I'd rather be crazy OCD lady than crazy crying lady

I’ve had some good times with the kids lately, like the afternoon I took them to the Japanese convenience store on 14th so they could load up on foreign junk food, or the time I helped the youngest with her Girl Scout cookie distribution, or the time I introduced both of them to subs at Publix. I’m trying hard to commit all these good times to memory as our time as a family unit of four enters the final stretch.

This week I helped the oldest register for some college classes she can take in her final year of High School. Actual human wailing may have been heard as my oldest child encountered bureaucratic red tape for the first time, being forced by offices of higher education to repeatedly enter the same information again and again on digital forms all on the same website, all going to the same institution. Explaining that this frustrating endeavor 1) used to all be done on paper and that 2) was needlessly complicated because administrators still think of web forms as a 1:1 analog to those antique paper forms did nothing to lessen the prospective student’s suffering. Children born in this century find no comfort in the idea that it could all be worse, you could be working in pen and have to start all the way over when a mistake is made. I might as well have said I used to have to do my paperwork uphill in the snow both ways.

I may have felt a little smug when I explained to the suffering applicant that I had, for YEARS, done the same sort of applications for every summer program she had been in - and often times done it in duplicate, as both children attended camps and enrichment programs. A teenage snarl was the only reply.

It’s not all fun and games as the kids prepare to move out. The girls are going through puberty while I go through perimenopause. Given the hormonal upheaval we all live in at the house, plus all the grieving for the life we had before the pandemic, I’ve unhappily taken to crying at the drop of a hat starting around last December. This is deeply unpleasant, and while I’m good at keeping a lid on the disgusting trash water coming from my eyes and nose at work, tears fall in private and in social situations when I would rather it not happen at all. In an effort to get the crying to stop, or at least get it under control, I started physical therapy this month for crying.

Yep, the whitest thing I do (white lady crying over nothing), is being addressed by the second whitest thing I do (finding a therapy to try to feel different). This week was only the third session, but I can feel the progress happening slowly. This week the therapist had me back up against a wall and just…feel the wall behind me as a physical support. So I may be replacing my deeply inappropriate crying with weirdo wall groping in public spaces.

I’d rather be a weirdo wall toucher than a crier. I would find it more acceptable, in fact, to repeatedly touch doorknobs or have some other OCD “eccentricity”, anything but tears. I’m actually happy my kids are growing up. I’m happy I’ml almost menopausal. I’m even happy that I have to teach my kids how to deal with the stupid red tape of academic bureaucracy, even while I have my doubts about the usefulness of higher education. At least, my brain is happy, my body is forcing the water works open without consulting my brain. So when you see me, teaching my girls to drive, or getting some new certificate of achievement, please don’t mention it to me if there are tear tracks down my cheeks. Just extend some understanding while I do some breathing exercises while groping a wall.