I really didn't want to write about the weather, honestly. But it has been dominating my life for the past few weeks. In the days when both the kids went to the local primary school ten minutes walk away, bad weather didn't bother me. Even the supermarket is within hiking distance (as I discovered last February. It's very inconvenient when it snows on Big Shop Monday).
Ever since the Boy and I got stuck in the snow before Christmas I've been very nervous about driving in this weather. It turns out that my lovely, road-hugging, huge-engined, rear-wheel drive BMW Does Not Do Snow. I've always been very vague about the difference between front-wheel drive and rear-wheel drive. This morning I discovered that front-wheel drive will let you get up the hill in the snow and rear-wheel drive won't. So there we were, turning our wheels, the car hopelessly wallowing across the road, and people in little Fords and Hondas happily bouncing past us and on their way. No-one stops to give a BMW driver a push either. So Hubby got out and pushed. We managed to get it turned around and back down the hill and I managed to neither panic nor flap, for which I think Hubby was grateful.
What is really annoying is the degree of anxiety the whole thing is giving me. Never having been one to suffer from anxiety or panic attacks, I now find myself obsessively checking the weather, worrying about whether or not I'm going to have to drive. And lying in bed in the middle of the night listening to the cars outside, trying to work out from the sound of their wheels on the road whether it is icy or not. Which is all ridiculous, because I live in a major city, I don't have to leave the house to go to work, and everyone else in the family is capable of getting to where they need to go by foot. And there are people in remote villages who have been cut off for weeks. There is one man up in Scotland who lives in a light house. His wife left a few days before Christmas to go buy a turkey and she still hasn't been able to get home. So I really should pull myself together.
But as a very wise friend of mine pointed out, trying to talk yourself out of your misery just because other people are much worse off never works. Your own misery is not contingent on the degree of misery of others. For me, though, the best medicine is to go through the process I call Naming the Beast. As soon as I admit that I'm feeling anxious / miserable / depressed, I almost immediately start to feel better.
Which is what this blog post has been all about. Thank you for listening.
