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Underpants and Responsibilities

30 Friday Jan 2015

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If you’ve been keeping up with me, this week was rough. Oh who are we kidding, they’re ALL rough! 🙂 Today is a better day, but lets not get ahead of ourselves. Let me go back 24…

Emotionally destructive day. Questioning where I fit in and who I belong to and how I stack up in this crazy broken family we have. Emotional outbursts. Unresponsive at work. Just down right down, all day. I came home last night, very late as work went late and there was nothing I could do to motivate my team. There was nothing I could do to motivate me, let alone 25 of them! So we got out pretty late. I drove the hour and a half home without ever turning on my music. I just zoned out. At one point I realized I was confused as to which road I was on! Not that I was falling asleep or not paying attention, just not connected to the present in a normal way. I was safely connected to the road and my steering, but my thoughts were flipping past the days events. I walked in the door to find Peanut was sound asleep like a good little girl (She better be at 10PM!). Bacon gave me a hug hello and just smiled when I said, “I’m gonna go put on sweatpants.” I walked to the bedroom and found a surprise waiting for me.

The thing about this surprise is that it made me cry. I never let anyone take care of me. If you want to take care of me, you pretty much have to ninja your way in there, surprise me or catch me off guard, and just take control and do it. So to have someone just take charge and take care of me in a way that was taking-no-prisoners, was the “straw” so to speak on this overworked over-stressed exhausted camel.

It wasn’t the bubbles in the bath quietly popping and fizzing and emanating a soft sensual smell. It wasn’t the bucket, yes bucket, of my favorite beer on ice stacked on the foot stool next to the fizzing bubble bath. It wasn’t the 100 candles giving off a soft welcoming glow, lighting the room just enough so that I could read my book lovingly set by the bathtub. It wasn’t even the soft ocean sounds playing on the iPad propped up on the sink or the sign on the bathroom door declaring “Night spa”. I started to cry when I saw all of these things, to the point where my nose was so stuffy I couldn’t smell the spa smell anymore. It was after I relaxed in the warmth and quiet for a while. After I had enough time to actually get into my new book and start to attach to it. Once I had (I’ll admit) started in on my second beer. After I could start to feel myself let go of all of my self-judgment and frustration, my insecurities and unfounded fears. It was after all of this that I decided I was ready to get out and rejoin my family (well half of it anyway). And as I went to retrieve my sweatpants and sleepy shirt, lovingly folded and stacked on top of two fresh towels. As I dried myself off and thought, ah I’ll just go commando tonight. It wasn’t all of this swirled together in a little brief ball of love and care and affection in a way I can understand and relate to. No, it wasn’t all of these loving and thoughtful and carefully planned touches to make my evening relaxing that made me feel truly special and loved and taken care of.

It was clean underwear folded in the stack of towels and sweatpants that made me feel truly cared for. That of all these big shows of affection, I fell for the most basic need being thought of, and put out for me before I knew I needed it.

Sometimes I’m so good at all of this stuff. I’m so great at managing multiple schedules in multiple families. Controlling and overseeing a multi-milllion dollar project. Balancing emotions and outburst and inappropriate behavior. Planning meals, shopping for food, managing my own budget while saving for the future.  Stressing and worrying over a misspoken word or a poorly written email. I’m keeping up with everything on a couple of hours of sleep a night. Sometimes, I just need somebody to get my underwear before even realize I need it.

So you’re tellin me there’s a chance!

15 Thursday Jan 2015

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Thank God the holidays are over. As much as I love 5 rounds of Christmas, two new years, and a couple double time birthday parties chucked in at the end; I’m happy to wave goodbye to that round of chaos.

Things escalated quite rapidly around here last week. I believe it was the illness plaguing everyone in our house for the last 30 days, making its rounds from one to the next and then back again, a flu that never really had to retire. Or maybe it was the stress of all of the planning and shopping and wrapping and strategizing and stressing and showering….at least I’m pretty sure I took a couple of showers last month. Regardless of the reason, my typically controlled, stoic, calm facade cracked in two pieces without warning. We went from a calm discussion to me nearly throwing my phone through a front window, only to be followed by a couple of framed pictures shortly after. Imagine the silent thud in the new fallen snow of both communication and history landing together in a perfect juxtaposition to the volume of my voice in that moment. I snapped. I knew in that moment I had snapped, I heard my inner voice frantically pulling back on the leash, flailing about and whispering “no! NO! NO!”. I didn’t care. In that tiny 2 second window of argument between me and me, I won with a simple, “I don’t care, what do we have to lose?!”

So I lost it, in the verbal attack sense. It ended with a demand to face the past and set out some boundaries and ground rules. To apologize and offer insight into history. To smooth the road so that I have a fair chance in this life I’ve chosen. It ended with an ultimatum.

I don’t believe in ultimatums. I don’t believe any true relationship should ever come to that. It should always be give and take, take and give. Never should one have to demand something from the other….or else. It’s not a great moment in our history, but I don’t regret it. In the end, the reason for my snap, my loss of control, my demands and ultimatum, was due to my own insecurity. In a previous post I mentioned how we do not have time for our own work, our own needs, our own insecurities and they pile up behind us. Well, this was the avalanche. My own insecurities won out against sanity and brains and took over. And it turns out…..I was wrong. Damn. I do not like being wrong. I don’t do well with being wrong, BUT I can find the silver lining in being wrong. I was wrong, but look what came of it!

Because of my temporary loss of control over my emotions we are now looking down the barrel of a long life that is just starting to build itself. Their relationship has been taped together through communication and honesty, for the time being. My relationship with her is new, fragile, and uncomfortable for both of us. I feel that we both want to dive in head first and skip all of the steps we need to take to build and establish trust in one another and start swapping recipes and Peanut stories like old chums. My sanity has returned enough to put the leash on this at least. I’ve stopped myself from unnecessary texts to try to force a relationship, but at least for now there are two new key elements to this awkward family dynamic:

1. They can talk to each other honestly, at least for now.

2. She knows now I have no intention of taking her place as Mommy, and will even go so far as to defend her role to people she doesn’t know.

I think that we have a chance. I am caustically optimistic as I’ve been burned by blind faith before. But if nothing else, it’s a start. I’m a good person, and maybe one day she will know me well enough to believe that.