Thursday, January 29, 2009

This New Year...a BIG Why?

Is it just me or is there a funk in the air. O.K. so my house isn't worth more than a bag of chips and there is the rumor and the start of layoffs at my husband's company, my work hours have been cut, but it isn't just the sour economy that has got me down. Now, a Pollyanna I am not, but I am also not a natrually depressed person. I decided to take stock of my last month, the first month of the New Year and I realized that given what has happened during these last 30 days, it is no wonder that I am not in the highest of spirits and find myself asking..Why? Why? do all of these things have to happen.

A thirty-five year old mother of two dies suddenly in her sleep, a mother at my childrens' school is diagnosed with late stage breast cancer, yet another friend's husband has been layed off and she finds herself suddenly the only breadwinner in the family and her job not all that secure, bankruptcy and foreclosure looms on a once secure horizon, a family loses their three-year-old son to cancer, a friend tries to take his own life, a woman in my neighborhood succeeds in doing so, someone has walked out on his family, and another is contemplating it...these are the stories of my last thirty days. In light of all that is happening around me, my problems don't seem that big. Despite the economy, we are doing better than most, my children are healthy, and we have no plans to try and sell our house anytime soon.

Maybe it is that I am middle-aged. I have now officially lived long enough to have bad things happen around me, things that I used to hear my parents talk about when they were my age. I think that I have always resisted growing up and now I am really, for the last time, being forced to. These are not problems that can be solved overnight, if at all. If I am going to be there for the people in my life who really need me I can't afford to give in to my own petty depressories.

Cheers to the new year, may it only get better!

No comments: