Luxury

Noun: A condition of abundance, or great ease

What is your luxury? How do you define it? A designer bag? Expensive shoes? A second home? An exotic car? Or is it even grander, like a yacht? Maybe for you luxury isn’t a material item at all, but rather a circumstance or situation. For me, I like some of the finer things in life but lately I’ve learned that writing is a luxury. Or rather, the TIME to write is a luxury.

Noun: An indulgence in something that provides pleasure, comfort, or great ease

I’ve really found pleasure putting down my thoughts in blog form the last few months. As I’ve mentioned before, it’s therapeutic. It’s like taking journaling to the next level, the scary level, where my readers get a peek at some pretty personal stuff. Some days I’m light-hearted as I write. But other days I feel raw and open, almost like the wound on my daddy’s leg. Someone needs to bandage my soul.

For some reason the last few weeks have been rough. It’s no one thing, but rather an accumulation of events that have left me with very little time to put words on paper. (Ok, there actually isn’t any paper involved. I do all my writing on my iPad. But you get the picture.) Life has just been in one of those phases that feels like someone pressed fast forward and forgot to press stop.

Noun: Something adding to pleasure or comfort, but not absolutely necessary

It all started with a presumably enjoyable trip to the mountains that for some reason seemed to turn into three weeks of grandboy sitting. It wasn’t really a solid three weeks, but was stacked close enough together that there wasn’t much recovery time in-between. Then daddy hurt his leg, which has led to almost daily visits to their house and trips to the doctor or clinic for wound care or physical therapy. Many days I was running the boys to their preschool, rushing over to my parents’, squeezing in a stop at the grocery, cooking for Raymond and Jesse, and then rushing to pick the boys up at 5.

Let me say here that I had blessedly forgotten, from my own children, what those last couple hours of the day are like with toddlers. Pure chaos! Everyone is tired, hungry…..more like hangry. We drag through the door with at least one boy, if not both, whining, crying, screaming, stomping, demanding, grabbing….you get the idea. Add to that a dog or two yapping and wanting to be fed. The cat even gets in on the act by inciting a dog and/or child to chase said feline around the house. If any length of food preparation for man or beast is required there will be hell to pay. I won’t even go into the battle over who will or won’t eat what. This unpleasantness is followed by baths, book reading and bedtime, thank God, but none of it is as easy as it sounds. I love my grandsons with all my heart, but they require every ounce of energy I can muster. After a week or so I am left with hardly a coherent thought, much less the ability to write a word.

Anyway, all this is to say that I’ve been in a slump. And I’m tired. And I’m getting nothing done at home. And I’m feeling a bit of a failure in the wife department. Really, I feel like I’m not doing anything 100%. We have a lot of moving pieces these days between the elderly parents, the brothers and in-laws, and all the little ones. Time to write has been sorely lacking. There is no indulging happening right now. No writing to comfort or ease my soul. I have not had the luxury of sitting with my thoughts and sharing them in my blog. And I’ve missed it.