How to Lose Your Mind in One Move

We moved. Down the street. Which was like a root canal.  Necessary and painful and perfect for losing those lingering 5lbs. Same neighborhood with pristine landscaping and perfect palms.  Same serene pool with "implanted" ladies of leisure and retired surfers. Same zealous security guards with more bark than bite. Same diva dogs with personal strollers pushed by drooling masters. And same creepy guy at the gym with dyed hair plugs and vanity plates on his Porsche SUV.

Same misery of moving ...even in paradise.  

 

Exiting our previous residence with three tiny dependents under 6 required an excess of take-out, our babysitter- Disney Junior, the kid's college savings worth of bubble wrap and the Southern hospitality of my much abused friend, Carla.  Three storage facilities maxed to capacity later, we moved into a hotel with my tiny, constipated entourage (I fault successive nights of Costco pizza) to await acquisition of our "providentially" leased foreclosure.  

 

This I have learned: Take care not to be cavalier with words like, "providential."  Evangelicals enjoy liberal employment of it as an omen of good fortune.  . . . until the day you seal your own providential fate with a foreclosed home that has an ant infestation and a holocaust of roaches and a sewer that overflows in your garage housing all your worldly goods. Yeah. Providential like a timely root canal.

 

Do I sound bitter? I am not. One day we will laugh about this...The crazy laughter of the elderly who forget their names and subsist on tapioca and mistake the orderly as their high school sweetheart, Harold who actually died in the second world war. Yes, we will laugh.

 

Really. These are - as they say- "first world problems." I realize this.  More dire than say- a bad draft pick during Fantasy Football season. But less damning than  human trafficking and Planned Parenthood.

 

Many have inquired as to whether we sequentially "insta-grammed" the "befores and afters". If I were a millennial with a narcissistic twitter feed, I may have. But, I am old and 30ish and tired. And frankly, that would require the foresight to photograph -say- a tsunami before you ran up the closest hill. . . while nursing and spanking and "root rescuing" errant stress-induced greys. Plus, these images are seared in my memory. Forever. Like the face of the contractor with *digestive difficulties* who used the powder room minutes before  sewage seeped under my Thomasville bookshelf. I will never forget.

 

Cue the encore arrival of my globe-trotting mother who has since acquired as many Facebook friends located in Honolulu as me. If you know her, this comes as no surprise. She saved what was the left of my sanity and helped feed my kids vegetables again.  Colson practically began to talk under her tutelage (or so she assures anyone who will listen).  We hiked out my anxieties and beached away our troubles (after I made her install toilet seats, fix plumbing and wipe up vomit). Most importantly, instead of crying, she helped me choose to laugh.

 

....Which is what I did today when my dentist sighed and relayed, "It looks like you need a root canal."