heavy

Beware: I'm a downer today.

I’ve been feeling low the last few days—sensitive. The kind of sensitive that makes my feelings easily hurt, the kind of sensitive that makes it difficult to fall back to sleep if I wake up in the middle of the night. The kind of sensitive that makes me read too much into e-mail messages or a look from D. The kind of sensitive that makes me snap at my children.

Is it a delayed reaction to Stella starting kindergarten? A couple of people have told me that often a new kindergartner will revolt after a couple of weeks, after the excitement of the school bus and the new teacher has worn off. Am I going through this kind of thing? Maybe, or maybe my heaviness has to do with the fact that half-day kindergarten means that my juggling of schedules and calendars and snippets of work has become even more frenzied than usual.

Or could this heaviness have to do with how fast Zoë runs, and how funny she thinks it is to dart into the street? How amusing she thinks it is--a huge smile on her face--when I jump up from the front steps to dash after her, my heart in my throat. Hilarious. (But it keeps me awake at night, this image of her getting hit by a truck. It plays over and over in my head, and I can’t stop it.)

Or maybe it has to do with the fact that the reality of the troubled economy is inching closer and closer to home, and this financial insecurity sizzles under the surface of our lives. Or maybe it has to do with how hard I work—how very hard—and how this doesn’t seem to matter. Or maybe it has to do with how often D is out of town these days. Or maybe it has to do with my computer, which froze on me yesterday, and which just cannot break right now. Cannot.

These are the times, I suppose, when a little meditation (or a long run or a heavy dose of Paxil) would go a long way. But none of these things is going to happen. Instead, I’ll continue typing away and hope Zoë will take a longer-than-usual nap so I can get a little more work done before we have to walk down to the end of the block, where we will wait for Stella to descend from the bus after her two hours and forty-five minutes of kindergarten.