note to self « Letters from Grenada

note to self

Remember that scene in Father of the Bride? Not the old one. The one with Steve Martin. Remember the scene in the grocery store? All he wants to do is buy some hot dogs and some buns, only hot dogs come in packages of eight and buns come in packages of twelve, and that’s just CRAZY, so he goes a little crazy, tearing open the plastic bags, and redistributing the buns so that the packages of buns will match the packages of hot dogs?

I’ve had that image stuck in my head for days, and I didn’t know why, and then it hits me. That it’s a perfect metaphor for my life right now. That over the last few weeks I’ve been cleaning and deleting and streamlining and culling and generally flailing about in a attempt to get my existence into a size and shape that I can manage. Because sometimes I think about all the things I want to do, all the things I have to do, all the things I dream about, all the places I want to go and the people I want to love and the stories I want to tell and the children I want to mother. And for a moment I can almost see all that wanting of mine, and it’s just like King motherflocking Kong, except with slightly better table manners. So I rub my eyes and the vision recedes and I take a deep, shaky breath and whisper aloud,

Sometimes things have to get worse before they get better.