As the economy is quickly flushing down the toilet, and everywhere I look I see the deer in the headlights gaze of people who are not sure what to be ready for next, I am trying to figure out what went wrong. Personally, years of trying to be everything, do everything, and play the parts of mother/father, husband/wife, have finally caught up with me.

This lifetime was meant to be shared. For many reasons. Not just so that we have company on our journey, but a helpmate for all the many tasks that make up daily life. I know I have what’s come to be known as ADD. However, to me it is merely a part of trying to remember at any given moment in the day, to know which hat I am wearing.

I am taking out the garbage last thing before I go to bed, having mowed the lawn after coming home from an 8 hour workday. I stick the laundry in and grab a piece of toast as I remember I forgot to do any grocery shopping. My health isn’t the best because I forget to eat. I forget to eat well because I forget to shop. Also, because I am working when I would be cooking. Drive thrus have become a daily sustenance to counteract hunger pains so that I can stay focused on the job.

I raised two sons, splitting my brain between their need for a mother and our need for a family breadwinner, and as a result came up short in both categories. As I ponder putting my house on the market before I lose it, I am still wrestling with whether to do the job of the wife and clean and paint and get the house in order, or to focus on the job that will secure my ability to continue to pay the bills.

I always come up a person short.

It is my hope for this country, that we go back to recognizing the importance of family, and marriage. Life has too many facets to be able to do them all well alone. We not only can’t have it all, we are losing everything trying. Smaller, less, cheaper, will become part of the new vocabulary, and perhaps we will return to the lives our grandparents knew. Would it be so terrible?