Beastly things, scars, and lemonade

There are wild beasts that roam amongst us. There are the beasts that constantly prey on your mind, making you second guess yourself or chewing away at your security. You know the kind: you wake in the middle of the night, you don't hear the soft snore beside you and so the beast of panic rears its ugly head. You reach over and gently touch your partner to feel their breath or feel them stir. There is another beast inside. If you leave the house alone, even briefly, you panic when you hear a siren. You panic when you call home "to check" and there is no answer for several rings. You panic when the house is quiet when you walk in. All of those beasts, chewing,  growling, pawing, snorting trying to get a foothold in your already over-tired over-taxed brain. You try not to feed them, you try to keep them at bay with happy thoughts and good cheer, but somehow...they keep coming. Learning to live with the beasts and acknowledging them might be easier than eradicating them. I will work on taming those monsters. Now a beast of another kind. I drove DH's beloved Beast! He has had his Yukon Denali for 2 1/2 year and I refused to drive this monster. I like my mini-van and I like the Miata he has had for 21 years (that incidentally, you could put into the back of the Beast) But I could not bring myself to drive the Beast.

"You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do."

Eleanor Roosevelt said this and I took it to heart. We had a long-standing appt to take the Beast in today to have an oil change etc, and DH wanted to cancel it. I honestly thought, sure, probably a good idea. But then I thought of all the women who have blazed a trail before me (including DH's elderly aunt who drove a mean 40 foot traveling behemoth motor home for years as her hubby was physically unable to, so they could travel the country together) Well, alrighty then. I tamed that beast and I am honestly thinking "Why have I never done this before???" OK, so I may never parallel park that sucker, but I can drive it. Not as good as DH, but passable.

Scars: We have so many scars in our lives. I bet you can look at an old cut or scrape and see the faint lines that don't quite have the same color on your skin. It no longer hurts, yet, you remember the pain, and remember not to be so careless next time with a knife. Maybe you have scars on your soul that are seared into your memory. Someone said something to you that hurt so badly, it makes you ache. Maybe you've lost a loved one and even though time heals your broken heart, the scar remains. Quite a few weeks ago, I nicked a finger with a knife and it cut into the nail bed. I bandaged it after cleaning, but it looked wicked. Then gradually, the nail started to peel, and I was terrified to lose the nail, because when it breaks far below the top of your finger, well, you know how badly it can hurt. So I continued to bandage it, then put super glue under it to keep the nail intact. Everyday, I babied that injury until one day, the nail got long enough to where it could come off w/o pain. Then a funny thing happened. The nicked part of the skin (which I was ignoring, as the nail was causing so much pain) came in, nice and pink, repairing itself. No worries. Shortly after that, it developed a hard, blood-blister looking thing that looked nasty. I was so surprised, because it had been doing so well. So this morning, the icky thick skin started peeling off, revealing the healthy skin underneath. So here is the lesson I learned. Sometimes when we "baby" a small hurt, the real damage is being done because we are ignoring the base reason. We need to look at the whole picture and repair the underlying damage, not just what you can see, but what you can't. Has someone hurt you? Is it causing you damage, even though the initial hurt is gone? Get it fixed. Peel back the layers and let the new skin of a healed psyche start fresh.

Lemonade. Last night I was so thirsty. I mean to the point of crawling on the floor looking for the oasis. I go to the pantry, pull out those nice individual packs for water, fill my glass and start to drink a thirst quenching lemonade. It was so sweet! I was gagging! I am thinking, maybe I didn't do 16 oz? I keep dumping water, and adding more to dilute. Too late I realized my mistake: I had used the 2 qt packet for the single glass of water. Blech!!! Horrible!!!! Lesson learned: sometimes too much sweetness is a very terrible thing.  Life is still a balance, is it not? We crave sweetness, but unless the tart balances it out, it is too awful. We need character building hurdles to appreciate the smooth pathways.