Consider My Bloomers Aflame.

Here I said I was going to start blogging regularly and have I?  HECK no!  Consider my bloomers aflame.

I've been so busy what with this whole being a mom thing (FOUR doctor's appointments for the boy last week...he gets his bad back from me...or maybe his dad...one of us anyway) and being an employee thing (the person who helps me, who I am not allowed to call my assistant, was on vacation all week) and being an honorary ex stepmom thing (got to see The Girl this weekend....I can't express the happiness there)....anyway the whole being a blogger thing had to fall by the wayside for a bit.

But I'm doing surprisingly well, or so everyone tells me.  There are scary moments, to be sure.  Being told by a car salesman, after NINE HOURS of negotiating, that there isn't a single new car that I can afford was one.  SO I traded in my dream car, and my mom's car which has been rusting in my driveway for two years, for a new-ish used car.  A very basic, small, smoky-smelling used car...with a good warranty, better gas mileage and a lower insurance bill.  But it still felt like a major, scary step backward in terms of success and adulthood. 

When The Ex came over to teach The Boy how to run the lawnmower and couldn't get it started...that was one.  Have I mentioned I have an acre and a half of land?  Yeah...a funcitonal riding lawnmower is sort of a necessity.  And when I was hearing the list of things that had to be fixed on it...that was another one.  But fortunately I have good friends...one of whom has a husband who repairs lawnmowers for a living, so I got to get it fixed AND keep my house (for now). 

But I learned something yesterday....only about two hours after getting my lawnmower back from being fixed.  When you're mowing the lawn and you have to cross the driveway, apparently you're supposed to turn off cutting thingy and even raise it up.  Who knew?  Not me!

Sooo.....my friend's husband is coming back out next week to get the lawnmower to repair the damage I caused. 

So yeah, scary moments but also learning opportunities.  And at this point I have to acknowledge the good in everything to keep from curling up into a ball in a dark room and never coming out.

Another thing I've learned is that the less desirable the vegetation is the more difficult it is to kill.  Why is that?  Is it some cosmic joke or something? 

I'm not amused. 

I have spent quite an impressive bit of time over the past week trying to keep plants alive.  I have a notoriously black thumb and XBF's thumb is the greenest of greens.  Even though I didn't ask for the nine hanging baskets, five potted arrangements and a tree (sans partridge or pear) that are on my deck, it would just feel like too much of a failure to let them all die.  I'm fairly certain that all but the tree are of the type of plant that doesn't come back next year (annual? perennial?) but dammit they WILL LIVE at least the better part of the summer.

So last weekend I learned to work the elaborate somewhat automatic watering dealio that XBF installed on the deck.  I got quite wet in doing so.  The Boy was amused.  But this makes at least the hanging baskets and the tree somewhat self-sufficient.  The rest I have to remember to water...God help them.  But I'm trying.

Yesterday after taking The Girl home I decided to tackle the flowerbeds.  I didn't realize how miserably overgrown they all were and I think this may be some evidence that XBF had a foot out the door before I even realized, because he used to be meticulous about them.  I don't think he touched them once since the snow stopped falling, and it showed. 

I had a hard time telling what I was supposed to yank from the ground and what I was supposed to lovingly preserve, but I finally figured it out.  If it looks healthy, it's probably a weed.  And as fragile as the flowers are, the weeds are just that robust, and then some.  I find it just WRONG that if I forget to water the flowers, or don't pinch them back correctly, or don't talk to them, or don't cut them back in the fall, or whatevertheheck you're supposed to do to them...if you don't do that, they die...but these weeds, many of them snapped off at the soil line when I attempted to pull them out of the ground, so I know they will be back mocking me within the week. 

Fuckers.

I also learned that weeding uses exactly the same set of muscles and tendons as typing and, theoretically, playing tennis, because my tennis elbow is KILLING ME.

But really, the biggest thing I've learned over the last two weeks or so is that feelings are very much like the weather, or city busses.  If you don't like one, just wait, another one will come along soon.  There have been MANY times in the last two weeks when I thought I couldn't keep going.  Things are hard right now.  Emotionally and financially this is the scariest time I've ever been through.  And like a nasty one-two punch, along with the fear comes a sadness.  The things in my life that are scary and different are scary and different BECAUSE my relationship failed, and that's a very sad thing.  I guess it's expected that it hurts to lose someone you spent five years of your life with.  It hurts more to not understand why.

But there have been times over the past few weeks when I've found myself thinking that I can't bear to feel this pain another minute...but then I do.  And another minute.  And that sometimes leads me to worry that I will have to endure this pain for the rest of my life.  The obsessive planner in me starts to wonder HOW I will stand the pain, or the fear, for the rest of my life.  But then something magical happens...I don't have to.   The pain or the fear or whatever feeling is gouging at my soul at theat moment grows weary of trying to kill me.  When I refuse to die, it moves on.  Of course, after a while, it comes back.  But it comes back a teensy tiny bit smaller the next time around.  So every time I feel the pain, whether it's from seeing a picture of him (they're everywhere I look, be it in my Facebook albums, my desktop or in frames throughout my house) or from coming across a sweet note he wrote me (I kept them scattered in various places because it brought me such joy to come across one.  Funny how something that used to bring such happiness can later cause pain that is like a mean, prickly, hateful living thing) or even if it's just the fear that I'll never have the strenghth, knowledge or money to do everything that needs to be done to keep this house...I'm trying really hard to just feel the feelings in the moment without fearing that I'll have to feel the feeling every minute for the rest of my life...because I won't.  Another feeling will be along in just a minute.  Waiting for it.......