questioning

Am I just not a good parent?

/ autumncircles / 4 Comments

I don’t know if it’s the holidays and my uber-high expectations of what they should be for a family, or if it is the impending financial doom my overworked and under nourished brain keep telling me I am headed for each time I swipe my debit card for yet ONE MORE gift.  Or maybe I am just not a nice person to start with and so when this viral negativity scene begins invading my body on a cellular level – how am I supposed to be able to handle two kids under the age of ten who have absolutely no interest in actually choosing gifts for others that I cannot possibly know what the perfect present may be in a cluster-f^@ked crowded store the Sunday before Christmas?

Clearly, I am not thinking clearly.

Does anyone with two kids, a tight family budget, 40-hour a week job that swing shifts on occasion with her spouse’s and little or no outlet for cranial pressure?

I do not want to be a whiner – one of those people who is not grateful for all the freaking blessings they have but there is little doubt that is exactly what I sound like!

I am re-meeting a great number of friends from my wild and theatrical times as well as those dating back to pre-high school and I have begun the ancient human tradition of comparing my life to what I perceive to be theirs.  Some are living fantastically bohemian lives in the greatest city on earth.  Others are taking fabulous trips to far away lands communing with the most awesome of nature’s creatures.  Mostly I am not really seeing anyone else in the death grips of parenting peril that I seem to have cornered myself into.  Even my own spouse and best friend are embarking on new musical journeys that are extremely promising given their individual and combined talents.

And here I sit – a’wallowing in a made-up mire of mayhem and monstrous envy writing a blog after getting so angry at my children’s apparent lack of adulthood that I threatened to return every gift I had purchased for them and email Santa to do the same.  Not exactly Donna Reed or Claire Huxtable, huh?  Probably closer to Joan Crawford or Norman’s mom…

And there are still three shopping days left…(play sound clip now … )

Trying something new to find something old

/ autumncircles / Leave a comment

Have you ever lost something and conducted an obsessive, exhaustive search only to come up frustrated and empty handed? Then, a few days or weeks or more goes by and you begin to accept that no amount of searching you do is going to find that precious something that was lost.

It is just lost.

So, you give up and let it go.

You know what’s coming, right?

The very next moment after having sincerely surrendered the search, that beautiful something manages to miraculously appear in the very place you could have sworn you checked a hundred, million times.

It hasn’t moved.

It hasn’t changed.

It’s exactly as it always was and it is right where you left it.

It’s like it was never lost at all, only hidden from your sight for a while.

I lose things all the time. Right now I am currently missing one of my favorite necklaces, the key to the second lock on my front door, the cable that connects my camera to my computer, and whatever shoes it is I decide I want to wear out that day. I continually lose things inside my purse and end up having to dump out the entire bag’s worth of stuff to locate my glasses or phone.

I lost my car once in a parking lot and was minutes away from calling the police to report it stolen before I remembered that I hadn’t parked in that lot at all – it was in the lot next to it. (Besides, I was driving a ’79 brown Pontiac LeMans at the time – who’d want to steal that?)

And yet, each time I lose something, I go through the same ingrained routine of obsessive search that upends my entire life spreading chaos along my whirlwind hunt only to be left standing alone perplexed, baffled and defeated as to where “it” could possibly be.

Well, I’ve finally decided my life is too full to waste time and energy terrorizing myself on a quest that always ends in disappointment.

So, I’ve decided to try something new. I’ve decided to trust that I will find it when I find it.

More importantly, I’ve decided to believe it is not lost at all. It is right where I left it.

Of course, you know the answer to the riddle about the three frogs sitting on a log and two decided to jump off and one decided to stay, so how many frogs are on still the log?

Which raises another question – am I jumping? Or am I staying?