Lion and Magic Boy

Today it feels like I am finally getting it: I cannot divide myself twelve ways.

I have been sitting here all evening with my ass parked in front of my computer, a rapidly-aging and cranky PC to which I am not afraid to say out loud right now I that would love to trade in right this minute for a shiny new MacBook, and don’t you think I won’t do this one day when this thing finally refuses to boot up (having the last laugh of course as it fades to a permanent black over all my photos, files, and the crappy novel I wrote last November), and running up the steps every 20 minutes to console and adjust poor Eric who has yet another respiratory whatever-it-is-this-time and can’t breathe and hates it and fights it and so is restless all night, insisting on sleeping in my bed which means of course that I cannot sleep because I know that at any moment he will sit up, eyes still fastened shut, and then fall over dead asleep but in another position that will cause him to slide head-first off the bed, and so it has become my job to remain awake and vigilant all night to ensure that at least one of us is sleeping and not lying face down on the floor.

It turns out it’s not that easy to function on 2 hours of sleep a night for very long, not nearly as easy as it is to write an incredibly long and aimless sentence like the one above that surely would take a Faulkner Award for Lengthiness and Use Of Commas and Other Punctuation if there were such an award. [pause] Is there?

So on Two Magic Hours I am sitting here attempting to become suddenly witty and appropriately snarky for that other writing thing I do, and meanwhile there is still the cat that apparently came issued with my chair and so has claimed his right to sleep here, on top of me if he has to, claws frequently extended and causing little snags in my otherwise holey jeans and the white leg skin directly underneath, insisting that I hold him up from falling so that the claws do not have to do this for him. I agree of course that it’s good to avoid the claws and so I have found that my legs remain rigid the entire time I sit here, ass parked in front of the computer.

Which is much the same position I used to find myself when one or the other of the children was smaller and I had allowed myself to become essentially a nap platform for them, mouth still nipple-attached, my arms going rigid and holding a relaxed little body for up to 2 hours, and I ask myself what is it about the insanity of motherhood that would drive one to continue to hold that baby instead of gently putting him/her down, other than the certain awareness that once I did so, that child’s eyes would open just as automatically as the somewhat creepy doll’s eyes did of the one doll I owned as a child, the one whose hair I cut with a child’s certainty that it would grow back.

So I’m sitting here, ass perched still in front of this ancient computer, books lying unread and taunting me from their shelves. The Ex came back “in the country” today from the super-duper-double-secret vacation location he would not divulge until his return and picked up the children for exactly 1.5 hours this evening, during their dinner time, dropping them off again to of course have dinner with me, and during this 1.5 hours I wondered to myself, “Self, what are you going to do with this gift, this bonus of time alone, completely alone?”, and of course I had to use that time to read, which in turn made me sleepy, and so I slept sitting half-upright in a chair in front of the fake fire for 20 minutes, causing extreme disorientation upon awakening as it did not go very far in addressing the deficit in which I find myself now.

Adding to all this the normal and regular demands of being a single mother, and calculating rapidly now as I remember and list for myself all the other things going undone: the writing I must be doing, the blog, the novel (ha!), the journal, the Morning Pages, taking a bath (who let that one in?), scooping the kitty box, reading a book or three, catching up with family, creating and re-creating who I am and where I am going, examining patterns and thought and behavior, and I begin to see myself stretching slowly, ever thinner, dividing in ever smaller and smaller pieces.

[This post was entered in January's Blogging For Books competition at The Zero Boss.]

[tags]time; cranky, crappy PCs; cats; sleep; writing; my ass[/tags]