Wake Me Up When It’s Over

I’m having one hell of an internal Monday morning debate:  Do I go through the motions today?  Or surrender to impulse and apply for a do-over?

My work week started at the un-Godly time of 2:30 this morning.  My littlest baby girl woke me up with a timid tap to my elbow and a whispered, “Mommy I had an accident.”

Ugh. 

Bless her little six year-old heart.  I remember that walk of shame to my mom’s bedroom as a kid, so I try super hard not to snarl when I have to trudge myself out of bed to strip the sheets and somehow manage NOT to let my brain reengage in the process.

Usually I can make it back to bed and find my way to dreamland without too much effort.  The trick is to keep the heavy fog of sleep hovering over my hibernating mind while I’m about my task. 

Every now and then, though, a stray thought slips up under that fog and fires up my mental engine.  From there, I’m screwed.

Guess what happened to me this go-round?

Yep.  You guessed it.  I was still up staring at the clock at 4:45, wrestling with everything from plot adjustments for my current manuscript to calorie expenditures for the previous day.

Oh, I finally made it back to sleep…forty minutes before my alarm went off.  (Sandman is a sadistic bastard.)

The urge to take a PTO day was strong, but I resisted.  One never knows when you might really need one of those precious paid-for eight hours.  So I’m here now, discombobulated and out of sorts with a backup generator already sputtering for gas.

My inner drill sergeant has gone heavy melodrama.  Picture one of those cheesy war movies from the seventies where the hero is caked in mud and urges his buddies to, “go on without him!”

 My inner flower child is pulling regular tantrums to divert me from anything productive.  So far, I’ve avoided three trips to Starbucks, one stop at Daylight Donuts and a stroll through a nearby Hallmark store—and it’s not even ten am.  I’m afraid to leave my desk for fear I’ll end up on the other side of town at the mall for unsupervised shopping therapy.

What do you think?  Which of my “halves” need the most fostering today?  What do you do when responsibility and self-nurturing go to war and leave you strung out like a hung over-junkie?