I feel a mixture of diappointment, sorrow, and hope. The disappointment is due to the fact that in many respect my birthday was a bust. I was looking forward to a romantic dinner, flowers, and some personal time with my husband. Life happened and I sort of got one out of three.
The responsible adult in me says that I can't really be too upset. Part of this is what I got for saying "Sure, he can have dinner with us." and part of it is just that life threw us all a curve ball. Getting ready at the last minute for a trip across the country that you found out about that afternoon can make any guy's day crazy. When it happens on a particularly busy day that is also your wife's birthday, it just makes you feel like a complete heel. But, that was what happened, and I felt pity for his boss being told he had to fend for himself for dinner last night.
End result of this is: Hubby didn't have time to get me flowers, though he really wanted to. Dinner was excellent, the restaraunt was plesant, but the guys talked shop in an attempt to ease their nervousness about this trip. Walmart didn't help us much for two reasons. 1. It had to be designed by some one that has no concept of how people shop. Everything was impossible to find easily, thus I wasted 2 hours of my life in high heels wandering around that store searching for what seemed like 4 hours. 2. The customer service desk's concept of customer service is "we're too lazy, do it your damn self." I'm pretty sure that my dear husband will be ranting about that in the near future.
As my husband was forced to repeat the 2 hour search for required items, after a 20 min game of listening to hold music as the customer service desk mocks you, I packed his suitcase and got everything ready for this morning. I fell asleep at 1:20 in the morning. He got home close to 3 am, only to have to wake up roughly 3.5 hours later. I'm amazed he actually woke up. Though I wonder if he actually slept, because he seemed rather nervous about this meeting.
I feel sorrow because of the fact that he had to go out to the otherside of the nation in a flying tincan held up in the air by a reinforced plank with a gas tank and motors attached. I don't worry about airplanes much, but because of my ever present anxiety that the people I love will be taken out of my life by a sadistic or amoral/insane diety, I worry. It doesn't help that I have a fairly good understanding of what happens when there is a catastrophic failure of equipment on an aircraft. Any person knows the answer to that, you don't even need complicated mathematics or much understanding of physics to do it. What goes up, will come down. The question is how controlled the descent is and how fast is it.
I'm sad because he's far away fom me and will be until some time late afternoon/early evening Friday. I'm anxious because he's far away from me and I can't reassure myself at the end of the day that he's ok. It's a huge anxiety problem that I usually don't have to think about because I see him everyday and there's not a lot of threats to our relationship. It may be that we'll drive each other crazy and lead to mutually assured destruction, but aside from that, I think we're ok.
The hope is from the children I work with. On my birthday, they threw me a surprise birthday party complete with cake and card. Both of which they had made themselves. These kids range from profoundly mentally retarded to severely learning disabled but functionally normal. The child who has been skipping school actually came into school to wish me a happy birthday that day as well. It was a delightful surprise, even more so when he showed up at school today. Who knows, maeby he will actually come to school on a regular basis. We'll see.
And then there was today, where one of the high functioning mentally retarded children tried out for cheerleading. I know, it sounds like a disaster in the making, but it actually went really well. She completely botched 90% of the routine that they did for the tryouts, but that was due to her disorder. And she was the loudest of the cheers and completely spot on for that. The physical therapist thinks we can help her with the simple routines and I think that'd be great for her. But this isn't what gives me hope for mankind. It was the fact that *all* of the girls trying out for the squad were offering her words of encouragement and doing everything they could to help her out. Not just at the tryouts but all of the last week and a half that they were getting ready for them.
It warms my heart when I see instances like that.
I think I'll end this on a happy note and make a much needed phone call. Stargazer, I hope this brightens your day a little bit, because I know the earlier portion probably didn't.
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