I ate dinner with one foot still in my workday

Dear Delyara, The children were talking. My husband was asking whether we could move money from one account to another until Friday. Somebody wanted ketchup. Somebody else had forgotten to bring their reading book downstairs. And there I was, chewing pasta while half of me was still back in the office replaying a conversation I didn’t like and trying to work out whether I had said too much or not enough. I think this is one of the least discussed forms of tiredness — the inability to arrive all at once. The body gets home before the mind does. The meal happens before the self does. The family gets the version of you that is physically seated at the table but emotionally still dragging pieces of another room behind her. I hate that split. Not because it makes me evil. Because it makes me absent in small ways that children notice before they know what to call them. Tonight I was there. But not cleanly there.