The Screaming Hour

Signing up to write seven posts in seven days, which I’m sure seemed brilliant to all three hundred of us who linked up, means that I have to think about something, anything, on two days I don’t usually have time to think at all. Saturday and Sunday are days of manual labor, not days to sit fussing over how two paragraphs fit together. In fact today is a Work Day, foolishly put on the Calendar by me, whereby I would make myself available to help other people in their work and do some of my own. And while I’m doing that over there, at church, I hope the children will work hard to vacuum up the little trail of hay leading out from a foot cushion all the way through several bedrooms and down into the living room. A day of work, preparatory work, sometimes very hard work, rounded off in the evening with painting all the girls’ nails and culminating, at nine pm, with me realizing that all the work was as nothing because the kitchen is still a mess and people are coming over to dinner after church on Sunday. This is what I affectionately refer to as The Saturday Screaming Hour.

Does this happen to anyone else? You slog out a whole day, warm with the glow that God has given you something improving and helpful to do, serving others and maybe even your own children, trying very hard to do what is required of you. But then you come in for a landing around 8 or 9pm and as you survey the day, you discover It Wasn’t Enough. There is still more to do. And you could wake up really early and do it (embittered laughter) or you can stay up sweeping angrily while your husband tries to convince you that you’re insane.

These are the moments I think it would be really nice to be single and childless because all the work facing me down at The Screaming Hour is stuff created or caused by Other People whose right hands never seem to have a clue what their left hands are doing. And yet I’m the crazy one. But then I know that if I was alone and the kitchen was always clean I would stand weeping over the sink and eat whole cheeses in the dark because I don’t actually do that well when I’m on my own.

So there you are, I blogged on a Saturday. Tune in tomorrow for another extraordinary post that may never happen again!