It seems like I am always digging. Digging out from under breakfast, lunch, dinner, laundry, a craft project, a dirty house. I don’t know why I thought it would be different.

It’s true that I have more time to clean now. But also true that everything gets messier because we are here many more hours of the day.

We’re falling into some semblance of a new routine– one that involves multitudes more whining and bickering than we previously had around here. I don’t know why. I guess they have learned better how to push each other’s buttons.I try not to get involved in it. I tell them I only want to know if someone is hurt.

But they also play more together, and in more complex schemes than they did while they were in school. And they defend each other, and have real conversations that are whispered behind closed doors. They are each other’s best friend, and each other’s worst enemy.

This is how I remember life with my own sister as a child.

I haven’t gotten into the playdate thing yet– not for lack of desire but mainly because our timing seems askew– by the time the kids are ready to leave, the baby needs to eat, or it’s lunch time. Truthfully, most days, I have a grande scheme and they tell me they would just rather play here. I don’t know why– they are driving each other batty.

Some days I force the issue, and venture out. But most days I empty the garage of every outside toy, and sit on a blanket in the shade with the baby, and they play and putter and bicker and run. When it rains they trash the house and we usually bake.

My day is full, of what I can never recollect. It starts at 3:45 when no one is awake, and ends at 9:30 with me in bed, the baby beside me in his crib. Every minute is full of one child or another.

I know that I need to cultivate a life of my own, but it’s difficult and I’m tired and just flowing along with this seems easier somehow. Like if I resist it, I will only make it harder for myself.

This is my life, now.

I don’t feel shrunken, as I feared that I would. At least not often enough to note.

I do often feel very… utilitarian sometimes. Like I am here to fulfill a purpose, that I am a machine in this house, and that I do not really exist outside of others’ needs. That’s a harsh way to put it, but not really untrue. I am the cook, the maid, the laundress, the nanny, the police… All of those things and more in my day.

But sometimes, when we’re all four on the blanket on a breezy afternoon and the baby is cooing at them, and we’re all giggling and talking about birds or weeds or worms– I find my Amanda. And I am grateful for this time, this moment that is flying by faster than I can fathom, and my kids more fully know each other and I’m seeing more of their beauty (along with their foibles)…

Sometimes, of course, I want to start drinking at 10am. And not stop until Hubs walks in the door.