January 23, 2006: At the Edge

I have reached it. I am standing on the edge of Cliff of Overextended with my tip-toes hanging over. Now I am suffering from a dose of guilt because I wouldn't do the one thing that would have sent me officially over the edge. Saturday, Sunday, and Monday were like one giant glob of STUFF that had to be done by a particular time and EVENTS that had to be attended and, in which, in 5/6 of the cases, I had to play a major "directing" role. And then tomorrow! Tuesdays are traditionally my do-nothing, go nowhere days...but I have a meeting in the a.m. and a party in the evening. What was I thinking, scheduling activities on my precious day off??

But the guilt! The guilt comes from not baking my mother an apple pie for her class luncheon. I just could NOT do it. And I'm feeling guilty because my schedule is so packed that I could not even take one hour to bake my mother an apple pie. Part of me wants to be callous about it. To shrug it off with--What would possess my mother to ask me to bake her a pie, when she KNOWS all this stuff I have going on? And why can't she bake the pie herself? But what I really feel, when I take a painfully honest gander at myself, is that I brushed my mother aside. I was so stacked with activities that I couldn't even set aside a little time to do this act of service for my mother. And now this day is gone, and perhaps my mother will wait a long time to ask me for another favor. She asks me for so little, and she gives me so much.

All this has added to that knowledge that's been creeping up on me lately: something's got to go. I feel some relief knowing that we will be sharing the teaching of Sunday School now with another couple and that we only have another month as leaders of our Small Group. It's not the everyday things so much as the extras: the parties here and there, the dinners, the extra meetings, the special event. I have to be better about leaving free time in our schedule.

I once had a boyfriend who summed it up well. One time we were driving back from a date and, when we passed a certain place where lots of our friends hung out, he said, "You just hate to miss anything, don't you? You can't stand to know that something is happening and you're not there." That's still true. And yet I read blogs written by women who have time for things like scrapbooking and quilting, and I think "That would be SO lovely!" But I love most of the things we do! Oh, it's such a catch-22. "It's such a conundrum," as my old boss would say, "that I'm all discombobulated."