It’s a sad story of my own internal insecurities and misery today.
I’ve been dashing around like the proverbial mad thing because as I said yesterday, I’m completely drowning in work, much of which is ganging up on me. I have several important milestone events in the coming week for which I have to be well-prepared.
So, I sat at my office desk all morning working then had to scurry round in preparation for David’s folks arriving later in the day. Shopping for food and wine, tidying up (always a difficult thing when I’ve been away and DM has a tendency to drop stuff where he leaves it) and cooking have all been on my agenda, as has washing – I have a window of a few short days at home, most of the time being full to capacity. I also am someone with relatively very few clothes – I hate shopping and it’s rare for me to find things I like, let alone that fit and suit me so I can't allow washing to build up or I have nothing to wear.
I was trying to peg out the washing quickly so we could get out to do the shopping, when I pulled out of the laundry basket these pants. I didn’t recognise them at all – not at all DM’s thing.
How did I respond? A free-fall of gut wrenching panic. It takes me no effort at all to worry about the amount of time I spend away from home and the ‘opportunities’ that would give to someone who felt like seeking solace elsewhere, whether because of lonliness or even simple opportunism, if you get my drift. Not only that, but I have, as anyone who’s been around on my pbase for a long time will know, ‘been there, done that, wrote the book, got the teeshirt’ before. I have good reason to believe that if it’s happened once, then from a pragmatic, sensible perspective, it can happen again.
These pants were different and therefore possibly the pants that someone might wear if they were trying to impress someone – you know, a little black posing pouch.
What I did take in but didn’t really think about was that they’re hardly fancy pants really are they? Though my misery thought they might simply be a pair pulled from the back of the drawer that have been ‘decommissioned’ between us meeting and now!
Ever the ‘grasp the nettle’ type in these matters – my BIG promise to myself after my divorce was that I’d NEVER sit back and watch my personal life fall apart again – I’d grasp the nettle no matter how much it stung. – I marched into the house and started grilling DM about ‘stuff’.
He looked baffled – genuinely baffled. He asked what the fuss was all about. I explained and he killed himself laughing – genuine laughter. He asked to see the pants and made comments as to their general air of being well worn and rather small – in fact, rather small possibly like those of a twelve-year-old boy. In fact possibly like those of a twelve-year-old nephew who’d being staying here only a few weeks ago and whose discarded pants could quite easily have found their way into our laundry rather than home.
After he’d picked himself up off the floor from laughter, he said he thought he should phone his sister and tell her all about it.
Me? I think I should crawl back under the stone I came out from and do a lot of humble pie eating for being mistrustful of someone who didn’t deserve it. Thankfully he doesn’t seem to be holding it against me, except in the nicest possible way!
Last year, a different type of knocker was on my mind compared to the last few weeks of close inspection of lots of knobs and knockers that have been going on around here.
