A Good Day

Not having a job which requires one to leave the house places bizarre pressures upon a person. At least, it places bizarre pressures on me. I find myself needing to accomplish certain goals in order to call the day worthwhile, not a waste, good.

Over the course of any given day I expect myself to:

• change out of whatever clothing I happened to fall asleep wearing (that sounds so rock and roll, except one must remember that since I wear a nursing bra to bed every night, I end up feeling like I go to bed fully dressed if I wear pyjamas. Also, I sometimes wear my pyjamas out and about in the world anyway.)
• shower
• walk at least 1/2 of a mile and/or engage in some extra physical activity for at least an hour-at the gym, on a bicycle, walking around with Julian, yoga or pilates in the living room, etc. I do take the recommended daily allowance of 10,000 steps seriously
• write at least 1,000 words. Lately it has just been blog postings, but I do have projects which languish in various stages of unfinishedness and I occasionally touch them. In the event I do not write, I expect myself to knit.
  
• LEAVE THE HOUSE

The last one often feels to be the most important. There can be a day when the only walking I do is from my front door to my car, from the car to the door of my destination, and back again , when I am unshowered and wearing the clothes in which I slept, and do absolutely no writing or knitting, but still feel the day was productive by virtue of the fact that I left the house. Then there can be a day like today, a day where I shower, put on a dress, post to two of my blogs (alas, no knitting occurred), and still end up feeling the day was a waste because I never left the house (alright, I didn't exercise either.)

I am exhausted all the time. The growing sense of dislocation I have been feeling due to events in my life manifesting itself physically only further increased my stress levels. Of course I am stressed, I am the mother of a toddler. Yet I find it hard to relax when I do have periods of down time. I use the hours of his naps to write and/or procrastinate on the internet. My mother babysits a couple of hours 3-4 days a week, but that is when I can get to the gym and get some errands done. I can't sleep at night because that is my time to read or write (though in truth, I have been doing neither lately. I have been wasting my time doing sudoku puzzles.) Even on a day like today, a day when I had another person here to carry some of the childcare duties (and, to be entirely truthful, I tend to foist as much as I can onto Fred so he ends up doing much more than I do on the weekends, at least in terms of taking care of Julian), I felt guilty for sleeping in while Fred made breakfast and, during the day, even when I was doing nothing, I had to be doing something (I did evil sudoku puzzles-instead of knitting-while watching television and, during the commercials, I packed a couple of boxes). I know that scientists believe that doing nothing is not the best way to recharge one's batteries, that there is value in activity when it comes to rejuvenation. However, I haven't yet found the way to relax which doesn't make me feel like I am wasting time.

So today was not a good day. But tomorrow is almost here and who knows what will happen?