I am a fragile flower, a delicate spidery web, a candle flame barely burning. One little puff and out I go. Touch me with two fingers and I crumble. Leave me in the sun without adequate moisture and I shrivel. Or, easier still, send me a form letter rejecting my painstakingly written query letter and I will crawl under my desk, push aside the outlet strip and refuse to come out and write another sentence fragment (at least until it’s time to cook dinner.)

I say to myself, “Self, why must you insist on something more? Isn’t it enough to raise four children, two of them adopted through a process so arduous you cried on the bathroom floor more than once and questioned the very existence of the Almighty God, and two of them the most exquisite babies conceived against impossible odds and born into dimly lit bedrooms with midwives in attendance? Are these miracles not enough? Is your husband of twenty years, that hard-working, calm, funny man who laughs at your jokes and didn’t divorce you when you gained 75 pounds not enough?”

“Self,” I say, “You have a spacious house (nevermind the clutter and dust), a safe neighborhood, shelves full of good books to read, new highlights in your hair and hot pink sneakers . . . and yet, it is not enough? You grappled with your faith as a teenager, wrestled with God through college, had a fist-fight with Him in your twenties, decided to trust in Him even when He tried your patience . . . you believe, you trust, you feel the comfort of God’s presence in your life and receive the occasional touch of grace to remind you of His care and it’s not enough? Is all this not enough?”

I’m a giant castle built with blocks and when one teeters, they all crash to the ground. The teetering block, that thing I thought I’d discarded years ago in a fit of despair, it keeps reappearing, insisting I pick it up, incorporate it into the construction of my life. I never asked to be a writer. I never studied writing, never majored in writing, never dared to call msyelf an author . . . but I write. I can’t help myself. I cannot be silent. The words march in my head, keeping their own beat, pounding pounding pounding until I line them up in sentences and make them behave like paragraphs. Then, sometimes, for a moment, everything is still and ordered and quiet and I am satisfied that I have expressed something just as it appeared to me. I have written and I am at peace.

I wish I had an obsession with handbags or designer shoes or something that did not come attached to the occasional rejection letter. A hunger for leather could be appeased. But this desire for publication is mean. I come apart like a seam only basted, not stitched. Today, today I am coming apart, unraveling, verging on tears, prowling in the kitchen for something to feed the gaping hole that food cannot fill. Today is a bad day, a day when I think that something might be wrong with me. I want to write, to describe the world from my viewpoint. I want to be read, too, to know that someone catches the ball I’m throwing into the universe.

Yet, I fear that I am completely delusional. I recoil from the business aspect of writing, the pushing and shoving your way to the front of the line, the impossible locks you cannot undo without the secret combination. (For instance, in the form rejection letter I received today, the editor gave me a list of ten possible reasons my query was rejected. Ten. This is maddening.) I’m not a member of the secret club, but if I could get in the door, I know I am capable of writing what they are buying.

Or I’m completely insane. You decide.

I quit. I think I will devote myself to creating the perfect muffin recipe (moist, yet nutritious), getting the laundry even brighter and whiter and organizing my sock drawer. I will purge the storage room of excess stuff, paint frames black and hang up photographs, degrime the corners of the floor. I will repaint the family room (away with you, red stripes!), alphabetize the spices and sneak stuffed animals out of the my daughter’s room undetected.

Yes, it will be a very satisfying life, one free of rejection form letters and editors who overlook me in their search for the Next Best Thing. You win, Universe. I get the message. I quit.

I hope you’re happy.

You’ve probably been picturing me like the little Dutch boy with his finger stuck in the dike, holding off impending disaster by plugging my heat pump leak with an index finger since last Wednesday. But no, that’s not it.

Wednesday afternoon I walked my kids over to the neighbor’s house, came home to curling iron my hair, dot some makeup on my aging face and pull on some black pants. The sun warmed the air with half-hearted strength. Summer is ending. I wore a sweater.

Cars jammed the parking lot, even though I had arrived twenty minutes early. I joined a line that snaked across the asphalt. I had no idea why I was standing in line nor did I ask or speak to the couple in front of me, even though I knew them and I’d just spoken to the woman earlier in the week about becoming my daughter’s preschool teacher. After some minutes, a man appeared on the steps above us and announced that due to the length of the line, we were invited to just come inside and sign the guestbook on our way to the reception.

I walked up to the front row and sat between my husband and my friend. She said, “There are no tissues to be found in this church!” and I opened my purse and handed her three. My husband patted my knee.

