At 8 o’clock this evening, I needed to do something to sort out my head.

I also had to give something away in a hurry. I remembered we had a spare DVD of the film Dazed and Confused and I could leave it at the DVD rental machine outside our local 7-11. It would be perfect for today’s gift as that’s what I am right now – dazed and confused. Dazed at the way my day ended up and confused as to how I’m supposed to deal with days like this. The day started off ok. I dropped Theo off at school, then went for a walk feeling good that I was able to make some time for exercise this morning and it wasn’t too hot today like it has been recently because of the late summer heatwave we’d been having. Then I came home, did the tidying up I usually do as part of my morning ritual and then caught up with emails and all the other work-but-not-really-work study I do at the start of my day. Then I started to work on the essay about one of the origami artists I’m featuring in the book I’m writing. I’ve figured out I have to write about 3 artists a week to meet my November 15 deadline and I seem to be making some progress, but then I remember that I’m supposed to send out an invitation to our son Theo’s birthday party that has been scheduled for September 26, ten days after his actually 10^th birthday, because we’d scheduled it on the 19^th and then realized he had a soccer game at that time that day and he couldn’t miss that. So, I sent it out and then a friend who I hadn’t spoken to called me and when we’d finished talking I realized it was time for me to go help with the lunchtime recycling at our son’s school. I finished up at school and rushed home, had lunch and then sat down to get back to work on my essay and then got a phone call from the radiology department saying that they needed me to come back because they needed me to come back and get my mammogram redone because they could see something unusual on the x-ray for my right breast and wanted to x-ray me again and do an ultrasound check as well to make sure that all the white they were seeing was just my dense breast tissue and not something scarier. So I rushed back to the doctor’s office, had my breast sandwiched between plates of glass again at 5 different angles and then lay on my back and thought of England as a nice-enough woman smeared gel over my breast and searched every millimeter of it with the ultrasound device until she was satisfied that she hadn’t missed spot and then let me go. And then headed over to Theo’s school to pick him up and sat and listened to him explain to me why he hadn’t done all his homework at school like I’d asked him to, and then took him home anyway, fed him a snack and then forced him to do his math home work. When he’d finished his math, his piano teacher showed up and gave him a lesson in our living room while I tried to catch up with my new batch of emails and start getting dinner ready. Then after dinner when Theo refused to do his spelling homework, we argued and I took his computer away and he got mad at me and started calling me a mean person. He finally sat down and did his work, while my husband David talked on the phone with a dear friend who is also a child psychologist to ask her for her thoughts on whether we should deal with Theo’s resistance to doing his work at school and at home by getting him tested, medicating him with Adderall, an amphetamine, (as suggested the other day by his new pediatrician who had met him for only fifteen minutes!!!) or perhaps moving him to a new school. When Theo had finally finished his spelling homework and retreated to his room to stare at his computer screen, I realized I had nothing left in me. I sat on the couch next to David and asked him what our friend had said, but he said he had to finish something important he was working on. It was 8 o’clock. I needed to give something away and do something to sort out my head. I headed to 7-11 with the DVD and left it leaning against the wall with a note on it saying, “Free!” That was the Giveaway taken care of. Now I had to take care of me. I ran into the store and bought myself a bottle of tonic water. I headed back home, still dazed and confused, poured some ice and some gin into a tall glass, chopped up a lime and squeezed it in. I sat at my computer and started typing sipping at my G&T. That’s how I’m going to deal with a day like today…