Life These Days

It has been a week!

Chicken had to go to the emergency vet for another blockage in his wee wee. He had one several years ago and it was terrible, and it was just as terrible this time around. They make you pay in advance for emergency vet care, and it was another eye-watering bill, the receptionist attempting to remove the credit card from Jon’s clenched fist, Jon’s eyes growing wider and more manic by the second. I can see him doing mental calculations in his head: how many months of Junia’s preschool fees is the first payment?? Emergency vet bills are not for the faint of heart, or for the uninsured. Or, actually, I guess they are only for the uninsured. Feedback from the vets included that Chicken was “feisty,” “not very nice,” and “sedated.”

Junia has started preschool, and there were tears. The teachers tried to comfort me, but I bravely waved them off.

I had imagined that after Junia started going to preschool, even though it’s only half days right now (which is the same amount of money and more work than full days) I would have time on my hands to do things, take photos, hang laundry, read books, eat bagels. But it turns out that Naomi caught some sort of stomach bug and instead I was home with my favourite middle child watching Glitter Force and ordering congee on Uber. “This is fun!” says Naomi, the stomach bugged.

Naomi returned to school, but luckily for me, now Junia is down with something (the same thing?), so my vaguely delirious dreams about time to wallow anxiously in my existential thoughts about the future have been pushed to next week. What am I doing with my one wild and precious life, I keep asking myself. No answer yet. Let’s put that on the calendar for Monday.

So instead I’m scribbling away in my notebooks. It goes so fast, all of it. Everyone keeps telling me you blink and you’re decrepit and your children are adults living their own adventures in the world and not calling home, so I’m trying not to blink, my eyes drying up like raisins, and I’m trying to catch it all while I can, the tiny wisps of it. Tiny little fingers creeping along the kitchen counter, looking for a tasty snack and not to be chopped off along with some ginger; hot little bodies with arms wrapped up around your neck. My one wild and precious life.