Tell Me It's Normal...

Tell me it's normal to feel a brief but white-hot flash of jealousy when you hear that your almost-7-year-old daughter is spending the day at the beach with her friend and the friend's family as part of the 'play date' you set up for her, while you're sitting in your windowless cubicle trying to work and trying not to think about your 5-o'clock psychiatrist appointment. (Oh, oh, oh to be a child in the summer again...)

Tell me it's normal to want to hunt down and physically throttle the people from the county who decided to pave all the east-west streets AND the north-south streets in your area--except for yours of course, which is a private street, and so you and your neighbors each had to pony up more than $700 a year and a half ago to have the street repaved--and to do them all on the same day, making it impossible for you to park within a half-mile of your home.

Tell me it's normal to want to run screaming in the opposite direction of the phone when your father is on the other end, because you just know he's going to tell you another story about how his pig-headed, manic-driven behavior has created even more heartache for him and everyone around him. (Too long a story to tell here, and it's not my story to tell anyway. But believe me when I say my father is, at times, breathtakingly dumb.)

I know it's not normal to have to concentrate on every breath you take, or to be completely unable to sit still without jiggling a leg or rocking back and forth. I know it's not normal to need tranquilizers and antidepressants just to get through a day. I know it's not normal to want to throw up everytime you think about going to see this shrink tonight, because you just have this feeling he's not going to be the one to fix you, and you really, really need fixing.

But tell me it's normal...please tell me it's normal...to despair of ever feeling normal again.