Midnight Medley

I spend my days alternating between thinking I'm a nearly kick-ass goddess to thinking I'm nearly a complete and utter failure on many levels. And in the times between those two extremes I have brief moments of thinking I might either be mental or perfectly normal. Is it possible to be both? To be all of these things? Is everyone like this?

Earlier in the week I had it all going on. I was accomplishing big things, making people say "wow", making myself say "wow", making my husband say, "good God, can't you be like a regular person for a change?" I always know I'm doing particularly awesome things when I send him into a downward spiral to contemplate his own inadequacies. We have developed a really nice mix of praise and humiliation in our relationship. Not everyone can have what we enjoy.

And then on Wednesday or Thursday, about the time my kids unrolled 250 feet of dental floss and ran through most rooms of the house weaving in and out between all the table legs, I felt the decline beginning. And here I sit at midnight wanting to update my blog and feeling like I have nothing more to tell you than describe how freaking annoying it is to wind up 250 feet of dental floss while the whole time I'm thinking, "Am I supposed to throw this away because maybe now it's unsanitary?" I'm really not up on my floss etiquette, so if you come over to visit, please bring your own just in case.

Probably I'm being too hard on myself. Surely there are other things I can talk about, like how my youngest son ran away from me again and I didn't catch him for about two blocks. I just made my entre into small town local politics and the whole time I was running down the street screaming I was thinking anyone who was witnessing the event would agree that this scene would probably not be a big a confidence booster for my constituents.

Certainly I must be too hard on myself. Because I made homemade beef jerky today, except I ate a little bit of it tonight and now I'm queasy and concerned that I may have just poisoned my whole family. My mother did that once before I was born, nearly killed her family with tainted tuna salad. They were on a road trip through the desert in the 60's with, apparently, no cooler. Did they even have coolers in the 60's? This is a family event that we joke about to this day and mostly we do it to make my mom mad, but on a deeper level I think we all are afraid she might do it again. She's frugal and eats leftovers that are way too old for most people because she hates waste. Personally, I hate puking and nearly dying way more than I hate waste.

I am too hard on myself, because it's really not all failure. Sometimes the pendulum swings quickly, quietly, suddenly the other direction. Through the darkened doorway I see hubby just now stagger into the kitchen in a fog of midnight sleepiness to sample more beef jerky, mumbling how good it is. And there he goes wandering out and here I go to follow and fold him gently into bed covers, wrap him in my arms, two spoons, one love, one good ending to another day of our lives together.

[photo: (nz)dave]