“We were together. I forget the rest.” -Walt Whitman 

We have been in school for two months now and it feels like a year already. Two months without drawing or writing or baking. Two months of chasing in a city that has decided that the best way to do construction is all at once, making every path I take a two hour venture. Two months of watching two kids play volleyball, rehearse for a musical, study for algebra, and avoid my attempts to Snapchat (officially the first app that makes me feel like an old person).

Two months outside of myself. Two days in a row I found myself at the grocery store listening to other moms lose their cool. One woman was shopping with a newborn and two older children. The boy wandered away a few steps and his mom snapped about how she should be able to look away for “two seconds” to “take care of business” without having to worry about his “antics.” At the second store, a mom, after being asked about fifty times, “Can we get this? Can we have this?” finally screamed, “NO ONE ASK ME FOR ONE MORE THING. JUST STOOO-OP,” and I wondered if that is how I sound most of the time, during these months when we are racing out the door so early in the morning and then spending our evenings skipping meals to jump from one thing to the next.

Finally, last night I cleaned up the house and cooked a real dinner. Lizzie asked if we were having company. Sigh.

I need to know how to be more patient and also more selfish all at once. At school, my students have started to write their artist statements and the one I read today said that the only reason he makes art at all is to pass the class. I wonder if the only reason I do anything is do pass the day. Yesterday I made two samples for my drawing class so that I could demo stuff about composition and design and as I lost myself in lemon drawings, I wondered if I am wasting my talent or missing opportunities or if I should be waking up at four to meditate.

I resort to drinking brandy old fashioneds and going to bed at nine. Yesterday, my son woke me out of a dead sleep to tell me that he was hungry. The jolt of “I am awake” kept me wake until wee hours until I drifted off again, only to be woken my the geriatric dog, who peed on me.

Fall, usually my favorite season, has found me falling apart. The house, my friendships … my willingness to stay outside of myself and watch bad television or hours of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles with Quinn, all because anything that demands more of the inner me feels too overwhelming.

I distract myself by ordering things on Zulily and scrolling through Pinterest, pinning dream studios and houses that are wide open and not crumbling, scrolling through Instagram and Facebook like perhaps there is a hidden secret there, an app that will tell me how to be me again. In a brief moment of belief, I considered finding a trainer that would maybe work out with me at four AM and then I brushed the thought off and went back to my numerology app. I am failing in just about every way possible.

On November 2nd the clock changes and we fall back and I am wondering if in that fake gift of an hour that I can fall back into myself … that for one hour I can be me again and that I will be allowed to be silly or loved or lost in a drawing that only matters to me. Often, I find myself humming the Avett Brothers lyric, “I want to be good to you.” I have always thought that I was singing that to my family, to my kids, to Sean, but I think the reason it keeps bubbling up as a mantra is because I am meant to sing it to myself.