So Mad!

As you may know, I am very good at feeling my emotions. I think it is very important to fully feel your emotions because then the emotion has been felt and it is over. I don’t like negative things to linger and fester, so when something makes me sad, I feel fully sad and then I let it go. And when I feel angry…

The Pastor calls this “being dramatic”. I call it feeling my emotions.

Today I had the opportunity to fully feel an emotion, and I thought you might enjoy the story.

So to give you a little background, I have been super tired for the last several weeks. I am not just talking about a little run down. I mean super duper tired. We are talking about getting ten hours of sleep at night and then still needing a nap two hours after I get up. We are talking “don’t sit down or you will tip over and fall asleep” tired. I was so tired that I even thought about going to the doctor, but I couldn’t drive (because of the tipping over and falling asleep whenever I sat down thing) so I just stayed home and slept all the time. I was really pushing myself to keep all of the humans and animals alive and that was about all I could muster.

This morning, I was feeling a little better. I was feeling like maybe I could get out in the garden and plant something.

“I know,” I thought “I’ll just go out and plant the okra. If I don’t plant okra today, I might as well not even bother with it this year.”

Okra takes a long time to grow. I’m not sure if there is enough time left in our growing season, but I might as well give it a shot. Also, I had purchased some fancy okra seeds that were supposed to be highly productive and I was excited to see them grow.

As I grabbed the package of fancy seeds, I noticed that it was open. This was not surprising, because in the early spring when it is too cold here to actually plant anything, I get together with a good friend of mine who is a fantastic gardener and trade seeds. We go through each other’s seed stashes and trade and trade until we both have a huge assortment of loads of different things. That way we both get to grow a little bit of everything for half of the cost. Well, she gets to grow a little bit of everything. I grow a lot of weeds and hope to find a little of something interesting among the weeds.

You see, my friend has something of a green thumb. She grows her garden in the backyard of her city lot and still probably gets ten times as much produce as I do.

I am hoping it rubs off on me.

So as I’m walking out to the garden, careful not to spill my fancy seeds, and I think about asking Green Thumb how her okra seeds are growing. I also think about how nice it is to have her garden so far ahead of mine so I can see what is coming. I opened the packet and peeked inside. I was going to plant eight okra plants. Unfortunately, when I looked in the packet, I only had three seeds.

“Three seeds!” I thought “What the heck happened?!”

Then I remembered last spring when I had been trading seeds with Green Thumb. I had told her to go ahead and take half of the seeds in the packet, if she had wanted them.

“Still,” I thought “I can’t believe they only sent me six seeds in this packet. They had better be pretty fancy or I am going to consider this a rip off!”

I flipped over the packet “Minimum of 15 seeds in this packet” it said.

Now I was very confused. Even if Green Thumb had taken half of the seeds, there should have still been at least eight seeds.

I stood there confused for a while. Then I decided to plant the seeds I had and find something else to plant in the empty spots. But as I walked toward the garden, I started to feel a little angry.

“That’s really unlike Green Thumb to be greedy.” I thought. “I know she didn’t need all those seeds, she has seeds for the fancy pink okra. I don’t think she understands how untalented I am, either. My three okra seeds will not grow as much or produce like they would in her garden. I need all the seeds I can get, and yet there she goes, taking all of my seeds. What is she even going to do with all that okra anyway!?”

At the time my thoughts did not seem as immature as they do now, but I was fully feeling my emotions. Especially the angry emotion.

When I got to the area where I was going to plant these fancy okra seeds, I was a little surprised at how little work the area needed. I was expecting to need to level the ground and pull a few weeds. I didn’t need to do any of that. “Well, at least something is going my way.” I pouted.

Then, as I looked at the ground, I noticed something. I noticed twelve small plants poking out of the ground. As I bent down to pull these plants out, I noticed that they were unusually well spaced for weeds. They also seemed to be growing in a perfectly straight row. They didn’t seem to look like any of the other weeds in my garden, either.

Then I realized what had happened.

Green Thumb hadn’t taken any of my fancy okra seeds. The greedy little gardener here had been me. At some point, probably at least two or three weeks ago, in my exhausted state, I had gone out to the garden, prepared the okra area, and planted twelve whole okra seeds and not retained even one minute of it. I have absolutely no recollection of any of it.

Also, I had blamed a totally innocent person for stealing seeds that were never even missing in the first place.

So now, while I am still very good at feeling all of my emotions, I apparently still need to work on getting all of the information before I start having these emotions.

Also, I think I need a nap.