This Crazy Life

It’s weird.  Or maybe not.  But I do a lot of thinking and dreaming and imagining when I’m sitting in a hotel room alone for hours.  There is only so much you can do a day and there is lots of “free” time no matter what you do.  I often think about where I went wrong.  What I could have done differently.  How we ended up here.  I do our laundry once a week or so and every time I’m walking down the hallway with my laundry basket of clothes, I think I never imagined my life like this.  Not in a million years would I be doing my laundry in a hotel laundromat.  But here I am.  Here we all are.  Somewhere life goes off course and doesn’t go as planned.  No matter how much of a planner you are.  You find yourself running to CBS at 10 at night to get your sick daughter pimple patches because you aren’t going to set off her OCD that time of night over something so small.  You talk to the maid to get clean towels when you need them.  You see the same older couple walking their dogs regularly and you wonder what brought them to live in this hotel.  But you won’t ask.  You’ll just smile and nod.  You’re considering a career change.  Or maybe a second job providing emotional coaching to other mothers going through the same thing.  Not now.  Not tomorrow.  But someday, when your daughter is better. Or if she never gets better when she’s older and you have more time.  You think about splitting her 529 between her other two sisters if she never makes it to college.  You look up if anorexia qualifies you for disability, and it does.  It’s actually one of the quickest things to get disability for.  You have two plans in your mind.  One if she gets better.  One if she doesn’t.  When it’s time to go home, you’ll put the rugs and the pots and pans and other items you bought for your php stay back into the box so if you end up doing this a third time, you’re ready to go.  You’ve become a pro at going with the unexpected when for so many years you fought it.  You liked to have everything all nice and neat and planned.  And this, all of this, but most definitely the hotel laundry, was not in your plan.