I Book Everybody Else's

Every article on this site begins here and this one will too. This is not medicine. I am not a clinician, nothing on this page is treatment, and nothing I write stands in the place of a doctor, a nurse or a pharmacist. This page exists to get one phone call made. If the call is yours, make it before you finish reading.

Now. Let me describe your calendar back to you.

Your husband's is on there. Both of the kids, including the one who moved out and still somehow runs through you. Your mother's, and the reminder three days before because she will forget. The dog. The car. The thing at the school. The other thing at the school.

And you are the person who knows all of it, and reschedules all of it, and rings for all of it, and sits in the parking lot for all of it.

And somewhere in the last while there has been a thing of your own that you have not put on there. Not once. Not even as a note to yourself. Because putting it on there would make it real, and because the calendar is for other people, and because you genuinely do not have a slot.

Somebody wrote this down about herself a very long time ago

There is a half line in the Song of Solomon that I think is one of the most honest sentences in the whole Bible about a certain kind of woman.

They made me the keeper of the vineyards; but mine own vineyard have I not kept. (Song of Solomon 1:6, King James Version)

That is not a complaint and it is not a boast. It is a woman stating a plain fact about her own life. She was put in charge of everything, and she did the job, and the one plot of ground that was actually hers did not get tended.

And nobody in the passage scolds her for it. It is said out loud, and it is allowed to stand there as a true thing.

You are looking at your own sentence written down thousands of years before you, and the noticing has never once been self pity. Song of Solomon 1:6 has a woman name what her keeping cost her without one word of apology attached, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets somebody say that out loud without feeling selfish.

I want to underline what is not in that verse. There is no instruction to stop keeping the other vineyards. Nobody tells her to walk off the job. The whole content of it is that hers was not kept, and that this is worth saying.

You have been saying you are fine in the same voice you use to reschedule a dental cleaning for a fourteen year old. The Spirit of God is the one who makes a woman audible to herself, and it is written that the keeper of the vineyards named her own unkept ground in the same breath as her work.

The slot problem is not a slot problem

Let me be practical, because practical is what you respect.

You say there is no time, and I believe that the calendar looks that way. But I have watched this for years, and here is what I notice: when one of the children needs something, a slot appears. Something moves. The impossible week rearranges itself in about four minutes.

So the week is not actually full. The week is triaged, and you have put yourself at the bottom of the list, and the bottom of the list is not a time problem, it is a category problem.

You are in a category you put yourself in, and no household has ever once voted you down there. Song of Solomon 1:6 has the unkept vineyard named as a consequence of the arrangement rather than as a fact of nature, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a woman see her own filing system.

And the household, by the way, does not experience your absence from that calendar as a gift. Nobody in that house is glad you have not been. Most of them assume otherwise, because the handling all runs through one person, and it would never occur to them that the handler is unhandled.

You were never asked to be the only name missing, and the family has never once required that of you. The Spirit of God is the one who changes a person's position on their own list, and what is written lets a woman say mine own vineyard have I not kept, with no defense offered and none needed.

The plain routing, and this is the part that goes on the calendar

Here is the section that is not comfort, and on this page it is the only thing I am actually asking for.

If something is happening right now that frightens you, that is 911, and it does not go on a calendar, it happens now. If the heavy thing tonight is in your own mind, 988 answers, and a real person picks up. And the thing of your own that has not been written down anywhere goes to a doctor, a nurse or a pharmacist today, and it goes on the calendar in ink like everybody else's.

You are allowed to take a slot in your own house, and taking one has never once cost anybody anything. Song of Solomon 1:6 puts the unkept vineyard on the record as a loss rather than as a virtue, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves a woman from the calendar to the phone.

Do it while the calendar is open. That is the practical trick. Open the thing you use for everybody else, and put your name in it, and then ring before you close it.

You have the same right to a Tuesday morning as the dog does, and the passage has never once ranked the keeper below the vineyards. The Spirit of God is the one who is present in a four minute rearrangement of an impossible week, and what is written names the woman who kept everything and lost her own ground.