i am busy. overwhelmed. stressed out. all my life is all the things to be done, all the things that i am doing, and there is hardly time for thought, hardly time for the close call, or for sickness or for drama. my body better, i press on, harder than i should, for surely the weather has changed, is changing, and i will find myself under the spell of some cough i've encountered unknowingly. so i wash my hands just in case. i am the germiphobe. i am the obsessive compulsive. i am compelled by my ideas to invent things not necessarily uninvented (for this in the internet age we can encounter most ideas already idealed readily and apparently by means of a google search), yet things necessarily new to me and perhaps to my immediate surroundings. i seek to create the art, write the novel, and invent the harry potter halloween party like i was completely insane. but harry potter does something for me that little else does. it is a melancholic escape into fantasy wherein magic and elves exist and where, were i a witch, i might be able to make dinner with the flash of a stick of wood in my fingers. it is excessively silly, perhaps, but it distracts me from my usual brooding on ecological destruction - at least temporarily. and as for art - i am compelled by my usual boredom with my own domesticity to be something greater and more important (though i think, in my head, that nothing is more important) than mothering my exceedingly wild and usually naked children. i am the perpetrator of lists at this juncture: writing down and crossing off. i seek for the moment to be able to cross something off the list to feel capable and forward-moving. it makes me feel powerful, accomplished. and perhaps it is a sad statement about being a mother that makes crossing things off lists feel full of power and accomplishment. i never finished college, so i can only assume that i am intelligent based on my own knowing and whatever resources in front of me. i cannot feel the power of societal position, for i have none of that. i am only me, toiling daily, as i am apt to do. it is my position in life and the role of my choosing, to be sure. i struggle with the choices facing me in regards to my children - their upbringing and whether or not they should be permitted to play video games all day or not and the varying philosophical perspectives that each choice comes with, of which there are many, which may surprise those not embedded in this type of life and all the minutiae that it encompasses. i so want only to be me, though. to be myself, free of the expectations of the world and especially of my children and their incessant whining and needing of things to be got and done for them. it is harder than it seems and more intellectually challenging than i could ever have anticipated. in fact, there is nothing else to call it, but utterly and completely insane. my life is the running rapidly out of control and back again to some semblance of half-reality only to be destroyed and rebuilt perpetually. it is the couch and the toys and the feeding and the cleaning and so much more. and all the while, there is me, in the midst, trying desperately to feel around for myself and to determine what that is and what that requires in the moment and in the long term. is it merely the environmental ethic that we live by? that thing most weird to so many that in my head is simply the effect of doing better by knowing better? or is there something else here? is there more to me and can i ever hope to honor it while taking care of so many others, by doing so very, very much? i do not know. i do not know. it may be, in fact, the very question i have been asking all this time.