Missy Diggs

Apparently the universe read my blog post last week and suspected that I wasn’t going to slow down anytime soon. Because this week started with a series of bangs that have definitely stopped my wheels from spinning.

First of all, we discovered over the weekend that our pockets were full of lint and empty of cash. Everything came due at once and here we are with only a few dollars to last until payday. Time to eat the food that I have squirrelled away in the pantry, the beautiful pantry with the double doors and the luxurious spice rack that seduced me into buying this house in the first place. Time to cook up some oatmeal and soak some beans. Time to eat canned vegetables and bake our own bread.

So Sunday evening I put some oatmeal in a pot with water and Monday morning I got up and cooked it so we would all have a cheap and nourishing breakfast. But the Vivid Girl woke up on the wrong side of the middle of our bed and she most emphatically did not want oatmeal. And she stomped over to the pantry and flung open the door……….. and it broke, and came off in her hand, and bottles and jars and little packets of seasoning hailed down on her.

Mr. B looked at it and said it was amazing the door had lasted this long, considering how it was made and how many heavy things I had been storing on its shelves. And we calmed down the Vivid Girl as best we could, and forgave her, and stepped back to survey the damage, which wasn’t too bad because even though there were a lot of glass bottles and jars on the floor, only one of them had actually broken.

It was the molasses. It’s always either the molasses or the fish sauce. I don’t know why.

So, we got the worst part of that mess cleaned up and we gave the Vivid Girl something to eat and Mr. B took her off to school. And I said to myself, “Now I can really get caught up around here!” and I started rushing around putting loads of laundry into the washer and cooking the beans that had soaked overnight and getting myself ready to go to my weekly therapy appointment with my therapist, Dr. Suess (yes, that is her real name!). And as I was putting down my hairbrush and leaving the bathroom I looked down at my left hand and noticed that my wedding ring wasn’t on it.

That was a little strange but not too much because I have been wearing my wedding ring on my pinky finger because my ring finger is sometimes, but not always, too big for me to get my ring on and off comfortably and when I can’t get it off I feel kind of panicky because when I was a kid my dad told me about a guy whose wedding ring got caught on some kind of machinery and it tore his whole finger off and that’s why my dad never wears a ring and that’s why I like to be able to slip mine off without feeling like my finger is coming off with it. So I wear it on my pinky but then sometimes my hands are cold and the ring is a bit loose. So I looked around a little bit but I couldn’t find it and that’s when I started to worry that I had dropped it down a drain and lost it forever.

So I was feeling a little bit bad about that as I drove down to Dr. Suess’ office. And maybe because I was feeling bad about the ring I did something that you are not supposed to do, which is I decided to give my husband a quick call so we would have a little time to connect and I wouldn’t feel like losing my ring was some big portentous event.

And I was talking on the phone and driving, which you are not supposed to do, and I came to a stop because the car in front of me was stopped, because the car in front of her was stopped and waiting for an opportunity to turn left.

And I was chatting to my husband about this and that and feeling pretty light-hearted and happy and then suddenly I wasn’t.

Suddenly I was sucked into a vortex of motion and soundless crashing. Suddenly I was rushing forward in space and backward in time. I could not understand what was happening to me, but I felt my feet going one way and my head and arm going another. I felt myself being pulled under by some fierce and unexpected undertow. There was nothing to hold onto, and I couldn’t see or hear anything that made sense.

And then that stopped, and I found that I was lying down in my car, and someone was standing next to me saying “Are you all right?” And I took a deep breath and did a quick body scan and said “NO I AM NOT ALL RIGHT!” and he took a few steps back and sort of walked around a minute and came back and asked me again. And I said again, “No, I am not okay. This is not okay.” And I realized that I couldn’t see anything because my glasses had flown off my face and so I asked him to find my glasses, which he did. And I was up and walking around, and talking to people, and I realized that what had happened was this: I was sitting there waiting for the person in front of the person in front of me to turn left so we could all go again, but this guy drove up behind me in his huge and speedy SUV and he just didn’t stop. He ran right into me. And I ran into the car in front of me, and here’s who was in that car: a pregnant woman and two small children.

But they were okay. And I was okay. And the guy in the SUV? well, you know he was okay.

And my husband, who was on the phone this whole time and heard everything, he was surprisingly okay. He knew I was okay because he had heard me talking to the guy, and he was in his car waiting to find out where I needed him to go. As soon as he heard the crash he got his keys and left his office and waited to find out.

But my car, the lovely Big Red Car, is not okay at all. The back is all smashed in, and the glass is all smashed out. After the excitement of talking to the firemen and the paramedics and the police and the nice people who stopped who helped us, I settled down enough to realize that there was glass in my pants, and in my shoe. The driver’s seat of my car is twisted and mangled and bent out of shape, and I have corresponding aches and pains in my whole body. A sore neck, a bruised knee, an aching back.

