In case, through some weird fluke of how our lives line up you don't know, this is Ninja. Also called Binka. She is the cutest, sweetest, bestest Binka baby ever to bink or be a baby.
But she doesn't like thunderstorms.
She walks around starting at sounds I can't hear and meowing her face off for hours before a storm, and then cries through all the thunder, or hides way far in the closet for the whole day.
That's how I feel right now.
I spent all of Monday this week and a large chunk of Tuesday watching the kids in an empty apartment because they were too young to help move, and the space they'd take up in the car was needed for the stuff being moved. At first, it was okay. It was sort of an adventure. But the satellite-TV guy couldn't get a line of sight so there was no cable, and then the kids got bored, and they don't know the rules AND have bad habits that they need to break for the new house, so I spent a lot of time explaining that these are new walls and new carpets and they needed to not be jerks to them. And then a lot of time yelling at them because I'd already explained it a million times. And then a lot of time yelling at them because they couldn't seem to keep the back door closed, and A1 immediately broke the screen off its runners, and there wasn't any furniture and my back and whole left leg were killing me even before I had to spend eighteen hours sitting on the floor or standing.
- I learned I'm no better at other people's moves than I am at my own*.
- I learned that pain and sleeplessness makes me really impatient.
- I learned that there's only so many times I can explain to a three year old that he's not being abandoned or held captive, but that this is his new home.
- I learned (again) that when I have kids, I'd probably do best to keep it to one or two, because even two is exhausting, and three is insanity.
And the very same day that I was going through this, my brother and my mom were driving all day to pick up my niece and her cat, who are now living with us. This is the first time she's lived with her dad since she was a toddler, and only the third or fourth time that I've even seen her.
Ninja isn't handling having a new, unknown, much younger and more energetic cat in the house very well. She hid for almost two days in mom's closet because Annabelle (the new kitty) stole her usual spot in my closet. She's only just now starting to come out, and that's mostly just to sleep on mom's bed and cry whenever she sees people, and then to creep out once in a while in the most heartbreaking way. It's like she's the one who only just got here, and it's almost exactly how I feel.
Like I want to hide.
Like I don't want to talk to people.
Like I have over-extended my brain and my coping skills and just sort of want to sleep for a week.
I'm sure we'll both be fine in a while. We've gone through the same thing (or very similar things) before, and we're fine. But the more change happens that isn't my change and isn't my choice, the more I want to climb into the closet with Ninja and just stay there.
Too bad that doesn't help anything.
I know I have to get my schedule back on track and fall back on my own personal rituals that make it feel normal...I just haven't yet. It takes a few days of wallowing before I can get back on that horse, and get my feet onto a new Makeshift Surface.**
NOTES:
*At least the kind I'm relegated to now, since we're no longer privileged to super-efficient military movers who do all the packing AND the shifting AND the unpacking in the new place. And haven't been since I was 11, but that's still the way I feel like moves should be--I always want to move, and never want to do it myself.
**See what I did there?
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