A few weeks ago my mom told me that whenever my life gets too calm, I intentionally complicate it. I've been thinking about this observation ever since, because it might finally unlock the mystery of why I decided to have a baby and undertake a major house renovation in the space of two months this spring. (And so why, by my own bone-headed design, my heart starts racing with stress before I even open my eyes these days.)

I'm not sure what I needed less: another child or a new kitchen. But my husband and I wanted both, and more than a little. The baby, our third, comes after several years of fence sitting, with a couple of miscarriages thrown in, over the whole topic of whether or not our family was complete. We talked about it for so many years that the decision to have another child finally became the answer to a midlife crisis: it was either Botox, a convertible, an affair, or a baby. The baby seemed the most sensible and least expensive, at least in the short term.

But Eldest and Middle Child are 9 and 12 years older (this photo was taken a few years ago) than Baby, and so suddenly I've gone from having a life where I genuinely didn't know what to do after dinner because no one needed me to draw a bath or read a bedtime story, to basically scheduling my life around when I'm going to breastfeed, pump, or breastfeed and then pump. With a full-time job, a house to run, significant relationships to manage (husband, nanny), and now three children, suddenly my Fantasy Life is again far away.

You see, despite my mother's (correct, I fear) observation, I have this persistent fantasy that I will one day lead a life where I have time to park my rear end on the sofa and read a book in the middle of the day (and finally tackle Proust or James Joyce — more evidence that this is just a fantasy). And yet I keep putting up roadblocks to ensure that this will pretty much never happen. I like to think what I'm doing is living life to the fullest, but for me living life to the fullest involves a lot of complaining about how busy I am. To paraphrase Eleanor Roosevelt, no one can make you feel overwhelmed without your consent.

So the big question is: when your life is chaotic, and you're the only one to blame for that, but you fantasize about having a life that's actually much less action-packed, what exactly is wrong with you? One of my sisters is a social worker, and she has this nifty book called the DSM that basically catalogs every possibly psychological problem anyone could have. It's a family joke: "Get out your DSM and tell me what's wrong with this person," or, "Boy, have I got a DSM situation for you." There is, no doubt, a DSM diagnosis for this intentional chaos thing I do to my life. If only I had time to find it.