Oh Mother, Where Art Thou?

Yesterday the babysitter came. She is, well, there's no way to avoid saying it, she's cute. She's got stripey highlighted hair and was wearing a bright red t-shirt that said: Dating a Theta? The back: Lucky You! She calls my son sparky. He runs to her with his tongue hanging out.

Watching this demonstration I feel like a long cane enters the picture to pull me off stage, underscored by some ridiculous kazoo music. It's 3:46 and I have three hours and fourteen minutes to myself. Or should I say t-h-r-e-e- h-o-u-r-s- a-n-d... f-f-f--- uuuuh. What? Oh. Hmm.

There's nothing scarier than driving 50mph in a new white car and not knowing who you are. I am thinking shit if I know what to do with myself for that long.

Truth be told, however, this is probably not a new predicament for me. Those of you with longer memories than the speaker of this text probably remember her former life as a poet (the predicament of poetry for me being I can't concentrate on anything for more than a few stanzas BUT I can't stop obsessing about these three things).

My brain is still in my head (at last check). My life, however, is a somewhat uneven dice. I go by the time of a 1 1/2 year old, which can be judged by the following algorithm:

truck-truck-put small object in mouth-truck-grab cat-offer truck to cat-find dirty binky-suck dirty binky-put binky in truck and so on...

That is to say, I have no ability to follow my own internal rhythms because I spend all of my time charting, trying to follow and/or modify the internal trajectory of my son.

What I have gained in sleep at this point, I seem to have lost in any ability to be self-directed.

And I am not saying this necessarily as a complaint. Just perhaps as an observation with a tilt of the head and a question mark. Perhaps like this ^? Shouldn't there be some sort of a suggestion above that diacritical mark? Or perhaps a telling comment, like "insert life here".

I find a way to piddle away the time anyway. I look in shops where I know my son would be A)bored out of his mind and/or B)pull everything off the shelves and try to use them as a teething implement for those hard-to-reach molars lurking beneath the gums. I eat at an "asian-fusion" restaurant where their idea of "fusion" is garnishing the pad thai with planter's dry-roasted peanuts.

I guess this is what it is like to try and get reacquainted. It's awkward, the silences. Nothing seems the way it did. Why would you expect it to? Lucky You.