Monsters

Dylan is obsessed with monsters. And we call Joey "Miss Monster". But the real monsters are, of course, within us. It seems to me that no sooner do I finish scanning the shadows on my child's dark bedroom wall, than I am suddenly locked into my own, staring at the ceiling as my husband snores beside me, and numbers flip over and over in my head. How many calories have I eaten today? How many dollars have we spent? How much is coming in? Are there any unexpected expenses: tickets, discovered wages from the IRS, cracked macbook screens?

I add up the columns again and again in my head as the passing headlights march across my ceiling, wavy from the blinds, their sound sources muted by the air conditioner, which surely is costing more than we can afford in utility bills. Again and again the columns do not add up. Again and again, I run through the drop off and pick up times times, the daycare locations, the number of hours I am supposed to put in at work, the modes of transportation. Again and again, there seem not to be enough hours in a day. Which leads to spending more on quick meals, which leads to more calories, which leads to more columns that don't add up, which leads to knots in my stomach, which leads to a short temper when Dylan won't brush his teeth and Joey won't play on the floor for one single minute so I can just button my pants. Which leads me to yell at my husband when he comes home with a parking ticket, which leads me to eat chocolate, which leads me to lie in bed awake at night, which leads me to write this blog.

And then it is sometimes the light of day that kills the monsters. We are on vacation (another set of monsters to be left for a different entry). Larry was up half the night with his own monsters; he feared he'd overbid on a job and wouldn't get it. I calmed him a bit by telling him he was wise to bid a bit higher because he was 1) worth it and 2) not turning any profit by lowballing all these estimates. But, as with checking under Dylan's bed and in his closet, I can do very little to assure my husband there are no monsters. When he checked his email this morning, he found he had gotten the job (and I think at a very fair price, in the end). His sigh of relief was the breeze across our day, a physical sensation all five of us could wind our fingers through.

How is it that sex and monsters are so closely woven?