapt into Scott’s arms, and hand over the diaper bag along with the day’s report and a reminder of what was for dinner at home and what time bedtime needed to be that evening. This parking-lot hand off involves me having everything ready and in the car before our child wakes up from his nap so that we can get in the car and drive the thirty minutes to town from our house in the middle of nowhere as soon as he is awake. But at least I’m not burning childcare hours to do it.
I have done all of this prep work. I am ready for the mad-dash out the door and to the two-week overdue haircut when I get the call: my stylist has to cancel because of a personal emergency. There is less than three hours until my appointment and now it is not an appointment any longer. She doesn’t have any openings until the next month – more than thirty days away. I have short hair that ideally needs cut every thirty days. I am already thirty-seven days into this cycle. Another thirty and I may as well never cut my hair again.
This is how I wind up with a mid-morning hair appointment on a Thursday with a stylist I’ve never seen before, an appointment that slices the day in half and means I will spend an hour of precious, expensive child care in the car. But I will get my haircut, because there really is no other option.
**
Three weeks ago it was a chiropractor’s appointment.
I had pulled something in my left shoulder blade. I remember it was a Monday morning, around 6:30 am. I was emailing my friend Ashley about something. I am emailing her at 6:30 in the morning, before I get my child out of his crib to start the day, because I know if I do not do it now, I will never do it, because that is how the life of a work-at-home mom is sometimes. Now or never, because I will have forgotten about it completely once I start changing diapers and wiping sticky spots off countertops that haven’t even been used yet that day; once I turn to the stack of tax receipts that still need entered for the 2018 taxes that are just weeks away from needing to be filed and days away from needing to be emailed to the accountant, emailing Ashley will fly straight out of my brain. So I email her now and somehow pull a muscle in the process.
Before I even lift my twenty-nine pound toddler once. The irony. (Coincidence? Ask Alanis.)
The chiropractor can see me, but not until the next week, in-between which I will lift that toddler in and out of a crib a dozen times and in and out of a carseat a dozen more.
Pulling something in my shoulder blade is not new; I’ve done it before, I likely will again so long as I am schlepping children and diaper bags and groceries around the world. When I used to pull a muscle, before kids and usually when carry-on luggage was involved, I made the next-available chiropractor’s appointment and went in. In the meantime, I rested that muscle and got better. Now, with a child at home, it is far more difficult to find the time to make the appointment, let alone get to the appointment on time. And there is no rest in the meantime.
There used to be time for it all. And T.V. Now, life is just one long to-do list that never gets smaller no matter how much I get done or check off or erase.
Oh. And that chiropractor’s appointment that was open? It was a Thursday.
**
Back to the parking lot at the start of the day: the new-to-me massage therapist sends me a message right away in the morning: she has hurt her back and will be unable to see patients today. I am already in town, thirty minutes away from my cozy home office and pajama pants and on-demand coffee. I am thirty minutes of expensive childcare into a day that will now only exist of a mammogram, not even a massage to look forward to after the indecency of having one’s breasts squeezed between two sheets of plastic in a room where the lights glare and everything smells slightly too sterile. I am one month into an injured shoulder that not even a chiropractor could fix and have finally secured an appointment to see a massage therapist and she has cancelled on me.
I am upset. And hollowed out. How is it that every single time I try to take care of myself I just end up disappointed? How can an appointment that took me forty-five minutes of phone calls and scheduling acrobatics be cancelled in a single, two-minute email?
**
“You have very dense breast tissue,” the radiologist tells me. The ultrasound technician echoes this a few minutes later as I am laying on the table, the entire left side of my torso exposed from the waist up, the flimsy teal-and-green hospital gown with fading leaf patterns covering the rest. High-waisted jeans adequately cover the unexpected cesarean scar, the extra skin leftover from the stretch of growing a human.
