The title of this post is an accurate description of how my life feels at the moment, as well as the title of one of my favorite Radiohead songs. Wins all around!

So being a working mom is a new experience for me. Stay at home parents work, especially the ones who stay at home with babies. Babies are a ton of work. They theoretically sleep a lot, but it does get time-consuming to lose hours making sacrifices to archaic gods of sleep and satisfying the ever-changing demands of a tiny being who needs to sleep but refuses to.

When kids get older, I think the amount of work a stay at home parent does becomes somewhat discretionary. If your kids are at school all day, you get to choose what to do with that time. Some parents choose to get really involved with volunteering in their kids’ school. Some parents kick it on the couch amid stacks of sweet-smelling laundry and have long lunches with friends. There’s a wide range of activities available to stay at home parents with older kids, and to a large extent I feel like whatever choice they make is valid because they’ve probably put the time in serving in the implacable baby trenches.

Before I started looking for a job, I was at something of a crossroads in my life. My kids were both about to be in school full time, and my inclination was to give novel writing my full focus. I had it all mapped out. I was an author with a plan (and a plot). Divorce derailed that plan thoroughly.

Now I have a job I feel I’m slowly starting to become competent at doing. My life has gone from having lots of space to a tightly coordinated series of satisfying activities. There’s little space, but more growth. There’s less free time, but more mental stimulation. I’m on my phone less, and I don’t mind a bit.

As far as I can tell, being a working single mother is spinning plates. When one of them starts to wobble and tilt, I reach out and give it a spin. Just as that one recovers, another slows. Over and over, I’m monitoring and adjusting and fixing. All my plates are spinning nicely at the moment, thank goodness. I’m going to keep it that way. My policy for at least the next few months is to not add anything to any of these plates.

Maintenance is the key for now, I think. It’s easy to get addicted to the chaos of plates crashing everywhere, but I’m learning to appreciate the soft whir of fewer plates spinning steadily.