Today was one of those days when I swear some gremlin was lurking trying to see how many little things he could do to send me into a raging cursing temper tantrum.
I broke the kitchen sink handle off in an effort to fix it.
That meant Saturday movie night was going to be tough come dinner time.
It also made it fairly certain Lisa would be livid pissed.
My knee jerk reaction would normally be start cursing, throw the part across the room, or if I’m especially energetic, launch into the desert.
The encore would usually be a day of brooding about how much it was going to cost to fix it, or how I could sue Moen for making such a cheap handle piece that I am replacing less than a year after the last one broke, or whether I just want to scrap the fixture and shell out $300 for a new one.
Instead, I stayed calm.
My plan to spend some quality time with Elliana didn’t quite work out as planned, although she was very sweet patting me on the back as I pondered a temporary fix in the plumbing aisle at Home Depot.
I jury rigged a temporary fix just in time to clean up the mess, show Lisa how to use the back up sink fixture, and take Elliana to dance.
The gremlin reappeared an hour later as I was dredging a box of old paperwork through the parking lot at work in my ongoing purging efforts to streamline the masses of paperwork I swim in these days.
The handle on the well worn cardboard box decided to give up its life, sending hundreds of pages of paperwork tumbling on to the ground in the parking lot at my office, and splitting open the alphabetized, organized version of some papers I had just finished.
Al Pacino type combos of profanity filled my head for a moment.
I took a deep breath in, gathered everything up and picked up the box from the bottom so that I could get some extra work done on a Saturday at the office.
So what the hell is my point?
Broken boxes and broken faucets are the little stuff.
But they can drain an incredible amount of energy during the stress of other things going on in your life, like infertility, if you let them.
Having been away from the day to day challenges of infertility for years now, I forget this valuable lesson that I learned to live so that I would have the energy to deal with each cycle: don’t sweat the small stuff.
My reward for staying calm through these nasty little gremlin attacks today was enjoying a night of snuggling with my girls watching Disney’s Teen Beach movie.
My reward for staying calm during similar gremlin attacks during our infertility days–I had more focus and energy to deal with the big emotional stuff when it inevitably hit us after a failed IVF cycle.
So all I can say to the gremlin is, go find somebody else to mess with.
You ain’t gonna get nowhere with me.