a day at a time

Some more photos from our Spring Break trip to the Northwest.

It seems like it takes as many days to catch up from a vacation as the number of days you spend away. The importance of getting away from daily routines, no matter how long or far you travel to escape them, seems like a necessity more than ever, but I’ll admit – it’s disruptive in the sense that I always underestimate how easy it’ll be to swing right back into things. A week in and I still feel “off”.
 
But I suppose that’s the idea of a vacation, right? You don’t come back quite the same. A good vacation is returning to the more mundane and tedious aspects of daily life with a fresh perspective. Or one would hope. But it also takes work because it’s easy to slip back into the nonsense that you needed a break from in the first place.
 
These days, I feel like I’m walking a bit on egg shells. Emotions are unpredictable. It’ll be the one year anniversary of my brother’s death in 6 weeks, but the months proceeding that day were also difficult times. I’m reminded of this everyday lately. Certain dates are burned into my head and I check them off one by one as we pass them on the calendar, exhaling with relief to have gotten past them. But almost a year later, “moving on” hasn’t been possible for a few specific reasons that I can’t talk about. I just want that part to be over; I never thought I would find myself here. But I suppose that’s how life often works. It can veer down a path and fling you so far off from where you thought you’d be. How we deal with the cards we’re dealt with is up to each one of us. But I’ll survive because I’m a survivor.
 
It’s almost midnight. Another birthday, another milestone to check off the calendar. I’m secretly happy that my birthday doesn’t fall on a day where I’m in the office – not because I wouldn’t like to spend it with the people I work with – I would. But I want to spend it alone more. Does that make my transformation into an old lady, complete? I’m close! I can feel it! But 6 hours alone before the girls get home sounds like the perfect way to spend a birthday to me. Because then there will be dinner and cards and cake (Miss C made me fill out a cake survey the other day) and let’s face it, celebrating our birthdays is just as much for them as it is for us at this point, am I right? I can already tell…I’ll miss it when the kids are gone.