We have all had them- those conversations where your skin suddenly feels all prickly and you instantly feel a divide between you and the person that you are talking to. The ones where you think, “How can you POSSIBLY have that opinion about _________?” The ones that make you want to crawl underneath the table, put your fingers in your ears and start saying “LA, LA, LA, I can’t hear you” (I’m real mature, I know).It’s as if this one difference in opinion, political stance, cultural view, etc suddenly makes you feel like you have absolutely NOTHING in common with the person sitting across from you.And it’s even worse when it’s family.
It was like any other day.I had driven this road hundreds of times, only this time was different.It was night and I had been out of town for a week.I wasn’t anticipating the construction work that had been done.I wasn’t anticipating the missing road lines that hadn’t been painted back on yet.I certainly wasn’t anticipating the uninstalled stop sign lying in the ditch next to the intersection.And I wasn’t anticipating the car that would smash into me, t-boning my driver’s side door.In an instant, everything that I knew was about to change…
I still remember that moment- sitting on the floor of the nursery holding a screaming baby and crying.I look up at my husband (who is also sitting on the floor next to me) and he, too, is crying (and my husband doesn’t cry.I’ve seen him cry like twice- and this was one of them).Why didn’t anyone WARN us?I felt duped.The only reason I could figure is that if anyone had told us that it would be this hard, maybe we wouldn’t have procreated in the first place (here is a line across the middle of the bed- don’t you dare cross it, or else!).But, alas, here we were with an infant, completely clueless as to what to do next- or how to get this baby to stop crying (he was lucky he was so cute).
