The Hits Keep on Coming

I am not one to feel sorry for myself. When friends are having problems, I always try to point out the bright side of things, and don't have much patience for complainers. Compared to the vast majority of the rest of the world, we all have it really, really good.

But hey, everyone has a particularly bad day now and then, and I think it's healthy to just acknowledge when things temporarily suck so that you can then focus on doing what you need to do to remedy the situation.

So today's post is my own acknowledgement of a craptastic weekend and how I'm going to manage to rise above and get over it before 40 people show up and 6 relatives stay overnight here on Saturday for Desmond's 3rd birthday party.

As I mentioned in my post over on my long-neglected Baba G & Me blog yesterday, Desmond is not feeling well. So that was the biggest issue over the weekend: what started as him sniffling and running a slight fever on Friday night is now a gross gurgly cough and him blowing his nose into his hand and then wiping the snot all over his face about twice every five minutes. (?!?) As expected, the pediatrician said there's nothing we can do except push liquids and let it run its course unless his fever continues throughout today, in which case we'll then go in to see if it's strep throat or an ear infection. So there's that.

But like most little kids, there are long periods of time when you wouldn't be able to tell he's not feeling well because he's still running around and playing like a maniac. And since it was kind of nice out this weekend, I decided we'd take advantage of the mild(er) weather and go for a long, LONG walk along Lake Michigan. So we did, and on the way back—still a good thirty minutes from home—I felt his stroller pulling sharply to the left. Since I have been wearing a splint on my left wrist for the past few months (that's another story), it was slightly painful to keep trying to fight with this huge-ass stroller that wanted to zig-zag across the walking path. So I inspected the wheels to see if I'd gotten something wrapped around them, and that's when I saw that the back-left tire was completely flat. Sweet. Needless to say I had broken out in a full-body sweat by the time we got home from trying to steer that thing against its will.

Then I had no choice but to haul Des to the grocery store because we were out of everything. This was the day he decided to reach for things on shelves, including a glass bottle of really pungent vinaigrette which he then dropped. Of course it smashed into a million pieces and I had to sheepishly go get someone to clean it up amidst other shoppers wondering aloud, "What's that smell???"

Fast-forward a few hours and Des is finally in bed and I needed to do some work. I went upstairs to my husband's computer to get a file. When I was done, I backed away from the desk, stood up, and crashed my head into our less-than-three-months-old-and-not-cheap lighting fixture, causing it to shatter into both large and microscopic shards of glass all around the floor. Obscenities were yelled.

I then marched straight out of that room because I had reached my limit. I called my husband (oh, did I not mention that he's been in sunny Arizona this whole time and is now flying to even sunnier L.A.?) to tell him about the accident, which led to an, ahem, "strongly worded verbal disagreement" about whether it was my fault for running into the lighting fixture or his fault for not raising it above standing-adult height like I had told him to do when we first got it and I PREDICTED someone was going to nearly kill themselves on it. Let's just say we both lost that argument.

Now it's a Tuesday that feels like a Monday because of the holiday weekend. And guess what was the first thing on my schedule today? A trip to the dentist. At the rate things were going I was 100% prepared for him to say I had ten new cavities and that at least two of my teeth were going to fall out. But everything was OK.

And I know everything else is going to be OK, too. On my walk home from the dentist I realized that my mind had been preoccupied with figuring out how in the hell I'm going to get everything done that I need to do before my parents arrive Friday, four other relatives arrive Saturday and oh, FORTY PEOPLE come over for Desmond's birthday party that same afternoon. On top of my writing work and possibly taking Des into the pediatrician, I must also move everything on our second floor in advance of painters arriving at 7 a.m. tomorrow and painting that level for two days AND I need to wash sheets and tidy up all of our guest rooms. I had been strategizing what I was going to do during every single hour between now and Saturday morning. And I was not despairing over it—in fact I was all revved up about it.

See, the weird thing is that I work much better and more productively when I am completely stressed out. I will get significantly MORE done in those times. So all of these little life challenges are making me mad, yes, but they're also subconsciously motivating me to pack even more in to each day than I would've otherwise. I have always been this way and will always be this way and it's actually a great thing. As I have said before to my husband, "I am the person you want around in an emergency." We're certainly not in any crisis right now, but the more things seem to go awry, the better I function. If there are any psychologists out there, please tell me what this means!

The other thing I go back to in order to stay sane is the same reminder I always give my friends, as I mentioned at the beginning of this post. These "problems" are not real problems. In fact, one of the things I'm working on right now requires me to go through years of pictures. As I look back over the decades, there is no denying that I've lived a wonderful life. So yes, shards of glass might be raining down on my head and my son may be violently spewing virus particles in my face and so on and so forth, but the reality is that I'm probably going to look back on this hot mess of a weekend and laugh my ass off. So I will choose to save myself the wait and laugh about it now.

- e