Artist's Way Journal - Week Three, Day Six

It's quiet.  DS is sleeping after having his blood sugar checked twice.  We're all wiped out, and on edge.  It's hard at times for DH to take a calm approach, but he's doing pretty well.  As long as we realise we're all in this together, and that no one is doing a "bad" job.

I want to find some creativity today.  Something other than the enormousness of the info we're absorbing.  I'm hoping I can do that for a little while, maybe exploring our new territory.  I told a friend on Facebook that this is a little like having moved to a new country, where the customs are all different.  We'll get used to them, and and make our way more easily in time.

I'll return later on.

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I just got back from the bank, the post office, the music store (to get DS's drum teacher's number to let him know why we missed Thursday's lesson), and the grocery store.  

It's weird what goes through your head when something new is in your life.  When I drive by myself I start thinking about things in great detail, and what I experience on the road is no small part of that:

At a four-way stop I look back in my rearview mirror at the older couple I've sort of cut off to get in the lane I needed to be in, and imagine what they're saying about me.  Since I couldn't fit behind them in line (no more room to squeeze in) I had to get into the right hand lane and merge when I could.  So, seeing a window of opportunity I sped up and merged.  I signaled in plenty of time, so I wasn't being pushy, but some people just aren't into letting others merge, even if they realise that the person trying to move over might want to turn left at the 4-way stop.  Road ownership is a big thing to some folks.  So here I am, ahead of them, but not gloating about it, thinking 'if I was talking with them face to face I'd say I'm sorry, but my son has just been diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes--I've got rights here.'  And when I was trying to back out of my parking space at the grocery some guy in a big truck (bigger than he needed to drive, I'm certain)(I'm getting catty now) was taking his time going by, some hard smirk set on his face, and again I'm thinking "look dude, if you had a child who was just diagnosed with diabetes you wouldn't get so macho with me, would you?"

The mind can be pretty one-sided when it wants to be.  And when I got irritated with the women who were parked in the middle of the intersection, probably looking for something in their car, I drove around, and something in my brain said, "you know, you don't really know what their story is.  Maybe it's worse than yours.  Maybe it's not, but then, compared to what they know, maybe it's bad enough.  Everyone has a story; everyone has something that is challenging in their lives at various times, and who's to measure on some scale what more important, and anyway, I'll get where I need to go in due time, and it's really okay."

Rambling is sometimes a good cleansing mechanism.  Gets it all out.  Grammar can be fixed later.