Keep on keeping up

The last two weeks have now merged in my mind into one mental, headlong rush towards Wednesday, when the latter of my two major deadlines at work culminated in a meeting at which one of the project teams I have been leading presented its proposals to our steering committee. The meeting went exceptionally well, and the sense of relief afterwards was palpable. I'd already booked an extra day off for the day after, so the journey home from work Wednesday night felt all the sweeter as I headed south into a four day break with my family. One important aspect of this mini-break is that I have made absolutely no concrete plans for filling it; I felt that I needed a bit of free-form time. And it's only now, on the second day in to my break, that I've realised how much the last two weeks I simply 'survived' rather than 'lived'. When you have so much on your plate you just keep going; you 'keep on keeping on'. But what also happens is that you make what seem like partially conscious decisions about which balls to keep in the air and which to drop. So it is that the following things are dropped: managing the household paperwork (one only pays attention to it when the tottering heap on the desk in the office falls over or the red bill arrives from BT); staying on top of household dust (I know we do own some dusters but really, this has got to be the most tiresome household chore next to ironing, which also never gets done in this household); maintaining an in-depth awareness of current affairs (I'm lucky if I have read the weekend papers by the end of the week and have just realised that I have no idea even of who's in and who's out at Wimbledon this year) and keeping abreast of the latest 'theme days' at Eden's school (this latter one became an issue this morning when Eden announced she should be wearing green because it was 'Green Day'; neither of us knew whether this was an entirely fabricated idea but fortunately it was not, as she would have looked pretty silly turning up looking quite so much like an elf if it were). Last night I ended up wondering whether I was the only Working Mum who actually feels relieved at the end of some weeks that we have managed to keep everyone in clean clothes, found food to put on the table each evening and maintained at least the appearance of sanity.