The Cruel Way That February Has Its Way With Me

I had a small breakdown of sorts yesterday.

I’d gone grocery shopping late morning and, at the end of my trip, found some wonderful-looking sushi in the deli area. The sushi chef saw what I was looking at and chatted up the new spicy shrimp and crab rolls, which were made with thinly sliced cucumber lengths instead of rice…low-carb…FINALLY I could eat sushi on this diet. Since it was right before lunch, I phoned home and told Sergei I’d bring home sushi. I grabbed the low-carb sushi for me, and a box of marina rolls (shrimp, tuna, eel) for the kids and Sergei, some seaweed salad, and made my way home.

I don’t know exactly what happened.

I unpacked groceries, and had it in my head to check the laundry after lunch and wait, did the kids get homework done, and I really should make treats for Valentines Day and what would I make, and I was simultaneously getting lunch stuff ready, and the sushi was on the counter…

…and it fell. The sushi fell. After I opened it. The marina sushi, the stuff that I know the kids like, their ‘main dish’, was now in a heap on the kitchen floor. I screamed out and scooped it into the plastic container, hoping the ‘Five-Second Rule’ would apply, but realizing all too quickly that the floor was much too dirty for that (another task I had to do), and that I’d just ruined my ‘special lunch’. “I just dropped the f***ing sushi!”, I yelled.

Then.

I lost it.

I knelt down on the floor with a napkin trying to pull remnants of fish roe from in between the tiles, and I lost it. I started sobbing. ‘Cause goddammit, I TRY to do something nice….

The kids came into the kitchen, quietly knelt down, and hugged me. God I love those kids. After a minute I told them to go sit down and I’d get their lunch ready. I put my low-carb spicy sushi on their plate with seaweed salad, made them some tuna salad, got out fresh fruit and crackers, and served the kids. Sobbing the whole time. What a loser I was. Can’t even make lunch. I cried for a while, for no reason in particular, and every reason en masse. Why not.

It occurred to me later that this is par for the course, because it’s February.

February does it to me every time.

The months after the winter holidays kill me every year.

I think it has to do with how psyched up I am about Christmas, still, like a kid, excited and running around and planning and scheming…I love it. Then, afterwards, the Big Letdown. It’s Winter. Simply Winter. It’s cold, and snowy. I go to work in the dark, and come home in the dark. Valentines Day is a poor substitute for a holiday.

In years past, in the Depressing Month of February, I have contemplated quitting my job, quitting my acting training, quitting caring.

I always snap out of it. When the sun winks at me on the drive home, when the mornings aren’t steel-snap frigid, when I can see the lawn again, when the newsletters come home about the first day of soccer practice…then I feel the heavy blanket of Winter start to lift.

Seasonal Affective Disorder? Perhaps.

I just think it’s the emotional Yin to my otherwise Yang.

Every February, I have to cry it out.

Before I can let the daylight in again.