The Little Things

Do you ever find yourself getting tearful about apparently small things?

I do.

My other half says I’m ‘wetter than a haddock’s bathing costume’.

I don’t know why I’m like this. It might be a trauma response: the result of all the ongoing stressors - the microaggressions, judgements, dismissals, the conflict and stigma - that have been parked, buried, shoved under the rug, to be dealt with on the twelfth of never, or better still, the thirty-first.

It’s never these things that make me cry, though. They might make me rage. But never cry.

No. It’s always the things you’d least expect.

Take last week, for instance. A simple email from the local authority about Fredie’s transport to college had me sobbing.

The taxi firm he was allocated in September have been less than optimal. In fact, they’ve been a complete shower. From initially denying he was on their books, to sending out a driver unfamiliar with the route who sailed straight past our house leaving a distraught Freddie wondering where on earth he was being taken, to repeatedly failing to provide the passenger assistant mandated for Freddie by the local authority despite many sternly worded back and forth emails between myself, the local authority, their compliance team and said taxi firm. Eventually it seemed we’d got through to them. They started to send the same driver every day and a passenger assistant.

Then, out of the blue last Tuesday, I got an email headlined ‘changes to Freddie’s transport’.

I panicked, thinking perhaps they’d refused to take him anymore because he’d kept them waiting a few times lately. How was I going to get him to college? I don’t have a car. I opened the email with a quivering finger.

It said that, as of the following day there would be a new transport provider as the current one had had their contract terminated. I clicked on the attachment to find the contact details for the new firm and found it was the same company who he’d had for the last two years of high school, who I’d said a tearful farewell to last summer: easily the best transport providers we’ve ever had.

I rang and left a message asking for a rough idea of pick-up time … and then dissolved into uncontrollable tears. I was still sobbing fifteen minutes later when the manager rang me back. I must’ve sounded like a proper prat, sniffling away on the phone, in fact, with all those tears, I probably sounded literally ‘wetter than a haddock’s bathing costume’.

It’s almost as though I’ve got so used to conflict and negativity that when something positive happens I’m completely blindsided by it.