Grown-Up Video Game?

It is no joke juggling school's year-end schedules.
Art Fairs, Graduations,Thank you's
Sport Functions, Presentations, Finals
(and)
Summer-like Spring days
Being out of the house
Sidewalk chalk crushed on the driveway
Abandoned bikes begging to be backed over
Lawn darts spending the night with circles in the grass

As it goes with me during busy moments in life, I self-sabotage.
I don't know why I do it, but clearly it's my pattern.  It frustrates me, and yet I feel compelled to carry out the urge.  I don't stop myself.

When there is no time, no spares, everyone is busy and tired and at wits end, sleep is not deep and mornings leave tangled, I rearrange the house.

It's like punishment to all of us.  It looks like we just moved in-again.  I don't do one room, I stir them all up.  Books out of bookshelves, nicks away from knacks, rugs rolled, photo books on the kitchen island, dishes full in the sink and a bright sunny breeze blowing through the house.

I've tried to pass this urge off as spring cleaning, but a corn maze is more accurate.  Couches go out, lamps are unplugged, eating surfaces are heaped with wall hangings and end of the year papers and beautiful artworks wait in a stack to be scanned to live out digital lives.

It's hard to walk through the place, unless you hug the wall.  On Tuesday, five tall bookshelves stood in my living room; my kids said they felt like super-giant-super-heros stomping through N.Y.C.  (Hearing it, I did get a visual of me climbing to the top of the highest shelf, using the ceiling fan as balance and giving a King Kong roar to send the kiddies running).  I "work" (meaninglessly) toward a goal I have not yet "seen," and-I do it up to the very minute I need to get children bathed, or dressed, or fed.  And then we get out of Dodge.  (My three year old told me I was saying that wrong, it is supposed to be "get out of dodge ball.")  So we do that.  Drop someone where they belong, run to the store, mail something, hurry.

My boys are big, so I don't usually put them in the grocery cart, but because I've left Dodge City so late, I run with the cart at the store, and I do not have time to be slowed by little legs detouring toward something 'so very interesting' at the grocery.  I don't listen either, my mind is steady on repeating over and over the list I took time to make out at the house then left in the car.

My child is swishing this way, that way, in the cart basket, his feet knocking against my legs, reminding me he is too big to be thread through those leg holes.  I throw things in the cart as we drive past what we need.  This is too much hurry.  I know it because impulsively I also throw-THROW-a tomato into my cart.  Later there are questions from the check out girl I don't have time to answer-"Yes, I'm buying it!"  We're weaving, ducking around store displays and customers that have time to read the back of shampoo bottles, and we're nearly done.  Detour.  One more isle.  The time sucker, I can't drive-by, I have to stop and search.  My eyes dart and my son does a back bend in the cart and stares up at the high ceiling.  He throws both arms in the air and says, "Look Mommy.  LOOOOOK.  Look up there!"  I glance up at the blue isle sign wagging slightly under an air condition vent.  And he gives me my due reward.
"Wow, Mommy, Great Job!  It says you made it to level eight!!!"