I’m sitting on the couch in my living room, laptop balanced on my knees. The sound of the shower drifts in from the first floor bathroom, along with the Beach Boy’s “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” from the shower radio. Among the splashing sounds come the voices of my daughters; the four year old’s high, happy laughter, the eleven year old’s voice a bit deeper, stronger, a little wiser. My older daughter treats her sister like a princess to be pampered, calling her sweetheart as she helps shampoo her hair.

They are in the shower together because it is now our only bathroom, and there is no tub. Last weekend I took a sledgehammer to the upstairs bathroom and back bedroom. Now it is a tangled mess of dangling wires, nubs of shattered lathe and piles of insulation.

Our little one is too small to shower on her own, and our oldest, because she loves her sister (and her parents), has agreed to help out. She has already showered once today, but the four year old has syrup in her hair and sauce on her nose. She hasn’t seen a bar of soap since Friday. Back to school tomorrow. Time to get clean.

I’ve just come in from a trip to the grocery store with the four year old to get supplies for the week. An hour and a half of jogging up and down the aisles, keeping one eye on the shelves and another on the little girl who keeps yanking things off of them. “Can we buy this one, Daddy? How about this? This one?” When we returned home I juggled putting items away while she pulled them right back out, delighted all over again in what she had found.

I am exhausted. I feel it deep in my bones. This Sunday began even earlier than usual. My wife got up at 6 a.m. to take a friend to the airport, while I tried to sneak in some writing time on the laptop before the kids found me, and before the chorus of breakfast and demands for playtime invaded my private thoughts.

We’ve been to the movies once today (Chicken Little); watched another on DVD (Robots); after the first movie and before the second, while the four year old took her nap, I lugged all the yard furniture into the garage, installed a lock to keep the doors from banging in the wind, packed up the transformer for the ground lights, and cleaned up a few stray pieces of the demolition project I’d tossed out the second-floor window a few days before. The dumpster gets picked up tomorrow morning. Anything not in for the ride will be left behind, bits and pieces to be discovered like an archeological find after the snow melts in the spring.

Already my brain is buzzing with a million other things to do. Update the website, get another new page or two written, tweak that ad for the newsletter, polish up a short story, read a few pages of a book I need to review. Then there’s work tomorrow, meetings and deadlines, phone calls and emails to write. Somehow we have to move ahead with the backroom project I started last week–make sure the dumpster gets picked up, juggle the carpenters and plumber and electrician, scheduling everyone so they don’t run into each other or fall through the open floor joists. We won’t be at home, so we have to make sure every instruction is clear.

The project needed to be done. We’d been living for the past three years with a second floor bathroom about five by seven feet, with a slanted floor, leaky pipes and a light switch that worked only when it felt inspired. But all this is enough to make my head throb. I can feel myself slowly simmering inside. A cough that has been lingering for the past few days feels like it might develop into something nasty, and my body is filled with a sledgehammer’s aches and pains. Why do we do it to ourselves, I wonder. I don’t need all this. Why not just let things go, just a little? Crack open a beer and flip on an episode of CSI? Why do we fight so hard to be always moving, always trying to cram in one more thing before we fall into bed for a few hours of restless sleep?

I hear the girls again as the shower turns off. The little one giggles as her sister towels down her hair. My wife smiles at me over the screen of her laptop. Green Day’s on the radio now; “When September Ends.” The little one starts singing along, and her sister joins in before the hair dryer drowns them both out.

My wife smiles at me, stretches her toes out to touch mine. Our dueling laptop keys pause as we recognize this fleeting moment, one of those rare suspended seconds when you see your life spread out like a fresh canvas, when you know the love that is always there, but too often buried deep beneath the remains of the day.

Then the four year old comes running in like a miniature bulldog, flinging her still-wet hair, shouting about her snack, and wanting to play for just one more minute; our oldest calls out that there’s water on the floor, and that her sister tried to bite her when she wouldn’t give her the hair dryer. The living room looks like it’s been ransacked by a gang of thieves. The moment is over. But I’m able to smile again.

I might miss a deadline tomorrow, and my story might not get done. I don’t know about the updates to the site, and I’m not sure if the electrician will show up or not. But I do know, once again, why we do this: we push ourselves to make everything as perfect as we can for our loved ones. But sometimes we lose sight of them in the process. And that’s a shame.

I’m ready to take on tomorrow. I’m going to tackle each and every thing on my list, one at a time. But first, I’m going to go read my little girl a story. Because this, this is my life.

This is why I do what I do.

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