Letting Go of Life's Unfinished Business

Back in October, when she was still getting used to having a baby around the house, Sayde peed on our comforter and duvet cover. I removed the duvet cover from the comforter and washed it, then washed the comforter. That night when Ben and I were re-making our bed, we were too tired to put the duvet cover back on, so we said we'd do it the next day. I folded it up and put it on top of a dresser in our bedroom.

Here we are over 4 months later and that duvet cover is still sitting on the dresser--and our duvet-less white comforter now has 4 month's worth of baby and dog stains on it. 

When we were moving into our house back in February 2015, one of our moving helpers dropped a box of kitchen stuff and the handle of one of my favorite mugs broke off [see image above]. "No problem," I said faux-cheerfully, "I'll just glue it back on!" I placed the broken handle inside the mug and placed the mug in the corner of a side table in our living room so that I would remember to fix it ASAP. 

Yep, you guessed it; two years later and that mug is still sitting there. Every time that I grab a pen from the jar of pens that sits next to the mug, I'm reminded that I still need to glue that handle back on. And that there are SO many more [metaphorical] broken-handled mugs in my life, just waiting to be fixed when I find the time to get to them. 

When I was little and my parents were getting divorced, I started having these scary nighttime episodes called night terrors (look them up: they're no joke!). In one of these recurring nightmares, I was in a library that had books all over the floor and it was my job to put the books back on the shelves. Every time that I put a book on a shelf, another 3-4 books would fall down onto the floor.

This dream was a horrible anxiety-ridden nightmare because even at the tender age of 8, I understood that I would never be able to put all of those books back up--that the work would never, ever end. 

Now here I am at 32, and while I've never been officially tasked with that Sisyphean library shelf stacking job (thank goodness!), sometimes life can feel like that job.

It's not as scary or daunting as the midnight terror version because I'm used to life being this way by now,  but when I strike a line through something on my daily to-do list, only to add another 2-3 items to the bottom of the list, I realize that my list will never ever end, either. And that there are tons of tasks--like the mug and duvet cover--that aren't even important enough to make my daily lists, but that will remain on the sidelines of my life for who knows how long, heckling me as I go about my day handling the more important and more timely to-dos. 

So this is it, right? This is how life goes. You keep hoping to find time to paint the trim and eventually, either you make it happen or you give up on it and the trim goes unpainted until you pay someone to do it or get ready to sell the house. 

It's time that we [I] accept that this is how it is and just get over it. Now that we have a baby and I have even less time than I used to, I'm working on being okay with all of the unfinished business in my life; I don't want to be haunted by the broken mugs of days gone by.

This past weekend, as I was doing some straightening, I made my way over to the little table where the broken mug sits (and where paperwork and unopened mail goes to die--you know the spot because I'm sure you have one, too).  

I picked up the mug and looked at it and in that moment, I knew that I was faced with a decision: do I go dig around in the basement right now and try to find some glue and just fix this thing already, or do I give in, admit that I won't get to it, and throw the mug away? 

As I held the mug in my hand pondering what I should do and somewhat paralyzed by indecision, Charlie Mae woke up and start crying for me and that was that. I put the mug back down and went upstairs to get her.

As I write this, I can still see the mug sitting right where I left it--where it has lived for over two years and will probably continue to sit for another two years unless I take a stand and do something about it as soon as I press 'publish' on this blog post. 

I'd like to tell you that I will definitely go deal with it right now, but something else might come up in the next two minutes and it might not happen and that's just life. 

I want to be the type of person who fixes the mug right away--I really do!--and there have been times in my life when I was that person, but I'm not sure if that's who I am right now, or who I'll be again any time in the foreseeable future. And I'm learning to live with the fact that it's okay to be the person who throws the mug away or lives without a duvet cover for a year.

It really is. 

Right?