MAMACADABRA

This weekend’s highlight (lowlight) came around 12:30am Monday morning when I stepped in dog poop with bare feet and in jammies as I pushed the shop-vac back in the house from the driveway where I’d emptied it of water for the eighth time as we fought the storm that was beating down on our city.  But here’s how it started…

My husband was asked to fill-in on a softball team he’d been a part of for years.  When we met he was playing ball two to three times per week.  With our newfound love for golf, he decided to not play softball this year, in an effort to get more time in on the golf course.  But Memorial Day weekend is always tough, so many players leave town, and his old team was desperate for players.

We had a tee time scheduled for yesterday and he’d been invited by a sales rep to play one of our state’s most exclusive course on Thursday.  With two golf dates on his calendar, he agreed to play the double-header.  He showed-up early and another team was also short guys.  So he played a game at 7pm.  Game two started at 8pm.  Half-way through the game, as he was running for home base, someone from the infield threw the ball home and it instead got my husband in the ankle.  Don’t worry…he’d want me to make it clear that as he crumbled in pain he made sure to slide home and got the run.  He texted me that he’d hurt his ankle pretty bad.

This is where you’d think a normal run-of-the-mill softball player would take himself out of the game.  Right?  Yes…well he finished the game.  You would then think that he would say “thanks guys, but I think I have to skip the second game in this double-header.”  Right?  Ahem…yes…well he played the 9pm game too.

In the meantime…across town…a storm blew-in.  When the rain started coming down hard I began running to the basement to check for flooding.  As you may recall, we had a very rainy week last week, and a flooded basement.  Around 10:30pm the flooding resumed.  I started vacuuming up water every 10-15 minutes and then going out into the storm to empty the full shop-vac of water onto our driveway.

My husband got home…and his ankle?  The one he injured and then PROCEEDED to play another game and a half?  It was the size of a baseball.  I forced him to ice it, which he was not interested in doing at all, and I continued to run downstairs every few minutes.  We stayed up with the basement until 2am when we finally decided we had to just give up and get some sleep.

Monday morning we ran our little girls to their other parents and then came home to cancel our tee time due to my husbands sore and swollen ankle (do you know how gorgeous it was yesterday??? Perfect day for golf!!!).  We napped, walked the dog, and then had dinner with my parents.  My uncle broke his neck late last week and my parents had been out of the country.  They cut their trip short and went straight to him and this was the first chance we’d had to learn how he was doing and what the next steps would be.  It was good to have more information but incredibly trying to hear about my uncle’s accident and what undoubtedly lies ahead.

The point is this.  While we had a great weekend in many respects…there were parts that weren’t so good.  They were straight-up exhausting.  I woke up this morning so tired I wanted to cry thinking about heading to the office.  Tonight I’m tired.  I’m so tired of my professional challenges.  I’m so tired of trying to make sense of my workplace and going back and forth between wanting to make it work and wanting to run screaming.  I’m so tired of family falling ill or having serious health concerns.  I’m so tired of this stupid pain I have in my hip.  I’m so tired of this phase in which our dog wants to eat everything under the sun (this weekend he threw-up a rock the size of a golf ball).  I’m so tired of not being able to exercise the way I want to.  I’m so tired of having to be so conservative financially.  I’m going to go ahead and steal this from wherever it originally came from and exclaim I AM SICK AND EFFING TIRED OF BEING SICK AND EFFING TIRED!!!

Okay…yes…I added-in the “effings.”

That said…I didn’t start 2012 aiming to have an okay year.  I didn’t go into it hoping to merely survive.  I didn’t have high hopes to make it through in one piece.  And in fact, I wasn’t even looking to have a good year.  I came into this year with plans for it to be transformational.  I had high hopes to leave 2012 a different woman than I entered it.  I was aiming to make changes that had long been on my list and had long been neglected.  It was going to be epic.

I’ve written posts in which I’ve lamented about things that have happened so far this year and how I still have plenty of time to turn things around.  I’m well aware that when you feel like the hits keep on coming, and you focus on the hits that keep on coming, that the hits will absolutely keep on coming.  I get all that.  But tonight what’s needed is a proclamation of deliberate transformation.  Because as it turns out…transformation doesn’t just happen overnight.  Apparently I must have an active role in transforming myself and admittedly I’m doing a terrible job.  I’m focusing on the bad stuff and my inability to see what’s next.  And, shocker, that’s what I’m getting more of.  Bad stuff and panic about not knowing how this story unfolds.  And I’m to the point at which my b-tching and moaning is irritating me.

Oy.  I need a vacation.  One in which I can relax, and be myself, and enjoy my husband’s company, and just take deep breaths, and know that tomorrow and the next day and the next day I get to wake-up at any time my heart desires and do whatever I damn-well please.

In absence of that (sigh) I need to really focus on what I want, and where I want to be, and how grateful I am for the remarkable things I have in my life.  I need to focus on those things every moment of every day until they are my reality.  Because this?  This right here?  This is not the reality I’m interested in thank you very much.

TODAY:  What if I deliberately transform myself and my life into exactly who and what I want it to be?  Or…for the love of Pete…what if I at least give it a shot?