A Crazy Beautiful Broken Life

It’s a crazy beautiful broken life.

I’m having one of those days.  One of those days when I have to remind myself that chronic fatigue means being fatigued chronically.  It means being utterly completely exhausted to my bones for no reason other than this is the way it is. It’s more than tired. It’s having no energy.  It’s being weak and shaky and achy. It’s feeling heavy like someone draped a huge sopping wet sleeping bag over my shoulders and I’m trying to run a marathon. It’s scraping myself together just to stumble out of bed.  It’s sitting on the couch watching HGTV and cruising pinterest for cute ideas for the grandbaby that’s coming soon.  It’s being so utterly tired my brain is slow and foggy and takes a long time to process so that everything I think is physical effort. Nothing is routine, everything is effort.

I need to make soup.  First, get the crockpot out, fill it with water and spices.  Sit on the couch and think of what to add to that pot to make it “soup”.  After some time, get up, add frozen corn.

Then, be so tired all I want is to sleep so I can pull out of the fog, but I can’t really sleep, so I doze restlessly, wake to the dog barking, feel worse than before. It takes a lot of work to make my brain think about doing school with Adrienne.  We get through it, ever slowly, one tiny step at a time.

 I hobble in to put the laundry in the dryer.  It’s a tired, weak, shaky day, but we need clean clothes.

 I’ve resolved in my heart, as much as possible, to press in to the tired and be happy.  Be happy in this moment, in this day.  This day is a beautiful gift, even if that gift doesn’t look like how I want it to look. I find happy things to look at and think about and I get texts from My Sweetie from work, checking on how I’m doing.  He can’t fix it, but he can remind me I’m loved.

At some point I realize that soup probably needs more than just corn.  I take a deep breath, get up slowly and head to the garage fridge for the carrots.  I retrieve the 10 lb bag I bought at Costco and wonder why in the world I bought this freakin’ heavy bag of carrots.  I get some chopped and dropped in the pot. Some time later, I realize I probably need more than soup and saltines on the table and silently curse whoever invented the need for “side dishes”. I put rice in the steamer.  And that’s it.  That’s dinner.

Some days I can’t even get that done.  But today I was able to make dinner for my family. Not because I couldn’t just sit and let them make their own, (believe me that happens) but because I like feeding them.

And no, I didn’t “do” anything today.  Nothing that anyone would count as doing something.  I corrected a math paper.  I threw in a load of laundry.  I “made soup” (cooks all over are groaning at my definition of making soup).  I did not clean anything.  I did not sit at my table and create anything.  I did not curl my hair or slather make up on my face.

I’m just too stinkin’ tired to do anything more than sit here.  But I “am” sitting.  I’m vertical rather than horizontal and that’s something.  I loved my people today.  I prayed for my peeps and talked with one of my boys and lit a fire under another to Own His Day.  I smiled and laughed and enjoyed breathing and being alive while my joints ache and my head pounds.

It’s a crazy, beautiful, broken life.  Own it.