In like a lion...out like a lunatic lamb

To the trees!

Twas the night before Easter... and I've got a dozen and a half hard-boiled eggs cooling and a 20 lb ham in the fridge. This is not a drill - I've got teenagers coming dinner tomorrow. Have you ever fed teenagers at a feasting holiday (or, you know, in general)? They're a cross between rabid hyenas and starving raptors. Pile it high and stay the hell out of the way. To be completely honest, feeding them keeps the passive aggressive (or blatant antagonism) back and forth between them to a minimum. So I'll prep a double-sized po-tate-er casserole and practice hurling asparagus spears aimed for their mouths without a second thought in the name of my own personal brand of holiday sanity. Mmmm, taters...

Visiting relatives, especially of the sibling variety, bring out a special blend of my mom's personalities. This is an evolving thing lately as well though. Most of my life, Mom's managed to hide a lot of what I've seen from my siblings, which made it easier for them to believe whatever stories about me she'd make up after I hit puberty (the magical age when everything turned to shit).

The trouble she's had day-to-day over the last few years has erased some of the magic she's used to keep the facade in place and now she's more flaky, less stable and sometimes down right weird around them. It's uncomfortable for my siblings but like a day ending in -y around here. I'll admit to some mixed feelings where my mom's illness and my siblings are concerned, but they grew up with her issues, and if I'm being fair, are entitled to however they deal with it. Or not.  And for at least one or two of them, there is some kind of resentment back my way for how close I am with our parents. Which I find hilarious, but that's a topic for another day.

Just kidding. Not really. 

Girding my loins for family drah-ma aside, I had a good day today. I got errands taken care of. I finished reading a good book. I wrote. I had a carefully crafted coffee beverage. I frenetically fangirled, babbled, and extensively critiqued chatted with a friend about the latest blockbuster movie we both saw with our respective snuggle bunnies. My husband and I sat on the glider swing on our back porch while it rained. He read & I worked on some French lessons. I nuked leftovers for dinner. Winner winner, leftover bbq chicken for dinner. It was a delightfully ordinary and completely wonderful kind of day.

What came to mind as I was driving home tonight is how nice it is, at this point in my adult life, to have happily married friends. People who understand venting is at worst a blip of a rough day or period and at best commiserating shared peccadilloes of significant others. When I was first married, all my friends were young and single, some not even sure who or what they were attracted to. If my husband didn't put the toilet seat down, or some equally goofy but annoying offense, they swiftly advised me to divorce the vile heathen. FYI, I can count on one hand the number of times my husband has forgotten to lower the seat in our entire marriage. #toiletseathero

Years and a fairly clean sweep of friends later, we graduated to married, in committed relationships or divorced friends. This seemed super cool to us. Couples dates! Shared experiences! We laughed at the newer couples' foibles - "What do you mean you've never left the bathroom door open? It'll happen, just wait until you share a stomach bug or get dicey takeout one night." We watched marriages/relationships disintegrate and nervously reassured each other it wouldn't happen to us. But even there, the people we hung out with the most, whose own relationship issues erupted in public and private, seemed to thrive on our run-of-the-mill rough patches. He's a butthead, I'm a harpy. You know, the snipey stuff that comes out when you both need Midol and a candy bar. It's not like he bought drugs with the mortgage money. (Hand to God, I knew someone...) It's not like either one of us ever hit or abused the other one. (Witnessed it. Made sure the abused party got out of the relationship.) We had what was our garden variety marital growing pains. You figure out and grow closer or you grow apart. But some 'friends' seemed strangely fixated on us splitting up.

So it's nice to start having more and more friends who are clearly good matches for each other. It's nice to be able to blow off steam about some silly nothing I won't remember happened in a week with another person who gets it. Group chats with wildly inappropriate gifs, dinner out, movies, theme parks, grabbing a drink. Really, this adult thing doesn't always suck. But it probably helps that I still laugh at poop jokes like I'm in elementary school.

We're a little more cabbage patch and a little less tango.

Writing: Wrote more days this week than not.

Reading: Finished 2 books, picked up 4 at the library and promised a nibling I'd start reading his/her newest favorite book. In other words, I've fallen off the careful self-pacing wagon and reverted back to picking up too many books at once. :-D

Foreign Language: I have met my daily course goal for more than 20 days.

Coffee: Happy medium. Less than I could be drinking, but enough to keep me going.

Nap: Not nearly enough.

Positivity: Not too shabby. I'll be dreaming of ab-a-licious super heros for the next few days, so that doesn't hurt.