Mojo on the Run — Waiting for the Dark Days to Pass

– Posted in: Blogging, Chronic Pain, Cranky Tammy, Crazy Tammy, Depression, Holidays, Homework, Parenting, Personal Insanity, Shopping Hell, Things To Do with Kids, Travel

I haven’t been around much in Internet land. Last weekend, I took the kids to Monterey (which was quite the haul in a three-day span). Then they had to do Nevada Day reports (Sarah Winnemucca and the Hoover Dam, if you’re just crazy curious). And, of course, there was Halloween. And yes, all of that stuff made me exhausted and frantic and at one point paralyzed by the inability to get anything crossed off of a laughably-long to-do list. But truth be told, the reason for the radio silence? I sort of flipped out and decided to give up on blogging.

I should know from years of experience that these dark moments will pass, but when I’m in them, they really don’t feel like they’ve just stopped by and set up a tent for a few days. They seem more like they’re building a four bedroom house with a finished basement. This particular “construction project” was ushered in by our trip, which pretty much depleted most of my energy reserves. I’m not in the best shape to begin with — if you read this blog, you already know all of this drama. If you don’t, in a nutshell I have fibromyalgia and atypical facial pain — welcome to the diagnosis wastebasket. Anyway, I’m not an idiot. After a three-day driving trip, I knew I was screwed.

Then came the day before Halloween. The kids needed to finish their Nevada Day reports and we needed to get everything ready for the next day. We have a bunch of friends and family over for dinner every year because Halloween is big on our street. Our neighbor starts decorating at the end of August (he has a graveyard on his lawn and a haunted house in his garage). So my kids now feel the need to be the second biggest game in town.

Run Joan! Run!

Everything was going well until I ran into my arch nemesis: the printer. Printers hate me. Seriously hate me. I can’t begin to catalog the number of times throughout my life when a printer has screwed me over and made me look and/or feel like Joan Cusack running through the halls in that scene from Broadcast News.

To be fair, our printer is about a hundred years old. And we’ve known that it needs to be replaced for about fifty. But I swear, every frickin’ time I go to print one of the kids’ projects that’s due the next day, the damn thing is out of ink. Every. Single. Time.

But I keep my cool. We decide to go out and get ink, stuff for the Halloween party, and lunch (three birds, one stone — very tricky). And so off we go to Costco (two kids, on a Sunday — not very tricky).

I survive this. Not only survive but shine. All’s well. We’re on schedule. We’re crossing things off the list. We’re smiling. And then I go to print again. . .

This is when things start to go badly. It quickly becomes apparent that the printer will soon become spare parts for my son’s robot experiment. But in the meantime, I start freaking out. Like, really freaking out. Because I do NOT want to research, go out, and buy a printer TODAY. And come home and hook it up TODAY. And make it talk to my computer, which always takes about ten times longer than anyone thinks it will, TODAY.

The poor kids. Now I can see exactly where they get all of their mannerisms from whenever they throw fits (their father — it’s all from their father).

So already-long story short, I ended up going out and buying a new printer. This after I laid down on the bathroom floor for a while to collect my thoughts. Which is where, incidentally, my son also found me and was nice enough to lie down next to me in solidarity (or maybe just to make sure I wasn’t going to off myself).

Anyway, that’s what started the steady descent downward. The final nail in the coffin had something to do with a Native American Halloween costume and the inability to find a properly-sized Tupperware container to hold Greek yogurt. But that’s not important right now. . .

What is important is that I pretty much lost the will to go on. It was a “nobody likes me, everybody hates me, think I’m gonna eat some worms” moment. A moment that just happened to last about three days or so.

Photo by PartlySunny

But I’m better now. Not “Woo Hoo!” better, but better. Today I threw the printer in my trunk like a dead body and took it to school for “disassembly” (my son did this voice the whole time: “Please! Please! I’ll be better! Don’t put me in the trunk! I promise I’ll work this time! Boo hoo hoo!”). And then I wrote this positively adorable, totally engaging post (it sounds a lot wittier if you read the whole thing in an English accent). And I’ll find something to post tomorrow at World’s Worst Moms (yet another neglected child).

The thing is, getting your mojo back isn’t easy. It’s not just a matter of putting on your stilettos, strutting into a bar, grabbing it off a table, flipping your hair, and walking out. Sometimes you have to sit quietly and wait for it to come back to you.

So I’ll give my mojo and myself a little more time. If for no other reason because I really don’t want to bust out the heels. They really hurt my feet.

1 Comment… add one

Wombat Central November 3, 2011, 2:58 pm

Glad to hear you're headed back from the bathroom floor, sweet lady. 🙁 My desire to blow up my blog seems to be a cyclical thing. I'mma go back and watch Joan now. I <3 Joan.
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