Suburban Goddess

…been kissed passionately in an airport by someone who missed me.

Does that only happen in the movies?

“No more socks laying around!”

“Yeah…”

“No more stupid racing videos!”

“Yeah….”

“You can fart whenever you want to! Just let ‘em rip!”

“Oh, now that’s just too much…”

Everyday you hear words, but some days, in the proper configuation, they can just rip your heart out.

I’m getting a divorce.

To say it makes my heart stop, to think about it makes my brain numb, and to look in my daughter’s face and know that I’ve failed her makes me ache for the life I knew just a few short years ago. The life I expected to live with her in it. That life is gone.

I’m so angry, and so resentful. I want to scream & yell about the unfairness of it, but what good does that do? It will never melt his cold, empty heart, and I will never have what I had before anyway. Empty promises, broken dreams, words, words, words….

…in the end, it all meant nothing. And so I start again, down the path to look for a true & lasting love. I can’t give up on the idea.

It’s the only hope I have left.

“You have six Justin Timberlake videos on this thing.”

“Yeah, so?”

“I thought you hated Justin Timberlake.”

“I do. But I like his music.”

“Then why do you have his VIDEOS?”

“I don’t have a rational explanation for that…”

I have a pretty low tolerence to all things narcotic. Two glasses of wine & I’m stupid. Tylenol puts me to sleep; Tylenol PM quite literally, knocks me completely out. So I tend to shrug off anything heavier than a couple of glasses of alcohol or stronger than over the counter. But this past week I’ve been struck with some kind of super-crud that has totally incapacitated me, so after a lot of denial, I finally realized I’d have to go see a doctor.

Because I waited so long, a simple cold has manifested into a sinus infection, an upper respiritory infection, and a pretty severe case of bronchitis. When you cough and your chest rattles, it’s not a good sign, not to mention that you’re barking like a seal and your voice disappears. Okay, okay, I MIGHT be sick. Sometimes my stubbornness gets the best of me. But nothing cuts through stubborness like a completely irrational fear of bird flu, so I marched into the doctors office with a death rattle and marched out with four prescriptions. A decongestant, an expectorant, an asthma inhaler, and the subject of this post; a hybrid of Robitussin with codiene. “So you can sleep,” says my doctor. Um, yeah.

So knowing my low tolence and the consequences I face because of it, I waited until I put my daughter to sleep and took my recommended dose. One teaspoon. Do not operate heavy machinery or drive while on this medication.

No kidding.

Within fifteen minutes, I was PASSED OUT on the sofa, a pile of drool on my pillow. Sometime about an hour later, I zombie-shuffled to my bed. I slept harder than I have since, hell, I can’t even remember when I’ve had such a sound sleep. My alarm went off sometime around 6:30am, and I wandered into the bathroom and took a shower. I vaguely remember the water streaming across my face. Somehow, I made it back to my bed with my phone and called out (another sign that I am TRULY sick). I awoke three hours later, the phone still in my hand, another pile of drool on my pillow, and my hair poking out in a million different directions because I slept on it while wet. Upstairs, I could hear Alex chanting, “Mommy, mommy, mommy, mommy, mommy….”

I jolted awake, bringing her downstairs and getting her breakfast. The rest of my day is pretty much a blur. I’m pretty alarmed that something with such a low dose can do this to me; I can’t imagine what would happen if I took something stronger. Tonight, I think I’m going to tough it out with my standard Robitussin formula and just deal without the sleep…