One More Best Day

So for the past two days, you could say I’ve been a bit weepy.

Okay, that’s actually not even close to accurate. “Weepy” implies some moments of tearing up. Maybe there’s a tissue involved, but usually you can get away with a finger wipe. What I’m experiencing is more. . . sobbing. Yes, hysterical sobbing. That’s probably a better description.

This was all kicked off when I was checking in with my dentist’s office. See, despite my grand and decisive announcement that I was giving up on yet another ridiculous attempt to cure my trigeminal neuralgia/atypical facial pain, I’m still undergoing treatment to readjust my jaw. It’s all turned into this rather pathetic and hopeless situation that’s left me in limbo land with no relief plus teeth that no longer fit together. Anyway, I was relaying my current and continuing condition to the dentist’s assistant, a woman who is, sadly, kind of a friend of mine now because I’ve known her for two whole years.

At the end of my pity party, I asked her how she was doing — she’s pregnant with twins and was sounding particularly tired. Turns out things weren’t going well at all. She lost one of the babies.

I went to lunch the next day with my friend, who also has twins, and people must have thought we were kind of crazy as we sat crying over our food. I’ve had — tragically — friends who’ve lost children in this same way. And I’ve had other friends who’ve had miscarriages. But I don’t know why this particular incident affected me so much. Maybe because I’d been feeling so sorry for myself and it was such a reality check (something my friend said I need to cut myself some slack on since one person’s pain doesn’t make another ones irrelevant — true, just hard to remember sometimes).

So that’s what got me going. Who knows. Maybe I’m hormonal. Maybe it’s all the pain meds I’ve been taking. Maybe it’s just all the pain, period. It breaks you down and makes you kind of lose it every once in a while (okay, more than every once in a while). But that wasn’t the end of it — the knockout punch came from a rather embarrassing source: Taylor Swift.

My kids love Taylor Swift. I don’t want to talk about how many times we’ve watched the “You Belong With Me” video. The problem is, now I like Taylor Swift. I can’t help it. I guess it could be worse — could be Justin Bieber. Anyway, yesterday, I decided to torture myself by listening to “The Best Day” in the car by myself. This is a terrible idea because with the exception of the part about setting up a video camera in the kitchen (I’m old, so that didn’t happen in my day) I basically could’ve written this song word for word. It’s all about a girl waxing poetic about her mother. And everyone knows this is not a good idea when your mother is, well, dead.

 
I love this song because it’s all about remembering ordinary days that were extraordinary. And not because anybody won an award or graduated or got married. They were just days when people loved each other and took care of each other. Like we all try to do, every day.

I ended up sobbing in the car, then pulling myself together, walking into the house, and sobbing all over my husband. Poor bastard.

And he tried to take care of me, like he does. Every day.

Then tonight, thankfully, I spent the evening with a bunch of friends who made me laugh harder than I have in a very long time. It was that type of laughing that makes you kind of embarrassed because you can’t get over yourself, but you also don’t frankly care.

Just a little extraordinary in my ordinary.

Just, lucky for me, one more best day.