The Tale of a Bad Mood

I’m in a bad mood. Don’t even try to talk me out of it. The last person who tried….well, you don’t want to know what evil befell him.

The worst thing about being in a bad mood is trying to rationalize it. It doesn’t matter how hard I justify my mood to Hubby, I still sound petty and irrational.

It seems juvenile that I’m mad at our empty fridge which only offers up condiments (pickles, lime juice, expired salad dressing) at this critical “feel bad” moment. I need bad-mood approved foods, like ice cream and chocolate, in my hour of gloominess.

But instead, the hits just keep coming. Two other appliances have now joined in the fray to cause more sulking and skulking. My dryer, despite having served my family faithfully for 15 years, has decided this is the month to go to the Great Whirlpool Hereafter. And my dishwasher, though being a fairly new employee in our service, has elected for early retirement. Both appliances decided to vex me at a time when I least needed the vexation.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been in a bad mood, and frankly, I think I’m overdue for one. My good moods have been wearing thin lately and haven’t been keeping up with the current events of my life. They’re increasingly oblivious to the aches and pains of days tinted by confusing events. And just as a child every now and then needs a temper tantrum to reset her attitude, I need a good ol’ fashion bad mood to absorb all the angst of living in an out-of-control world. One can only squeeze so much sunshiny optimism from flowers, cool breezes, and classical music before One has a meltdown.

So here I sit, stubbornly resisting the persuasive positivism of Hubby who just walked in declaring success at accomplishing my honey-do list I’ve so churlishly given him. His good mood irritates my bad one even more.

To be completely honest (because you, my faithful readers who love excessive punctuation as much as I do, deserve complete honesty) I’m not in a foul mood because of dryers that won’t dry, or washers that won’t wash, or fridges that won’t cough up good-for-bad-mood delights. I’m not sitting here with my tarnished 70’s mood ring because of the state of the world’s hell-in-a-handbasket headlines.

The truth is, I’m throwing my little hissy-fit because I’m confronted again by my internal chaos. I can blame frustrating appliances all day long, but that doesn’t change the fact that my sadness disguised as a bad mood is due to the lingering after-effects of the hurt I’ve experienced at the hands of people I trusted. Just one conversation or interaction with someone from that season of pain can throw me back to the early days of shock, hurt, confusion, and sadness. And I’m forced to internally process my experience all over again.

Thankfully, processing is faster these days. What used to take me weeks to work through, can now be acknowledged, accepted, labeled, and filed away in a matter of hours. But what still causes lingering sadness is the feeling that I should be “over it” by now.

I know there’s a part of me that will never be “over” what happened. It may always come as a shock to my system when I bump into the random encounter with my past. I doubt I’ll ever walk into a church again without a certain degree of suspicion. But I want so much to let go of this story and its power to still wound me. I’m tempted to pretend it never happened so I can go back to the days when I blissfully believed there was justice in the world for those who take a stand against injustice and aren’t mowed down by it.

The act of writing haiku brings calmness and clarity to my emotional struggles. Haiku gives me a small measure of hope that - in 17 syllables - I might contain a very uncontainable experience; that it might be possible to explain the unexplainable and accept the unacceptable.

If nothing else, writing haiku gives me space to deal with the large questions I have a right to ask even if I don’t get any answers.

The Crow Squawks
     My lingering angst -
     like the crow's squawks and caws - hits
     my impatient heart.
     Irritation gnaws
     at the edges of civil
     discourse, wanting answers.
     Yet hope rises - a
     plea for heaven's courage to
     fly swift to my aid.
     The crow boldly caws.
     Even if all is quiet
     in return, his squawk
     demands a hearing.