Honie Briggs

Yes, I could write that book, but first I’d have to find my glasses so I could see how to pull my head out of my ass. I screwed up big time this week. It’s my own fault. I forgot it was that time of the month. No, not that time of the month, the other time of the month. The time of the month when I usually do two things: thoughtfully plan for the month ahead and realize I have completely over-committed to the point of hallucinating that the nice young men in their clean white coats are coming to take me away to the happy home where life is beautiful all the time.

Smarter women than me, I’m sure, have lost track of what time of the month it is. I mean, birthdays and anniversaries alone are proof positive that not knowing what day it is can lead to, well, things like pregnancy and marriage. No, I’m not pregnant. I don’t know how I would manage to accomplish much of anything if I was the mother of small children at this point in my life, but there are women in their forties who do it. God bless ‘em.

The semester is two-thirds of the way over and up until now I have stayed ahead of the curve. So much so that it has become a joke in my family that I must have memorized the syllabus for each of my classes so that all of my assignments can be completed two weeks before they are due. Well, things got a little out of control this week, and even though I didn’t have to worry about Halloween costumes or mobs of trick-or-treaters, I seriously dropped the ball, a couple of them actually.

Forgiveness is one of the best things we can do for ourselves. I am not good at it. I know, big surprise, what with all that peace and love smack talking I do, but my self-talk creates guilt for me sometimes. Homework and laundry notwithstanding, October got to be a little jammed up there toward the end. Blog posts sparse, reading blogs even sparser, throw in a little autumnal sinus crud and you’ve got one lame excuse for a student/community servant/wife/mom/friend/blogging human being. Yeah, my self talk is cruel like that.

Control freak does not describe me. I am more like the love child of a caffeinated wildebeest and a half-crazed Tasmanian devil. Some sort of perfectionist anarchist hybrid. My life looks manageable on paper. It’s when I wander off the paper that it gets messy. Going back to school is the best thing I have done for myself in a long time, there’s no doubt about it, and school is my priority. So, thinking I could get my house ready to put on the market, drive an hour and a half at five miles an hour to volunteer for four hours, drive another hour, drop off the dry cleaning and shop for a dinner party on the way home, meet my adviser to work out next semester, look at a house to purchase, and remember to submit my homework on time was more than a little NOT DOABLE, and last night I had a mini-meltdown. If not for a bag of fun sized Snicker’s bars it might have been a full-blown stress-induced apocalypse.

Today is November 1st in my year of something better. I am stressed. Stressed because it’s that time of the month when I need to get my act together for two exams, our wedding anniversary, a presentation about disaster response and recovery, and Thanksgiving. Oh, and finals. Yeah, they’re not until December, but you can never start studying too early. Then there’s Christmas. Where did The Year of Something Better™ go?

Take it from someone who knows, one day at a time, one step at a time, one crisis at a time, multitasking is not for dummies!