all the way home
I arrived home from my trip to Maine last night around 12:30am.
The day started off hard and just seemed to—not get worse—but just stay hard to the end. Saying good-bye to my son and granddaughter was emotionally hard. Physically I’m at low ebb with a cold coming on. I had three hours of work to get the rented house back in shape before leaving. This became complicated when I hit my head on a wall lamp causing the thing to crash to the floor and smash into smithereens. And then, an 11 hour drive.
I kept comforting myself with how much worse it not only could be but has been! I was remembering the day I left to drive home from Maine last March. It was bitterly cold with high winds and I had to muscle my luggage down a narrow set of stairs and over slippery ice to get it into the car. Then as I neared home late, late that night, heavy blinding snow made the last 3 hours literally life-threatening. Yesterday was NOT that bad and I made sure I never forgot it!
But it made me wonder what it is that makes me do that. I always compare whatever I’m struggling with with something worse that I’ve been through in the past. When I was young and hadn’t been through much, I used to compare a challenge with the time I had to give an oral report on the Algerian-French War in French! Now it seems silly but then, to give an oral report was bad enough, but to do it in another language seemed like an impossibility. And yet, I did it, (I got a ‘B’ and was grateful) so I used it for years as proof to myself that I could do impossible things!
If I can’t come up with something worse that’s happened to me, I comfort myself with the fact that it’s not anywhere near as bad as what others have been through. I clearly remember being miserable during a 24+ hour car trip with my first husband, two young sons and a mother-in-law in a small car. I was sitting in the back literally on the edge of a too small, non-ergonomically designed seat with everything in my body tired and achy. But I was thinking that it simply wasn’t that bad because imagine the poor pioneer women in covered wagons!
Can’t I just be miserable?
Evidently not. Oh, I do my fair share of moaning and groaning. I can be a real baby when sick or injured. But if it’s something I have to get through, it seems to be in my nature to mentally sustain myself with reasons why it’s not that bad. I can then realize that packing up the car on a muggy day in June is certainly preferrable to a blizzardish one in March. That a late night drive alone in familiar territory with a loving husband waiting at home to give me a warm, hearfelt embrace when I FINALLY pull into to the driveway is really just something to get through and not something to wish away. My life is and has been easy and full of many days without danger or real hardship. I know I should not forget that.
I can still feel buffeted and bruised by my day yesterday. Take a day to recover my bearings. Do blog entries. Open mail. Wash my hair. Be with my husband. And remember things like…
…when I was in Junior High School, I did a dramatic interpretation from a play called All the Way Home by Tad Mosel (the playwright’s name is not from memory but from Google). I remember little about it except that the right to do it at a speech tournament was ‘willed’ to me by one Cheryl Somebody, a tournament-winning actress who had gone on to high school at the end of the previous year. What I do remember is that the excerpt required me to sing Swing Low, Sweet Chariot at the end. This isn’t another story about hard things I’ve been through, as for some reason, doing acting wasn’t nearly as difficult as oral reports in French! My now-husband was in that Speech Class and still talks about being wowed by my sweet soprano tremolo. I tell him it was nerves he heard, but that he believes differently makes me smile, makes me happy. I’m not much of a soprano anymore but he and I still sing together at home—where I am now once again pleasantly ensconced.
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