Three In the Bed

Driving Miss Crazy

Friends I’m turning forty in a couple months and I think I’ve finally come to a place in my life where I feel things are going to be a lot better if I share something. 

I’m crazy.¹ 

¹Here comes the “you’re not crazy” train of friends insisting that it can’t possibly be true. Crazy people don’t develop careers, write white papers, pack super-cute bento lunches for their kids, put up Little Libraries, blog.²

² Okay, lots of crazy people blog.

But here’s the thing. When I finished the draft of my book.³

³ Yes, still talking about this mythical book – what does this tell us? Put a check mark in the "crazy" column.

Anyway, when I finished my draft my editor was excited, she was confident it was going to get picked up by a publisher. And it did generate a lot of interest.⁴

⁴ I know I’ve said that before but let’s just pretend I’m like a former high school football player who can’t let go of what could have been.

It’s taken a while to work through the book stuff  but last week my BFF made a startling revelation. 

“The problem is the reader doesn’t know.”

“Doesn’t know what?”

“That you’re not normal. They don’t know you have all these issues.”

"They don’t know I’m crazy?"

“Exactly. They start reading  thinking you are normal. You need to find a way to help the reader understand your issues.”

Perhaps "issues" is the best word.

My BFF has spent years helping me with my issues. In fact, anyone in my inner life circle has probably helped me out with an issue.⁵

⁵ They are perhaps the donor figures in the hero’s  crazy's journey.

Out of all my issues driving is perhaps the biggest one. Driving  disagrees with me.⁶

⁶ I know a lot of people don't like to drive. But I didn't say that. I said, it disagrees with me. As in, it causes within me an  allergic reaction. It disrupts my nervous system. On almost any occasion I would rather not be driving.⁷

⁷Except when it's to take myself to the Dairy Queen drive-thru.

Allow me to share a recent issue I had related to driving. Typically I manage my driving concerns by following the same route and using the same parking spaces to provide myself a sense of calm predictability.⁸

⁸I understand that many animals use this same "trail" system to go to and from their burrows.

The other day I arrived at my kids' school and found that the parking lot was full.⁹

⁹It was not actually full, it was full according to my standards. My ideal parking lot looks like this.

 

I circled around looking for a spot that would suit my needs for turning radius and proximity to other vehicles. By my third lap my seven year old was getting restless. "Just park Mom!" she moaned from the back.¹⁰

¹⁰ I've done my best to try to hide as many of my issues from my kids as possible but my daugther is on to my driving. I know that if she could reach the gas, she would gladly hop in the driver's seat.

I reluctantly pulled into a spot and got them into school. When I returned a new vehicle had parked beside me and totally blocked me in.¹¹

¹¹ This is not the photo of the actual incident but this is what it looked like to me.

I squeezed my fat butt into my car, got my phone and called my husband.¹²

¹² This is not the first time I've had to call him regarding a parking issue.

My husband was in a meeting and couldn't come assist. He told me to find the maintenance man for the school.

You see, part of being crazy is that sometimes you have to speak on behalf of your crazy. You have to advocate for your crazy and get it the help that it needs so you can carry on with your day.¹⁴

¹⁴ Getting help from men is generally a good thing as most are already operating under the assumption that women are crazy.

The secretary told me the maintenance man wasn't in yet. 

I was about to full on panic when I turned and saw a delightful surprise. My daughter's friend's father, who, for bonus points, is also a commercial airline pilot.

I shared my crazy with him and he laughed and walked with me the half mile journey to my blocked car.

I'm assuming that to a person who flies 747's full of passengers, the situation probably looked like this.

In seconds he backed my car out.

After a thousand thank-you's I was on my way.

I'm not entirely sure how to get these issues across when it comes to my writing but perhaps part of the problem is that I try to hide them like I do my parking.

I guess I'm going to have to learn how to parallel park them up front. 

 

You Have a BFF? That's Nice. I Have a BGF.

Do you have a best friend? Maybe it's a childhood friend, or your sister or brother or maybe it's your mom. I will pause and acknowledge that for some, it may be your husband. I'm not really a fan of husband as best friend but that's another post for another day. Back to your best friend - whomever they may be.

