Cleaning out my cupboard

So, you're on your knees, except you're not, if you're me. You are speaking metaphysically or allegorically perhaps.  If you're me you are, literally, curled into a ball on your side, clutching the knot in your chest, Matt snoring beside you, because you absolutely refuse to give up and break the seal of the covers and force yourself out into the freezing cold air of the house.  The heat resets to 68 in the middle of the night no matter how you try to force it up over Matt's Medieval conditions.

It is 3:45 a.m. and I remember 2:45 a.m. and 1:45 a.m.  Two hours is an impossibly long time to wish for sleep around my irrationally energetic heart, but I can't blame my heart. Some reptilian artifact in my brain is screaming at it MARATHON! FIRE! SABER TOOTH TIGER! and it is forced to believe and respond to the whip, though the higher mammal in me recites calmly, it's fine; make a list; you can deal with it tomorrow; OMFG, you cold-blooded dimwit, saber tooth tigers are extinct, nothing is chasing you nor is anything likely to chase you, ever, so go.to.sleep.

First, it's a phone call that I didn't make. Nothing, really. A running list of things to do for Listen to Your Mother. Will we sell enough tickets? Because I want these women to be heard. I didn't record the kids' voices today. Again. Tomorrow they will be a day older. Quinn will wake up and he will say "my foot's asleep" instead of "my weg has bwees" and I will have missed it.

It is painful, the way my heart squeezes and releases when I can't sleep. A pointless exercise in indeterminate stress. It's almost enough to make me wish for something bigger to happen, something I could actually worry about, because that would, for a brief time, make the focus clear. It would give me something to do. But, I don't really want those things to do. It's a false promise. The burst of action isn't worth the grief of calamity, which lasts forever.

Besides, I can always clean the kitchen.

At 4:45, I rip off the comforter, as fast as possible, like a bandaid. I don't want the frigid air to stick to my skin. I pull Matt's fleece over my head and yesterday's socks over my freezing feet and I feel my way downstairs. The dog peers at me, irritated and then hopeful. There's a watery winter light; we have spring light now, sifting through the weave of the clouds at 5:00, though no one is fooled except the maples and the daffodils.

I pick the worst cupboard - the one that is always a disaster - the one that is two cupboard stories tall and six layers of junk deep. The one where I throw every single thing smaller than a toddler's first. I empty it onto the kitchen floor with the dog hair and the stray cheerios. Ten broken flashlights. Corroding batteries. The candles and the shot glasses and the crayons and the presumed lost bubble wand. Seventy-five blue plastic forks without a box. I count them as I put them away. I don't turn on the lights; I let my pupils contract slowly with the arriving day, adjust moment by moment. Somewhere between the 45th blue fork and the spilled glue, the lizard is tamed. It curls up into a tiny, green doughnut and goes to sleep and I am left alone, exhausted and relaxed, making the most of the final half hour before the day begins.

I crouch on my knees in front of the perfectly organized cupboard when he shuffles around the corner from the bottom of the stairs in his red footie pajamas with the dark blue racing stripe. "Watchya doing? I waked up. I have to pee pee but I can't do my zipper by myself. Can I help you?" He butts against me until he can wiggle  into my lap.  "I want to hug you. I wuv you. My weg has bees."

And there you go, take that lizard, he didn't lose his lisp last night.  Sometimes, it pays to stop struggling and enjoy the view from your knees. You can always clean the kitchen.

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Thank you, thank you, thank you for your open, loving, thoughtful responses to "Faithless." I drew a ton of comfort and knowledge from your comments. Thank you for your stories and for sharing your struggles and your conclusions. I could write a post to each of you in response. Really, for such a hard and charged topic, I deleted only two comments because I found them hateful.

Heather summed it up for me. "All that to say that it's really interesting that I'm a "believer" and yet we share these same feelings. I would love to talk about it for hours and hours."

I would love to have you all over, pour some wine (or soda) and talk for hours and hours and hours.