Only The Good Die Young

The year began with a loss.

Actually, if we're splitting hairs here, the new year began with a rousing call of "Rabbit, Rabbit", a deep, purging breath to exhale away all the tumult that was 2013, and a solid plan for how best to use the day ahead. 

But loss was the theme of the day.

It wasn't all bad.  It started out okay, actually.

The first losses were deliberate, carefully orchestrated affairs, although I suppose they were not so much loss as forcible expulsion; two rubbermaid totes filled with outgrown jeans and household effluvia that needed to go.  It was packed, driven across town and fondly shoved into charity donation bins.  Result!

Then came the actual loss.

Loss of expectations: I had to toss those out the window of the extremely sexy family truckster as we spluttered around town doing glamorous errands; one child, thoroughly dysregulated, and one child lashing out at him in sensory overload. It was fantastic.  Not.
Loss of moola:  Sometimes, you just run out of e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g at the same time.  That time, for us, was five minutes after Christmas was over.  However, due to a very ill-behaved set of nerves (occipital & trigeminal, for the medically savvy or particularly interested), I wound up spending a few days in bed unable to move very much or very well.  Erego - the running-out-of-everything-ness.  You see what I'm saying here.

Loss of hope:  This has been one of the longest Christmas vacations I can remember.  I'd had great hopes for it, but between feeling quite poorly and the neurological misfiring, it was just grim.  There were moments, of course - a stolen snuggle, a shared laugh, a cooperative venture between brothers, sans bloodshed - but it was a challenging twelve days.  TWELVE DAYS.  I don't think this is what the Twelve Days of Christmas are supposed to be about; on the twelfth day of Christmas, my children gave to me...Twelve nervous eye tics, eleven hopeless head shakes, ten fists a shaking, nine rounds of whining, eight consequences, seven thrown Skylanders, six (thousand) scattered Legos, fiiiiiiiiiiive ...tiiiiiiiime outs....  four rolling eyeballs, three crying tantrums, two unhappy boys, and a mother who deserves a glass of wine.

Moving on.  Loss.  After this DAZZLING Christmas vacation - the forecast calls for snow.  Lots and lots o snow.  Starting. Tonight.  Which means...drum roll please... NO SCHOOL TOMORROW!!!  There was much rejoicing in the playroom.  In the kitchen, over the sink, less so.  On the other hand, there will be no mad dash in the morning to get lunches made or find any one of the rogue underpants which have hidden from my 9 year old in the last couple of days... so a loss of ideals as well.

Then there is the to-do list.  It loses.  I know when I'm beat.

I had conceded defeat to the day.  It just didn't go the way I intended.  So - perhaps my lesson was meant to be compromise, flexibility, adjustment, collaboration.  I can work with that.

And then.

We all have that friend who goes to bed early , and when they call you past their designated bedtime, you just know the news isn't good.  And it wasn't.

A boy we'd gone to school with - a man, now, really - had died.  Specifics unknown, and kind of irrelevant - it was the fact of this former football player with arms like Popeye and a Paul Bunyon chest, twinkly eyes and a GQ face, being dead.  Dead? What?  I listened to my friend and then we hung up, because I needed to tell another friend; my oldest friend, who had been utterly infatuated with the decedent for years.  For. YEARS.  We stalked him in the hallways, at the football games, and once she got her license, we did drive bys of his house; no simple thing, since he lived on a tiny cul de sac.  For ages, he was the focal point of her life.  And I had to tell her he was dead before she read it on Facebook.

But I couldn't call her, because I couldn't get my head around the facts.  I called Early Sleeper back.  GQ was dead?  Really? Had I understood correctly?  Regrettably, yes.  I tried Stalker again. And again. And again.  Her iphone had conked out.  By the time it had juice again, I had blown it up with texts, FB messages, and God help me, an actual voicemail.

Not a lovely conversation to have.

It's terribly sad.

I had about two micrograms left of Infallibility from my youth.  And just like that - they left the building.

2013 kicked me in the rear end pretty badly.  I would like it a lot if 2014 was not all about loss.  I like to start as I mean to go on - so I've been trying to absorb this shock to my already beleaguered system and spin it into a positive notion with which to lead the year: A reminder to live while you're here.  A reminder to go for it, to carpe diem, to seize every chance. To live, live, LIVE!  Live hard, live fully, live authentically.  Live from the heart.

Because really, otherwise - - is it living at all?

This isn't exactly the glorious whimsy I'd hoped to start my blog with, if I'm being honest, but whimsy and whim are close enough and on a whim, I decided to write what was on my heart; the authentic, horrible reality.

Back tomorrow; hopefully with something less rending.   I hope you'll be back as well.  It would be a pity if, having resurrected my blog and attempting to write every day, nobody showed up to the party.

Party.  Well. You know.  This could hardly be called a party.

And this is why 'tangential musings' get to headline.