Too busy

I am overwhelmed with tickery-tockery. Really, I should have been an automatic calendar, running by computer, then it wouldn't have mattered.

Because today I co-ordinate our comings and goings with three different families from 9am to 9pm, bringing my three kids to three different points with six other children via astronomy clubs, play dates, and swimming sessions. Between times I reschedule the walk-and-talk, rearrange the theatre booking, organise the London date, navigate the telephone and shop, then meantime clear up, cook dinner, empty bins, and set the laundry churning.

Some nights, when the days are like this, too busy to think or to rest, I lay my head on the pillow and try to remember whether I really did beome a software program running on a blind routine of motion. Then I feel fear how it all passes and I never knew that I was alive. I try to remember, as the hours clicked by that day, whether I hurt or felt happy or knew the wind on my face.

I must have been alive. I remember, through the clock ticking and the anxiety running too high, catching Squirrel's horrified widening eyes on finding the only swimming costume in the shop sized for her, and  laughing at her expression from my bellywards up.

I remember eye-spying in passing the last half-muffin from breakfast, cold but buttered, abandoned on the kitchen table, and no-one around to ask, Does anyone want this? Delight.

And I found, put here by a daughter hand, the moments taken from a day to follow impulse and curiosity, a ring of petals and leaves tatty and crushed, maybe drawn from a pocket or held in a clammy fist, where an eye, not mine, absorbed and intent, set the colour and shape swirling round, laying it all out, out of time.