Chapter 6
Harper
Saturday is the one day that belongs entirely to me, and I protect it with the energy of someone who has earned it.
I have a system. I have always had a system.
The week is for my students—twenty-three kindergartners who need everything I have and several things I don’t.
Sunday is for church, which takes up the entire morning and most of the afternoon once you factor in setup and teardown.
Sunday evenings I give myself permission to do absolutely nothing, which I have decided counts as observing the Sabbath.
But Saturday. Saturday is mine.
I wake up at eight-fifteen, which feels luxurious, and by eight-thirty I am sitting cross-legged on my bed with my coffee and my phone and my Saturday list pulled up in the notes app, because there is something deeply satisfying about a list with checkboxes and I refuse to apologize for it.
The list reads, in order of priority:
Clean bathroom.
Change sheets.
Laundry — fold, put away.
Grocery run.
Meal prep for the week.
Call mom back.
Wipe down kitchen counters.
Vacuum.
Water the plants.
Find the source of the weird smell in the hall closet.
I look at the list. I feel the particular pleasure of having written it. Then I open TikTok for twenty minutes before I start.
By nine-fifteen, I am in full motion. There is a version of being busy that feels genuinely good, productive, and purposeful, and satisfying in a way that not much else replicates.
I am that version of busy right now. I strip the sheets and start the laundry and put on the podcast while I clean the bathroom, because if I am going to scrub a toilet, I am at least going to be enriched while I do it.
The podcast is called Unbothered and the host is a woman named Jenna who has the type of organized, intentional life that I find both aspirational and mildly stressful.
Today’s episode is called “How to Protect Your Energy Like a CEO.” Jenna has a morning routine that starts at five-fifteen and includes a cold plunge, which I respect in theory but will never do in practice.
“The most successful women I know,” Jenna says, while I scrub the grout with a toothbrush I designated for exactly this purpose, “have learned that nobody is coming to save you. You are your own answer. Be your own foundation.”
I nod along, rinsing the toothbrush.
“You don’t wait for rest,” Jenna continues, her voice bright and certain. “You don’t wait to be poured into. You generate your own energy. You fill your own cup.”
“Yes,” I say out loud, to nobody. “Exactly.”
“Every yes to something is a no to something else. So the question I want you to sit with today is this—what are you saying yes to? What are you building? Because a life worth living doesn’t happen to you. You happen to it.”
I pause for half a second, toothbrush hovering over the grout.
The verse from yesterday morning flickers at the edges of my brain uninvited. Be still and know that I am God. Which is a beautiful sentiment, I think, but Jenna makes a compelling point about the cup.
Then I keep scrubbing.
Staying focused would have prevented the grocery store from taking fifty minutes. The store’s layout, which forces a walk past the candle display to get to the produce section, made this easier.
I have a list. I always have a list. My notes app displays the list, organized by section. My numerous grocery store experiences have taught me that to survive one with ADHD, you must enter with a plan and execute it with military discipline.
I execute it with something closer to enthusiastic chaos.
The produce section is fine. The dairy section is fine.
I am moving well; I am focused; I am a woman with a list and a purpose, and then I turn the corner toward the pantry aisle and there is the seasonal display, which has apparently been restocked since last week and now features a candle called Sunday Morning that smells like vanilla and cedar and something warm I cannot name.
I pick it up to look at the label.
Eleven minutes later I set it back down, because I already have four candles at home, which I think about for approximately three seconds before putting it back in my cart, because five candles is also a reasonable number of candles and I deserve something nice.
I found everything on my list except the eggs, which were on the list, and somehow I walked directly past twice before ending up at the self-checkout without them.
I go back for the eggs.
I also come back with a bag of the chocolate-covered almonds that were on an end-cap between the eggs and the checkout, which were not on the list but which I have now added to the list retroactively so I can check them off.
The second podcast episode starts while I’m putting groceries away.
This one is called “Stop Playing Small: Unlocking Your Full Potential,” and the host spent the first ten minutes talking about a vision board she made in January that has already manifested three of its seven goals, which I find genuinely impressive even though I have complicated feelings about the word manifest.
I switch to a playlist while I meal prep. Something upbeat. Something that keeps my hands moving and my brain just occupied enough to stay in the kitchen.
The laundry gets switched. The counters get wiped.
I find the source of the weird hall closet smell, which turns out to be a forgotten bag of potatoes beginning their journey toward becoming something else entirely, and I deal with it with the grim efficiency of a woman who has made this exact mistake before and will almost certainly make it again.
By eleven-thirty, I have checked off nine things.
I feel fantastic.
