There are days when I am nearly overwhelmed by a sense of failure on all fronts. Days when a tiny advective term dropped in a long equation, forgotten when the equation was scaled, suddenly throws the utter futility of what I'm trying to do into sharp relief. Today was one of those days.

In my work life, I am a shadow of my former self. I have never been brilliant, but I used to be competent and diligent. Now I am neither. I spend the few hours that I work each day chasing scattered thoughts around my empty skull. I alternate wildly between fumbling with the big picture of the problems I'm working on, and becoming hopelessly mired in the details.

Somehow in all this, I make progress. Slow, stumbling, ego-bruising progress. Because I come and subject myself to the effort of it every day. But the mistakes, uncaught and then discovered, humiliate me. Talking with my colleagues, I am suddenly inarticulate, unfamiliar with the current literature in my field, and unsure of what I meant to say. I can see the looks on people's faces -- sympathy, pity, a little superiority. I remember the feeling of the same looks on my face a few years ago. Here, they think, is someone who was not committed enough. Someone who gave her outside life too much priority. Someone doesn't have what it takes.

The flip side of this daily humiliation, of course, is that I am neglecting my children to experience it. They are being raised by strangers, and I borrow them at night and on weekends. I should play with them more, talk to them more, hold them more. I should soak in every second because their brief babyhood is falling away from them as I watch. I should clip their nails more than once a week. Instead I feed them and give their baths, mute with fatigue, then croak out a song as I put them to bed.

It is a great relief that I am quitting my job. I feel a little like Sisyphus might feel if he suddenly realized that he could leave the rock at the bottom of the mountain. But I'm also ashamed. If you'll let me torture another analogy, I'm like a lab rat who has escaped its maze -- and maybe even scooted out the door into the grass. It's nice out here in the sunshine -- and I didn't want the smelly cheese that would have been my reward on the inside -- but I really wanted the other rats to know how good I was at running that maze.

But today. Oh, today. Why did I sign up for the maze-running in the first place? Why was I foolish enough to think I could devote myself to so many things simultaneously? Why, five weeks from my release, my escape, did I work so hard to make sure that I would be allowed back in the maze part time? How will I muster the will power to come back to face the tedium and my embarrassment again?

Have I mentioned that there are only five weeks left?