do you ever get the sense that i get just a little too much pleasure out of being, erm, disappointed by life?

that too much happiness might make me blotchy and damp…and if the world really coughed up sunbeams and roses all over my lawn, i’d move?

yeh, me too.

but maybe not right away. ’cause apparently, not getting rabies was just the start of a neat new turn of luck here in the crib. they called. yep, called. after days of the phone sitting limply in its cradle, taunting my tender, puny, shrivelled sense of usefulness to the outside world, they called. bless their crooked little hearts, they called.

i have a job. :)

of course, now i have to go to work. perhaps i shoulda thought this all through a little better?

nah.  i am grateful. very grateful. i feel validated. i feel relieved. i feel a pleasant, odd, unfamiliar sense of material security. this will be the very first time in the thirty months since we came back to Canada that Dave & i will both have full-time employment, at the same time. it’s been a long, hard slog, this past two-and-a-half years…and the respite from blatant uncertainty is something i think we need, for awhile. it’s only a term contract, my job, but it’s an interesting contract. and they called.

so we celebrated the turning of the worm in our apparent favour, our little family, by playing with some worms in the yard after dinner. with the sun dappling down, in the grass with my healthy, laughing child on an almost-warm, almost-summer evening, i too felt healthy. ‘normal’. unembittered, unwounded. like someone not weighed down by damage and loss and self-doubt, not crouched, warily, cynically, waiting for hurt and disappointment even in the midst of joy. for the first time in more than two years, i just felt…safe. and pleasantly, banally, hopeful.

dad, O, and worm

now hell, it could all be an illusion. i know i could be hit by a bus on my way to my first day at work. more important, i know that Oscar and Dave, so precious to me, are mortal, and vulnerable. i know. but for a few minutes last evening, i remembered how to forget. and regaining that footing - just that simple sense of balance, the absence of agitation and fear - brought a peace i hadn’t remembered at all.

i have exhaled, finally.worm is cool