Have you ever had a week that makes you want to scream?
And by scream, I met let loose with a primal roar so intense it might strip the enamel off your teeth and shatter the eardrums of anyone in a 10-mile radius.
I just had one of those weeks recently. It started with lice and went downhill from there.
Every day had a new delight: a traffic ticket, a bounced check, a pinched nerve, a kid with the plague, the sudden-death of a cell phone… all smothered in more loads of laundry than imaginable. First world problems to the Nth degree.
The icing on the cake was a little blowback from the peanut gallery on the name of my blog — apparently the word BITCH’IN no longer holds its adorable ’80s connotation of something being exceptionally awesome.
If you buy the Law of Attraction, then what you put out is what you get back. At that point, my vibration was so low that I had to abandon the limbo pole and get on my belly to see the light.
Literally, laying flat on my back on the floor to sooth that pinched nerve, I got to thinking about the word BITCH and how it could possibly help me shift my attitude around.
It wasn’t going to be through bitching to the choir. After all, almost everyone I know has survived infestations and a whole lot worse.
It couldn’t be about yelling and screaming, even though that was my raw, go-to first impulse.
It wasn’t really about cursing, even though that is a quick release for anything that ever ails ya.
I had nobody to be a bitch to, as that wouldn’t help any of the people in the same boat as me. (If only I had my own red carpet critique show on E! Still mourning the loss of the Queen B of High Comedy, Joan Rivers…)
And so, after a little while, I got a grip, and headed off to continue organizing a room that serves as my office/storage facility/dumping ground for shit that has nowhere else to go. My husband has a vision of a man cave — one that I know will end up being a kid cave but let the man dream! — and so we are clearing and cleaning like crazy.
There, in the wreckage, I kept coming across photos: me with the closest things to abs I have ever had, the aftermath of giving birth, babies at the beach, the view from the bleachers, and loads of happy memories all along that same vein.
But when I really thought about it, I remembered that along with all the wonderful things also came a lot of hard times, too.
Childbirth is a bitch, working out is a bitch, wrangling children on the beach is a bitch, sitting on backless bleachers for hours is a bitch, and so it goes.
The Yin and Yang of it all means that the very things that we bitch about are also what makes life memorable. Delightful. And precious.
BITCH and BITCH’IN — two sides of the same story.
And honestly, I often can’t bear to listen to the news nowadays because BITCH isn’t even the word for life in the Middle East, Africa, and so many other parts around the globe. First world problems to the Nth degree don’t scratch the surface of the horrendous realities of life in disease and warn-torn places. But I do listen because it is a constant reminder for me to live in gratitude every single day.
So if you see me wearing my bitch’in necklace, just take it for what it is: a gentle reminder that life’s a bitch, and that’s a good thing.
bad daygetting my groove backlife’s a bitch