Last Friday I woke up with sex hair. Which is only different from beach hair in that it's less curly and more freakishly mullet-like. The only reason I mention this is as a way of illustrating that my day STARTED OFF great.
I watered my fro into submission and left the kids with Joel to go to therapy.
We talked about how important it is to remind myself that in real life I'm not half the fuck-up the voices in my own head tell me I am. It was a really good session. I'm making progress! Woot!
It was also the most expensive therapy session since the birth of Freud.
Because when I walked out, my car was gone. It'd been towed by the city of Portland for unpaid parking tickets.
Not ticketed. Not booted. But TOWED. In under 56 minutes.
I ended up canceling all my appointments that afternoon because it cost me two paychecks (one Joel's, one mine) and an entire afternoon in court to get my car out of jail.
Talk about being a fuck-up!
It turns out that when you get really poor (like I was last summer) and you have to divide your tiny income up into URGENT expenses (like electricity, gas and water) and NOT SO URGENT expenses (like unpaid parking tickets), the tickets end up at the bottom of a shoebox where they breed and multiply with late fees.
Apparently it turns out they don't just magically disappear!
Your car does.
And then you cry a lot in front of a judge because even though you've sent off the paperwork to the state of California, they haven't yet released the title to your car. You might even spend three hours of your life convinced that no matter how much you pay, they will not give you your car back even though your divorce decree says it belongs to you.
Joel's reaction was markedly different than I expected. All he said was AMANDA! Then he left my kids with our closest friends and spent the entire day (not to mention every dollar to his name) bailing me and my (our) car out of trouble. Even though he knew the only reason my car got towed was because my Oregon trip permit had fallen out of my back window and I had forgotten to tape it back up. (I'm waiting for the title so I can register the car in Oregon and get new plates, so it's trip permits until then...)
No fight. No I TOLD YOU SO. Just... let's do what needs to be done. He put up with my absolutely TERRIFIC mood, too.
It was a horrible day.
And it was a great day.
Because when we got home, twenty of our closest friends came over to help us eat the ridiculous quantity of lettuce I thought it was a good idea to plant earlier this spring. We made more of a dent in our booze stash than the lettuce garden, but I'm not complaining.
I got to feed a new friend's newborn at our backyard campfire while talking about parenting with our landlord while Joel waxed poetic with his gay BFF while the kids roasted marshmallows and made s'mores. Even though Alex had a VERY VERY unfortunate accident with one of his friends involving a hammer and stitches, it was poetically perfect.
Ugly and sweet. Terrible and fantastic.
Business as usual.
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