Emma has made arrangements to catch public transport to work. This is great! A 45 minute air-conditioned pre-work siesta with a book. Sounds delicious, no? So off she trots, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed (v. nice tail, actually) and I return to my breakfast delights.

Five minutes later the front door reefs open and bangs close. My little grey fox is mumble grumbling something and I get the idea that something has gone wrong. The bus is right there! The bus stop is right out the front of our house, so I am a little surprised that she missed it (or was in the process of missing it).

The stupid bus broke down!

The stupid bus broke down and look where it broke down! Right outside the house, so I can’t even drive to work.

I offer to let her take my car to work (it’s parked out back) and that kind of works, but it’s not until she comes upstairs that I can see her face.

How can I compete when the world is throwing things like THAT at me? I mean, how do you even arrange for the a bus to break down in your driveway for exactly enough time for you to walk back up the drive, turn around to point out the broken bus AS.. IT… DRIVES AWAY!!

The bus had recovered and was pulling away as she was saying this to me. The look of total disbelief on her face was priceless.

I’m sorry, baby, I just had to share this one. You did a great job of recovering and getting to work, but it was SO funny at the time. Okay, It was funny to me.

Image by JonasPhoto (Flickr).

Emma went to do some shopping for groceries and it was finally her turn at the checkout when the checkout person ignored her completely. This caused too much emotional pain for Emma and she dropped the shopping, burst in to tears and ran out of the shop.

(Please be aware that this is only what I think she said happened, as when Emma was telling me what had happened she was crying and very upset, so it could very well be that some guy had tried to hold-up the shop and Emma beat him to death with a can of Baked Beans – her favourite)

The point being, Emma is really upset for no apparent reason – for no reasonable reason that she understands – and this is also upsetting her.

During the calming down and “We can cope with this” conversation we had over the phone (which is great because Emma rang me when she was overwhelmed) I came across this picture of severe emotional damage and what it’s like:

Imagine that we have both been hit with this huge water bomb full of emotional goo. We got soaked, we didn’t see it coming and don’t know who threw it. We started to clean up the big splash of goo around us; we’ve had a shower and got clean clothes and now we are working at cleaning away a slightly bigger circle around us.

During the process of cleaning up we get covered in the goo again, it’s almost as bad a being hit the first time, but there is less goo and so there is less emotion. Cleaning up is dirty work, more showers and fresh clothes are constantly required. It’s a long and draining process, but we’ve almost cleaned the room now. Now that we have the room and most everything that we can see all clean, it looks like things are fine.

What we haven’t realised is that the goo-bomb was HUGE and globs have gone in to all kinds of places that aren’t even in view. Like Coles; there was a bit of goo over there and Emma just stepped in it when she was ignored by the checkout person. She got covered because she wasn’t expecting it – emotional goo doesn’t have an “Emotional goo on isle 4″ sign.

So we have two options; go hunting all the goo; or accept that we got gooed and that there is probably left over bits around the place that we’ll run into every now and again.

Getting clean again is a metaphor for us “feeling like normal”.

It is impossible to tell if we have removed all the goo unless we do nothing but look for goo – Don Quixote style. A far better approach is to accept that there might be goo out there (from this and other goo-bombs) and that we are capable of dealing with a little goo from time to time. After a long enough period of time, the first one solution looks identical to the second one but we haven’t spent anywhere near as much time doing the other things we want to do in life.

And I wouldn’t want to miss that, especially with a wonderful girl like Emma.

Image by jontintinjordan (Flickr).