Stress

It's week of the young child. It's not a concept I completely understand, but it involves a lot of giving thanks and free food, which are two concepts I ALWAYS understand. Yesterday we took a special field trip to the library. Today we had a delightful breakfast for the parents and each got a fifteen minute break to get a free massage.

We talked about our common love of Indian culture, and then how and why she learned to do this, and then how and why it is so easy to become stressed. Stress. It's not a word I generally consider. It's not a word that I've ever necessarily associated with my life. I'm too laid back to be stressed. I'm too optimistic. I'm, quite frankly, too ambivalent to a lot of things to allow myself to become stressed. I'm the girl who always chose sleep over pulling an all-nighter. I'm the girl who would rather get things over and done with than have them sitting in the back of her mind, festering. What's done is done. What will happen will happen. Que sera sera, and all the rest. Stress has never really been a problem for me.

But as the words fell from her tattooed lips, I thought, "yes, that's exactly what I am." That's exactly what I've been feeling, and I haven't really been able to define these recent ups and downs because it's not a concept I'm familiar with. It's not a sensation I'd necessarily notice. It's not a state of mind I've ever been in before, not prolonged like this, not coming and going so frequently.

Yesterday afternoon we fell in love with a house. In LOVE. It is the perfect size in the perfect location with perfect rooms painted perfect colors. There is a backyard and a front porch and a crowd of daffodils growing in the garden. Even the windows were beautiful. Even the pavement of the sidewalks was lovely, as silly as that sounds. Even the selling price we could AFFORD, which seemed too good to be true.

And it was, of course, too good to be true. The taxes are too high and we spent all of last night in our realtor's office trying to crunch numbers. We spent all night mending the rises and falls of our hopes, our hearts. And while we still have hope, still have several people working on it, the logical part of me knows that it probably isn't going to work out.

And an even more logical part of me knows that it will be okay if it doesn't, that there are other perfect houses, that there are perhaps even more perfectly perfect houses. Que sera sera. Still, I'd be lying if I said we weren't both upset at the moment. I'd be lying if I said I truly believed it when we told people today "there's still hope!" I'd be lying if I said this whole thing wasn't terribly stressing me out. We're just so ready to have a place to call our own.

And after a very long day of trying to release that stress, of trying to be more patient with children I thought I had lost all patience for, of trying to be more patient with adults I thought I had lost all patience for, of soaking in the beautiful weather, and pushing myself that much further at the gym, and stopping to take pictures of flowers on my walk home, I am so exhausted and drained I can hardly write, let alone write eloquently. So this is what you get.

I just needed to release this somewhere, and this seemed like the perfectly perfect place to do such a thing.