Summer Remorse

I woke up Monday morning with a grump in my gut. You know that unidentifiable unease that can't be explained away by eating bad leftovers? Like maybe you slept through your birthday or forgot to wear underwear to church. I finally recognized it as opportunity lost... a bad case of the shoulda-woulda-couldas.

School started here last Monday and the Labor Day weekend is upon us. That means summer is pretty much over. Not every mother looks forward to the start of school like those office supply advertisements would have you believe. Some of us are just too contrary for that. For me the school year means a big bag of extra responsibilities - time grabbers and money suckers. Understand that I do love my kids, and I am proud of their accomplishments, but parenting is a much full-er time job during the school year. Put that in the blender with the other full-time jobwithbenefits and the need for sleep and you get School-Year Jane, who is no one's favorite person.

As the school year drags on I get behinder and behinder. So I tend to lower my standards a bit, which helps for a week or so. Then the holidays loom and I go through the great ideas -> lesser ideas -> buy gift cards and slap a bow on them cycle... for which I suffer immense heaps of guilt. Then comes the new year, with new hopes and ideas for projects... but there are always things that must be done before the projects get started... and then I'm out of time.

As spring arrives I start looking to the horizon - June!! School is out!! Life will be simpler! Time will be mine! Hahahaha. Even now I see the naivete of my thinking. But still I hope. I tell myself that when summer comes I'll finally have time to:

• Dejunk the house
• Organize the storage
• Clean out the closets
• Scan and albumize pictures - OMG, the millions of pictures
• Transfer and edit movies, YEARS worth
• Empty the dishwasher... kid-ding
• Clean out the garden shed where everybody dumps their $^&* sh!t!
• And the patio... can no one put away their perpetual piles of effing sprinkler parts?
  Refinish this, paint that, repair all those other little things

But then summer comes and the day job becomes intense... and vacation looms, and then the post-vacay recovery period lumbers on... and on... And very soon the retail freaks are all 'Back to School Time everybody'! And I start to panic... so I grab something... ANYthing off the list. This year's winner was the garden shed. It is clean... it is organized... it is a thing of beauty. But it won't stay that way. *sigh*

And now summer is almost over and you might just as well put me in a dark cupboard and feed me left over pizza crusts because sometimes I feel like that would be a much more productive life for me.

Okay... pity party ends.... now.