Limping.

Limping along these past few days with a sick, feverish kid - while still trying to maintain some kind of momentum, I am. Steady rain and cabin fever certainly don't help the feeling of limping along. And of course motherly guilt is the worn down crutch that insures an uneven pace. How can all those guilt-inducing questions not slow one down: Am I paying enough attention to my kid? Am I doing the right things for her? Am I just laying the foundation for years of future therapy bills? And when I manage (with the good fortune of having nanny hours) to get a few hours to myself, I do some long overdue genealogy review and tree-building on the computer - how fun for me & how selfish when my 5 year old is miserable.

And even if C weren't sick, I'd still have the same guilt. I don't *think* I have too much on my mental plate of priorities, but maybe I do. Certainly adding this blog hasn't helped my bloated list, which now consists of: family-care, self-care, household maintenance, genealogy project, Italian practice, writing - of which the first three include countless subcategories. So those are six things -- oh and that doesn't even cover maintaining friendships, pleasure-reading, any community contributions, etc. And I don't even have a job-job.

So I feel when anything moves forward a bit (like looking at genealogy notes that are over 5 years old and finally inputting them into Ancestry) that everything else lags far behind (like this blog, for which my original intention was to commit to doing a new alphabet letter just about every night, but in reality has been a couple-few times a week). I certainly get more "done" if I don't exercise (self-care), but then I also feel like shit. Do I just settle on doing several things "well enough," and not excel at any of them? Does anyone manage to keep all the balls in the air? I sometimes think there's this perfect goddess of a mother-woman (please be imaginary!) I'm supposed to live up to. She is the quintessential role model, a beacon, the North Star to help me navigate through such challenging days, but usually she just brings out the fear in me that I'm just a lazy slob. So... maybe limping along isn't so bad after all.