Little Tornadoes

This is what it looks like on the outside:

Mother and father and 2 children. A 4-bedroom, 2.5 bathroom house in the suburbs. My husband has a great job and our kids go to a great school.

I take the children to school, getting a 2-mile walk in each morning. I spend the next four hours working as a freelance writer which entails a lot of emailing, getting more coffee or snacks, and folding of laundry while I think.

I pick up the children. I supervise them as they have a snack and do their homework. I cajole them into doing chores. I take them to karate/baseball/volleyball. I cook dinner.

We eat together as a family, in various combinations of 1-4 people sitting at the table at the same time.

We play and clean up the kitchen. We read stories, we turn out the light. I may work for a little while before turning out my own.

We sleep.

We rise and do it again. On the weekends we have baseball/volleyball/church/the beach/the pool/housework/yardwork or the occasional excursion. Sometimes we travel, or host guests in our home, or meet friends for dinner.

And that’s it. A simple, pleasant life.

This is what it looks like on the inside:

There are a million little tornadoes in here. You might see a generic mom-shape in yoga pants walking down the hill back to her house, but what I feel like on the inside is a person with countless ideas and not enough time to make them into realities. When I am choosing the right apples in the produce section, I am thinking about an endless list of other tasks I didn’t get to that day. As I arrive late to pick up the Kindergartener at his off-schedule dismissal time, I have also just realized that it’s almost May and time to reassess my professional goals for the month ahead.

I mentally kick myself. I add it to the endless list of things that make me worry, plan, produce, rethink, and regroup.

And yet. The children keep growing. Things keep happening, good and bad. As my physical therapist used to say, shit hits the fan no matter how much you worry about it.

Things will look the same on the outside, tornadoes or not. So why not just let them go?

[photo from tornado-facts.com]