Getting Over It

She's a dear woman, very like me in her brutal honesty and blunt talk. She worked overseas for many years before becoming pregnant. When the man who had a key role in the pregnancy, a redheaded Irishman with a sexy brogue named Mike, disappeared one day, my coworker came back to the States, back to where her family was, back to a place she had never been very happy, but at least she had some support.

She is the sole supporter of an adorable toddler who points at pictures of dogs and pants heavily, makes fish faces at aquariums, and confuses pictures of apples and tomatoes. My coworker comes to work every day, makes coffee, and tells me all about the antics of the small child. One night she was making pancakes for her daughter and accidentally splashed some of her beer into the batter. As she served the beer pancakes to her daughter, she texted me, asking if she was a bad mother.

Sometimes it overwhelms her. She wants someone else to take on responsibility just once in a while. Someone to watch the baby while she sleeps in until noon. Someone to deal with the toddler meltdown over what shoes to wear in the morning. Someone to chip and help pay the bills for just one month.

And she calls in sick on those days. She calls them mental health days. On those days, she drops the kid off at daycare and heads back home where she does nothing, except for text me repeatedly about how she's doing nothing while I'm at work.

The next day she comes back and is her cheerful self again, always too happy to rub it in that I was at work while she wasn't.

She is the closest thing to a friend I have at work.

And last week was bad for me. I was upset about several things. I was in need of a mental health day, but I couldn't justify taking a day off because it was finals week and this week is Spring Break and I knew I should just suck it up.

I told her all about it. I snuffled into a Kleenex, while laughing, telling her how ridiculous it was. I can't justify my misery. I am not a single parent, I am able to pay my bills, I have the support of a great guy, except when I interfere with his building that damn bike, I am able to compose a complete sentence if pressed to, I am able to teach high school students how to solve not only equations, but systems of equations, and I am not an idiot most of the time.

She looked at me. She handed me a Kleenex. And then, true to her nature, she sort of shook her head at me.

"It's time to pull up your big girl pants and suck it up."

So that's that. Moping serves no purpose and it may be time to adopt that phrase as my motto.

And now I'm going to convince my husband that the damn fucking bike is not worth tinkering over right now and perhaps a better use of this sunny Sunday afternoon would be to actually take our bikes out on a ride instead of just working on them.