It’s Monday.
Mondays aren’t usually a lot of fun for anyone. You go from having a weekend of time spent with family and friends doing fun things or doing nothing at all, to I have to get up early and go to work. I would say most of us enjoy our jobs, but most of us don’t have a job that is life fulfilling each and every day. It’s mostly satisfactory with some highs and lows mixed in.
Imagine a Monday after losing a child. It is expected that you mourn the loss, go through the routine of a visitation, funeral and guests dropping in and out of your home and then Monday hits. And, the expectation is that you go back to work, like nothing ever happened. Most companies, mine included, give you five bereavement days for the death of a child. Five. How in the actual world is that even a thing? October 20 will be four months since Nikolai died and every minute of my day is different and unknown to me emotionally.
Monday is like that bad dream, where you open a door and fall down a black hole. Monday is routine. Monday represents the start of a new week and getting back to the grind. Monday is supposed to be the first day back to normalcy after the weekend.
But maybe I don’t want this new normal. Maybe I want Mondays to be how they used to be, where I woke up and just didn’t want to go to work because nobody wants to go back to work on Monday. Because it’s a Monday.
Mondays for me are the beginning of a new normal, over and over and over again. I reject you Monday and your new normal.
This is where my mantra of “just get out of bed” really comes from. It is painful for me to get out of bed on Mondays. Guaranteed I’m going to be late every single Monday. I cannot get out of bed. I lay there in a pool of stress and anxiety willing myself to move. I want to curl up in a ball and pretend for a few minutes that this is not my new normal.
The drive in this morning had me nauseous and nearly hyperventilating. But no two Mondays are ever the same. And, by Tuesday I will be fine. In the sense that it isn’t Monday anymore “fine.”