Life These Days: A Grey November

The plant above is a metaphor for life, and I’m just grateful it’s still alive. The sun still shines, through it all.

Life, these days. Amazing! Busy! Full of celebrations and anxieties. I’m bobbing around and drowning and gasping and it’s all glorious and wonderful and exhausting. No one has it together, but I mean there are varying levels of what “not having it together” means. Are my kids learning enough math? Are the kids at school nice to each other? At what point do you evict the dust bunnies from under the bed, in fear of their reproductive magnificence overcoming a paltry human vacuum cleaner?

In a top 10 crazy Chan family moment, I convinced Jon to buy us some bubble tea, and while parked outside of Chatime, the car refused to start. It was a terrible situation in which I walked home with the babies and the bubble tea, and Jon sat outside the Chatime, in a broken vehicle, waiting for a tow truck.

With the car in the garage, our family is quavering in the wind, and I’ve rediscovered that the TTC is not conducive to the fast-paced kung fu kung pao life we live, even if you can get a lot of reading done on slow streetcar rides. This was not exactly news to me, and yet it comes as a surprise every time, and in the last few months, there seem to have been lots of surprises. The garage we go to is outside of Junia’s preschool, because once upon a time, the car broke down there, and the mechanic and Jon pushed it across the street into their healing hands. Now, I get off the streetcar with Junia and we wave hello at our car, hood up, before continuing on with our day.

I once congratulated myself on the hyper efficiency of scheduling my children’s music lessons and then picking Junia up from preschool on Mondays, allowing just enough time to make it from one place to another, and now someone’s gotta give (it’s Caleb). Ah, well, he will live to saw away at his albatross another day, those loose pages having freed themselves from the staples of his Suzuki book, floating away with my dreams for him.  

And so we monkeys swing on, from branch to branch. I found some library books under the bed, shook off some of those dust bunnies, and we returned them to their home.