balance

Blissfully bumping along in my no worry day I was jolted back to reality by a call from the school nurse. Nothing stops a heart faster than fearing your child is hurt or worse. My mother always warned me of these feelings proclaiming, "you'll understand when you have children". Well now I have one, a boy and boy oh boy she wasn't wrong. It's bad enough fearing the phone call, but boys are just dumb. Boys do stupid things because that's just how they're made. They play with sticks and stones and jump off high things thinking they can fly. They wave shovels in the air and throw balls at windows all the while laughing their little dumb heads off. Oh sure it's funny until someone loses an eye or flips backward off a porch or gets hit in the neck with a stick. Good Lord, he is only 4. How the heck do I make it to his adulthood?  My husband tells me stories of all the dumb things he did as a boy and let me tell you, dumb! He used to launch dog poop from the end of a stick at people he didn't like, hide for hours from his poor screaming mother, jump off cliffs into the shallow lake, climb back up those same cliffs. He was a holy terror. Neighbors used to hide. If that's what's in store for this mom, God help me. After retrieving my child and getting him settled on the couch with heating pad and Tylenol(pulled neck muscle)I than retrieved today's mail. Please don't let there be anything suspect I pleaded to no one. Of course as fate loves to have it, a big threatening, I mean scary take care of asap bill. Great. You see yesterday I paid my store rent and paid for a work trip to New York City. Even though just an overnighter one of my favorite friends is joining me and I have fun things planned for the down time. A lot of I Love New York crammed into 48 hours. I was also making tentative plans to do some estate sale-ing this week with my partners in crime. So you can see I was happy. No worries. Bills were paid, so I thought. Financial plan for the next 6 months in order and now, yes, F*@# reality check. January is usually a month of despair for me. I usually enter this month with an overdrawn bank account and unpaid bills from the holiday frenzy. This was not to be in 2013. My husband and I were smart, dare I say thrifty this year when it came to gifts. Money got put in the bank not someone else's pocket. Life was on track, again or so I thought. See, I am a BIG believer in waiting for the other shoe to drop. For once, I wasn't thinking about the balance, I was just happy the scales were tipped in my favor. So I guess I got too big for my karmic britches because the shoe dropped hard. I suppose after writing it down it doesn't sound all that bad. My child is fine, the big scary bill will get paid, but in the heat of the moment when my stomach is flip-flopping all over the place, life feels sucky. I don't know what it is about my generation, but sometimes it feels like we all got a really bad turn. Trying to find balance in such an unstable environment is so tough, no wonder we are chasing yogis, and cleansing ourselves with disgusting juices and self-promoting only the happy times. Life is hard and ugly, but it is also beautiful and fabulous and if one can find the balance between the two than I guess we are ahead of the game. For me that would mean finding a little financial stability and a big plastic bubble in which to enclose my child. Since the latter is slightly unrealistic I suppose just being the best mother, wife, and friend that I can will have to suffice. Good evening world.