Slippery little sucker

Slippery little sucker! Yes, that whole ‘get a grip’ attitude that I promised in my blog last week is proving somewhat elusive.  Just when I have a couple of days strung together with my hands firmly gripping the wheel, something unexpected comes at me and causes me to swerve erratically.  Friday night, all was quiet on the home front so I decided to take a load off and sit to watch a movie.  A film had just started on TV so I stuck with that.  It was something along the lines of the book, ‘How to win friends and influence people,’ but the opposite version if you can imagine.  I had a good chuckle here and there; fully enjoying my hour and twenty minutes of escapism and then bam! In came the  'Hollywood,happily ever after’ ending.  Well, the tears started flowing and let me tell you the phrase, ‘I cried buckets,’ had nothing on this wailing session.  It was akin to a full toddler, temper tantrum! I felt like kicking my legs and thumping my fists on the ground, all the while shouting, ‘Where’s my happy ending? I want a happy ending!’

I’d like to tell you that the whole pity party ended there but unfortunately it did not.  Saturday rolled around, the younger kids were at their Dad’s for the day and my teenager dumped me and our plans in favour of doing something with her friends. Who can blame her? So it was that, seeing as I could not be bothered to organise myself other plans, I found myself with a free day.  First, I did what any woman, bordering on the edge of sanity, would do; I took myself off to the shops and bought myself a new handbag and a pair of boots.  How could I resist?  These designer outlet stores have a way of wooing us into thinking that because a price tag has a 75% slash on the RRP, that we would be fools to resist.  Clearly, I am no fool so snapped up their offer. 

I had managed to make it to lunchtime with my ‘get a grip’ firmly in place and then I decided to sit in the garden, with headphones on and listen to music.  At that point, my eyes started to fill once again and overspill in a torrential flow reminiscent of a cartoon character.  I can’t even tell you what it was that set me off.  Feelings have a way of filling up and brimming over with a need to escape somewhere.   Perhaps I do need to let all the tears out to wash away the past and free myself up for future smiles.  There are certainly various stages of grief and it is possible to revisit stages before complete healing takes place.  (That's what my 'Overcoming life's traumas' stack of books are leading me to believe.)  The way I like to look at it is to tell myself that with each emotional outburst, I am moving one step closer to closing this current chapter of my life in readiness for moving forward with of the rest of my life.

So after a few hours of both retail and personal grief therapy, I hauled my sorry ass up and decided to tackle the much dreaded project that was still haunting me from the top of my To Do list.  You guessed it...my office.  I attacked it like a ninja and by the time the kids returned in the evening, I felt like I deserved to take a gold medal in the ‘Office Cleaning 2012 Event’! Bless my precious children for making all the right noises when I did the big reveal to show them what I’d been up to all afternoon.  I do have before and after pictures but I’m not sure I’m brave enough to post the before ones for fear of you all thinking that I should have been on an episode of ‘Hoarders’.

Toward the end of the weekend, I felt like I’d got a controlled but comfortable grip on reality; despite having turned up at church on Sunday, clutching a giant pavlova for the buffet lunch only to find that it’s next week.  And what about my happy ending?  In the words of my new best friend, (and I am entitled to call her that because she liked my Living Life Facebook page and wrote me a personal message) Karen Salmansohn, best selling author from New York, I will create my own happily ever after one day at a time.