Sometimes, the hardest part is just beginning.
Just deciding to start and deal with the hurdles as you go. Because you may not even know what they are if you never start.
But being brave all the time is exhausting and sometimes I just can’t do it. Or I think I can’t so I don’t and then I hold all that anxiety inside for too long where it simmers and boils around and then spills out on my husband’s poor unexpecting soul and then.
Then we just have a mess to wipe up off the linoleum.
And then we’re just back where we were anyway, if I would have just kept on being brave all the time, every day, even when it felt like too much work.
Laziness never got anyone anywhere.
I had influenza a week and a half ago and it kicked my psyche into some corner of some room of this new house that I didn’t know existed. I was the only one there (thank God), but, man, was it intoxicating. In that dangerous, crack-heroin sort of way.
For a few hours on a few days, I thought to myself, “I’m never going to get better.”
And I was so feverish sick and my head was so full of crap and the bubble I was existing in so thick, I believed it.
And that didn’t help my mood or my temperament or the way my family felt about me at all.
Or so the crazy thoughts told me in my head.
It was a few days after the bubble burst and I climbed out of that dank corner that the mess spilled out onto the kitchen floor and across the K-Mart table where we dine and the husband reminded me he loves me all the time, just the same, whether I’m living in a corner of self pity and doubt and anxiety or not.
But he has more fun when I’m just me.
So, shit, man, what now?
Well, right now, today, yesterday, too, and even the day before that, I’m trying to chill the fuck out. What’s wrong with my life anyway?
Not one thing.
What’s so great about Omaha anyway?
I don’t know. For the first at least half of my time there, I wanted to leave. To come back here.
Oh, goddess of irony, I will name you Daffodil and Scotch-tape a picture of you in your vintage crew-cut cardigan onto the wall above my dresser. So there you can mock me.
And I can be reminded.
That maybe I don’t need that as-of-yet unopened bottle of Celexa in my medicine cabinet. That there’s no reason I should feel sad about a website for moms that, yes, played a huge role in my life. Back then. Not now.
That my friends who are my friends will always be my friends. That my friends who aren’t my friends won’t.
And I can miss them, or maybe more specifically, I can miss the way my life with them as part of it was back then. But now?
Big deal.
I’m the secular version of blessed in every sense of the word. I have an amazing man who loves not only me but also my kids who are varying degrees of nice to him, depending on the minute. I have a home that we own in a just-as-nice-as-anyplace-else town. We are not poor or sick or hungry or ugly or mean.
Our babies are beautiful as they come.
We have friends and family and cats and pasta and swimsuits and words and coffee and beer and wine and acoustic guitars and sun on our faces and hikes just waiting.
And beauty. In so many things.
We have people who love us. We have people to love.
What else, really, does anyone need?
Not Omaha. Not momaha. Not women who I still care about but who maybe never liked me that much anyway.
Not even the yellow house in Dundee.
Today and yesterday and so many days before that … and tomorrow … and next month … I need what I have.
Drink the sweet syrup of the simplicity of that.