My advisor meetings are both tomorrow (the Mon one got moved to Tuesday).
I’m working from home today, and having a hell of a time concentrating. I already dispensed with many mindless tasks, but I need to dial in on some coding. Usually it’s the kind of work that is really fun, but my mind is all over the place.
I spent much of the weekend fending off overwhelming panic, mostly by doing marginally useful household projects. (Both kids now have stuffed-animal/doll hammocks hanging in their respective portions of the bunk bed.* Our back porch looks less like it was hit by a tornado. All clothing in the house is clean. All wrinkled shirts are ironed — I do have to look sharp this week). I would distract myself for a while, and sort of forget, but then I’d think about this week and feel like I got kicked in the gut. Again. When I woke up this morning, I had been dreaming about coming out to someone who wasn’t reacting all that well, and I was momentarily relieved that it was a dream, but then I remembered, fuck, that might have been a dream but tomorrow isn’t.
In a strange way, this feels not dissimilar from waiting for a baby to be born. You should have seen me before Leigh was born. I did a million projects, organized our house top to bottom, and filled our freezer and pantry with enough food to feed a small army (Gail mostly slept, she didn’t get that whole pregnant-nesting thing). But still, even when everything was done, I didn’t know how it was going to go, and no amount of preparation could make me 100% sure it was going to be OK. During the time waiting for birth (Leigh was 10 days late), and even during the birth (which was long), I spent a fair amount of time wondering what the hell we were getting ourselves into and whether or not it was actually such a good idea.
So far I’ve been able to handle everything. I can probably handle this, too. I’m doing my absolute best to believe this is going to go great, and to do my part to make it so. I’m thinking about how I’ll feel about two weeks from now, when I’m not hiding anything from anyone. But keeping myself in this space requires a near constant internal pep talk. 26 more hours.
I need another project.
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* I deserve a major parenting award on this one. Ira really wanted his hammocks to have bicycles on them, and rainbow ribbons. The rainbow ribbons did not match the bicycle fabric, but I made it that way anyway…and he loves them. He and Leigh spent the bulk of the afternoon putting lots and lots of dolls and animals to bed. In our house, such a game involves intensive debate about which animals are what gender, with Leigh lobbying hard all characters should be girls, Ira lobbying equally strongly that all are boys, and an occasional compromise that a few are transgender/genderqueer. The whole exchange made me think about when I was a kid — my favorite animals were boys (as designated by me). Dolls were not strongly in rotation, though that one cabbage patch kid I wanted really bad in the 2nd grade? Yep. A boy.
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