When you think about your BFF lots of nice thoughts probably come to mind. The two of you chatting, drinking coffee or wine or on a great night, starting with wine and ending with coffee. Maybe you get each other little cards or notes to say how much you mean to each other. If I asked you to say the first word that came to mind when you thought of her (or him) it might be "fun" or "kind" or "considerate" maybe even "beautiful" or "radiant."

The first image that comes to my mind when I think of my BFF is a gadfly. So really, she's my BGF, Best Gad Fly.

I majored in public policy so a rather unfortunate amount of my academic time was spent reading Plato's Republic.¹

¹It seemed unfortunate at the time. My roomate's art history books seemed fun.²

²My roommate did not consider her art history books fun at the time.

Back to the gadfly, I realize that my BFF does not fit the true symbolism of the gadfly as I am not the status quo and she is not trying to evoke political unrest. But she is wholly committed to causing unrest in me and she continues to sting me no matter how many times I try to swat her away.

My BFF and I started writing our first books on the same day. Over the course of several months we both produced pretty good shitty first drafts. We were delighted. Dream mode was activated. My BFF had an agent from California call her and she had to literally lock herself in the bathroom away from her three kids so she could better describe her marketing plan. I got a lot of interest too. Requests for full manuscripts from top NY agents and some eager young fella was even shopping it around as a movie. Gasp!

Then the initial love fest from others was over and we were both left with shitty first drafts that needed clean up. My BFF kept at it. And I just kinda quit. I let my blog wither and die on the vine. I stopped tweeting. I put all my writing in the bottom desk drawer in a file folder under the utility bills.

I had lots of good reasons for stopping. For example, my sister died and I stumbled around in a grief induced haze pretending everything was okay. Shortly afterwards I developed an ucler. The following summer my mom had open heart surgery. My own kids wanted a mom and all I was offering was a string of babysitters and nannies. I was struggling through a super shitty job which we nicknamed "dragoning."³ 

 

³ I ended up working for a guy who kept a dragon on his desk, like on purpose, for everyone to see. And he was a total jerk. Not a nice collector of dragons and reader of Lord of The Rings. More like hoarder of souls dragon. Working for dragon sucked any remaining hopes and dreams out of me. When friends called me at work they would say, "are you done for the day or are you still dragoning?" It actually became so widely used that one day dragon's girlfriend was introduced to another coworker who blurted out, "oh, you're dragon's girlfriend!"

Back to my BGF and her book. I cheered her on at night through the second round of edits, I cheered her on over morning coffee on her third round and I half listened through the fourth round hoping she would just publish it already. And she did.

But the gadfly in her wouldn't leave me alone. "Don't make me read your novel as your eulogy," she pleaded. But I just couldn't budge, no matter how many times she stung me.

What I couldn't see so clearly at the time was that I was slowly sliding my way down into a hole.⁴

⁴ Holes are not entirely bad. For example, the first line of The Hobbit is, "In a hole in the ground lived a hobbit."

But my hole wasn't really a cozy hobbit hole, it was a hide out. With encouragement from my gadfly and husband and parents, it was decided the best thing I could do to get out of my hole and back into the sunshine was to quit work for a while and try to take care of myself. So I quit.

I can't tell you that I grew wings and flew out of my hole or that I even built a ladder. It's a slow climb out of a sandy pit but there's someone at the bottom of it stinging my ass every day. Every. Day.

"What is your one goal for today?" will be a text on my phone at 6am from my gadfly.

You see, my gadfly won't let me give up on myself or my  book dream or my own branded website with 1 million followers.⁵

⁵ Moms Who Need Coffee is presently hovering at 82 Likes, so you can see, I'm practically there.

My gadfly tells me it won't grow until I start to share, not just photos of coffee but real, authentic thoughts. So one thought is that sometimes, things fall apart and it takes some time to put them back together.⁶

⁶This is also the title of a great book by Achebe, Things Fall Apart. 

Another thought is that my best friend is a gadfly. And I love her.⁷

⁷You'll love her too. She's at A Slice of Happy