Monday and the 16th week of the year
April 15. Monday.
I woke up this morning, tired. It was one of those mornings that I thought to myself, “why don't I just have a 9-5 job?” I have catching up to do (like taxes), but today there’s little time to catch up and only time to ‘do’.
As I write this, it’s 10:15pm. I've been awake since 6:30am. Last night I worked late and only slept 4.5hours, something that was constant back when I was a single parent. My face feels like it's buzzing and I'm trying to write this letter as a way to prove to myself that I've done something for me today.
This morning started off like every school morning: a 6:30am alarm signifying I have 30 minutes to either choose to get up or hit snooze, leaving enough time for Wordle with my sleepy child. I hit snooze, but I’m too cold and tired for Wordle. When the alarm goes off at 7am, I get up to make my child’s lunch while simultaneously making him breakfast and tidying up as I go.
After food preparations I unpack my bag from our recent trip and begin creating three piles of laundry on the floor, making sure to include the dirty clothes I managed to avoid for weeks. Today I'm determined to get through these piles, knowing full well air drying slows down the process and I'll only make it through ¾ of this laundry because I only have three racks to hang dry everything on.
Around 7:37am, another alarm goes off, (my child's watch) signifying I have approximately 3 minutes to look presentable, slap on my shoes and be out the door to take him to school. We drive so that he's about 10min early.
After dropping him off, I headed straight to the grocery store to pick up more lunch items, and when I returned home, began the process of washing. First colors, then blacks, then hots. Each load I set a 29min timer so I don't leave laundry in the shared machines. Again. As I'm hanging clothes I noticed that the window blinds cast a perfectly framed piece of morning sunlight on the table and it reminds me that once I told myself I'm going to try cyanotype. After hanging clothes I decided to prepare the cyanotype solution I purchased a month ago wondering how full “fill the bottle” really is and then let it sit 24hrs as noted on the package.
The work emails must be answered in between loads of laundry, and the emails transition into the first hour-long meeting of the day, which is about crowdfunding for a short film I'm producing. We decide on many things like dialogue and shots and incentives and I realize I'm hungry.
My first meeting ends so I turn my focus to our cat’s barf. His signature is three barfs and because it's dried from a few days of sitting while we were away, I need to soak each one. Soaking and wiping while I'm making myself coffee, peanut butter toast and trying to breathe a little deeper to quell the feeling of overwhelm.
After eating, I answer texts about a client needing Illustrator files, prepare a shooting schedule and then type up a contract and quote for filming an awards show. Just as I hit send on the quote, I realize I have to pick up my child from school soon. Where did the time go?
Today I'm also baking because I have frozen bananas to use, and muffins are an easy and quick way to feed a child when he's hungry. It feels like he’s always hungry, so I bake a box of small frozen veggie samosas, start the rice cooker and then prepare the dried ingredients for muffins in a metal bowl. I have the samosas baked and cooling as I head out the door.
Despite the sun and the fact I'm wearing a dress, I'm cold. I smile as I see my child run towards me.
He tells me his day is a 9.5 / 10 and I'm so thrilled because last week was a 6 and a 7. We get home, and he comments on how good it smells. There's nothing like coming home to the smell of freshly cooked rice to warm up the soul. I make him a plate of rice and samosas and he informs me that he has no homework so I tell him he can do whatever he wants. He chooses to build airplanes in Roblox.
I mix up the wet ingredients for the muffin batter and combine it with the dried, and then I remember that I have a 3:30pm meeting because I get a message asking if I'm joining. I quickly line the muffin tin, pour in the batter and shove the tray into the oven setting the timer for 13min. I join the Google Meet. In this meeting we're discussing branding for a new agency that myself and two other women are starting. We get through color pallets and the oven timer goes off. I think I've over baked the muffins. They are too brown.
The meeting goes on for another hour about fonts and logos, and I have a 3min break before the third meeting of the day. I taste a ‘too brown’ muffin while someone talks about their film’s marketability. This meeting is about funding for a slate of films, with the same women plus one more. The muffin is good but I made the poor choice of adding pure tableya into the batter, tableya I got from the Philippines. Pure tableya is bitter. I tell myself that tomorrow I'm going to toast a muffin and add butter to it so that it tastes better. I warn my child that these are not sweet muffins anymore and he replies without looking up from his computer, “they are breakfast muffins then.”
This last meeting goes long and it's nearly 7pm when it ends. I text my husband that I'm all meeting-ed out. He's away for work, also in meetings, and sends me a heart emoji back. I make dinner: rice, which is perfectly fluffy, leftover monggo (a Filipino dish) and the rest of the samosas. I tell my child it's not pretty, but we sit down together and eat, and he replies, “It's pretty. Pretty good!” and we laugh. I love this human.
After dinner I tell him I'm baking cookies. Ube chocolate chip cookies because the muffins were supposed to be the sweet in his lunch and I’m determined that we have some baked goods rather than store bought. So I baked for the second time today. At 8:30pm the alarm goes off signifying to my child to take a shower, and then the oven timer goes off ready for the second batch of purple cookies to go in. By the time he's done in the shower, the dishwasher is loaded and on, and all 27 cookies are cooling on the counter. They are delicious.
It's now bedtime, I dry my child's hair while he brushes his teeth and makes faces in the mirror that make me laugh. By 9:10pm we're snuggled in bed. I read aloud the newsletter from the Toronto Ink Company, like I often do. This newsletter is about the colour of 2025 - ‘Future Dusk’ and the eclipse, and then I play Brains On podcast long enough to bring about the breathing I know tells me that he's sound asleep. Our cat meows loudly at his door just as I slip out from under the covers and tip toe out of his room.
The floors are cold and I’m shivering. I make sure to put all the cookies away, freezing half of them and cleaning up the counter ready for tomorrow. I shut the bedroom window and decide to turn the heat up.
It’s 11:19pm now. I've folded and put away the pile of laundry that covered the bed, in between writing these paragraphs, because the pauses help me think of the right words. I have one more work task to do: shipping a cable and gaff tape to a crew member, and then it will be the end of this Monday and the start of the 16th week of the year.
