The Sad Week and the List of Anyway

I have to be honest with you. Last Tuesday I cried in the cereal aisle of the IGA. Wednesday morning I sat in the car in the school drop-off line and could not, for a moment, remember why we do all of this. That is a thing that happens, friends. That is a sentence I am going to say out loud, because the women I love do not say it enough and then they think they are alone in feeling it.

The hormones, the heat, a hard conversation with my mother on Sunday about her doctor's appointment that she keeps not telling me the details of, the second water bill in a row that was bigger than it should have been, the way Mark fell asleep on the couch before I could finish telling him about Noah's stutter — it all stacked up. I went to bed Tuesday at nine and Wednesday I did not want to get out.

I made a list. The list is called 'Anyway.' It is on a yellow Post-it on my bathroom mirror. It says: drink water anyway, brush teeth anyway, sunscreen anyway, walk Biscuit anyway, three things in the mirror anyway, twenty squats while the kettle boils anyway, one candle poured anyway, one kind text to one person anyway, dinner that is not cereal anyway.

I did them all. None of them well. All of them anyway. By two in the afternoon Wednesday I was crying again, this time at the kitchen sink, but I was washing the lunch dishes while I cried, and there is a different kind of dignity to crying while you wash dishes than there is to crying in a parked car. I do not fully understand why. It just is.

By Thursday I felt almost like a person again. By Friday I felt like a person. Today I went for the run and I did the kettle squats and I poured three candles and I am writing this with a cup of tea at my elbow and I want you to know — sad weeks pass. They always pass. The Anyway list is what gets you through to the other side.

I will tell you something else. When I'm in it, the loudest voice in my head is the one that says I am the only mother on this street who feels this way. Joanne with her petunias. Sarah down the road with her four perfect blonde children. Megan with her bakery and her energy. The voice is a liar. Every woman I have ever asked, point blank, has had a Tuesday in the cereal aisle. Most of them have had a Wednesday in the car.

If you are in it tonight, do the Anyway list. Make your own. Put it on a Post-it. Stick it where the morning will find you. You do not have to feel like it. You only have to do it.

Worked Miller's. Lunch with Megan in the back of the bakery — she made me a coffee with too much cream, the way I like it. Picked up the kids. Noah told me a long, mostly incomprehensible story about a kid named Wesley and a worm. Emma read me three pages of a chapter book about a girl detective.

Mark home at five-thirty. He noticed I'd been quiet for a few days and said, 'You good?' and I said, 'Better,' and he said, 'Good,' and put his hand on the back of my neck for a long, plain second. That is a love language.

It's almost six. Anyway. Talk tomorrow. — Lucy