Things I Hate About Myself Yet I Go on Living

Scenario 1: You know when you’re writing one of those put-that-insulting-woman-in-her-place letters that you only intend for the recipient to be your drafts folder? You’re writing it for therapeutic reasons, really, as you know you would never have the nerve to actually stand up for yourself and hit “send”.  Certainly, if you did, you would do it with dignity, not sprinkle it with the F word as liberally as movie theatres salt their popcorn to bring you to near death by dehydration so you have to buy one of their overpriced sodas to survive.

And then the phone rings and it’s her, as if her ears were ringing and she intuited how pissed you are. She calls to apologize profusely and tells you how much you mean to her and the two of you come to understanding that it was all a misunderstanding and ha ha ha, “oh, I wasn’t really mad about it, really. I know you better than that.” ha ha ha

You talk about getting together later. You’re relieved. Every muscle in your body loosens, anger melts away and you feel completely mature and zen and silly, really, for having been so upset. You hang up the phone, but you put it down, not on the recharger that is white and roundish and has a wire coming out of it, but on the mouse, while the cursor is over the send button.

Scenario 2: I hate when I walk into a friend’s house and she’s sitting on a stool in the corner of her kitchen, crying to her mother. I discount the tears and the slumped posture. It is her birthday. Some people get weird about that number changing. I don’t understand it. It’s not like she didn’t see it coming. But my friend is very sensitive.

I know what my job is here and I am going to rock it. Besides, I’m so proud of myself that I remembered today’s her special day. Usually I forget birthdays and I don’t realize until I walk up to the cake and read the icing. I was not going to be that person this time. My memory was on! It was sharp! I blurt out, “Happy Birthday, Patricia!!” to break the silence and get this party started.

How was I supposed to know she just ran over the deaf family cat that’s so old it couldn’t run out of the way like it always did when the birthday girl pulled into the driveway!!??

I’ll tell you the reason I’m able to go on living when stuff like that — but not really that, I was just making parts of that up as I went along — happens. The drafts letter never was sent. And my friend didn’t really run over a cat. It was much worse than that. She was crying because she’d had a miscarriage. But that sounded too tragic to say. So I changed it to cat to make me look less douchey.

But when I did this next thing I’m going to tell you, it makes up for the douchery, and enables me to go on living.

Scenario 3: One time? In band camp? Okay, really it was one time when my husband was coaching little league. There were two moms complaining about the coach to the other moms on the bleachers — how this is his first year coaching and we keep losing because he doesn’t know the secret underhanded strategies that all the other competitive Upper Wonderful moms respect in a coach. They want to win as much for themselves as for their child, and take these losses as personal failures.

The one with the athletic gear that says, I BELONG TO A GYM, leans over and says to the mommy cheering section, “This new coach doesn’t stack the line-up with the best hitters first and the lame hitters last.” At this level, it’s still half kid-pitch and half coach-pitch.

The other mom with braces that say, AS SOON AS THESE COME OFF I WILL BE PERFECT, leans over and says, “He doesn’t tell the kids not to swing at the kid pitches” that never sail over the plate and don’t count in the strikes/balls tally.

They don’t know I’m the coach’s wife, as they whisper their gripes to each mom along the bench to earn popularity for having the inside scoop. So when they get to me I say, “Really?” I act interested and honored that they are sharing their infinite wisdom with me. And right when I have them I say, “I’m sleeping with him.”

The look on their faces makes the lack of impulse control and filter management truly one of the greatest blessings of having ADHD. Stuff like that will pop out and I just sit there like the cat that ate the canary.

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