Change of Pace

My summer days are relaxed.  The hours pass by in a long, slow, bumblebee haze, without much in the way of schedules or deadlines.  The obligation list gets simpler in the summer:  mealtimes and enough clean clothes and the regular round of tidying the house and an occasional appointment.  He and I spend lots of time together in the summer.  Not programmed time, and not structured time.  Often we sit side by side and read, or we watch baseball, or we walk, or we journey out to the ice cream place for a late evening treat.  We sleep late because we stay up late.  Summertime and the living is easy.

No matter how I try to plan the inevitable transition out of that, the start of the school year always comes as a bit of a shock.  Suddenly, we are thrust back into a world that is bracketed by the 5:20 AM alarm clock, and the necessarily early bedtime.  I'm out of the house and on the way to school by about 6:45.  He and I try, most days to stay in touch by IM during my planning times, but our extended hours together vanish in a flurry.  Weekday evenings are busy:  home from school, fix dinner, clean up the dishes, handle whatever chores (home or school) need to be taken care of, try to watch the baseball game, and stagger off, exhausted, to bed so we can do it all again the next day.

Weekend times take on exaggerated importance during the school year.  I really look forward to those lazy weekend mornings -- time to play, time to make love, time to enjoy leisurely breakfasts...  When things get in the way, I have a hard time making the allowances needed.  This was a three-day weekend, because of the Labor Day holiday, and those always seem like a real gift.  Three days feels like a "long time" somehow in the midst of the wild and wooly first weeks of a new school year.  I shouldn't let myself get all wound up into expectations for the weekend, but knowing that is not the same as doing it.  I spend the school week building up silly, girlish fantasies about the weekends... and more often than not, I get my hopes dashed.  Life happens, after all.

This past weekend, the big bad wolf, was a monster, intractable migraine (compliments of the excrutiatingly slow moving remnants of hurricane Isaac).  No matter what my mind fantasizes, spanking in the midst of a migraine headache is just ugly.  He loves me and won't add to the pain and suffering that is a migraine episode.  So, added to my physical misery is the disappointment...  Logically, I know what dashes my hopes, and I know it isn't, in the first instance, His idea or His choice.  Emotionally, though (and migraines mess with my emotions in very weird ways), I start to believe that it is really because He "doesn't want to."  And then I start to get all tangled up in an emotional tizzy...

And that was the weekend.  We did, finally, spank this morning, and He tells me it was good for Him.  I think I finally shut down all the nasty internal voices -- just as it was all over with.  Sigh.  Ahh well, it is a four-day week, and then there will be another weekend.

swan