Last weekend was my Bachelorette party. My sisters and best friend organized it, and it was incredibly fun. They asked if I would have done anything different had I planned it myself, and I said no – a sign of how well they know me, I think!

As I wrote to in the email introduction to last week’s post, the weekend featured local Portsmouth breweries, great homemade pizza, a dear friend’s newborn baby, sing-shouting at a piano bar, windy winter beach walks, and one VERY cold plunge into the Atlantic.

We drove back to Boston on Sunday, and everyone went their separate ways. But I kept feeling so full of love and gratitude for the incredible women in my life. It felt like a buffer between me and everything else.

That evening, I wrote:

What an amazing weekend. Emily: power and generosity. Mary: glow. Meghan: love. Margaret: radiance. Naomi: hilarious and deep. Rosi: a beacon. Emma: courageous/a symbol of courage.

I got to gather all this energy from the weekend which combines with my own power and inner radiance to create a force to be reckoned with. That’s what I’m walking into Monday morning with. Of course, work will be crazy, the same challenges will be there, the week will be so hectic, but luckily I have my power/generosity/glow/love/radiance/humor/depth/beacon/courage inside of me, from my friends.

I hung up the card they’d made me next to my desk.

I had a frustrating work week, and by Friday night I was saying to Raja:

I’m frustrated with the feeling of always being pressed for time, behind, rushing, racing. I’m frustrated that the challenges I’m facing at work have taken over so much of my mental space in the past few weeks. I feel like time is going by so fast. I feel a sense of lack and scarcity – there is not enough time to do everything. I feel like we’ll blink and it will be our wedding day.

My warm and fuzzy buffer feeling was gone.

In its place I had this thought:

I want to savor this spring, bite into it like a juicy peach on a hot summer’s beach day and let the juice run down my chin before jumping straight into salty cold water.

But it’s gray, it’s March.

The days are a blink and it’s go to sleep, wake up, go to sleep, wake up.

It’s feeling behind on emails, texts, laundry, dishes, groceries, taxes, and wedding planning.

I told Raja, I want to go to Maine with you. Let’s do Acadia this summer. Let’s go to California next week. I can work remotely and you’re job searching. We shouldn’t be this tired!

Suddenly I found myself in another extreme, wanting to rework our whole life setup.

It’s funny that it took me five days to get from that to that. Equally dramatic feelings, pulling in opposite directions.

Now it’s the weekend again, and with two days off, I thought to myself, maybe I’ll get from this back to that.

My best friend is in town from Mexico City, where she lives. I’m looking forward to hanging out with her. Then my one-year-old nephew, as always, is a little peach himself. He’s walking more now, and he’s more steady on his feet. He’s more expressive than he used to be. He loves harvest snap peas and dancing.

I love living close to my sister and her husband and baby, a six minute walk, and seeing them all the time. We often have dinner at their place and they send us home with extra cookies from the batch they’ve baked.

Weekend mornings are still lovely. This morning I went for a swim at the nearby pool, which always makes me feel good for the rest of the day. In a little while I’ll go meet up with my friend, sister, and nephew.

Still in the background of the weekends, there seems to be a clock faintly ticking. It still somehow feels like a race. A race to use the weekend days to their utmost to feel the most refreshed possible by Sunday evening. To go into Monday morning feeling reenergized.

It seems this time pressure follows me into the weekend from the work week. It reminds me of how when I schedule Introvert Time, which yes, I do have to schedule, I check in with myself approximately every 12 seconds to see if I am feeling recharged. “You feeling recharged now?” … “How about now?”)

Of course, the Monday morning and Friday evening feelings both come and go. “Nothing can touch me because I have amazing girlfriends” and “We need to change our entire life set up” are true and not true.

The answer is never in the extremes. The answer, I think, is that working days and non-working days alike should feel manageable, so I don’t have such extreme swings nor get hit so badly by the Sunday Scaries.

---

More on my wedding: Planning My Wedding Three Years After Getting Married