Re-Entry

It’s Thursday evening, and the house is all quiet as everyone is asleep.

Except for me.

Re-entry to normal life after a week’s holiday in Spain, sans kids, has been more difficult than usual.  Jet lag has been more difficult to overcome – I awake each morning and fail to clear the haze that surrounds me. We both came back in less than full health, he with a stomach bug (just what you want to come down with the day you plan to fly) and me with a condition that makes caffeine and sugar bad ideas.

Recovering from jet lag without coffee, after a week of caffe con leche several times a day? I’m still not sure if the headache is due to what’s ailing me, caffeine withdrawal, or both.

I find myself completely incapable of finishing the smallest project and so the piles begin to build – on my desk, with paperwork, on the guest room bed, as the continuous loads of clothes get washed, dried, and nearly folded, but not put away.

Piles overwhelm me, and so with my headache I retreat to the sofa, cup of (chamomile) tea and afghan in hand, the dog curled up so close we could be sharing a sweater. Today is the day I should be back to normal, but motivation escapes me.

I shall treat today like a day off (if a stay-at-home mom can have a “day off”), trying to accomplish a small bit of laundry, reading, playing with the dog, and writing.

Never you mind that I just had 8 days off.

It was interesting to see what life could be like when the kids are in college and the Hubs is retired.  I spent the first part of the trip mostly on my own, and with another spouse – she made for an interesting travel partner, as her travel motto was one of  “wing it and wander” while my husband is a structured, careful planner and quick to pull out the map app on his phone to navigate. I’m somewhere in the middle of them both; I’m sure you can imagine which was more relaxing, and it’s clear that my darling husband will need to learn to relax when he retires or we may never travel together, because I will have suffocated him in his sleep, or at least left him on a street corner somewhere.

Despite carrying a notebook with me, in which I wrote furiously at every coffee break (which was many), I find my brain too full. I have so much I want to write about that I can’t seem to get anything out properly, and so I do what I usually do when I give myself a day off: I retreat to a book.

Another cup of tea, finish one book, and promptly start another.

It’s the perfect delay tactic, really.

It isn’t, however, helping me clear my head. I’m tired and my thoughts swirl around me like fireflies on a summer evening; I struggle to catch some. If I could, I’d put them in a glass jar, where I could enjoy in the quiet until I could put them on paper and finally set them free.

For now, I’ll keep plugging along, tackling one pile at a time in between chapters in my Kindle,  stuck in this orbit looking for a soft place to land.

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This post inspired by:

It started out based on Prompt 1 “You have a day off, what do you do with your free time?” – but very quickly went somewhere else.