Each day I look over my Day Zero list and annotate a dated document containing notes about the progress I made the previous day. In that way, I can collect what I need for my monthly update post. But, right now, I'm obsessing about several goals that I planned to have finished by some date or another in July or August, noting that almost none of them were completed. Some had no progress at all.
Then my sane(r) self kicks in and reminds me that I've had Younger Daughter at home for the past month, German Daughter here for 3 weeks, and, more recently, Older Daughter at home for a brief post-surgical stay (emergency appendectomy). Follow that with delivering her back to camp for a weekend and scheduling a post-op checkup that didn't require 2 hours of driving for a 5 minute appointment. In the space of one week, there were exactly 2 days that I wasn't driving on the northeast extension of the Pennsylvania turnpike!
After all that fun (?), Older Daughter came home to get unpacked from camp and re-packed for her senior year at college, loading the car, and driving to Washington, DC to move her in -- all in less than 72 hours. Then poor Younger Daughter got to haul the detritus from the living room to Older Daughter's room (I do have to go to work occasionally), so she could take over the space to pack for her freshman year. That trip, this past Friday was in the other direction -- just one week after the DC trip.
Maybe all of this activity had something to do with why my self-imposed deadlines (set up in June) weren't met, d'ya think?
So I remind myself that I'm not super-woman or super-mom or super-anyone. When my energy and time are going in one direction (children), they aren't available to spend on my task list. (Even this post was begun much earlier in August, but took until the 30th of the month to finish.) Simple and obvious as that seems to other people, I need to make a conscious effort to remember it and put down the hammer that I am about to use to beat myself over the head.
But at least I managed to add one blog post in August -- even if it was about why I feel like I didn't get anything done in August. Success on item #101.
Don't let the smaller goals overshadow your much larger (and mor important) goal of being a good mom. All of those little things will still be there for you to work on, one by one, a month from now -- having the opportunity to spend time with ALL of your daughters American, German or otherwise) may not. You are a good person, even if your laundry piles up and the livingroom may look like a ship wreck. Take a deep breath and just take a look at what you and your daughters have edxperienced with each other this summer, then tell that judgemental gnome in the back of your head to take a hike.
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