Not very lovely.

Looking back at pictures from just a year ago, I think: I was happier then. We were happier then. I look at old blog posts from last year and think: I was so optimistic. I had hopes and some clear eye for bigger things. I look at where things are right now. I am grateful for my job; I know it's a good one, but I am not content in it. I am apathetic. I spend too much time away from my family. I neglect the house. My husband has not yet secured a teaching job, so he's working second shift at his regular job and subbing at least two days a week, usually more, and we never see each other. I feel like we are scrambling to pay our bills and do little else, so that we can save money, except we never actually save. Our house needs work, our yards (front and back) are shabby, and nothing is really very clean or organized. I spend evenings searching for lost things: I can find one shoe but not the other, Mad's school library book is missing, I can't find Violet's blanket, and there are no clean towels. I feel a terrible urge to just upend everything, to quit my job, to run away from home, to set the house on fire. I feel smaller wishes: I wish I would get a cold, just so I can spend a day at home and sleep the whole time. How sad. How stupid.

What has changed? What is the thing that put me in this place, where I feel small and confined and resigned to this life of tugging stress and a deficit of time, always struggling to reach something that is just nothing, nothing that excites or inflames me. Nothing that gets me excited about living.

A year ago I had these feelings, but I also had hope. A year ago I had plans and a belief that everything would be fine. That I would conquer the nasty pull of inertia, that I could be more and do more in my life than what I am doing right now. But inertia is an insidious, awful thing. It's worse, really, it's quicksand. I'm shrinking down into it.

There is a sign I posted next to my computer that says "Bloom where you are planted," and I am failing at that. My roots have thinned and stretched out, gasping for water. My leaves have browned. I am hunkering down for a long winter. I guess under this metaphor I need to tend the soil, to strengthen my roots so that I can grow, bloom, cast seeds and grow in other places.

But I don't know what that means. I don't know what my soil needs.

I don't mean to make it sound like I am walking around in a perpetual haze of sadness and depression; I'm not. We have our walks and the evenings I spend with the girls are (usually) very lovely. We manage to squeeze fun into the weekends and I have little hobbies that fulfill me: I read voraciously, I taught myself how to sew these simple fabric flowers, I discovered I don't totally suck at water coloring, I take pictures of nature that make me happy to be alive, just to see these things.

But even with those things I look at the big picture of how we spend our time, what we focus on more often than not, and I think: we're missing the point of life. Somehow. Because whatever it's meant to be, it can't be this.