A Little Dark, A Lot Dreary

I suppose I was hoping that the next time that I wrote here I would have this fabulous news, this life-changing information, but it didn't happen. Financial turns, deals never made, and in the end I am in the same place I started out, but I feel as if I have lost something that I never had in the first place.

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This isn't the first time. For the past couple of years, Jeff and I have occasionally hung our hopes on something too high and been disappointed with the inevitable. I am more numb to it now than before, I was halfway expecting the bad news to come and it stings to think that I now expect anticipate the worst. No big deal, onward and upward and swallow the thick before it chokes you.

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We've all been sick. First it was me, sore and tired, then James, coughing and leaking thick nasty out of his nose. Jeff is now feeling the beginnings of Something Bad, Faith the only one unscathed so far. No one had been sleeping well and every morning I wake, folded into strange positions between two toddlers, in our thankfully large king bed. Jeff lays sprawled out every morning, seemingly unaware of the three other coughing, dreaming bodies in his bed. The children crowd only me for some reason, perhaps because they know that I'm the one who will wake up when they cry or crawl into bed beside me. It is my arms on which they lay their little round faces, it is me who sleepily walks to the medicine cabinet to fish out the suppressant needed in the wee hours of the morning. It's always me.

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Thanksgiving is right around the corner and it already feels off balanced. My nieces and nephews are with their father this year. My mother-in-law has to work. We're having dinners on different days and missing people, as if it were a rehearsal dinner instead of the real thing. I am designated to desserts, like every year, since I am the youngest. With Jeff's family, however, I hold some cooking clout, being the best cook they have in the family. I look forward to making something that actually gets eaten at the table. I'll be happy to see the holiday come and I'll be just as happy to see it go. I wasn't always this way.

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It's not a good day, or week, and tomorrow is a new day that will be filled with expensive coffee, pleasant routines, and my two sweethearts. As always I need to see the light in their faces before the dark creeps up around me, deceiving me into thinking things are worse than they are and only hopeless futures await me.