homecoming queen

Always before, no matter how wonderful my vacation spot, there's been a part of me that couldn't wait to get home. I'm such a homebody - and a real affront to the stereotype of the "on the town Gemini" - that I've consistently had a strong pull to be back in my own space. I love traveling, and would happily go virtually anywhere, but at some point I just want to be home. The feeling of peace and comfort as soon as I walk in the door has always calmed my soul.


Not anymore.


We were scheduled to come home late Sunday so that on Monday the kids could go to school and I could go to work. But that morning, after a self-imposed moratorium on any kind of emotion whatsoever, I woke up weeping and couldn't seem to muster up the balls to stop. By the time I kind of pulled it together, I resembled something in the roadkill family and my inner control freak had gone MIA on me. For a woman who prides herself on iron fisted self control, it was a really ugly moment.


But, for the first time in a while, the mechanical gods were smiling on me. My mom's car had thrown a belt of some sort and the part the mechanics needed to fix it wouldn't arrive until sometime Monday morning. So with my family egging me on, I made another uncharacteristic move and called in for my Monday shift. There was certainly a huge element of truth in not leaving my mom in the middle of nowhere without a car, but we all knew that was only part of the equation. The thought of going home was literally making me sick. And if I could put it off for another 24 hours, so be it. (And on a preemptive note, my new therapist insists that putting on a neutral face for your kids isn't as good a solution as I want it to be. Guess we tested out that theory).



My living arrangement won't be changing until the beginning of June. We'll all be one big, happy family living under one roof until then. But a lot is going on with me personally, and even though it's all going to be good (in the end), at the moment I'm in the Mojave Desert in the Highway of Life. There are people reading this blog who shouldn't be (and who shouldn't want to either), so I'm going to leave it at that for the moment. There was a comment made on an earlier post that pretty much sums up my current position - "post what you're comfortable with and save the rest for the book."


I've never been a person who trusts easily to start with and it's terribly hard to realize that there really are people you can't trust with your emotions or feelings. And there are a lot of conflicting thoughts that come with that realization. One of them, strengthened by my refusal to drag my kids into this, is envy. I envy, almost more than I can say, people who have the freedom to say what they want to and just get it out. But I've decided that there are those who will no longer be burdened by my thought processes, and while for the most part I'm surprisingly comfortable with that, sometimes the urge to just let 'er rip is pretty tempting.


So when I got back home Monday afternoon and checked a few blogs, I was immediately struck by Irene's. She has called me her "sister in arms", and to tell the truth I've been worried about her while I was gone. I do not for a second envy a single thing she is going through and wish I could snap my fingers and wish it all away so she could be the happy woman she totally deserves to be. But as I was catching up on what is going on with her, I couldn't help feeling a little envy at the way she's working through it all. And the more I read, the more I thought


Damn. I couldn't have said it better myself.