Walking Backwards

I should be cleaning right now. I know this because my house is filthy and "clean house" has been on the top of my to-do list for three days running. The start of the new year always brings with it a huge amount of aspiration on my part to revamp most areas of my life. My house will be cleaner! I will make every dinner from scratch! I will stay on budget! I will spend my free time studying instead of whoring the internets! Sadly, I have made it two weeks in to 2009 and my ideas have yet to see any fruition, save for being written on a folded sheet of paper in my planner.

I do feel bad about it. I wish that I was better equipped to manage all of this household management/life management, but I don't seem to be able to. Over winter break my sister and I were discussing the phenomenon of women that we read about on the internet and magazines that are obviously more high-functioning than ourselves. The women who have four children, manage their own businesses, volunteer at their children's school frequently, head up charitable foundations, all the while keep house perfectly and look fabulous doing it. I am barely hanging on with a much less hectic schedule and just one kid. And there is where the guilt comes in. Shouldn't I be able to do more? I go to school and am responsible for almost all the work around the house, but shouldn't I be able to do more? Now that I'm unemployed, where has all my free-time to catch up on reading or garden or have sophisticated lunches with my friends gone? Why do I still have dirty dishes in the sink?

Just so you know I do try, but need sleep at some point. I wonder where all the other women like me are, because I know they have to be out there. The women (or men, really), who have their kid's name written in the dust on the bookshelf or who still have Christmas gifts sitting in the middle of the floor almost a month later. The behind the scenes pictures of houses that, like mine, hold secret, sticky hand-prints and piles of clothes that need mending, but that their child has already outgrown. I find the disparity between the representation of the lives of those able to keep it together and those that are barely holding on unfair. I think people like me need a sense of belonging too. We need to know we're not the only ones who don't have a place to put their shoes.