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Is that Gloria Naylor (oops, Gaynor) I hear?

I took everything to our homeschool group that I was supposed to take except my sanity and my sense of humor. Niara’s hair was on top of her head in this funky beehive, upswing do and only one person was on time and that was the former President. I was 6 minutes late, fuming because Kiserian waits until everyone is in the car and ready to go before he realizes he has to use the bathroom. HELP! I think I am going to put a portable potty in the car. A lot of my friends have one and I need to get with the program because between that brother and these nasty public bathrooms, sistah is going to lose it.

Anyway, folks rolled up slowly but surely 15/20/30! minutes after the scheduled time and all I could do was breathe in, breathe out. Find joy in the moment, release the stress (this is some of the jibberish I feed myself when I’m about to implode). We did get started. We did have a blessed time. The kids were so excited to be back with their friends (and their not-really friends…they are everywhere, even in a homeschooling environment) and I was glad to know that all was well with my folks. I spent the entire time administrating stuff–”Do you have enough copies for your class?” “Who’s in the girl’s bathroom making that noise?” ” Oh, I’ll be sure to address that at our next meeting.” Between new people not knowing about the activities for the year to seasoned people who have a ton of new ideas that I’m supposed to make happen like right then, I was BEAT DOWN. I mean, I could have been flat on my face on the concrete and been OK. The kids could have gotten dropped off by my folks and I could have just laid there. My mind was racing 180 miles an hour on the way home mentally writing my 100 million things to do by next week list. Oh, the headache was unbelievable. I sat down on the couch, asked the kids for just 10 miles to attempt to regain some brain cells and instead of crying, I started laughing. Laughing at Khari (the baby) who took a little girl’s chicken from her lunch box, bit off of it and then gave it back to her. Laughing at the fact that no matter how many emails and phone calls I made to people, people still didn’t have their stuff together. Laughing at the crazy mood swings of our teenagers who really think that being like everybody’s expects them to be is just a little too hard, so they result to being dismissive/snippy/overall WHACK. This life thing is happening before my eyes and I…I betta keep laughing.

I sat there in the living room and began to doubt again why am I doing this. Why am I putting myself out there, stretching myself? Can I really take on one more thing on my plate and be better at all of the things that I can’t take off of my plate like wife and mom? Well…the funk lasted for about 5 minutes and then I heard my kids laughing in the background/running through the house like maniacs/talking about all of the fun they had at UMOJA. Then I heard my girl, Gloria Naylor…”as long as I know how to love, I know I’ll stay alive. I have all my life to live and I have all my love to give, I will survive…I will survive. Hey Hey.”

Yep, I’m stretched to the max (or at least I think I am) and God (oh, and Gloria) said I will survive!

OOPS! Correction: I kept this in its original context because it’s quite funny, but my girl Yolanda nicely corrected me via email and I got pop culture on my brain, but my music brain collided with my literature brain and it’s Gloria Gaynor (singer)/not Gloria Naylor (author). See, I’m crazier than even I originally thought!

© 2006 DahGurl.