It was a typical Sunday morning. The coffee was poured. The newspaper was spread across the kitchen table. Dirty dishes were stacked on the counter. In every corner there was mess or areas of organized chaos. Nothing was out of the ordinary, except for one tiny detail: I was crying.
The Carpenter and I were sharing a cup of coffee and a conversation that started at my request; “I need to talk to you about something.” I should begin by declaring that it is not easy to be married to me. I am not one to hold back or hold in an emotion. I feel what I feel, when I feel it and it’s all or nothing. Before I could even speak, you could see the range of scenarios running through my beloved’s puzzled mind. Was I leaving him? Was I having an affair? Worse, was I pregnant again? (Not gonna happen). You could see him trying to figure out what he’d done to make me cry before 9am.
Men hate when women cry. It triggers their fright or flight senses. It sets off basic cavemen sensibility they either need to hunt something and kill it to appease their crying woman, or need to run and scour the landscape in a mock search for something or other, and not return until they are sure the crying has stopped. The Carpenter was trapped, holding his coffee like a life preserver. The sports page lay before him, but he didn’t dare look down at it.
Instead, the love of my life watched me unravel before him into a hot mess of emotional madness. Overwhelmed and sleep-deprived, I rambled out a liturgy of issues, losing my ability to sensor my thoughts or even put them into neat categories for him to decipher. I let out a list of all the things that were pressing the breaking point in my head; my fear over finances, car issues, deadlines, and paperwork. Add coordinating homework and practice schedules, client meetings, and overtime, not to mention being exasperated by the job of parenting an anxious child, (which, based on my current hot mess status, was surely my fault too). Obviously I was an inadequate mother and an incapable spouse, having failed to make a healthy dinner three nights running. Despite futile attempts at structure and cleanliness, the house looked like a war zone. And my career? What career? Sniffle.
“I just can’t keep juggling it all,” I declared, weeping. “I cannot keep juggling all these stupid balls in the air.”
Silence. The Carpenter, hiding his bewilderment like a seasoned pro, (18 years experience counts), looked up at my soggy, red face and said the most fabulous thing anyone could say in that moment: “Kelly, juggling balls are not meant to stay up in the air. That’s why we juggle them. Juggling is an act. Everybody drops them once in a while; everybody acts like they don’t. That’s life. ”
And there it was. In one simple common-sense statement, the Carpenter put a fast stop to my whole illusion of woe. I blinked in awe.
“I hate it when you’re right,” I replied, smugly.
“I know,” he smiled, picking up the sports page, stopping to give me a devilish wink over the headlines.
So there you have it. Juggling is fun, but it turns out life is much better when you bounce. Go ahead and drop the ball.