Just Breathe

Life is sheer chaos.

I’ve been hemming and hawing mentally over a series of intractable problems. These problems took up residence in my brain — and my life — about eight months ago and I’ve been doing everything possible to untangle them ever since.

It has been a very long eight months, indeed.

Tonight, I was laying on the floor next to the Babyman’s crib, because he needed some extra mama-love. It was a long, hard day of consuming chocolate and jelly beans and playing in the park and the boy was beside himself.

Even the array of colorful treats in his Easter basket sent him into a gale of tears. The choices! They were simply too overwhelming. For dinner he had ambrosia salad, a hot dog, a pear, a cup of yogurt and some ketchup … and he ate nary a bite of any of them, after begging for them like a parched man begs for water.

The park wasn’t enough to soothe him and his people train kept derailing. Stories were too short or too long, and his “shirt like Daddy’s” had a tag in it.

He fell asleep on a bed that wasn’t his and woke during the careful transfer. Shattered like a half-peeled egg, he rolled and tossed among his pillows and beloved blankets, begging me to snuggle him.

I held his hand through the bars with one of my own, while my other five fingers busily checked emails and tabbed from work website to work website.

I felt bleary, like the boy, gut swollen with too-rich food and not enough sleep. My head throbbed with anticipation for Monday, frantically running down my Great Big List Of Unknown Outcomes and Things I Can’t Control.

In my frantic tabbing, I opened Lindsay’s blog and she asked, “What message is the universe sending you these days?”

I laughed a little then, a wry snort halfway to a sob.

The universe is laughing its ass off at me right about now.

I’m right where I always wanted to be, on the cusp of real professional achievement. I have two beautiful children and a super-smart husband who still likes to catch glimpses of me when I’m getting in and out of the shower.

I’m almost 40. I have just four months to count down before that unbelievable number shows up on my driver’s license. Did you know that one of my local establishments won’t sell you a beer unless you were born after 1990?

NINETEEN NINETY!

I saw that sign last week, when I was wolfing down a disgusting piece of pizza before running back to a desk that wasn’t mine to do work that becomes more challenging every day for reasons way beyond the scope of my control.

But Lindsay, she brought me back down to the center of me, with that one sentence:

What message is the universe sending you these days?

I held my boy’s lanky fingers in my own and I closed my eyes. Downstairs, my girl was 160 pages into “Charlie and The Great Glass Elevator,” a novel she found this morning wedged under her Easter basket by a generous bunny.

That is when I wanted to write here. In this dusty place. The beginning of the ending that is right out of my grasp started here. I wanted to come back here and say something. I didn’t know what that something was, but it seems the universe was shouting loud and clear that it was time to set the problems down, all tangled as they are, and put one letter in front of the other, the way I always have when I can’t decide which up is the end and vice versa.

So I’m here. I’m looking at you. I’m listening to the stillness and my breath and his little-boy breath and the comforting nun-nun-NUN-nun of the TV through his floor below which sit the other pieces of my heart and I

just

breathe

again

and

again.

I begin.

Again.