Rough Nights

We covered potholes.  It's ok, they happen.  You bounce through them and move on.

Then, there are the rough nights.

Last night, I had trouble sleeping.  It's not the first night it's happened either.  But last night was one I hadn't really experienced before.

I was all tucked in bed, snuggled up and happy in my cute little blue flowered pajamas, re-reading one of my favorite books, Sherrilyn Kenyon's "Seize the Night", and yes, it's a romance novel.  Reading the story, which is really good...you know, Dark-Hunters, Daimons, Acheron, the whole bit...and as I put my "love" book mark in the book, closed it, put it on my nightstand and turned off the light, out of nowhere I realize that I've said goodbye to my baby-young looks and that no guy would ever look at me like they used to. I sucked it up and realized that I'm not easy to live with and can be patience-testing difficult (to put it nicely).  After taking those things into account, an overwhelming fact hit me:  no matter how successful I become, I'm destined to be alone.

At that moment of epiphany, I started to cry.  BIG cry.  Crying over one simple fact: I don't want to be alone for the rest of my life.  I sat up in the bed, grabbed a tissue and just wept.

When you're going through the process called post-marriage it's never easy.  No one came and sold me a bill of goods that said it would be.  But there are days where you just can't help but sit down and cry.  I've had more good days than bad, so to have one really bad night out of 100 isn't too shabby.  However, when you're going through a rough night, you don't even begin to remember the 99 that were good.  All you know is that you're hurting in that moment.

I laid there inconsolably crying for a good 15 minutes and then got up the gumption to tell myself everything was going to be ok.  I told myself I needed to breathe in and out, that I'd feel better in a little bit.  I marched myself to the medicine cabinet and between sobs, I popped a Xanax so I could calm down and finally get to sleep. 

I hate the rough nights when I have them.  There is no consoling to be had because there's really no one here but me.  But, as I told myself to calm down, I reminded myself, the first person who needs to console me and know I'm going to feel better is me.  Yes, it would be nice to have someone to cry on, but really, it doesn't need to come from someone else, it needs to come from inside me.

So I turned on CNN.com for a minute, looked over the news stories for the Gulf Disaster, a couple of pieces from the entertainment section and realized, hey, I don't have it so bad.  My family loves me, my friends think highly of me, and even though I may be a 'self-contained unit' at the moment, the world keeps on spinning and even though my night was rough, the sun was going to come up, then it was going to set in the evening and nothing could ever change that.  It was a giant billboard that said:

Keep moving forward.