Work in Progress

So the trip to the hospital was stressful. I got into my car in the parking garage, and I just wanted to start crying all the sudden. It's a lot to handle. Up all night with a poor little kid that doesn't want their head taped up anymore or that stupid wire box trailing behind them like a tail. To top it all off I scheduled a communication evaluation when the VEEG was finished. You know, save the 7 hour round trip and an entire day spent. Two fer one. I wanted to cry like somebody had died.

I had no idea I'd been feeling like that the whole time.

On the way home I slid of the road twice. It was surreal. I'm steering one way, and the car is sliding off the road. Seriously. At least I had the 'non'-sense not to brake. Two semis behind me and a whole train of cars. I was in the left lane, and I slid onto the shoulder. I tried to get back on the road, but I slid off again.

I have no idea how I stayed on the shoulder. I'm really glad I did.

I saw six slide-offs once I started going again. I was shaking so bad. I hadn't really gotten breakfast. (I tried to be as healthy as I could with the snack cabinet. We were leaving too early to order, and the cafeteria wasn't that healthy anyway.) I went to Dairy Queen. I know. Given my earlier Holy Cow Calorie Moment how could I do that?

Well, I don't know. I had cake Saturday. More than I want to admit. I am ashamed.

I'm not saying that it's okay for me to have too much cake. It wasn't. But I am saying I forgive myself. Driving is not learned by being shown the perfect way with an instructor in the passenger seat. Walking is learned by painstaking and predictable patterns building up the muscles and coordination over months of trial and all ERROR. Becoming a master of anything takes patience, perseverance and PRACTICE. Especially becoming master of one's self.

All I'm saying is that I handled this better than I ever could have before.

“I don't know if I continue, even today, always liking myself. But what I learned to do many years ago was to forgive myself. It is very important for every human being to forgive herself or himself because if you live, you will make mistakes- it is inevitable. But once you do and you see the mistake, then you forgive yourself and say, 'well, if I'd known better I'd have done better,' that's all. So you say to people who you think you may have injured, 'I'm sorry,' and then you say to yourself, 'I'm sorry.' If we all hold on to the mistake, we can't see our own glory in the mirror because we have the mistake between our faces and the mirror; we can't see what we're capable of being. You can ask forgiveness of others, but in the end the real forgiveness is in one's own self. I think that young men and women are so caught by the way they see themselves. Now mind you. When a larger society sees them as unattractive, as threats, as too black or too white or too poor or too fat or too thin or too sexual or too asexual, that's rough. But you can overcome that. The real difficulty is to overcome how you think about yourself. If we don't have that we never grow, we never learn, and sure as hell we should never teach.”

-Maya Angelou