It’s eight thirty-seven pm, I have literally just got the kids to sleep, aka, I finally have a tiny sliver of real time to myself. I want to demolish a box of chocolates in front of the tv and zone out on Netflix. But it’s a brand new year and it’s time to make a change. (Also my Mum is watching a match on the tv). So I’m hoovering up the Quality Street while I type this instead.

That’s a win in my book.

When you feel like you have no time to yourself all day long, using your precious evening to do something Current You doesn’t want to do, but Future You keeps wishing you would do, is a challenge. Chocolate or no chocolate.

I’m conscious I have just over an hour till I should get to bed for a night’s broken sleep. That is, assuming baby girl doesn’t demand attention in the meantime. So this tiny sliver of time to myself is really precious. I’m tired and frazzled from a laundry basket that never fully empties and piles of clean clothes that constantly need folding and putting away. I’m exhausted from the mess of dinkies, lego, train tracks and my four year old’s latest obstacle course, spread all over the freaking house, despite my daily efforts to tidy up.

(It struck me recently that tidying is essentially just moving things from one place to another. What an inane thing for me to spend most of my waking hours doing.)

Actually I’m just tired. My darling 7 month old still wakes a few times looking for milk and snuggles, my four (nearly five) year old pokes my eye or kicks me in the back and my brain decides to go, fuck it, let’s stay wide awake for the next hour and consider how I’ll never be able to afford the Irish rental market, what a failure I am for being forty and still not knowing what to do with my life or how the world could come crashing down around us at any minute and annihlate us all.

All those lovely things. And then I berate myself because at least I’m in a safe, warm home with my loved ones alive and well near me while unspeakable horrors occur across the world to people just like me.

So yes, I’m tired. Bone-fucking-weary. Which, to be fair, means the chocolate is in fact a necessity. It provides a much needed boost of energy and a nice little dose of dopamine or serotonin or melanoma… Probably not the last one but it definitely makes me feel temporarily better.

Until Future Me wakes up tomorrow feeling like crap and starts mentally cursing Current Me for eating hundreds of calories of sugary shite again.

You win some, you lose some. I’ve written this and got the writing-juices flowing again. I’ll take that and deal with angry Future Me tomorrow.

Happy New Year lovely people.

Liz

“The way to get started is to quite talking and begin doing.”

Walt Disney