It’s been one of those weeks, oh dear Lord has it. This is the first week sans nanny – we were unable to locate a suitable replacement, so we’re cobbling together something workable for the last two months of this school year, which this week involved me going to pick up the oldest child at 2:45 and then bringing him back to work with me for a couple of hours. Unfortunately I have a ton of deadlines this week (five answers, two hearings, one pretrial conference and one dispositive motion all this week, plus prepping for mediation on Monday), so this wasn’t the best time for taking an hour break in the middle of each day to go get him, but so it goes. Plus I have to leave on the early side to get the other two in time. What this means is that I worked til midnight on Monday night, midnight on Tuesday night, 2:30 am last night . . . getting up at 5 every day. I’ve got to keep pushing through but every week is like this through April, and I’m running down like a clock that needs winding. I’ve been in front of the computer so much, my eyes can barely focus and I’m getting that “trial hunch,” where your shoulders hunch over and your hands become claws and you stomach loses all its tone. I am, in short, a mess.
In addition to work obligations, the domestic/child obligations have been somewhat heavy this week. Monday night we also had a little family Boy Scout awards dinner after school, and Tuesday I took all three kids to baseball practice. I am going to have to learn to keep a set of casual clothes in my office, because both days I totally trashed my professional, expensive outfit (Monday I had to feed the baby dinner in my lap . . . you can imagine how I looked after that. Tuesday I had to toddle through the dust of the baseball fields in my heels, and then pace in said dust while holding said baby who was being kind of a dickhead about the whole evening, to be honest. There is so much snot on the shoulders of my suit jacket, I just can’t even.) Last night was mercifully unscheduled. Tonight is baseball again, but this time the Professor is home and we can split duties, so Littlest Man doesn’t have to suffer the indignity of sitting and eating snacks and playing with toys for an hour and a half outside, and instead can sit and eat snacks and play with toys inside the house. A vital distinction to a thirteen month old.
Yesterday’s poem was in response to the line, “Anne Frank’s Neighbor,” which occurred to me while brushing my teeth the other day for no real reason at all. I thought about how spiteful you’d have to be to turn them in – and then I thought maybe the person who turned them in was forced to – or maybe an anti-Semite – or maybe hated the family specifically due to a social clash and not anti-Semitism – or maybe was being tortured or threatened and broke under pressure – or maybe young and excited and naively ideologically intertwined with the Nazi politics and aiming to please a superior officer – or maybe was trying to buy freedom for someone else with the information – who knows. I didn’t google it until after, and they apparently have some idea of who did the turning in, but the truth is less interesting to me than the myriad possibilities, and also the Lady Macbeth Out Damn Spot-ness of the palm print image.
Staying afloat. Cannot wait til this trial is over. Good friends are coming for Easter . . . that’s about the time this will all ramp down, and I am looking forward to it for about a million and one reasons. Jack turns seven that month – hold me.