For my birthday I got a pair of new, summer pajamas. I love pajamas. If I could have 500 pairs of unique, cute, cotton pajamas, I totally would. I don’t want to live in them or anything, I just love them in the evening. The down side to these particular pajamas though, was that it was still a little too cold to wear them, so I tucked them away and eventually they slipped my mind.
This week started out ridiculous. Monday became a Monday, and I am not the type of girl who has Mondays. I’m not the personality type to have a bad day and then focus on how bad it is so that I only see the negative. Everything about Monday, however, went from bad to worse. It was one of those luck days where the bad luck simply kept on coming, like a geyser, even though I ignored it and attempted to laugh my way through it. My husband had gone out of town, on business, and I was left to deal with the broken air conditioning unit, the phone calls, the tornado sirens, the upset pets, the overly anxious teenager and all of the bad “luck” things that tucked in the “in-betweens”. To help matters, I haven’t been sleeping more than 2-3 hours (of broken sleep, in 15 min. intervals) for months now, and Sunday night had been an all time low. (I wear a fit bit that monitors/confirms this.)
Gen and I decided, due to the storms and bad weather, to camp out on air mattresses, in the living room. (Air mattresses because we currently have NO living room furniture, which is a whole other, increasingly stressful ordeal.) Well little sleep, naturally, happened.
Tuesday morning started out ok, despite Monday’s set backs. I ran out to do errands and was in a noon meeting that went a bit frustrating. As I’m walking back to my car I see 7 missed calls from Gen’s school. I listen to frantic messages from her about how she is sick and why I am ignoring her… (there were emails of the same tone.) Super sad… I rush to the school, (in bad, unusually thick traffic so it takes an insane amount of time) and get her home. Just as she’s settling in to our 98 degree house, (remember, broken AC) with her 103 degree fever, and I’m on the phone with our nurse- the power goes out. More storms hit, and 5 hours later, the power is restored but nothing in our fridge survived, due to the temps in the house coupled with the power outage. Awesome.
Wednesday finds my husband back in town, and back in the office. Gen makes it back to school after lunch, fever free and I’m optimistic that things might just be resuming themselves to normal… And just when I finally hit a groove of “this is good, I can deal with this”, my husband calls to tell me he’s headed to the ER due to a work injury. The rest of the day is a blur of that, taking care of make up stuff that had been neglected earlier in the week, running my high schooler to all of the many places she needs to be, running out of gas, etc.
Thursday he was home from work, but I was driving him to doctors and pharmacies, running school errands and literally hit the ground running the second my alarm went off. By the time 10 0’clock rolled around last night I was done. I was tired, I was so achy (this wasn’t a good fibromyalgia week, between the weather, the stress, the lack of sleep) and I just wanted to crumble into a heap and cry. This furniture situation has my blood pressure soaring and my guilt soaring because it’s such a shallow issue when there are REAL problems in the world. (Did I mention the dentist is calling EVERY DAY wondering when we will schedule Genny’s oral surgery and braces? the $6000 process that we just don’t have the cash lying around for, and I tell them that we are working on figuring something out, but they call back the next day. It just makes me feel like crap…)
BUT THEN, then, last night, I look in my PJ drawer and there are my birthday pjs. And they are new cotton and they feel so cool in the hot house. I put them on and I go in to wash my face. I hadn’t even noticed how my hair looked because I’d just pulled it back while I folded laundry earlier, but it looks so great and I smile. For the first time, all week, I feel value. There, in my desperately-needs-cleaned bathroom, in my birthday pajamas, with my hair pinned back I feel like I have some worth and I feel pretty. I take a deep breath as the warm water glides over my face and, in that moment, I just commit to being in that moment.
When I crawl into bed, it’s 10:38. My husband is snoring, medication having knocked him out, and I twinge with an instantaneous sense of jealousy. I sigh because I know that gives me even less ideal time to sleep, but thats ok because despite the hardest week I’ve had in a really long time, I truly do feel full of peace. I acknowledge the feel of the pajama cotton on my skin and I feel so much comfort in the joy it brings me. I am overcome with joy for those forgotten birthday pajamas…
It’s not so bad to hide bits of joy, tucking them away for later… Note to self: just don’t forget to find them.
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