My son, a conference and a granddog. Oh, and unexpected travel.

I love my son, who moved back in with me after graduating college. With a very few, precious few, months’ notice. Who SWORE he wouldn’t need help, until he did. A LOT of help. It’ll work out, my place is simply crowded until everything gets put away. And my son and I get along quite well, or we will once he’s back from the vacation gifted to him by his grandparents as a graduation present.

Sandwich the AMAZING IOCDF, International Obsessive Compulsive Disorder Foundation, conference – more to come in another post – in-between the fledgling coming back to the nest and …

My granddog, the big, dumb, very very sweet, poorly-trained goof who wants to kill me. I’ve been sitting him since my son started the vacation. The brute isn’t good on a leash, and I will not horrify you with his personal habits. He costs me an average of two hours sleep a day, and that sleep deprivation led to me tripping on a parking barrier in a parking lot and wrecking my hands for all of last week.

Oh, and to make my twice-yearly visits to back East family rational for my young person, I abandoned being walked by the dog to wake up at 3AM for a 7AM flight to NYC, today. ISN’T the usual timing for the trip back East. Nope, not at all.

I broke in the last two months: cancelled work sessions, fell behind on everything from filing monthly documents for my bookkeeper to blog-posting. I caught myself finding it hard to form complete sentences every once in a while. The fog was real and frightening.

Why, as Brené Brown would put it, am I “pissing and moaning with perspective”? Because I want my clients, my colleagues, my friends and family who often have many more, and much more significant challenges – migraines, brain injury, other chronic medical conditions, differently-abled children, too many miserable life events to name – to GIVE THEMSELVES A BREAK as much as they can, literally and figuratively. I barely broke a comparative fingernail and I think I turned into a snapping turtle, head completely hidden and unfortunately ready to bite.

I have real-live people in mind as I write this: someone who cut off part of a toe who thought we ought to keep an appointment the next day, someone who thought after a fall that could have been fatal that we’d work in a storage unit that same week “as long as I don’t bend down.”

HOWL.

How can you be mad at that face?