Smartypants: My Grocery Store Aversion! Angel: What I Do For A Living!

A while back, I had a dream that Brad Pitt took me out to buy groceries. It was the best, most fun, happiest grocery store experience I’ve ever not had!

I hate shopping with a cold knuckled passion. My husband thinks I’m totally weird though. He loves buying food. Well. He just doesn’t understand...the grocery store trolls don’t bother him like they bother me.

Why wouldn’t I have a grocery store aversion? It starts before I even go. I have to make a list, partly because I’ll forget and partly because I am a compulsive list maker. But before I make the list, I have to face the kids and ask “What will you NOT turn your perfect little nose up at?”

Then I have to remember the list. If I get to the store and realize that the list is still on the kitchen counter, I will stand there frozen for a few long drawn out seconds, willing myself not to cry.

Then I have to find a decent cart. If it pulls to one side or has a wheel wobble, well, I might cry.

So I’m in the store.

There are other people in there. Other people tend to always be lingering at the one thing I want to pluck off the shelf. They wear boring clothes, they look miserable and they are always in slow motion. What kind of strange physics exist in the grocery store that leave me in real time but slow all other humans down to a crawl?

Then I have to face the multitudes of choices. How many kinds of ketchup do we need??? And is the cheapest one the same as the expensive one, only with a different label???

Oh and then there’s the muzak. It makes me feel surges of potential violence.

You know what the worst thing is about the store? It’s full of food. You know what that leads to? Cooking.

Cooking and decision making about the cooking. What to make that both kids will eat, that’s healthy, and won’t take all day to prepare, and won’t cost too much. I have to cart all this food home, then stand there in the kitchen and try to guess what won’t get complained about.

This leads to incredible guilt, because I live in a country of wealth, and here I am complaining about the abundance of food.

When I have survived the shopping, I’ll have to pay for it. This is where it gets ugly. I have had way too many bad days in my life when I couldn’t afford food. I’d get to the cashier, having added it all up on the side of the grocery list, and suddenly it doesn’t add up, and I’m twenty bucks short. Then with a red face and stinging eyes, take things out as the cashier totals it. I don’t buy expensive junk foods, so I’m deciding I don’t really need that block of cheese (damn cheese) and we don’t need sliced meat because we’ll just eat the cheap tuna instead. Running out of money for groceries has always been a fear.

And you know what burns me the most? I’m going to get that food home and somebody might waste it. I hate that.

But what I hate most of all is the trolls. I hate grocery store trolls. Just when you think you’re safe in the dairy aisle, one jumps out from behind the nacho chips display. Jethro thinks it’s really funny but he doesn’t know. He’s never been ambused like I have. He thinks I’m overreacting but I’m telling you, if he ever gets attacked by the trolls as he walks innocently past the cereal, he’ll change his tune pretty fast.

I have been outsmarting them though. I am learning to survive.



I make a longer list. I set it on the table for a few days and tell the kids to write something down, which I may or may not buy. I tell myself that if I can get through this, I don’t have to do it again until next week. I bring the Ipod shuffle. I get the boy to load it up with all my metal therapy.

And I usually buy myself a chocolate bar and a People magazine for the destressing afterwards!

Sadly, Brad Pitt is only available to accompany me on these shopping trips in my dreams.

I really feel the pressure to get it right! I have one major job to do with my life, and this is it. I am the parent who takes care of home and family. My one task, the thing that I can’t screw up, is bringing home the food. So I better get out there and do it.

Because it's what I do. But not for a living. I do nothing for a living.

I’m pretty sure I work. I do more than blog. I’ve written a couple of unreadable novels and a couple that need a lot of work. I’ve kept two kids alive for over a decade. Our clothes are clean and we don’t smell bad. Last year we had a nice collection of homegrown vegetables. I cook, whether I like it or not.

I just don’t get paid for any of it.

My most recent paying gig was teaching riding lessons.
I liked it enough to start thinking I should do it for real. I think kids and horses can go very well together.

I’ve never made a single penny from writing. Not a red cent. I’ve been telling stories for as long as I can remember, up until about a year ago when I decided to smarten up and get serious about this.

I write for many reasons.

I love it. I have an active imagination. There’s a whole other world going on up there. My three other personalities really enjoy my stories. I have to write. If I don’t get it out it fills my brain up pretty bad and then I start forgetting things!

Some of you might know that I started this Little Blog Project about a year after I had a Little Breakdown. I was kinda mental when I started this. Now I’m feeling much more like my own normal healthy kind of mental. Once I started wobbling along in blogworld, I felt a change. The words came out easier the more I wrote. I hadn’t been at it in a long time. I think being sucked into a bad depression, that I worked very hard for years to deny, stopped the words for a while. This freed me up. I loved it. I slowly felt more like myself. Some of you have remarked that I sound different than I did a year ago or a few months ago.

Before the breakdown, I was working for my husband. I spent two or three hours working on his paperwork, billing, and phone calls, leaving the rest of the day to take care of the house and kids and all that stuff. With him putting in 14-16 hour days, it was good to have me here running the place. After the breakdown, I wasn’t working for anybody. Seriously.

We’ve had a few long talks since then about working for a living. He’s the one with the career that we’ve both put a lot of suffering into. He didn’t want to take a chance on me breaking down again. I still feel fragile. I can get the panic under control now, but I have set up my life to suit me, instead of trying to fit myself into anybody else’s job demands. Life is generally pretty okay these days. It’s been a hell of a long road to get here but I no longer feel like I can’t survive.

I have a life!

He wants me to write. There are no guarantees that I will ever make any money from writing. He says he’s investing in the future, and letting me off the hook for earning an income protects his investment. He makes my eyes fill with tears.

We both know that I need to have horses in my life. I know I can make a small living from teaching but probably only enough to keep the horses fed. I’d love to be able to do that myself and not depend on his income to take care of the horses.

Here's where I work. This is the corral at the farm. The footing isn't ideal but we're not doing any seriously athletic moves. Some day I'd like to have a decent sand ring.

Here's where I work. My desk. My messy little corner of the family room.

Where the magic happens, people. Ha ha. Yes, that's a Pirates of the Caribbean calendar. And a big empty space on the shelf. Guess what that's for.

So, right now, I don’t make an income. But, you know, I’m living.

(Love Month starts tomorrow...)