I am going to go ahead and declare it to the world….

I am having a quarter life crisis.

I joked that this may happen, back when I slept a full 8 hours a night (hasn’t happened since before Christmas), when I was still on maternity leave, and when my boobs were still enormous. Basically, for the first three months of Eloise’s life, I felt like a less tragic version of Anna Nicole Smith (before OldGuy died). My maternity leave was what I imagine her love affair with OldGuy was like. It was blissful, but I knew it  was going to keel over pretty soon and I would have to go back to work. I could sleep as much as I wanted and be as crazy as I wanted. People brought me meals. The world was my ice cream sundae and Eloise was cherry on top.

But alas, the tides have turned, and my pre-old-guy-death Anna Nicole days have melted into something resembling first-episodes-of-the-reality-show days. The bliss of maternity leave is gone. I make my own food, and everybody else’s food. My boobs aren’t enormous anymore, and are starting to look a little depressed.  I can’t speak in complete sentences anymore, and what words I do manage to formulate are slurred. My eyes tend to roll around in my head like I am on something, and I snap at people who try to help me. It’s really tragic. For your viewing pleasure:

Maybe all of this drama is due to lack of sleep. I have not slept a full night in over three months. Some nights I am up four, five, or six times with Eloise. She doesn’t really nap anymore, so my days and nights have been a full court press for the past three months. All that added to the fact that I still have a full time job is enough to transform me into someone I don’t recognize anymore. I wonder if Anna Nicole felt this way, and that is why she got jacked up on pills and rode the crazy train all the way to E! True Hollywood Story. I sure hope not.

But all of this insanity has led me, once again, to question what it is I am supposed to be doing with myself. With my time. With my life. Am I really only meant for night feedings and laundry duty and tractor website training sessions with people who use phrases like  “I ain’t never saw so many buttons on the screen”. Really? Is this why I busted my ace and was senior class president and junior miss congeniality and president of the stinking french club in magnet school and had a 4.0 in college while I worked three jobs to pay for it all? So I could live in Mayberry USA, squirt milk from my udders, make websites for people who don’t even know how to turn their computers on, and clean poop off of every imaginable surface in my home? Is this all that my hard work in life has amounted to?

Yep. That’s it.
And if that were the end of the story, I would have a serious crisis on my hands- think Chernobyl.
Lucky for me, this quarter-life crisis is more like Anna Nicole didn’t know what to wear to the Kentucky Derby. It was frustrating for her at the time, but it didn’t last forever.

It is definitely true that my sanity hangs by a very, very thin thread. But that thread, although thin, is very strong. It can stretch, and stretch and stretch some more, but it won’t break.

It’s love.

And just as love will make you do crazy things, love can also keep you from doing crazy things. I stay in Florence because I love my husband and this is where he lives. I haven’t slept in months because I love Eloise and I don’t want her to feel sad and alone at night. I clean poop off of every surface in my home because I don’t love poop. I sacrificed all of my so-called accomplishments and career and whatever else a modern woman is expected to have so that I could be with Chris and then Eloise. Why? Because I love them.

Don’t think that some days I am not tempted get in my Corolla and drive to anywhere that has an interstate and an organic grocery store (because Florence has neither), and never look back. I could try it, I guess, but I wouldn’t get very far. The string of love keeps me here in sleepless, slurring Mayberry-crazyland. And for now, that is fine. What fun are accomplishments anyway if you don’t have anyone you love to share them with? I’ll bet if you asked Anna Nicole she’d tell you the same thing. That and “I been askin’ and askin’ and askin’ and askin’ and askin’ for these pictures!” And after another few years of this kind of life, I’ll be saying the same thing. So and So be it.