I’d say this has been one of those days, but I fear it’s been one of those weeks.  Or months.  Or worse.  It just feels like I can’t get ahead.  I realize some of this is chronic caregiver stuff: laundry, cleaning, cooking that are just completed when it’s time to do them again.  I try to think of these things not as goals to be attained but as the background activities of my life, the patterns of the everyday.  But it’s hard when I’m so tired some days that getting dinner on the table IS in fact a major achievement.  What’s troubling me most, anyway, isn’t the dismal routine of maintenance but instead the strange psychological adaptations that are happening.  The onslaught of winter isn’t helping, with its corollary SAD and Vitamin D deficiency, and maybe that can account for what’s going on.  But I’m somewhere between agoraphobia and hibernation, and anyone will tell you that’s a tricky place to be.  I’m CRAVING time at an office, with tasks and challenges that need my brain and expertise.  I’m lusting after adult conversation, preferably not about children.  Most of all, I want blessed quiet and my body, my space, my environs to myself.  This feels ungrateful but it’s truly not: it’s just that I, like almost everyone, am too complex to do just one thing or be just one way.  I love parenting and I love the other things I’ve done with my life, and I’m headed toward a new kind of balancing, I hope.  In the meantime: I do the strange and crazy dance a friend in college termed “full body flail” and try not to act out in public.