A compass wildly spinning

 The past few weeks have left me reeling. I know I'm not the only one.

What should look like this:

Is looking and feeling like this:

I am falling, and trying like hell to get back up again. Until the next gutpunch.

"Mercury is in retrograde" people say, as if that would really explain the hellfire and damnation that has rained down.

When you are just taking one hit after another - when everything seems to pile up and pile on and spill over - all of the OTHER stuff, the regular day to day stuff, and the things you committed to forever ago, and the things that are important to you, or to people you love, suddenly become part of the burden. And that can make a girl ornery.

I learned this lesson recently, when people were asking me perfectly legitimate questions at a time when I was feeling physically, spiritually and emotionally overwhelmed. Instead of just answering their damn questions, or simply saying "I honestly don't know" I had to spend a great deal of time talking myself down from responding to their laundry list of woes, with a list of my own.

Tit for tat. (Says the girl with the tat on her tit.)

Deep breath.

Right. They're busy. Or at least, they think they are busy. Maybe they are busy in relation to their  normal life of navel gazing.

My point is this:

Everyone is busy.

Everyone's life sucks at some point.

Everyone is over-committed, under-funded and out of time.

"Until you've walked a mile in my shoes, you can't judge me."

Well, I'm calling bullshit on that. Because unless you are wearing some really hot shoes in a size 10 1/2 (which is practically impossible to find, BTW) I have no interest in wearing your shoes.

Never mind walking a mile in them.

Stop with the excuses already. Put on your own damn shoes, and start walking.

And if you are assuming that you are busier or more stressed out or more heartbroken or somehow more important than the next guy, well. You would be wrong. To behave as though you deserve priority, that you are above the rules or somehow excused from following them......that just makes it easier for people to dismiss you as a self-centered ass. Even if you are currently the ass featured in your own private game of pin the tail on the donkey.

I am watching families come undone, and slowly finding a way to come back together again. A new kind of together, they hold their compass facing north and the compass swings wildly, as their North Star suddenly heads due South. And all I can think, as the waves of remembering lead to a terrible, painful, breathless sadness, is keep your eye on the horizon.

And even with that life and death reality slapping me repeatedly in the face, I am looking around and seeing more examples of pain - different, but just as terrible - all around. And I am realizing.

Life is full of hard lessons and painful experiences and NO ONE will be spared.

So. Lesson learned, and lets move forward acknowledging that everyone's reality may be different in the details, but the load is equally hard to bear at times.

Buck up, Buttercup. We're in this together.

Valentine's Day with a broken heart.

Earlier this week, I had a full blown temper tantrum. Like, a toddler sized meltdown. I was the almost 40 year old woman crying and stamping her feet.
Because my family did not acknowledge my birthday.

Other than a little note left by my bedside as my husband snuck off to work, there were no cards or presents or dinner reservations. Not even a take-out pizza. My kids never bothered to say Happy Birthday. My family forgot to call. The lovely texts and Facebook messages were drowned out by the silence in my own home. For all of my "I don't care about birthdays, I don't need a present!" bravado, it still hurt that no one at my house seemed to think my birthday was worth celebrating. I mean, couldn't someone have stuck a candle in a fucking Twinkie? Would that have been so hard? Lucy makes cards to give to perfect strangers - surely she had made one for me in her fully-stocked art room.

But I was mistaken.

So at the end of the day, after realizing that no, there were no dinner plans, and yes, I was going to have to figure out what to feed the kids after all, and no, there wasn't so much as a birthday Oreo coming my way, I lost my shit a little. I was tired, and overwhelmed, and my feelings were hurt.

I declared the next day a do-over. I made dinner plans. My boss gave me a cake. WITH candles. I read birthday messages on Facebook. Max apologized for not saying Happy Birthday. That night at my favorite sushi place, I had a cocktail. We got home around 8. Had cake. Got the kids in bed. It had been a good day, even if it was a day late and I *had* been forced to plan it myself. As I rocked the baby to sleep, my cellphone rang. It was late by then. Too late to get a phone call for any good reason.

And that was when I found out that Harlan had died.

As I climbed in the car barefoot clutching my phone and a charger and very little else, and drove down the mountain in the dark towards my friend, the one who had called when she found her self, suddenly, a widow with two kids and a mortgage to  take care of, I had no idea what had happened. It didn't matter, of course. All that matters is that he was here - a man with a grin permanently taking up his entire face, eyes that crinkled and a booming laugh - and then he was not.

When I opened the door and walked into a living room so full of grief it was impossible to take a breath, the reality hit me right in the chest. I steadied myself.

I am still steadying myself. When I am struck by another wave of knowing, the double overhead that towers over you for that brief terrifying moment before you are swallowed up, those few seconds when down is up and your ears are filled with a roaring, and you cannot breathe, I just hang on for dear life until I find my way to the surface again.

Valentine's Day was full of love and hugs and friends and family. We passed the baby (who was clearly brought into my life in order to help all of us through the weeks ahead) and ate boxes of chocolates, and consumed entire pies in one sitting. An endless pot of coffee in the kitchen and a steady stream of people coming and going.

But one very important person was not there. And each of us, in our own way, celebrated that crazy day of Hallmark love with a broken heart.