Tomorrow

You don't get days much more beautiful than the one we had today.

Not hot or cold or windy or wet or anything other than bright, comfortable, glorious, inviting weather.

I drove home with an ache in my belly past kids on bikes, families on walks, parents pushing strollers, a skateboarder, and many smiling faces.

Once I arrived home, I sat in my car an extra minute or two, not sure how to go inside and seize the day.

It's hard when you have a child who has learning disabilities, communication challenges, and poor social skills, to know the right way to begin the evening.

As much as I'd like to join the beauty outside my house, inside, there is work to be done. Homework means reteaching, much needed practices, playing catch-up, addressing areas of great challenge for my son, and corralling my precocious and undisciplined daughter.  Family time means balancing difficult dynamics and endless quarreling. Housework means some idiosyncratic chores that, I'll just say, are probably not occupying most typical families on the block. Dinner and packing lunches means constant care with kids with severe allergies.

When I get home from work, hours of effort stretch out before me, and the hardest work of all is figuring out how to experience any leisure or play. Sometimes the effort feels debilitating, if that makes any sense.

And so I'm blogging now as the sun disappears, taking away the perfection outside our window, closing yet another opportunity when I am entirely unsure whether or not I blew it.

Probably I did. Probably I blew it.

Hopefully the sun will come up again tomorrow and give me another chance.