It’s so much easier to work from home…

Is it?

This could make you cringe. This could make you “pffft” because I know we all carry a cross. This could break me.

Because I am breaking.

Because it’s been a long road and sometimes I wish I’d flown instead of driven. I wish I’d explored instead of made roots. But wishes mean nothing when you’re sitting in a doctor’s office, one of a hundred you’ve been in over the past 6 years, and all you can do is pray.

I’m praying for an answer. Or no answer and a miracle. Or no miracle and for just that hint of burning behind my eyes to stop. Just stop for one goddamn minute so I can catch my breath and not be some illogical human who feels like they can’t go on because that’s what being an adult looks like sometimes. But I never see it. In the perfect people in the filtered images that even I am guilty of posting. The smiles that shine through eyes glassy with clear blue that you can’t tell have been up all night in worry and fraught about the next shoe to drop.

I must have a million legs upon which I wear a million shoes because there always seems to be another one dropping. This must be why it is so hard to drag myself from the bed where I have yet to slumber peacefully for more than a few hours in the past year. It’s all those legs and all those shoes.

“You work from home- that must be so nice. If I worked from home…”

I drown you out.

Because if you worked from home you wouldn’t get anything more done than you do now, because the kids would be right next to you as the same deadlines you have now appear in your inbox, from a text message, from the words of someone on the other end of that smartphone. Only when you attempt to reach the deadlines, it won’t be from an office or a cubicle, it will be from the dining room table when your kids are eating dinner, trying to tell you about their day while your husband does the same. And you will again feel that burning because you want to listen, but you HAVE TO WORK.

 

Or it will be from the doctor’s office while your baby has another test. Another series of questions with possibilities of maybes of we need just a few more… answers.

And at the end of the day, there are no answers and more deadlines and I’m trying. And I’m blessed to have the opportunity to try. But please do not confuse my reality with your dream. Because we all have benefits and perks and stumbling blocks.

Today, those stumbles are plentiful. Tomorrow, I can hope they will be less.