And that’s about when my brain melted

Have you ever started filling up  your kitchen sink to wash dishes (because your dishwasher is broken and every time you think you’re going to buy a new one, well, something else comes up and then you don’t get a dishwasher and you have to keep handwashing everything even though it makes you want to punch a manatee) and then walked away, completely forgetting what you were doing until you register the sound of the still running water and you glance over at the sink, the water dangerously close to the top of the basin?

Or you were pouring flour into a glass measuring cup and the flour crashed out of the jar in a huge glump and then the cup overflows – flour everywhere.

I don’t know what’s up with the kitchen analogies but essentially what I’m saying is this: these containers have a finite capacity to hold stuff. You try to put too much stuff in, and eventually – poof – stuff everywhere.

That’s…kind of where I am. Dangerously close to being an exploding bag of flour or overflowing sink.

And it’s not a great feeling.

–

My grandma died on Wednesday.

My mom called me on the drive to work – and in the span of ten minutes, I was on a roller coaster: the paramedics were on their third round of CPR and no response to… they had a pulse and grandma was on her way to ER.

Sobbing, I navigated through a dismal road construction bottleneck while sobbing to my coworker on Bluetooth, telling her I would not be into work. I arrived at the hospital the same time mom did, and we were immediately ushered into a family room

Not a good sign.

We waited for everyone to arrive.

There’s not much you can do in a moment like that. You sit, and you cry and you wait. You try to get ahold of family on the phone. You scroll Twitter and feel envious of the people who haven’t had their morning go completely astray. You check your email.

A ventilator was breathing for my grandmother and I was thinking about work and the things I would have to delegate to someone to get done and a teacher was emailing me about an award my daughter was being surprised with the next day at a ceremony I would be unable to attend because I was chaperoning my other daughter’s class trip.

The glass measuring jar. The overflowing sink.

One by one family arrived. The priest arrived. The doctor disconnected the ventilator and we watched as she took her last breaths.

We cried and we hugged and then we didn’t know what to do next and so most of us just went our separate ways.

–

That push and the pull of all of the obligations facing me in that moment, that’s what has replayed in my mind over the past few days. The moment when I realized that no matter what I did, I couldn’t possibly do all of the things when they needed to be done, to please all of the people.

It was also the moment when I realized: there’s just too much.

–

If you thought that this was going to be the kind of post that tells you how to overcome that, well, you thought wrong. I had this epiphany several days ago and I’m still pretty much a mess.

I don’t sleep well. My home office is filled with laundry that needs to be folded. There is a crockpot sitting on my counter that needs to be emptied of leftovers and scrubbed clean, but it’s the first time I’ve found to write in days, so I’m typing this post, eating Dots candy and watching the Food Network Star on Netflix. I only feel a little bit bad about that.

–

In trying to find peace, sometimes all I can see is the clutter on my bookshelves. I stress about work projects and problems that never come to be because I’ve just created some imaginary worst case scenario and beaten myself up over it…only to have it never happen.

I am an overflowing sink.

And I don’t know how to turn the water off.

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The thing is, I suspect I’m not the only one. In fact, I know I’m not. And it’s a bit sad, I think, that so many of us are operating in this mode – this gogogogogogogogogogogogogogo mode of getting things done and running-running-running-gotta-get-it-done until we are about ready to collapse.

Until we are wide awake at three a.m. imagining awful things, pulled so far in every direction, feeling like we’re not succeeding anywhere.

–

Things are going to change. They have to. Because I cannot function like this anymore. My sink is overflowing and I’ve got to let some of this water out. Somehow. Someway. Soon.