My Sanity: One Year Later

One year ago, most everything was gray. Gray carpet squares flecked with shades of darker gray, a hard plastic gray desk, gray metallic cabinets, and matching gray pants and suit jackets all inside a gray, old concrete building filled with graying corporate traditions.

And, everyone was older. Not aging, just older, or my age or maybe even a bit younger. Walking around in their gray and black suits. They gave me career advice and life tips as I lumbered around with my obvious life-transition sticking out.

The smells were older, too; the odor of adults. The sharp aroma of coffee over the slight chemical scents of commercial carpet fibers, copier ink and yellowing paper. All familiar flavors, but older than the common kind found in an elementary school classroom: Elmer's white glue, bleach water and sweaty kid.

Every morning, there was an adult routine. An alarm-clock wake up time, a speedy shower, suit up and drive to meet the carpool partner. Then, the commute and fending for your right to get two lines of traffic over into the HOV lane on 405 with Bellevue in the distance, like Oz. All while resisting the urge to let the idiot who won't let you in know how mad you are. Or not.

I carried with me adult necessities in my cute compact purse: my phone, wallet, office ID, Zune, sunglasses and some lipstick.

Things are different these days. The gray in my life shows mainly in some wiry strands of hair on my 31-year-old head. But most of the world exists now in primary shades: apple red, sun yellow, grass green and water blue glazed on shiny plastic toys.

And, it's all about the young and small and new. My little man. His tiny hands and fingers feeling things for the first time every day. And, pudgy new toes that haven't learned the pain of walking. There are the new smells of sour spit up, powdery diapers, lavendar baby lotion, and the oily ointment smell of A&D.

And these days, each time I cruise over to the carpool lane, I whisper a little apology because it is just me and the baby in the back, and we can't possibly be in as much of a hurry as the office population is.

Now when I go out, I pack as if I'm leaving for a week. No more quaint sophisticated purse. My bag is bulging with travel-sized Aloe hand sanitizer, countless crumpled receipts, Wet Ones, a plastic monkey container with peach-flavored cereal puffs inside, T Junior's soft blue striped cotton baby hat (my favorite), a stuffed horse toy with all the bells and whistles, fuzzy baby slippers, two sets of earbuds, my Zune, and a zipped pouch holding three lipglosses, a scratchy file that has never been used on my short nails and clippers that have seen plenty of action. Then, there's my wallet, phone and sunglasses. It's as if my purse and T Junior's diaper bag got together and had a baby.

One thing that hasn't changed is my emotional breakdowns. Well, maybe a little. I still have them, but not like before. They were really bad when I was pregnant, and I had lots of them. Crazy ones. The kind I couldn't control. Yelling. Screaming. Crying. For stupid reasons. No WiFi access. Misplaced items. Late for work. My emotional meltdowns were so bad and frequent that sometimes I feared T Junior would turn out to be a really unhappy baby. He's quite the opposite, actually.

But it's why I started this blog one year ago. I needed an outlet. I needed to feel not-crazy. I needed to stay sane.