These are bound to happen and I am optimistic that maybe this one will be it for a little while. I am close to tears all day and completely overwhelmed and buried under questions and inquiries and instructions and waiting for updates and I made an amazing lemon bundt cake this morning and forget to not follow the directions and tried to pry it out of the pan after ten minutes, when if you've been baking for as long as I have you know better and you wait until it's room temperature because otherwise it will break apart and it did so we chopped it up and put the glaze on and now it's a sort of a crumble-dessert. It's very good only I was hoping for slices as a treat for the boys who don't live here but visit every day. Home baking is a treat any time, if you have a penis, apparently. It's sort of a pain in a ass to me, when I can buy cookies for $5, why in the hell would I want to mix and stir and bake and then I guess...hope they come off the pan intact?
But I still make a lot of things, mostly things that end in cake because cake is supposed to make Bridget feel better, only this time the cake was just the icing on my..cake of a day, I guess.
Ben took me for chicken fingers when he got home and I feel a little better but now I have a stabbing hot poker of a pain in my chest and if I don't find a way soon to not be completely overthrown every time life hands me a curve ball or that big list of things to be done, I think I will implode. Or maybe I'll learn to relax the hard way, like I already do, breathing through panic attacks, wishing I had all my shit together like everyone else seems to, even though I know that's a fallacy on both counts.
I am reading One Day by David Nicholls. In it, the male lead remarks about not having cried for eight years prior to a massive breakdown after visiting his dying mother. Notable to me was not the fact that hey, he has baggage and Christ, what an asshole, but eight years without a tear? Is he a robot?
I don't think I've ever gone eight days. Maybe I'll start keeping track. I mean, I have nothing to prove and I'm not saddled with gender bias when it pertains to visible emotions (hell, if they are visible, I CAN SHOW YOU EVERY LAST ONE) but I could take a stab at not crying for a bit and see what happens, even though I have a tendency to drop big fat blubbery tears in place of any definable emotion. I've always been this way. When I think about Cole or Jacob and how they could talk me down until I had dry eyes and even breaths, I believe it was a gift that the others are learning about as slowly as I adapt to change.
In other words, I'll let you know how that goes too.
So what am I doing tonight? Killing time while I wait for Caleb to arrive. Seeing the new paperwork, payroll and benefits falling into place for the boys, who depend on me when they CLEARLY SHOULDN'T for very important Life Decisions I'm not qualified to make, realizing it's just about mid-week, and the upcoming weekend will be necessary and restorative, and assuring you that you are completely pulled together and awesome, because thank God you're not a little mess too.
Tomorrow will be better, this too shall pass, as they say. Also Caleb is here now, and the first words out of his mouth were How are your tales of woe tonight, princess?
How indeed.
I smiled darkly for him, before telling him I would be just a few more minutes, because he's one of the few who simply embraces me as I am, weird panicky uptight competence and everything. Like a little ball of nervous energy, I'll do just fine. Just don't ask me how I'm doing. Caleb won't ask, he'll just decide.
On my behalf.
Which is fine with me and probably better anyway. Let him pick. Let him choose everything and then maybe someday I won't have to answer for it. Call the shots and hit those targets, and bag yourself a