Difficult Things

This is me with my whole life, at the moment.

I don’t know why exactly, but I’m always surprised when things everyone warns me will be hard actually turn out to be hard.

For example, I was told before my c-section that recovery would be a slow, difficult process. Intellectually, I understood that. I planned for it. And yet, when my daughter was a week old, I was astounded by how difficult and draining it was to stand up for five minutes and fold a load of laundry. It shouldn’t have surprised me, and yet, it did. It’s like I thought simple acknowledgement of the fact that it’d be difficult would be enough to excuse me from having to live it.

The latest examples of this weird quirk of mine are being away from Wes for two weeks and the process of trying to land an agent. When Wes and I finally figured out our schedules for the summer and realized that we’d basically be on opposite coasts the whole first half of July, we knew it’d be hard. We talked about it. We planned for it. And yet, once again, I’m surprised by how challenging it is.

We have Sprint for our cell phones, which means we can’t talk on the phone because lo, Sprint never met a call it didn’t want to drop. This means we’ve barely spoken and must rely on texts, which are about as cuddly as a Decepticon toaster. Add to that the fact that I’ve been on solo parenting duty for six straight days, all while querying the agents I met at the conference, and you’ve got a whole lot of missing going on.

For Wes’s part, when he’s not flooding his hotel bathroom and wandering into rough neighborhoods, he’s finally relaxed enough to realize he misses me. He’s been so stressed out getting ready for his conference, the poor guy practically had cogs springing out of his head when I got home from New York.

So here we are. In yet another situation where I’m surprised something is tough even though I knew going into it that it would be.

Maybe I’m just adept at the kind of wishful thinking that convinces me I’m exempt from these kinds of struggles? If that’s the case, querying agents is an excellent way to pay my dues. So far as I can tell, no one gets a free pass at this process. It’s tough for just about everyone.

What’s nice is, pretty soon I’ll have my husband back to go through it with. I’m pretty sure all my friends, on whom I’ve leaned heavily for support while my husband’s MIA, will breathe a sigh of relief at that!

How lucky am I to have friends willing to be leaned on?!