my dad said a really cool grace at thanksgiving about being thankful for when life sucks. and i’ve had a few rounds of life really sucking hard and it was a good point to be made. because through life sucking, if you do it right, you come out the other side of the suck with a better understanding. new lessons. all the crap i post about on here. growing. changing. adapting. learning. blah blah blah.

ok. so i was thinking about social media. i mean i think about it a lot. how it changes how we perceive the world we live in. it expands our knowledge. it gives us greater access to a large number of people. and i like that part.  i’ve met a lot of really cool people on here. people i don’t know in real life. people who don’t know ME in real life. and even the people who know me in real life, have a perception of me based on what or who i am via social media. because it is controllable. i can chose to be positive. or negative. i chose what i share. we all do. and i think in general people try to be positive. we post pictures of life when its happy. we document the good times. we tend to leave the dark crevice of our lives tucked away. 

actually. thats not even a social media thing. thats a life thing. its simply heightened by social media.

this month marks the 12th anniversary of when my ex husband and i sat down and had a real talk about our marriage. harrison had just barely turned a year old and all the dr. phil books in the world weren’t turning the tides. i think thats part of what makes this month so brutal for me every year. this is when shit got real. and it got real hard and real awful for a long time before it got better, before it got to where it is now. 

and i remember the night i told my girlfriends that steve and i were splitting up. and there was genuine shock. because i didnt talk a lot about being unhappy. i talked a lot about what a great provider he was. what a good cook he was. how good he was with our kids. i didnt talk about the other stuff. the loneliness. the emotional void. the plethora of issues i kept sweeping under the rug. besides, marriage is supposed to be hard. but i didnt want to admit it was FAILING. but we were. we were failing. 

i can see now, it was ok to let go. steve and i are good. we just weren’t a forever fit. we served our purpose for one another and we were due to move on.  – this post got sideways, this wasn’t the direction i meant to go.

anyway. so this morning my tree crashed to the ground. thats what woke me up. and its not like i don’t know that noise. one year i tied the tree to the wall and held the hook in place with hot glue (i’m not even a little bit kidding. that was the most evil tree ever)  and i was thinking about all the pics i posted of my pretty trees and my pretty kids and even my pretty if not insane dog and i thought you know what? no one posts pics of the tree when it crashed to the floor. and if that isn’t a metaphor for pretty much everything i don’t know what is. and i didnt take a picture. in fact. i went back up to bed and went back to sleep. i pulled the covers up over my head and spent an hour pretending i didnt have to deal with it.  “Scarlett: I can’t think about that right now. If I do, I’ll go crazy. I’ll think about that tomorrow.” – i do so love scarlett . . .

but then i came down, and stepped over the tree and made breakfast for the boys. and i braced myself and on my third try i got that stupid tree back up and straight and secure without having to tie it to anything. 

and next year i’ll do a better job of making sure the tree is solid before we decorate. maybe this will be the year i learn that lesson fully. make sure you are solid before you put the pretty lights on. thats a pretty good metaphor too. but thats a whole ‘nother blog post.