I didn’t get the gorgeous red Addison Shepard hair I had my heart set on. I got to the hairdresser and she realized that she didn’t have enough dye. She had only bought one tiny little bottle (because here in SoCal nobody goes red, they go blond) and hadn’t even thought to ask how long my hair was.
She was perfectly nice, and she gave me a nice little cut (nothing fancy, just freshened the layers), but the experience was still a mess. She had a salon in her garage and her kids were all home from school and the dog kept running in and sniffing my butt. And I didn’t get any color at all and now she’s going out of town for two weeks. I haven’t decided if I’m going back to her or not.
The odd thing was that for a normal rational person, this experience would hardly be worth more than a shrug, while I had to fight back tears until I got to the car and cried myself all the way home.
Most of time I really feel like I am over the miscarriage. It was sad, it happened, cest la vie. I hold babies without a single pang, I babysit my nephews without thinking about what could have been, I’ve even watched television shows where someone loses a baby and I don’t shed a single tear. But if I run into one obstacle over the course of my day, if one unforeseen event fowls up my plans, I turn into this hysterical, over-sensitive, weeping willow.
I’m basically operating at full capacity over here. I have just enough to keep me going on an even keel, but if that balance gets upset, I have nothing else to fall back on.
Typically, I’m a beyond rational person. I don’t get over emotional, I don’t frequently get crabby, I’m totally high-strung, just not emotional. I’ve been finding myself acting out of character more and more lately. I’ll be crying over something that does not warrant it, or completely stymied by my choice of restaurants, or absolutely out of the minimum amount of patience it requires just to deal with the normal friction of life. Bear has to return the phone calls, and the movies. He has to tuck me into the couch with some knitting and a coke, because I am suddenly like an overtired toddler who can’t see that relief exists.
We even have a code phrase now. When I find myself reaching the point of tears, I just turn to Bear and say (or maybe sometimes scream, but almost always at the heavens, not at him) “I HAVE NO MORE RESOURCES!” And he understands that that is the equivalent of Code Red with a big flashing light and a siren, and it’s time for him to take over cooking dinner while I sit down and watch a Tivo-ed craft show.
Lest I sound like a hothouse flower, this happens maybe twice a week. And it’s almost always precipitated by yet another offer on a house being rejected or the fact that I haven’t seen another human being in two weeks. When Bear reaches his threshold, he just takes it out on the cats.