Dumpster Fire

Everything is ruined. There is no way to fix it. What am I going to do? This is so unfair!

Life is full of surprises, and some are not welcome ones. In fact, life tends to test you to the very ends of your nerves and emotions. There is no way to avoid it or the tragedies that spring up, but they can be weathered, if you sit back and take a breather.

I have had my share of car crash scenarios in life. Believe me, I know and understand when things don’t go as you planned them or as you envisioned them. Some of us, women, in particular, tend to blow it up even more than the actual incident is. Why we do that is sometimes a mystery, but in many cases it is the fairy tale syndrome.

We have a perfect vision of every detail of a thing. We plan, work out details, painstakingly arrange all the nooks and crannies of what we are planning, and then it happens. The poo hits the fan. Everything is ruined, and there is no way to fix it or get it back.

I feel you. I have had that experience more times than not. But it really, isn’t the end of the world. It will for sure pass, and if you are lucky, you will laugh about it later on in life,

I have had more than my fair share of the colloquial dumpster fires. One of my first, was my entire first marriage. I married for the wrong reasons, found the wrong man for me, and then proceeded to to make all the clichéd mistakes, well not just me, but we made them. That ill-fated marriage ended, badly. I had this perfect little image of marriage, the prince and princess chronicles, all written out and sealed, and then they caught fire. Life burned up my short story.

Fast forward seven or maybe eight years, and I am about to marry the man I love, really love. I planned, I organized, scheduled everything to the nines and sat back and was waiting for the day. It was going to be in a beautiful setting in Thornton, Colorado, on a beautiful day, with a beautiful back drop of mountain range and Denver in the background. Family were coming from all over the country. Our guest list was intimate but not tiny. We had fifty people confirmed to attend. Food was ordered, flower arrangements and bouquet, cake was sampled and ordered. It was all going as planned.

Whenever you feel that, or say that, expect the shoe to drop. It will. For us it most certainly did. In fact it turned into the dumpster fire of dumpster fires.

We were getting married on a Friday evening, at sunset. We had planned it so our friends and coworkers, could come after work and not have their weekend tied up. We had a flight out the next day to go to the northwest for our honeymoon, so it was all coordinated perfectly. On September 14, 2001, we were going to be married and start our beautiful life together. Yes, for those of you astute people, you read that right. For those who aren’t paying much attention to dates, our wedding was to take place three days after 9/11. Well, guess what?

Ya. That. That Tuesday morning, the world imploded and life stopped for a few hours. Our land was attacked, our people murdered, out way of life threatened, and our history would never bee the same again.

Needless to say, all flights were immediately grounded. No family could fly in, and we were no longer having a honeymoon in the Pacific Northwest. For a woman, planning the happiest day of her life, the rug had been yanked from underneath us and ignited. I cried. I moaned and complained, I was distraught. Our fifty went down to twelve. The only ones that would be in attendance, were people close to us from Denver, and anyone close enough to drive in for the wedding. My family were not going to be able to come at all.

There was nothing we could do. Everything was paid for, and that was that. We had a small wedding with way too much food, which we gave away to the staff of the venue. We had my dream wedding cake, which we portioned out to our guests, in doggy bags. (I did keep the top portion for the tradition one year anniversary.) It was a large incident and I had no control of any part of it.

To add fuel to this raging fire, I had hundreds of dollars in flowers in my refrigerator, in the form of the most dreamy bouquet, and I left them at home, when we left for our wedding. Yup, my ridge enjoyed their beauty and fragrance the entire evening. I cried when I realized it, bit we were at the venue, when I did, and too far from our home, in Denver traffic to get to them and not be late to our own wedding.

My husband talked to the manager of the wedding place, and the venue put together a very pretty substitute. My panic and disappointment thwarted.

That same year began our tragic attempts at having a child. While I thought it would happen right away, we had five years of hit and miss, and miscarriages, before we were blessed with our son. That struggle was not what I had imagined or planned.

