Wednesday, April 1, 2009

A little scar

I have a little scar on my left hand to remind me not to do too much. It is on my palm and you can barely see it, but if you touch it there is a tiny knot.

When I owned my business I had a wonderful person who came to watch my kids for twenty hours a week. I worked two days a week at the store, coming home around dinner time and sometimes went in on Saturday mornings. The other days, I did my office work at home working around the kids schedule. It sounds like the perfect set up, and it was in some ways, but it also felt like I was constantly working. On the one hand, having my own business brought me incredible personal satisfaction, but then again it wasn't like a job you could walk away from. I did the advertising, bookkeeping, buying, merchandising, and payroll myself, which is probably why I always made money at it, but also how I killed myself doing it.

One evening after working at the store, I rushed home to make dinner. My Little Guy was a baby then and always started crying just about thirty minutes before dinnertime. I put him in his high chair and tossed some Cheerios his way. I had two pots simmering on the stove, and one full of boiling water. Girlie was upstairs playing, and I was running in and out of the kitchen to fax an order off to a vendor. Why, at that precise moment it seemed like a good idea to change the bulb in the range hood, I will never know. Except that I always felt like I needed to squeeze in a million things at once, and I did. As I was changing the bulb, it shocked me and I jerked my hand way, slicing my palm on the metal. It bled like crazy and I almost passed out at the sight of it. My husband wasn't home yet and was stuck somewhere where he had no cell service. I had no choice but to call my sister in law who was working at my store and tell her to lock the doors and come save me before I bled to death or maybe just passed out, baby in the high chair, pots boiling, five year old upstairs doing who knows what, fax machine buzzing away...

As I told the story to my one of my friends a few days later, she said Maybe the universe is trying to tell you something. At the time I brushed it off, I was, after all, a person who could juggle a million things, and look how successful I was.

Except I wasn't. I was bleeding in my kitchen.

Now we have sold the business and things have slowed considerably. I am not working and though I whine about it quite often, I also realize that my life is so much happier on a daily basis. I have that little scar to remind me of how crazy things can get when I try to do too much, and I have realized that just because you can doesn't mean you should. I'll be working again in a few years and some days seem a little crazy regardless, but for now I am just going to relish the fact that I don't have TOO much going on.

1 comment:

latisha said...

sigh. this was great.