When I was an exhausted, maddened, rabid, smitten younger mother to an infant or two, I growled at anyone who would listen, “Never compare your little bit of tired to a nursing mother.” So I won’t. It’s not that bad. When I wake up for a few moments in the night – with achy hips and shoulders, or else screaming neck and back, maybe my hands asleep from perching across my chest in an average way – I have learned to lean into the sleeplessness, get up and pee, turn on another audiobook with a timer. It’s not like when the babies demanded, in their sweet way, that I be fully conscious for an entire feeding and burping and snuggling back to sleep. When I pace to the bathroom to get myself water now, I am not as dehydrated as a nursing mother. Nobody pinched my nipples for forty minutes in a row and then cooed up to me to force a prostrate smile despite myself.

My babies are almost old enough to fend off monsters by themselves. I have learned to practice radical acceptance. I’ll never get the years back that I spent arguing with the court about how to best preserve their chubby cheeks and innocence. Not that I believe in overly romanticized childhoods. It is a privilege to have even the stolen moments – much more so months and years – of fleeting protection from a dull, slow, and steady human world of ongoing tragedy sprinkled stingily with connection and kindness that keep us driven to connect and find joy again. We all take our turns being the bad guys, and there is no real preservation of a happy state untinged by the engulfing histories we move through everyday. There is no happily ever after, but there are such moments of radiant joy and effervescence and peace and interest that we keep going along, laughing almost as much as we cry. Such a boring and average cycle. It is tiring to accept all of this and to think about it and to stare into my belly button and to gaze out at flawed but beautiful humans and to bother typing out overly precious words about it. Lame and tiring to never shut up about how we’re all doing. 

You’re tired. I’m tired. Everyone is doing the best that they can. I should leave it there. 

I’m not going to leave it there.

I’m going to write notes to myself to remind me to pay overdue bills and to remember that we’ve all done this all before – trying to contain and quit the new age and old age simpering. 

My career is also in a better place than when I was truly tired with babies in diapers. Another privilege. I am whiney but scrappy and loving, so at each next capitalist hurdle I have found a way to pay rent while cramming my brain full of data and terminology and supporting as many vulnerable neighbors as I can. Going back to graduate school is an exhausting privilege. Working as a Social Worker was an exhausting privilege. Writing housing grants was a tiring exercise in leaping through burning hoops in our holy social safety net while remembering that even those fighting for community have harsh, glaring faces. Loving residents in Memory Care was sacred and precious but still draining in a for-profit scheme that barely prevented bed sores and human rights violations. Teaching Special Education is a delight and a technical nightmare, comparing the love and joy of working alongside incredible students in a system that is not making much Disability Studies progress or healing the hurts that towns, cities, states, and quaint farm families have already piled on their young heads. I am not as tired as those who can’t find a way to pay rent and some of my bills each month. I am not as tired as those who do not have access to studying the highest levels of their favorite book topics. I am not as tired as those in residential hospice or children saddled with more trauma that most of us could move through.

The heart only ever grows but it aches. I didn’t think I would heal enough from the horrors of truly vicious humans and courts enough to love up close to another individual human again, but I was wrong. We are all more flexible and resilient than we suppose, and if we work ourselves to exhaustion to remember that we can heal, sometimes we can stop bemoaning the human conditions long enough to love, love, and love again. What, am I not to belch out acknowledgement that we do also rejoice amidst raging against the machines? We have already discovered that I cannot shut up. And, oh, the joys. We hug, we burn, we eat, we stretch, we scab where we cracked, and we look at sunsets and rainbows and other cliches that make us gag on our vows to see things as they are. As things are includes beauty and stamina that make us seasick and annoyed to find that not all is lost. Disgusting. Sometimes I hear the birds chirping in the morning, feel a small, fresh breeze, and almost puke that I am all wrapped up in the whimsy of it again. Recharged. With enough charge to go on.

After a long, hard project – on a screen, on paper, in a classroom, holding a weeping child, in the woods trying to be a steward of land I do not deserve, after listening or reading what the vicious are up to now – I stumble in the direction of shower and blanket and meal privileges and I think, “This is it. I am too tired. I have used it all up. I’m out of intellect. I’m out of creativity. I’m out of the will to pick another project. I can’t even handle picking up the shampoo bottle. I can’t pay all my bills. Nobody can. Everything hurts. I’ll never write or dream or lift a tool ever again. Look at these blisters on my hands and feet.” And then I wake up the next morning and the bees buzzing on the wildflowers almost make me vomit with their beauty. Disgusting.

Oh, look. I am sore but I can still walk, at least for one more day before my disabled skeleton really finds a staunch limit. I will waft back out to the woods, put down a vintage floral bed sheet as a picnic blanket, get back to work on whatever I can make a dent in for the day. I will text my family. I will study. I will listen to my heroes who have faced and accomplished more than I can imagine despite constantly setting myself to the task of understanding. I will suck it up and move through the ennui of feeling connected to land and neighbors whom I cannot seem to figure out how to support and serve better. I will teach and talk and not restrain myself from what is probably useless babble. We’re all doing our best. We’re all tired. We all try to recharge our batteries, with a crank shaft when the modern charge-holder chemicals aren’t up to the task. 

I’m not as tired as nursing mothers. I’m not as tired as my heroes. I’m not as tired as you are. I’ll just keep going. I can’t ever shut up. Hand me that hammer. Here we all go.