Stupid Daddy leaves tomorrow morning for his two-day stint away from home. He does this every week, and every week it sucks, but in a regular, no surprises kind of way. By the time Thursday morning rolls around, I'm exhausted and unshowered and I've served lots of frozen, not-green foods and I can hardly tolerate my kids and I'm even more foul-tempered than usual. And then Stupid Daddy returns and I nap for a couple of hours and things get back to normal, to the extent that anything is ever normal in our house.
I've kind of gotten used to this rhythm. And yet tonight, I find myself totally panicked about the next 48 hours. Like, somehow, it's going to suck that much more, like it's going to suck beyond the breaking point.
But I'm trying really, really hard to--here I am rolling my eyes--take it moment by moment. So if, for example, we all wake up tomorrow and Ezra greets me by screaming at me and storming out of the room, that's only how he's acting right at that instant and it's no indication of how he's going to behave next, no true predictor of how the day will pan out. In another instant, things could be different. He could come back into the room and put his arms around me and tell me he loves me.
Okay, probably not. But the point is it doesn't help to anticipate the next annoying or irritating episode. It only intensifies what's irritating or annoying about the episode at hand, which is already close to exhausting your resources.
So as the day progresses, I'm going to treat each new insult, affront, and bout of hostility fairly--without bias, without memory. Then I'm going to put on my hair shirt and sleep soundly on my bed of nails.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment