fettered

I should be doing something.

My Christmas cards are still unwritten, cookies unbaked, presents unwrapped, and more than a few still unboughten. There is food to buy. Dinners to plan. I should make a list. (But I know I won't.)

I never actually finished decorating. We pulled out all the boxes and had a huge explosion of the Christmas tchotchkes. Some I love. Some I hate. Some to which I am indifferent. All of which I have little room for. And it all makes me feel like the walls are closing in on me. I packed up the ones I couldn't deal with, left the "maybe" pile sitting out, and there they still sit. In disarray on the coffee table. As if left by the Ghost of Christmas Disorganized.

My kids (some of them, anyway) have settled into their usual pre-Christmas routine of acting like they deserve, well... nothing but coal. And yet, I have it on good authority that they will do much better than that. I weigh the balance of a good lesson learned vs. years of therapy and I know this is one time I will not follow though. There must be something biochemical, or barometric, or hormonal that causes their behavior, because I could set my watch by it. It arrived right on schedule. But still it angers me to the point of speechlessness.

It's at this point that I have lost all sense of the meaning of what I'm doing. I'm grimly marching forward. Circling parking lots and sliding my credit card over and over again. There has to be a better way of doing this. And yet, year after year, I don't find it. Or I forget to look for it until it's too late.