Just Be

It’s a Friday night, mid-September. The leaves are mostly changed, with a few stubborn trees hanging on to their brilliant green. It’s been raining grey and cool all day. And I’m at the grocery store, alone and in sweats, buying the fixings for home-made nachos, some bubble-bath, wine and cat food. You’re probably picturing a sort-of Diane Lane scene from Must Have Dog or Under The Tuscan Sun. Where she looks perfectly dishevelled and her big liquid brown eyes and perfect body quietly ask, why me? I’m lovely and brilliantly acerbic, intelligent. And notice how great my ass looks in these tight sweats.
So, yeah, that’s so not me. I’m the one you see in the grocery store while you shop with your husband and kids. You might notice me more as an anthropological example than anything, but it’s more likely you don’t notice me. My ponytail is not artfully messy, just messy. My sweats don’t have j-lo written on the tag and they certainly don’t fit me like a glove. Good Lord what a thought! My clothes are shapeless and colourless. Every so often I get that little sad smile that’s not a smile from a fellow shopper. The one when your lips turn neither up nor down but thin into a non-commital line that says ‘How sad! (cluck!)’. You know what’s so great about this, though? It’s not bothering me. Not the twenty-something checkout girl who tells me briskly to return my basket to the front when I have finished packing my groceries. I assume she had her own reasons for being a bit of a bitch. Not the young guys in line behind me who whisper to each other and let out squeaky barks of laughter. Not even the bitter rain on my slicker as I trudge out to the car.
The thing is this - I have discovered one fundamental truth that keeps me going. Going through awkward public outings (did I mention that earlier I was at the bookstore alone, buying a cheap copy of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility and an expensive copy of Glamour? Glamour costs more. It makes you think, doesn’t it?) Going through more difficult, permanent things. Like my ex-husband, the one I still love even though he is the worst person in the world for me, bringing in his new baby for me to hold and cuddle. The baby he had with the girl he left me for. Sort of. The baby who looks like him - our sons, god love ‘em, are both the image of me - and giggles when I tickle his belly.
Sometimes your terror of a thing, your avoidance, is far worse than the thing itself. We’ve all heard this often enough but it doesn’t just relate to sharks and spiders and - in my case - birds. It’s moments like that. When David has walked in to my tidy little house to find the two boys and I cuddled on the couch, half asleep in front of ‘Teen Titans’. When he is carrying the baby I have avoided looking at or thinking about for over a year. And that baby instinctively stretches his chubby arms out for me and I have to take him. I have no choice. My stomach clenches in protest, my mind screams ‘no! you promised! There’s no going back now.’ And it’s done. This simple, stupid little moment is over. And I have not crumbled into dust. Hurrah!
So what is my fundamental truth? It’s alright to be just alright. Not fantastic, not stupendous, not joyous. Just alright. And it’s also okay to stay in a holding pattern of alright for as many years as you like. Once you let yourself go, let you dreams get smaller and more finite, your pleasure come from things like brie on a fresh baguette or wildflowers in a nice vase on your windowsill, it just comes. Stop striving. Stop trying. Stop changing. Just be.