Lazy or Exhausted?

Nine months have nearly passed, and my daughter is about to be born. Like all children she has thrown her parents's little world into utter chaos. My life has been a whirlwind of activity trying to get things ready to bring a baby into our home. We've had the nursery to create, complete with a new paint job, a new floor, new trim, and new furnishings; I'm not even sure if the decorations are done yet; we've not even managed to unpack all the baby gifts we've been given nor put enough of them away. At this very moment the crib is full of all manner of baby accouterments, with no room for a baby.

In the process of creating a nursery one room needed to be emptied, and the contents of that room spilled over into many others, with my study taking in the majority of the refugees from The Great Baby Migration of 2008. These are just some of the changes we've had to make, and I expect more are on the way, and these changes take time and energy to complete. Most of them aren't even done, as my study is a war-zone of storage versus productivity and there is no clear victor in sight. There is only one seeming solution: time plus elbow grease.

I suppose it should not surprise me to discover that I'm exhausted, but it does. I have a literal pile of work that needs to be dealt with, combined with a short list of things I'd really love to do, and a long list of stuff that would be great if I could do. I suspect we all have these lists, and some of us have the piles as well, but what is hard to quantify is the toll these lists take upon a person, and the extent to which they contribute to a person's exhaustion.

So here I sit with more work to do than time to do it, and no energy to do it, and I want a break. And then some voice in my head mentions the word "Lazy" and the inner turmoil starts anew. I'm out of energy, dead exhausted, losing sleep at nights, and I'm day-dreaming about vacations. So I took one today, sort-of. I did have a short list of things that needed to be done, but once I did them I decided to do nothing else but lay on the couch and watch T.V. You know what? I feel profoundly better.

So the inner turmoil is a-broiling again, and I'm trying to get a handle on it. Have I found a new angle to combat this inner voice accusing me of being a lazy lay-about? Was I really just exhausted and in need of a rest? And yet, on the other hand no one I know would dare call me a "work-a-holic" . . . score one for the lazy argument. For my part I cannot deny the physical change, and on that evidence alone I must conclude I am in fact exhausted, and taking down-time with the intent and purpose to rest is, in this case, not being lazy but is an effort to maintain my health.

In the end I still don't like it. I don't like struggling against being lazy versus taking a much needed rest. I'm just weeks away from becoming a father, and my actions will set an example and expectations for my child, and the last thing I want to do is approve of laziness, even if I only tacitly do so.