Coffee is evil

It’s gotten so (loooong sigh) MUNDANE……that at the end of the week on a Friday night (the night I most usually found it hard to contain myself, unless I’d already been overexcited on Thursday and was having a less excited Friday) all I want to complain about is how evil coffee is. We’ll today it’s sugar actually, but yesterday it was coffee, because after  one simple white coffee at 11am by 5pm I was ready to climb the walls, had a festering rage and an unexplainable anxiety that even asking me for a fork would have been scary. Today I’m almost the same, but not the coffee thing,  just nailing a sugar filled homemade cheesecake, so deliciously sweet it made my teeth ache, and then I’m having a sugar rush like no other and ALMOST wish I had coffee instead. I know that neither of things is good for me. And I’m not a righteous health head, I actually can mix it up a bit and would really like to be able to have one coffee a day before 11am and be cool with that, and perhaps a sweet treat every so often, but it just doesn’t work. I may as well go the hard stuff because at least I’d be able to thrill Friday nights with tales of my drug-ridden school drop-offs, visits to the crack den and wild things I’d done to get extra money to score during the week. Instead, I can only lament the coffee I had a play group was too strong, and when I eat cake I feel sick and yuck. Yawn.

How is that we know the things that make us feel great (writing, yoga, a cup of the in the sunshine, salad for lunch, reading a great book in the afternoon on the weekend) are the things that seem to slip off the radar first when the schedule gets a little bit hectic (OK OK really freaking hectic)? How is it that even though I know what makes me feel great and I work with people all week getting them to identify what helps make them feel great and how they can do it, I can fall off the wagon with one piece of cheesecake on a Friday because my man is away, I’m a bit tired, the kids are fracas (because I am finding it hard not to yell “PLEASE STOP YELLING” at them) and although I know it won’t help, for one sweet moment it does….

How important am I? How easy is it to put myself first in an unselfish way, so that at the end of a week where I forgot to, I don’t feel so mad and selfish?

So this is what I did. I left the heater on in my office. I made sure the girls are fed and comfortable, and the two most little and most tired are in bed, and I came into this warm little space I love to whinge about coffee and sugar and Friday night without a party, and realise all I miss in the end is me. She disappeared at home all week, because in a job that’s so much about giving (and in that I get so much), I wasn’t saving enough for home – some insight, some gentleness, some guidance, some openness, some love and some me. Three times this week I had beautiful feedback from people I work with about the job I do, and in that I realise that like everything, with our work and our passion, that can come so much more easily. Bringing all of that to my babies, and those moments that seem so frequently frustrating (yelling in the car, bossing each other around, whinging (this one drives me the most nuts…wonder who she sounds like? :)) and being hungry at bed time) would be the greatest gift I could give, to both them and me. Wonder why that feels like such a challenge? Wonder why my ego likes to pipe up and say “don’t be so hard on yourself, mothering is hard job”? Thanks for that, but really it’s not that. It’s only hard if you make it hard, and if coffee and sugar make is hard – let those mofo’s go! And fast! There’s only time for the best you can be around here….