When Sunday’s Rest is Over & Monday’s Reality is Settling In

They’re squabbling over episodes of Harry and the Dinosaurs and I’ve begged for just a few minutes. I didn’t get up early enough to write and despite drinking Sleepytime herbal tea before bed I spent a restless night alternately hacking and worrying.

Welcome to Monday.

The past several days have been like a month of Sundays. We’ve rested and recuperated and tried to stumble our way back to reality. I’ve sat and held Amelia while she slept and Gilmore Girls played in the background. Saturday morning we moved slow and curled around steaming cups of coffee and read magazines that have been piling up for a month.

I gave myself permission to escape via the Internet or Netflix or the glossy pages of Food & Wine. Thanks to friends who’ve been the hands and feet of Jesus in the form of folded laundry and hot food, there’s been few dishes and even fewer piles of dirty underwear.

You know a friend is true when they fold your underwear.

For days we’ve lived in this alternate reality where the world gets to revolve around test results and doctor schedules and the hours of the Children’s Hospital coffee shop. I didn’t try to write and I didn’t try to work because I’ve never been able to divide my life up into little segments and square each away to deal with another. I’ve always been a big tangled mess where every little thing bleeds into everything else.

Which is why when I rest, I stop. I halt whatever project I’m on and just retreat away into something mindless. Then Monday’s reality hits hard.

And thank God.

Because there is relief in the structure, the schedule, the normal. Even when it’s a new normal of monitoring progress and scheduling physical therapy and trying not to google every blessed worry. Because even though we are built to rest, we are also built to work and create and exercise.

We are built for the Mondays as well as the Sundays.

May your week be glorious, friends. May it be productive and encouraging and the very best kind of ordinary. Then, when it’s Sunday again, may you find the softest pillow and the quietest hour.

And something good on Netflix.