pura vida

It must feel like an angry 12 year old took over this blog. Probably because that’s what happened … Vien has not skipped a beat in posting, while I have been struggling to get my act together.

Spoiler alert: this is my worst post ever. The reason I haven’t posted in a minute and this is my worst post ever is because it is SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO hot here. I know that sentence was the pinnacle of writing, but I don’t know what else to say. IT IS SO HOT. IT is _{so hot} (me melting away). Everyone told us about the heat in April, but I lived blissfully in the moment, until, ya know, April.

Which is good, because if I had known how it was going to be, I would have been really dreading it. Because the kind of heat that we have been experiencing since early March is a next-level heat.

Yes, I am a total wimp. Please bear that in mind. Room temperature is kind of my sweet spot, both indoors and outdoors. In my defense, objectively, it is very hot. Every day it is 95 degrees by 10am. In the evenings and mornings there is a lovely reprieve where the temp drops to a super chill 80. But maybe the worst thing is that the heat is relentless. There is barely a breeze or a cloud in the sky. Every day, day in, day out.

In my mind, I’ve been calling it the “heat grind.” Mostly because I feel my gears have seized up, and my engine feels like it is working overtime to turn over even the tiniest bit. I think that’s a pretty good analogy. It feels like a lot of work to get a little done, every day.

Couple that with a realization that I made about housework. Guess what guys! I do a lot of housework. Take this morning, for example. I made breakfast. Everyone ate. Everyone did a good job of cleaning up their individual plates. But there is still a big mess in the kitchen that I am putting off cleaning.

And soon I will have to do it, along with a million other things that need to be done: Nene’s wax museum costume, studying with Sinh for his test and fixing his phone, mopping the kitchen because of a popsicle-making sesh and sweeping the rest of the house because of a flying ant infestation/die-off sitch. But I will only get a bit of that done because IT IS SO HOT.

The heat death of my energy has exposed that I do a lot of things. I think I was a little delusional, actually, about the number of things that I do for our family every day and every week. Something inside of me believes that I am never doing my share.

Which is insane, and also so typical of me I want to roll my eyes at myself. I never feel like I’m enough and it has manifested in all these crazy ways throughout my life, from de-prioritizing my friendships to declining raises at work to believing that I don’t do my share around the house. Which as I type it, feels more and more insane. If there’s anything good about the heat grind, it is that I am forced to acknowledge that I do A LOT for our family.

As you can probably tell, it takes a mountain of evidence (in the form of dead ants and mango-covered floors) to help me acknowledge my contribution. And so, I want to thank the heat grind, the mango explosion, Trieu’s flu, and my children for helping/forcing me to fail. Thereby forcing me to realize my contribution to success. Thereby forcing me to realize the energy required for my contribution.

I bow humbly to the heat. You win.