My Life as a Sentence

Yesterday -- all day long -- I snapped photos.  Of breakfast, of playing, of messes, of relaxing, of cleaning, of dinner...I snapped photos.  The idea was to capture A Day in The Life of me.  Of my normal day, when it starts and when it stops and what happens in the middle. 

Simply Rebekah is hosting a link-up of day-in-the-life photo collections at her blog on February 6th, and I was inspired.  Doesn't it sound like fun?  Capture everything you do on a normal day?  Set it down, share it, see others' lives? 

And it was fun.  I enjoyed the day in such a new way: I saw the beauty in a stack of dirty dishes, oh yes I did.  I let Lauren haul out the much-underutilized-of-late craft box, simply to see what colorful things she would produce.  I was completely present in the day -- the whole day.  I saw it all, top to bottom.

I love this life.  It's true and it sounds cliche, but I really do love it.  There are days when I wake up and feel joy bursting from my skin in fizzles and sparks of possibility.  The contentment washes over me.  Lifts me up.  Carries me through the mundane.  There are other days, too: those that find me disappointed or bored out of my fizzly skin.  It's true.  It's life.

But yesterday, at the end of the day as I took my last photo before crawling into bed, something else hit me about this life:

It is a giant run-on sentence. 

I snuggled into bed near midnight.  A little later than usual due to a good book making me lose control of my limits.  I stared at the window thinking, I will probably remove myself from this bed at least 5 times before the morning officially comes.  This day WON'T actually end as my eyes close. 

Because it just keeps repeating.  Morning, noon, night, midnight: it's all the same.  It rolls over and over -- in this season of babies and little ones, at least -- without pausing to designate THIS day from THAT day.  Motherhood is my run-on sentence. 

I could feasibly snap photos at 1:34 AM when Landon wakes up, restless.  Or at 2:18 AM when Lauren is crying because she needs to go potty.  Or at 4:21 AM when Landon needs re-swaddled, his cold fist banging into his confused face.  Or at 4:24 AM when I forgot to replace his binkie.  Or at 5:49 AM when I crawl into his bedroom and nurse him so he'll stay asleep until I actually deign to begin my day at

7:30 AM. 

The days do look different: their verbs and nouns and clauses and subjects shift.  The sentence becomes a part of our fabric. 

But it doesn't actually have a stopping point. 

It turns into a paragraph.

A chapter.

An essay.

All without a definite end.  We just keep rolling, catching our breath on commas of rest, dwelling inside parenthesis and descriptors. 

It makes me tired. 

I love it all more than fire loves air and the ocean loves the moon.  But, God help me,

the prospect of a sentence that never ends

makes me tired.