weekends away
I think I've talked before about the restorative powers of my family. They really are amazing; I've been told a lot over time that I'm very lucky to get along with my family as well as I do, and I believe it.
I'm still pretty bitter about how everything happened at work, and since I have to show up there for the next two weeks and sit in an office all day with people who've thrown me under a bus as hard as they could, I think I'll be bitter for a while longer. It won't help that some people in the office don't know the exact details about ANY of the situations that have been brought up against me, so they just assume that everything is my fault. And I'm not someone who can easily forgive or forget such things.
But it's solely due to my family that I was able to laugh about the situation just a day after it happened. Of course I called my mom on Thursday, so upset, and I told a few friends as well, and they were all shocked and infuriated for me... and that will ALWAYS feel good. But I needed Thursday night and yesterday morning to mope a bit, and I certainly did mope as I drove down to FamilyLand.
And then mom and I were in my sister and Billy's dining room, and I was telling Nicky and Billy that I got fired. And we were suddenly all joking about it, about my apparent inability to keep a job, from the people who fired me for being a minute late (seriously), to the supervisor who got me fired to save her own ass, even though I was the only one who did any work, and now to the new dictator, who apparently had me pushed out because she didn't want to deal with my and my inability to deal with her rudeness or to kiss ass effectively.
And this is the way my family deals with things that distress us or piss us off or make us sad. We laugh through it as soon as we're able to.
Throughout the afternoon and evening, if someone asked me something or made any sort of joke at my expense, or just out of nowhere, I would say, "I got fired!" My sister, never one to be outdone, started returning with, "Well, my dog died!" (Poor Herbie, R.I.P.) It might seem callous to joke about such things, but it really does help.
I have a strong childhood memory of sitting in my grandmother's kitchen, surrounded by my mother's side of the family. My grandfather had died of a heart attack while plowing a field... doing something tractor-related, anyway. I'd been pulled away from a sleepover to hear this awful news, and my nine-year-old brain couldn't quite process the grief, so I was sitting in the background, quiet and shocked and almost inexpressably sad, wondering if I should cry, or if it was wrong that I wasn't crying. But then my great-uncle Howard started doing a rather hilarious (though perhaps in poor taste) impression of my grandfather having his heart attack, shaking on his tractor. And suddenly everyone was laughing, and it was so inappropriate, and I was less shocked and more able to deal with the sadness.
Now I find myself applying humor to any situation, to make myself feel better, and the quickest way to apply the humor is to be around my family.
I'm still pretty bitter about how everything happened at work, and since I have to show up there for the next two weeks and sit in an office all day with people who've thrown me under a bus as hard as they could, I think I'll be bitter for a while longer. It won't help that some people in the office don't know the exact details about ANY of the situations that have been brought up against me, so they just assume that everything is my fault. And I'm not someone who can easily forgive or forget such things.
But it's solely due to my family that I was able to laugh about the situation just a day after it happened. Of course I called my mom on Thursday, so upset, and I told a few friends as well, and they were all shocked and infuriated for me... and that will ALWAYS feel good. But I needed Thursday night and yesterday morning to mope a bit, and I certainly did mope as I drove down to FamilyLand.
And then mom and I were in my sister and Billy's dining room, and I was telling Nicky and Billy that I got fired. And we were suddenly all joking about it, about my apparent inability to keep a job, from the people who fired me for being a minute late (seriously), to the supervisor who got me fired to save her own ass, even though I was the only one who did any work, and now to the new dictator, who apparently had me pushed out because she didn't want to deal with my and my inability to deal with her rudeness or to kiss ass effectively.
And this is the way my family deals with things that distress us or piss us off or make us sad. We laugh through it as soon as we're able to.
Throughout the afternoon and evening, if someone asked me something or made any sort of joke at my expense, or just out of nowhere, I would say, "I got fired!" My sister, never one to be outdone, started returning with, "Well, my dog died!" (Poor Herbie, R.I.P.) It might seem callous to joke about such things, but it really does help.
I have a strong childhood memory of sitting in my grandmother's kitchen, surrounded by my mother's side of the family. My grandfather had died of a heart attack while plowing a field... doing something tractor-related, anyway. I'd been pulled away from a sleepover to hear this awful news, and my nine-year-old brain couldn't quite process the grief, so I was sitting in the background, quiet and shocked and almost inexpressably sad, wondering if I should cry, or if it was wrong that I wasn't crying. But then my great-uncle Howard started doing a rather hilarious (though perhaps in poor taste) impression of my grandfather having his heart attack, shaking on his tractor. And suddenly everyone was laughing, and it was so inappropriate, and I was less shocked and more able to deal with the sadness.
Now I find myself applying humor to any situation, to make myself feel better, and the quickest way to apply the humor is to be around my family.
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