Ivy is already at a booth when I arrive at Si Senor just after noon, with Olivia sliding in across from her a minute behind me.
The restaurant is busy the way it always is on a Saturday, warm and a little loud.
The smell of sizzling fajitas hits me and I decide immediately that I made the right lunch choice.
We order without looking at the menus because we have been coming here long enough that the menus are mostly ceremonial. We share a bowl of queso. Olivia gets the chicken enchiladas. Ivy gets the tacos, which she has ordered every single time, and I get the burrito bowl.
“We need to talk about the girls’ trip,” Olivia says, wrapping both hands around her water glass with the expression of a woman about to deliver a verdict.
Ivy makes a face. “I know.”
I look between them. “That’s the thing. We always go in the spring.”
“I know,” Ivy says again. “But Gray’s got the worship conference in April and I told him I’d go with him, and May is already looking—”
“What about June?” Olivia asks.
“School doesn’t let out until the second week,” I say. “And then I usually do the summer reading program the last two weeks.”
We are all quiet for a moment, looking at our drinks, silently acknowledging that we are the kind of busy that has started to eat the things we said we’d never let it eat.
“This is how it starts,” Olivia says eventually, in the voice she uses when she’s making a clinical observation about something that is actually making her sad. “You reschedule the things that matter, and then one day you realize you haven’t done them in three years.”
“That will not happen to us,” Ivy says firmly.
“July,” I say. “What about the last week of July? I’m free, school’s out, and if we book it now, we’ll actually do it instead of just talking about doing it.”
Ivy pulls out her phone. Olivia pulls out hers. We spend the next twenty minutes with calendars open, talking over each other, narrowing it down to a four-day window that works for all three of us, and by the time the food arrives we have a date locked in.
“Where are we going?” Ivy asks, picking up a taco with both hands.
“Somewhere warm,” Olivia says.
“Somewhere with good food,” I say.
“Somewhere that is not New Orleans,” Ivy says, “because I cannot be held responsible for what happens to my marriage if Gray finds out I’m going back without him.”
We laugh, and the afternoon stretches out around us the way good Saturday afternoons do, unhurried and easy, the food warm and the salsa bottomless and the conversation moving the way it only moves between people who have known each other long enough to skip the surface and go straight to the real things.
I drive home an hour later with a full stomach and a full heart and the windows down, even though it is only technically warm enough for that if you commit to it fully.
By four o’clock I have finished the list.
I stand in the middle of my living room and look at the list.
Every box checked.
I wait for the feeling that is supposed to come with that.
It doesn’t quite arrive. Not fully. There’s something that resembles satisfaction, thin and surface-level, the way a snack resembles a meal—enough to quiet the feeling for a moment but not enough to actually address it.
I set my phone on the couch cushion beside me and try to figure out what I am waiting for.
I worked all week. I had a wonderful lunch with my people. I cleaned my home and meal prepped and protected the girls’ trip, and dealt with the potato situation. I was, by any reasonable measure, productive.
I feel vaguely, inexplicably hollow.
I pick my phone back up.
The evening goes quickly, the way evenings do when you are not doing anything that requires your full attention.
I scroll for a while; the feed moving under my thumb in a pleasant, frictionless blur.
I switch to a game I downloaded two months ago, a word puzzle thing that I’m embarrassed by how often I open, and I play three rounds without really engaging, just going through the motions of tapping letters while the television plays something in the background that I chose and immediately stopped watching.
I check Instagram. I check it again fifteen minutes later. I open TikTok, watch four videos, close it, and open it again.
At some point I pick up the throw blanket from the end of the couch and wrap it around myself, and in the process my hand knocks my Bible off the end table where it’s been sitting since Wednesday’s Bible study.
It lands cover-up on the rug, and I lean over and pick it up and set it back on the table.
My hand rests on it for a second.
The cover is soft and slightly worn at the corners, the good kind of worn that means it has been used and loved, which is mostly true from a few years ago when I went through a season of actually reading it regularly.
There is a faint coffee ring on the back cover from sometime last fall that I keep meaning to address and haven’t.
Be still and know that I am God.
The verse from yesterday morning nudges at the edges of my brain, quiet and patient, the way it has been nudging all day between the podcast episodes and the grocery run and the meal prep containers and the game and the scroll.
I could read it. I have the time. I have nothing but time right now, which is the whole point of Saturday, and the apartment is clean and the list is finished and there is no reason I could not sit here for thirty minutes with this Bible open and actually do the thing I told myself I’d do later.
My phone lights up on the cushion beside me. A notification from the game. Your daily streak is waiting!
I reach for my phone.
I’ll do the Bible tomorrow. I’m at church tomorrow, anyway. That counts.