Then there was the entire nursing my baby drama. No one ever checked our son, when he was born, but he was born tongue tied. It is very common. I had no clue, and I spent days and days trying, only you have to bottle feed my baby. Since he could not latch, I pumped, and formula fed him. The problem I had then, was that my milk should not drop and I was drying up. The baby’s tongue issue was later found, but not in time. I would cry after every feeding, when I failed to nurse, I would cry when I would pump and not get more than a couple ounces. (The baby’s sucking is very important to a mother’s great milk coming in, by the way. Always have them check before you take your newborn home.) I remember crying everyday in the shower, so my husband wouldn’t hear my sobbing. I felt like a failure at motherhood. The my sister said the words, the saving grace, for my weary spirit. She told me this would not be the only battle in motherhood. There would be many more, and many larger. She reminded me that at least there was an alternative to feeding my baby, and that children all over the world live normal and healthy lives having been fed formula. That gave me the freedom to let go, and I then accepted that this was not going to go as I “had planned”.

I am an organized and methodical person. I leave nothing to chance, and I dot my i’s and cross my t’s. I am a type A person, so I have standards that are often even too high for me. When things go wrong, I go into action and take care if the problems. That was my career, in fact. I went into practices to fix problems. Once they were fixed and running smoothly, I literally worked myself out of a job, or into boredom. If you know me, you know I can’t be bored. I have to constantly have my mind engaged and I need to stay busy. I am a task warrior. So when things go wrong and I have no control over the fix, I become stunned, followed by upset. Upset me is not fun me.

Over the years, I have had many of the same kinds of mishaps, or faceplants with plans, decisions, actions. It is a natural and unavoidable thing. I have had to learn to be more adapting. That is not easy for me as a woman, and not easy for me as someone who is always in control of myself and most of the time, of the things I am working on.

My wedding went off, just fine. Not as planned, no, but it was a beautiful and intimate shin dig. We actually got to enjoy everyone and spend time actually talking to each person there. Weeding are not often that way.

My flowers were alive and well, in climate controlled refrigeration, and the cake topper was nicely ensconced in my freezer. The flowers went with us on our honeymoon so I was able to actually enjoy them, since I did not have to toss them away to a female wedding guest.

We did hav a honeymoon, though it was a bit different. We rented a car, drove eats to see my family, and we went to Disney and Universal Parks. My happy places. We dragged along my family and distracted ourselves from the devastation in New York and D.C..

As I stated before, I my husband and I finally had a child, and not he is living his life and successful. I stopped working when I became a mom, and now my career has moved into something quite different.

With the years of experiences I have had with things going phenomenally and horrendously, I learned to stop to regroup, when the unexpected happens and threatens to ruin everything. It helps and pays to be calm and think rationally. Often in life, when we react in extremes, we overreact. None of the experiences I shared, ended the world. We are all still here. I won some and I lost many. But that is all perfectly okay. Life is messy and stays messy. Don’t forget that.

When you make plans or think about the future, think casually, knowing there will most certainly be adjustments. If you are one of those women or men who do not enjoy surprises, it is better if then you have plans B and C in the hopper, for the just in case inevitability. You will have far more success and enjoyment if you have forethought mini fires. Major ones will happen too, and that will have to be handled. The best way to do that is to understand, that there is beauty and wonderful to come from ugly and terrible. You just have to find it, look for it.

Trust me when I say that aggravation over things you cannot change or anticipate, is a waste of energy and time. Expect them, and let them roll over you. In the end, none of it matters in the grand scheme of things. You’ll forget the majority of the drama over the years.

I have learned that the secret to being content in the dumpster fires, is to not let them have the power to burn down your spirit. Think about it this way. Maybe the train wrecks in life, have, in a very odd way, prevented or moved you away from something worse, something you could not even imagine being worse. Imagine this smaller wreck and wreckage my have saved you from something unimaginable and immeasurably more difficult to correct.

Life is not fair. I don’t know where anyone ever gets that idea, because it isn’t. It is navigable however.

Roll with it as it comes. Be patient, Stay calm, and laugh it off. You will live to fight another day. If you do, you will be content no matter the circumstances.

#life #lifelessons #women #everyone #writers #writing