It's 1:12 a.m. on a Friday morning. My brain is simmering with thoughts, regrets, hopes, fears. It's a thought stone soup where every part of my brain, both conscious and unconscious is contributing to the stewing. But it's nothing new. I've always been a night thinker, solving the world's problems (and often finding new ones I didn't know existed) while I should be sleeping. As a child, I would wander back into the living room hours after bedtime to ask my parents a deep and profound question, such as what would happen if all the butterflies in the world died.
What would happen indeed! I never got an answer to these questions, only a dry "Kara, go back to bed, and go to sleep." But it worried me, and worry is hard to supress at any age. I haven't been 10 years old for quite a few years now, but it never fails that some unanswerable question lodges itself in my head at 11:30 at night, just as my husband drifts to sleep, and I have no one to ask it to! Will I EVER get my nighttime musings resolved, or am I condemned to send my questions out to the owls and the skunks and all other things nocturnal?
Tonight, I am conflicted on two issues. They have pretty much consumed my life for the last 6 months, and have plagued both my waking and sleeping hours. One, is the looming demise of my parents' 27 year marriage. Yep, 27 years. You know all that stuff they say about kids of divorce, and how they blame themselves, and have failed marriages themselves. Yeah, none of that applies here! There is shockingly little on how to cope with your parents' divorce as an adult, unless you are a grown child from a failed marriage, and then there's thousands of resources for you! My logical "adult" brain, understands that everyone had low times in their life, and my parents need to sort this out. The "child" brain, that little part in the back of your head that sings nanner-nanner-nanner when the jerk that cut you off gets pulled over, that part of me screams at them to just fix it and make it better.
Hence, my inner 10-year-old needs a cookie, because cookies always seemed to make things better. Scraped knee? Have a band-aid and a cookie. Teased at school? Tell mom about it and have a cookie. Find out you have to wear a retainer 24-7 and get glasses? There's not enough cookies in the world for that one pal!
Funny, these cookies lead to my second problem, my weight. I'm finding as this year goes on that cookies not only do not make my parents' marital problems any less, they are adding to my midsection at an alarming rate. A good friend has given me a mantra to help with this; "if hunger's not the problem, food isn't the answer." It's so very true, and lately hunger has definitely not been the problem!
So, what's a girl to do? I accept that I can't do anything about my parents, and I'm doing my best to be healthier and lose the extra pounds, but that just doesn't stop my brain from whipping these issues into mind numbing obsessions. I want so badly for both to just happen, without so much effort, without so much, anguish, and without so many daunting obstacles.
*Sigh*
My inner 10-year-old needs a cookie.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment