The Shopping List Was Longer Than My Patience

Dear Delyara, I wrote the shopping list this evening and felt instantly tired of my own life. Milk. Bread. Fruit. School snacks. Toilet roll. Washing liquid. Rice. Chicken. Potatoes. Birthday card. Shampoo. Bin bags. Nothing on the list was unreasonable. That is what made it feel so heavy. Ordinary life has a way of exhausting me not through disaster, but through maintenance. Through the endless predictable things that must be replaced, bought, remembered, carried, cleaned, folded, paid, arranged, and repeated. It is not glamorous suffering. It is supermarket suffering. Domestic suffering. The kind that rarely sounds serious enough to justify how much it wears a woman down. I sat there with the pen in my hand and felt irritated at everything. At the prices. At the repetition. At the fact that no matter how well I shop, there will be another list in a few days. Another meal. Another school week. Another practical problem waiting quietly at the edge of the next morning. Then I felt guilty for being irritated. Because these are ordinary things. Necessary things. Even loving things. But love can still be tiring. And necessity can still feel relentless. That’s what I wish people understood more clearly about domestic life. You can be grateful and worn down at the same time. You can love your family and still hate how often life reduces you to admin. You can be a good woman and still feel privately angry at how many practical details your mind must hold just to stop everything from becoming harder than it needs to be. I finished the list. Then I added “tea.” That one was for me. And for some reason, that made me feel less invisible.