As a general rule I’m not a crier. Those of you who’ve been in the room with me when Jim and Pam have an argument or that Kodak commercial comes on- you know the one, when the little girls steps on her dad’s feet to dance and then all the sudden it’s her wedding- you’d laugh to hear me say this. My day to day people know though, that you’re not going to see me overwhelmed with emotion very often. Thankfully, my BFF has the same aversion to tears in the presence of another human, and so when either of us sees the other heading down that road, a joke is usually in order.
You might imagine then, my surprise when I found myself sobbing last night for hours, headphones in place, angsty music at the ready, complete with the rocking in place and the silent “oh god please don’t let anyone in my family wake up right now” pillow-sob.
it took my by surprise, this stealth attack of emotion, and I was so disoriented by it that I just wandered the house for a while, listening to music and crying, amazed that the medication with which I’d been very liberal at bedtime (don’t we sound do grown up now: “I took a double dose of my MEDICATION” instead of the teenage “I wanted to stop feeling so a took a bunch of pills”) hadn’t knocked the emotion (now that we’re grownups, we call it emotion, and not angst) right out of my head.
Instead I snuck into my son’s room where of course he was semi-awake, whacking his head on the only hard surface in his bed, and I put a silky pillow under his head and rubbed his back while he whacked and rocked himself to sleep, much like I did when I was a baby, and up until- well, last night, I guess.
I woke up at four a.m. eyes crusty with half shed tears and stumbled back to bed where I no longer really have a spot because last week in a fit of “something has to change and there’s got to be something I can do to make things different” I decided we needed a new bed and the new bed is 18 inches narrower than the old bed. I thought I’d solved that problem when I created the Princess Cubby (see flickr) but somehow I wake up every morning with a small hand slapping my head like an alarm clock while snoring only just loud enough to keep me up all night.
I still don’t know what started it all. All I know is I woke up after a dream about the Real Housewives doing a live action performance piece involving sex toys and the thought in my head has to do with whether, when you find yourself completely at odds with your whole life, whether it’s the medication that needs to change, or the life.