The Lawsons did Dallas!

Never Mind

June 20, 2007

It never fails, whenever I start to feel all down in the dumps and bad about life I meet someone who gives me a healthy dose of perspective. All morning I've been moping around and spontaneously bursting into tears because my husband didn't like my new shirt from TJ Maxx. Poor me. What an insensitive turd-brain of a husband I've been dealt!!

I decided to take a brief rest from my angst to head to a neighborhood playdate around 10:30 this morning. I was walking over there, just seething about Jared's comment, making myself sadder and madder with each and every step. By the time I arrived at the hostess's doorstep, I was mentally piecing together my Home Depot shopping list--after all, I would need to replace the window after I hurled Jared out of it this evening.

There were four moms at the playdate, including me--I knew two of the moms well, and I hadn't ever met the other one. I began to chat with this new mom and learned that she was originally from New Orleans. She and her husband moved to Dallas after Hurricane Katrina. So of course I got a little nosy and asked her about her experience with the storm.

She was like, "Oh yeah. Our house was wrecked. We had closed on our new house on Friday and we had to evacuate on Saturday. Then the storm hit on Monday. It was a two story house, but since we had just moved in everything was in boxes on the first floor. We lost everything, except our bedroom set...so that was cool! Oh, and we took our pictures with us, too."

I was like, "Whoa."

Then she went on, "Yeah, our old house was untouched, so that was kind of a bummer. Oh, and you know what else was tough? All of our homeowners insurance records were washed away. We had just paid the premium for the entire year and there was no record of it anywhere. That's was kind of a pain to work out."

And I said, "Yeah, sounds like it."

And then she capped it off with, "Oh it wasn't so bad. We had family to stay with in Houston and they had a nice house. That was really convenient since I had a two year old and was just over seven and a half months pregnant at the time. But really, it wasn't that bad."

I just kind of sat there with my mouth hanging open and thought to myself, "Yeah, my husband thinks my new shirt is ugly...."

So, in conclusion, I've gained some perspective. You can bet your entire savings account that Jared is still getting tossed through the window tonight, but that doesn't mean I haven't been humbled.