circles

I woke up this morning at 4:30 am and couldn't go back to sleep. I rolled around a lot and desperately tried to go back to sleep to no avail. I fear I am turning into my grandmother . . . . falling asleep at 6pm and waking up before the birds. The preschool that I have been working at this year is kept very cold, frostbite cold, and my hip from a previous break when I was in college was aching. Yup! I just heard my inner grandmother voice saying: "Y'all, I just couldn't sleep 'cause my hip's a hurtin' me."

So there I was. Flipping wide awake! Because of that fact, my mind started racing and thoughts seemed to clog up my frontal lobe at an alarming rate.

I belong to a very strange and wonderful species called women. On one hand you have all the many wonderful traits woman possess: compassion, wit, multi-tasking abilities, the ability to bear children, nurturing, boobs, one handed cooking skills, etc. The list could go on. On the other hand, women can be catty and downright mean to each other. This funny world of females starts young. Observing girls and boys in their social circles is quite the experiment. Girls can say a million words with one glance and every other girl knows just what she meant with a brief moment of eye contact. Boys seem to wrestle and push each other around all the while oblivious and unaware of the world happening around them. They live in the now whereas girls tend to stew on all the what ifs and whys.

It doesn't change as adults in my opinion. Partly not being able to fall back to sleep this morning was due to the many thoughts I just can't shake about the women in my life at the moment. I keep wondering and worrying about the impression I put forward in my day to day life. There are very few people in my life of friends and family that I never have to second guess what their true feelings of me are. The few that I know will love me and protect me no matter how many stupid things I say or do. And let's face it, if we all were disowned because of the stupid things we've said or done, I would be a very hated person by now!! And so would you, my friend, so would you.

We are just so hard on each other, we women. Always doing the "dance" in our social circles. People who deny this fact are either very naive or very self absorbed. The old saying rings loudly in my head almost daily: Life is too short to worry about the silly things. And, although I know this to be so, so, so, so true and right, it's truly easier said then done. It's hard to not get caught up in the dance. It's hard not to wonder. Or worry. Or gossip. Or talk about it until all the people around you are so sick of hearing about it they would rather pull their own fingernails out with a pair of dirty pliers then listen to you relive the single moment you've been stewing about one more time.

After my second cup of coffee, two Excedrin Extra Strength and dropping Wonder boy off at school, I write this to purge. And I feel better. Less worry. Less fear. Less care. We all have external issues we are dealing with and I need to realize that I can't control how life is treating the ones around me. I can only be a listening ear and a compassionate shoulder if they choose to lean on me. Until then, I tell myself again: my life is just too damn short to worry about the silly things. And so I keep calm and carry on.