In the past few days I've felt a great change within me, and I'm uncertain as to it's origin. Is this the happy hormone taking a full and final hold over my senses, enabling me to deal with previously terrorizing situations with inordinate calm and near-piety?
Or am I, as my ex-boss/dai-lo contends, loch-san, ready to come down from the mountain? Mellowing, he keeps saying, over and over, every time I triumph over past prejudices and over-reactions and manage to behave in just the right way to illicit maximum involvement and minimum upset from previously entitled "known enemies".
He stopped me in the hall today, after I'd diffused a situation that would have previously had me standing on a desk and screaming -- to tell me how proud he was, and how much I made him feel like a real sifu. Last week's difficulties between us, where he was having a hard time working under as opposed to leading me -- seem over. He is thrilled to be involved in our project, and even starting to enjoy not having to be the one on the line for it. I think he also understands how much I value his advice and how much I need his involvement. I think he is also perhaps learning to enjoy our peerhood, our new relationship, now that the father-prot�g� relationship is ebbing.
I've had such glorious role models in my life, my sheer fortune is humbling. I wake up each morning, prouder of my life than the last, and pledge to remember just how much I owe to how many people. Would that I could do the same for the planet at large.
Today's other point of pride, one that I am certain isn't hormonally enhanced, is our bedroom. For the first time in my life, since ever, in the over-decade since I left home in pieces, I chose where furniture should go, I came up with the idea myself, and held it and nurtured it and thought it through for months until we finally re-arranged what had once been a room that filled me with the stress of clutter and chaos, and is now, suddenly, after a week's difficult work -- a haven. A real, haven. I've never had a bedroom be a haven before, not even when I filled it with a canopy bed, crimson silk curtains, and all the joys that a post-university dotcom income could buy.
I, mistress of the anti-aesthete, am learning. Slowly, and with continued difficulty, but I'm learning to work with the last dregs of what I always thought impossible. First singing lessons, and now arranging a room without begging an artsy friend for help first.
It doesn't sound like much, but it is. Oh, it is.
As for this past weekend, with parents in town, we shopped for six hours (my most hated exercise), settled upon a registry, they spake unforgivable, horrible things and somehow their words slipped right past me.
And yesterday morning glorious carpool bunny of mine pointed out that I don't NEED a registry at that other, delightful, brilliant hippie store -- because I can afford the sling, each supra-ergonomic bottle, each plastic link entirely on my own, and that not all showers have to be about gifts, possessions.
The montreal shower for the harpie friends of mother can be all about procurement of crib and bassinet, but the glorious celebration of life that we can still have both amidst the real montreal folk, as well as the toronto folk (gods, there will be so many celebrations, so far there are four of them in demand) -- can be like the wedding; about celebration, about joy, not about stuff.
I'd gotten so confused with the colours and dreadful store-bopping exercise, that I'd forgotten that.
Fortunately, I have people even now to remind me of such things.
Oh brilliant day -- maybe it is the hormones, but gods I will never forget the sheer burst of poetry that is exploding from me as I type.