The blues

I feel quite bad today. I don't know whether it is the pressure from the past couple of weeks taking its toll. or if it is an attitude. Or a signal that wants to tell me something.
I felt some pain in the chest this afternoon. C attributes it to stress. Maybe. But what about it?
I am feeling a bell ringing, asking me for a major adjustment. This is not just tiredness. It won't go away if I go shopping, have a hot chocolate or buy a magazine. This is asking me to reconcider.

I have gone past feeling that this job is temporary and that one day I would go back to my intellectual pursuits. I know I have to work to sustain a certain lifestyle. My kids' private schools. A vacation or two every year. But I am getting very tired, inside and out.

I have been working ever sinve I was 17. I am nearing 40. That means that apart from a two year stretch of being at home with the girls, I have been working all my adult life. And those two years under the influenve of C's mother and her entourage is not something I want to remember or go back to.

So, what do I want? Am I  not grateful? I keep asking myself. I am. But I think there is a shift in my priorities. There are things I want to do, that I don't get to do. I haven't touched my cross stitch in months. I don't know where my bedside diary has gone. I haven't finished the book I began during the summer. There are piles of washing, piles of old newspapers, things I have no idea how they came about and where they belong. Books I want to read but instead I leaf through the middle of a magazine before I fall asleep. I am tired of being in contact with customers all the time.

C gets to do the outside work and that gives him the time to walk around. I spend most of my days typing reports, serving customers, doing the accounting. Yes, I stop and browse my favorite people on the web from time to time, but even that is being done with haste, like gulping, instead of savoring.

It is the autumn and I want to walk in the forest. I want to smell the earth and walk on the fallen leaves. I want to make soup and sit in the garden and gaze at the clouds, read a book and do my needlework. I want to work part-time. I want to go back to my yoga practice. I want to cook healthy meals and enjoy my food.

In short, my body yells that I need a brake or else it is going to impose it on me!

When I was younger I couldn't imagine my life without work. I tell my girls that they should be self-sufficient. My mother's situation had a deep impact on me. I want my independence. I want my girls to be independent. There is a price to everything though, and one must do the best they can with the least cost.

In an ideal world, I'd say that women should work before they get married so that they know how money is earned, but after they get married they should be the ladies of the manor. Some work at home, involving the domestic arts of making and selling preserves or knitting and sewing, would be fine. And then, taking care of others. Ministering to others is embeded in women's soul, yet look at our lot as the current lifestyle wants us to be: egocentric bitches, envying each other, hating our nature, heartless, happiless creatures.

Such a distortion of God's Work, of God's will!
There, I spoke my mind once again. Can't remember where I found the pictures, but thank you nice people for keeping company to my thoughts.