Greediness

Life is like a set of scales. You keep some sort of balance by shifting weights from side to side. I think before you have a child you feel that things are unbalanced so you move things around. Cleaning the house balances going to a movie, doing the bills balances exercising balances vacation balances work balances...and so on...

Then baby comes along and basically someone drops a ton of bricks on one side and everything flies in all directions, leaving you a little stunned as you scramble to pick up the pieces of your old life and combine them with your new.

Sometimes I feel like M. and I are living in a perpetual state of imbalance. Of course I've always felt that way. We were never responsible enough, never rested enough, never fit enough. Finn has made me realize that we were a hell of a lot better off than we are now.

I think what happens when you live in a perpetual state of imbalance is you constantly make greedy choices to get what you need. It's like you've been starved and someone hands you a chocolate bar. Never mind that the chocolate is probably going to be the last thing you ever eat because your body can't manage it, you're going to eat it and enjoy it. This is why when M. and I finally get some time without the boy, some precious ME time, we grab it and gobble it up, even if it sometimes means staying up too late or spending too much money or doing things we know we will pay for later.

I can't tell you how much better things are since our ton of bricks came screaming into our lives. Our scales are taped together, jerry-rigged in some sort of strange manner to make things a little more even, and we've combined the old and the new into a motley collage of a life. We still don't have balance and I don't know if by the time Finn is less needy and more independent if we'll remember how to get that balance back.

This is all a long way of saying that sometimes I stay up late when I know I should be going to bed just because I want to. So there. Take that, life!