“At your age, this isn’t unusual,” she says. “Nothing to worry about, but check in with your primary care if you notice any changes.” I am here because I noticed a change; a lump in my left breast growing larger and larger as my cycle grew closer; the lump disappearing along with my period, returning again two weeks later as another cycle began. It reminds me of those early days of nursing, when this expansion and emptying happened like clockwork every two hours, tender breasts filling with milk, only to be emptied again in order to fill once more. That’s the first place my mind went when I felt this lump in the shower: a clogged duct. I took a pregnancy test the next morning, just to rule that out. I tell the radiology tech this when I check in, when she asks if there’s any chance I’m expecting. I am not, I know. But I might be in a couple of months.
And what on earth will Thursdays look like when that hypothetical baby arrives?
**
The mammogram and ultrasound are over. There is nothing unusual, nothing to worry about. I have spent two hours of childcare this morning for them to tell me this, exactly what I expected they would tell me. I am sitting in my car inhaling a Starbucks breakfast sandwich at 10:00 in the morning on a Thursday, because Thursdays are the day I am supposed to have child care and get things done and instead I am yet again in the car, the entirety of my home office packed into a backpack in the car seat beside me, trying to decide how to navigate a day where I was going to get my shoulder fixed but now I am not.
Thursday’s were supposed to grant me some space. They were supposed to be a reprieve during a week where I could focus on being one thing at a time. Where I only had to be one thing, instead of mom and. Instead, I find myself being even more: mom and chauffeur and patient and work-on-the-go parent and disappointed almost-massage client, and so very tired and tired of it all.
**
My table at the library has a view of an apartment across the street that I almost rented one time. I thought it would be so awesome to live next door to a library. I still think that. But they didn’t have an apartment available until fall and we needed one in spring and so I never lived there. But I can still think about how I almost did, in an alternate universe where I don’t have a husband or a child and I sleep in and rest injured shoulders, shoulders injured because of the large stacks of books I am constantly toting back and forth across the street to and from the library.
I have landed at this table after eating my sandwich in the parking lot and have now typed all these words in a single two-hour stretch punctuated only by a trip to the bathroom and not a single glance at social media. I have not written a single thing in months — maybe a year? — Because I have been drowning in all that I have to do and have no room for things that don’t check something off a list. Writing does not check anything off a list. There are no external deadlines forcing me to focus. There is no one relying on me to get this writing done but myself.
And remember how bad I am at doing things for myself? It took me three weeks to make a massage appointment that was then cancelled. Womp, womp.
I think if I were only more organized, I would get more done. If I could be more efficient at feeding my family, take less time to write client projects, not have to return so many emails in a day… if I were a perfectly organized mom I would not be sitting in the parking lot of the library eating a drive-thru breakfast sandwich because I would have thought ahead and packed a nutritious lunch for myself along with all the diapers and teddy grahams and water bottles that I remember for everyone else.
**
It’s the last day of February, which is only significant in that the last day I ever wrote and published something on my blog was also in February, a full year ago. Apparently I can only blog in February. And also I was sitting at a table in this same library, a table that I can see from where I am sitting right now, except that I didn’t choose it because it is next to the bathrooms and who wants to hear that all day when they are trying to work without distractions on the one day they have childcare, the one day they should be able to be utterly unconcerned about anyone’s toileting habits but their own.
I sat down at this table and glanced at the shelf of books facing me and saw this:
A book titled “The Organized Mom” sitting on top of the others on its shelf in a haphazard way at which I’m sure the contents of said book are cringing. I’m cringing.
I don’t pick up the book to read, or even fix it, something you will often see me doing at libraries and bookstores and, honestly, even other people’s houses. I do log on to the salon’s online scheduling system and book a massage for next week, in hopes that the massage therapist’s own back is feeling better and she can help fix mine.
The only openings she has? Yep: they’re on Thursday.
If you are wondering, I did not check out the book pictured above. For one, it’s placement doesn’t seem to lend itself to a success story. And two, if I bring home one more book that I do not have time to read both my husband and my bookshelves might start swearing at me.
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