Sour Milk

I’m taking my chances with milk that has sat out for about two hours (still feels cool…good sign?). Why? Because the morning meeting lasted way too long, and I want to eat my cereal.
This is about how my life is going this week. I taped “Gray’s Anatomy” on Sunday night because I started watching it, too tired to pull myself off the couch, got hooked into the story line, and then realized that I wasn’t going to make it to the end. Monday, I watched the last half hour. Surgeon had lost her baby that she didn’t want in the first place, other surgeon lost a patient on the surgery table with cystic fibrosis that she was very close to, and other surgeon is torn between his girlfriend and his soon-to be ex-wife that has given him divorce papers to sign if he wants to. I cried for the last 15-20 minutes of the show. It started with the stop and go silent tears, sliding very moviestar-like from my eyes, but then quickly progressed to loud hiccuping sobs, and I spent five minutes in the bathroom afterward blowing my nose. Normally, I embrace shows/movies that make me cry…very cathartic. But this is embarrassing.

Today at the meeting, we watched a national news segment based on our high school about how the war affects a school that serves the military. I sat sniffling in the auditorium, watching my students put on brave faces as they talked about the uncertainty of having a parent in Iraq. There are certain stories that are so powerful, I warn my students that I will probably tear up as we read them together…I’m not touching those stories this week.

In the movie “Broadcast News”, Holly Hunter’s character makes herself cry every morning, just to release all the emotions that have built up from the previous day, so that they don’t affect how professional she can be that day. I need to learn her technique, or learn to run quickly whenever someone asks me how I'm doing.

My daughter has passed through the bratty part of being a four-year old girl and transitioned over to wonderful precociousness. I’m not ashamed to say that one day, she will be smarter than I am. I suffer through these silly song CD’s on our rides home from school because while sometimes, she sits quietly, bobbing her head in her car seat, other days, she belts out the songs, and I have to tip the mirror to watch in wonderment as she puts her heart and soul into every word (not an easy task with “John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt”). I feel undeserving of her this week. I kiss her goodnight before I shuffle off to bed, and, pausing at her door, I feel as if my heart is being crushed by the fear that I am not good enough, am messing up somehow, will lose her eventually.

In “Thelma and Louise”, there is a scene where Louise sits in a diner with her hard-to-pin down boyfriend Jimmy. He has brought her money and an unexpected marriage proposal, which she has turned down; they are saying goodbye. He tells her, “I don’t know what you’ve done, or where you’re going, but I’m not going to tell anyone that I’ve seen you.” She smiles and says, “Dang, Jimmy, what’d you do, take some sort of pill that makes you say all the right things?” He gives a weary half-grin and says, “Yeah…I’m choking on it.”

That’s about my life this week…I’m choking on it.

I wonder if that milk will come back to haunt me.