So I came home and put on my pajamas and padded across the sticky kitchen floor to get a blanket out of the dryer, and my wedding ring fell out. So I put it on and laid myself gingerly down in bed and now I am taking it very very easy.

Last week was a crazy busy week here at Casa de Diggs. I made a wedding cake (and yes, I am planning to write a post about that), and also we have some dear friends visiting us (they live in Panama!) with their 21-month old daughter, and then of course there was going out of town to the actual wedding, which both Mr. B and I were in, and in the midst of all that I also started a weekly farm subscription so we got a big box of veggies and stuff. Whew! It was a lot, and I haven’t even mentioned what a big job it was helping the Vivid Girl identify and manage all the feelings she was having about all these major events. Suffice to say that it was a very big job, and since we were using all our regular time to do all the other stuff, we mostly worked on that job during the hours previously dedicated to sleep.

So, by Sunday evening, with all these fun and sometimes not-so-fun things behind us, we were all very very tired. And so we said, “Let’s take it easy this week.”

This was my plan all along. Over the past two or three years, since I’ve been dealing with cancer, I’ve had to slow down a lot. I used to be kind of a go-go rah-rah-rah just-say-yes sort of person, but since I got sick and went through treatment I’ve had to pay for every busy day by spending the following day in the ugly mauve La-Z-Boy. And this whole wedding extravaganza was way more than just one busy day; it was more like six busy days, and I can’t remember the last time I managed something like that. And Mr. B? well, he can do it but he really truly prefers not to. He likes downtime, and a lot of it. The Vivid Girl is like me, but also like him. She’s a study in inertia: once set in motion, she has a lot of momentum and will go for ever (in the absence of friction), but you’ve got to apply quite a bit of force to change her state. And the more friction there is, or the more often force is applied, the more things devolve into entropy and chaos.

So, being a wise woman who knows how to take care of herself, her husband, and her child, I left the calendar blank for this whole week. No meetings, no appointments, no playdates. No special events of any kind. Just resting and getting back on track.

You probably already know stories that begin just like that. And so you know what happens next.

What happens next is the houseguests from Panama realize that your house is much nicer than a hotel, especially for their toddler, and ask if they can stay a few more days. And because we love them and rarely get to see them and because it is more fun having them than not having them, we say YES! STAY AS LONG AS YOU LIKE! and we mean it.

Even though that decision has the unforeseen consequence of making the Vivid Girl not want to go to school. This is unforeseen because the Vivid Girl, who often tried to find ways of getting out of going to preschool, almost never tries to get out of going to her new school. In fact, she often wishes she could go to school on Saturday and Sunday. And she resents all those times when there is no school, like Spring Break, because school is so much more fun than Spring Break, even if your mama lets you eat nothing but trailer food and takes you to the zoo to see baby lions and helps you collect and carry a whole pail of rocks from the Llano River. School, it turns out, is better than all that. But the Toddler from Panama? she is even better than school!

So this week I have been taking the Vivid Girl to school late (two or three hours late sometimes, but that’s okay, because her school is cool like that), or picking her up early (today, four hours early). It’s really cutting into my taking it easy time. Because no matter what I am doing when I am spending time with the Vivid Girl, I am not taking it easy. Unless I’m asleep. And usually not even then, I think, because lately I have been waking up sore from fighting for my space in the bed. (The Vivid Girl is sleeping in our room with us, and the Toddler from Panama is sleeping in the Vivid Girl’s room. Not that the Vivid Girl would be sleeping there anyway. Even if we paid her.)

There is also the totally-foreseen consequence of making the Vivid Girl not want to go to bed. This was easy to predict because she has never ever once in her whole life wanted to go to bed. But over the past six years we have actually developed a bedtime routine that usually results in her being asleep sometime before nine’o'clock if we’re lucky. The excitement of having a Toddler from Panama to bathe with and read to has been a very sweet disruption to our bedtime routine. The wrathful disappointment of having a Toddler from Panama who is still out with her parents when bedtime arrives has been a little less sweet but just as disruptive.

But still we are enjoying having our friends with us, and it is very touching and sweet to see our two girls having such a good time together, and the sweetness of seeing our child reading to a younger child who is wearing her old pajamas and tucked in to her very own bed is more than compensation for any minor disruptions in our daily routine.

So naturally when my friend called and said that she had to leave town for a family emergency and asked if we could take her dog for a week or so, I said YES! OF COURSE! FOR AS LONG AS YOU LIKE!

And I meant it.

And for being able to say that, and mean it, after the busy days I’ve been having…. for that, I am truly grateful.