SUNDAY

Sundays depress me.

Well actually, what I feel on Sunday is more melancholy. But I don’t like that word. It sounds like the emotion of a 19th century British man.

But I can’t escape the Sunday evening feeling I have gotten for years.

I think it started in my teen years. I spent many Sunday evenings with a math book in my window sill, trying to concentrate but looking out and remembering the smell of Sunday dinners at the kids’ table with my aunts and uncles and cousins around me. There was something so warm about it all.

In my window sill I would worry that I was growing up too fast—that I wasn’t the little girl anymore for Uncle Fred to give pillow rides to, or Grandma to make spaghetti for because meatloaf is gross.

And then on Sunday evenings, I used to walk my little baby and think, “How could I have a baby? Where is that teenage girl, the one on the brink of infinity, longing for her childhood?”

I miss my baby. The one I used to walk with while I hummed the lullaby from Disney’s Dumbo.

And she comes in and twilight and asked where her snack is, and I think that on Sunday five years from now I will long for this little voice I am hearing now. And this adolescent will ask for help on homework that’s due tomorrow and I may lecture her for not asking me Friday.

And while I sit at the table with her, explaining fractions (hopefully I understand by then) I will know I am half way there, halfway to having a daughter who is my age when I got married.

Sunday is my day to take stock. And it goes so fast.

My life has been beautiful. I am really lucky. Nothing bad has happened that has not led me to something wonderful. I have not suffered anything that I am not grateful for by now. But I miss the parts that are over and the parts that are now are zooming by so fast I barely have enough time to enjoy them.

I think Sunday is the only day they really slow down and let me take a look. And even the melancholy of Sunday does not last long enough.