What does a mommy think when she finds herself with absolutely nothing to do on a Thursday afternoon? Heck, I have no idea. I have no recent memory of having been in this situation. We are in Branson. Missouri. With the Hatfields and McCoys, I believe. The children are running around outside somewhere with their cousins and all the mosquitos in Lake Taneycomo. Ok, they are even wearing the same clothes they had on yesterday. Ok, I think they ate Cheetos and Dr Pepper for lunch. Whatever. They're boys. They don't care. Laundry? Got none, I'm on vacation. Lunch? Eaten
(remember the Cheetos?) Dishes? Paper plates. There are no GI Joes on the floor. No golf balls under my desk. There's not even a desk here. More like a porch chair at this cabin. No jelly beans stuck to anyone's sandals. I'm feeling like Luka's little snowman-with-a-hockey-stick-action-figure
(from some long ago Happy Meal). Yesterday, in the car on his way here, he looked at his little snowman, in scarf and hat, hockey stick in his hand and declared "Mommy, he's got no puck to hock!"
Well, Luka, mommy's got no puck to hock either. My larder's are full at this cabin, thanks to all my clever stockpiling last week, so I'm not shopping. There's not a Staples in site, so my internet shopping has come to a screeching halt. I even painted my toenails and built a website button for a fellow mommy blogger today I'm so at the end of my to-do list. Why is it that I find myself unable to just sit and do nothing? Do I feel that I need to justify my existence with a whirling display of cleaning, storing, organizing, picking up, driving, and thousands of other manic movements in my daily mommy ballet? Yes, obviously.
Back when I had a full-time job, I found it much easier to do nothing. I got really good at nothing.
(After work of course.) All justifiable because I worked from 9-5, and determined that I deserved to do nothing the rest of the time. I was numb from eight hours of passionately hitting that puck with my hockey stick: brainstorming, concepting, frantically meeting deadlines, high on caffeine for client meetings and crashing afterwards triumphant from another successful presentation. "Nothing" was truly all I was capable of at the end of those days.
Now that I work from home with the help of my two-year-old intern Hurricane Luka, and the lines have blurred between client meeting and CVSing, playgroups and presentations. There's no dressing up or doing lunch
(except with Miss Spider's Sunny Patch Friends of course). I still have deadlines, but I don't have any account executives breathing down my neck for a layout. No red tape. No conference calls. I just have to contend with Thomas the Train and all his friends being dumped on my keyboard with a loud "CHOO CHOO!" ten times a day. It seems I still have my job as creative director, but now I'm doing it in the middle of a Dallas Stars Game and a three-ring-circus all rolled into one. I'm going and going dawn to dusk, until I drop from exhaustion at 9:30 and pass out in the middle of CSI Miami.
Sometimes, I miss the dressing up for work, having an actual hair-do, wearing make-up (what's that?) and stopping for Starbucks on the way to my office. I suddenly realized last week that I no longer even owned a single pair of dress pants. I realized this the morning that I actually had my first real client meeting in over a year. I dressed hoping they liked their designers in jeans and crocs. I suppose if I were their lawyer or their banker, they'd have given me the stink eye, but since I'm a designer I think I got away with it. I was still wearing the same jeans and crocs when I later spent the afternoon knee-deep in sidewalk chalk with Luka. Dress pants would never have survived.
So today I am here in this moment on a Thursday afternoon, out of town and out of my usual element, where I've got "no puck to hock", as Luka says. I contemplate the accomplishments of the past year. I sit. I watch the kids run around outside here on the porch and I sip my first 4:00 beer,
Tammy. I decide that nothing is kinda nice. I remember this. I can get into this. I watch a little spec of dust catch the sunlight and drift slowly to the floor beside me.
And land on a golf ball. With a jelly bean stuck to it. Ok. Vacation's over, back to work.
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