The funeral celebrated the life of a father–almost exactly the age of my own deceased father who was born fourteen days before Jeff’s birth on September 15, 1942–husband, grandfather and friend. I bit the inside of my cheek to stop myself from tearing up, but this strategy failed completely during the congregational singing of “There is a Redeemer,” a song written and recorded by the late Keith Green.

By the time we sang, “When I stand in glory, I shall see His face . . .” the lump in my throat convulsed and burst into a sob. I couldn’t catch my breath and then I held my breath on purpose, thinking that I could prevent what Oprah calls “The Ugly Cry” if only I didn’t breathe. As the music flowed, I remembered that I had to breathe and that breathing would keep my heart beating in rhythm and if my heart continued to beat I would not collapse in tears, never to stop crying again.

So, I told myself, “Breathe,” and I did. I gulped in air, bit my lip and gathered my composure as the song ended.

Why does music unravel my soul?

The Last Patrol film

My husband spoke eloquently about his friend and I understood for the first time how deeply this loss affected him. When Jeff’s children spoke, I could hardly bear it. I felt their loss as a daughter who lost her own father, and yet I rejoiced with them because their father had lived his life with such joy and with a lack of regret, unlike my own father.

I did not speak at my own father’s funeral, nor could I have managed. I admired these three grown kids who loved their father freely, who embraced the love he gave them. I also listened with some envy–their father lived 18 years longer than mine did. If your father is still alive, if your mother is still alive, be grateful. I had my own father for only 24 years.

• The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse buy

Two of his children sang and again, I cried. By the time the slideshow ended, showing picture after picture of Jeff with his family through the years, my three tissues were wet wads, useless.

When the funeral ended, I hugged the widow and then I had to hurry home to my children. Life resumed, regular precious life.

The rest of the week has been unremarkable, as life does after a crisis. A second repairman came to look at the heat pump and fix what the first repairman had been unable to solve in two visits. I helped the young moms of the church paint the nursery. The ceiling hole remains and we are reduced to sharing one bathroom with its inadequate showerhead. I’ve taken baths again which reminds me of college when I had no choice; the entire girls’ dorm only had bathtubs without showers.

I’ve taken my daughter to the pool where she swims in near solitude. The summer crowds have thinned. Everyone has abandoned summer for fall, even though the calendar offers us a few remaining summer days. I’ve been cleaning bedrooms, vacuuming happily with my new vacuum cleaner, worrying a little about the school year, neglecting my own mother, planning a birthday party for my daughter which will take place on my dead father’s sixty-fifth birthday.

I’m drifting in a swirl of sorrow and monotony with spots of joy here and there like lumps in a batter. This is life and as happens from time to time, I am painfully aware of its rushing current which drags some of us out to sea and some of us to shore, while most of us bob in the waves, feeling no current, but only motion.

And my email box is stuffed full and I can’t seem to catch up.

I have a molar that cannot be salvaged. I figured as much which is why I avoided having the twenty-year old crown removed and a new one put on. I suspected that once the dentist removed the old crown that the entire tooth would disintegrate into a mushy slush, which is pretty much what happened. The disloyal tooth had no nerve . . . years ago, the original dentist did a root canal, leaving the tooth without feeling.

I kind of wish my brain had had a similar procedure because I’d rather not have felt the dismay over my impending toothlessness.

Two dental assistants in the office all but sang and danced trying to distract me from my woe while we waited for the x-ray to develop. They extolled the virtues of the titanium implant that is in my poverty-stricken future. I’ll have to sell a kidney to gain a tooth. Or drain my body of all its plasma, sell it and then mortgage all my future plasma as well. I’ll have to grow my hair long, then cut it off and offer it for sale on eBay.

Gloom, despair and agony on me. Do you know how much a dental implant costs? Thirty-five hundred dollars. Do you know how much “cheaper” bridgework costs? Three thousand dollars. How about a crown on the rickety remains of my tooth? Twelve hundred bucks, no guarantee. Do you know what happens when you leave a gaping hole in your jaw instead? Uh, me neither, but I heard something about shifting teeth and, oh, probably a whole-head collapse for all I know.

We have no dental insurance, by the way.

My kind dentist filled in the decrepit tooth with a sturdy temporary filling which brings the tooth to about half its normal height. I have an appointment with an oral surgeon for June 21. You can bet I’m looking forward to that day–about as much as I look forward to having my hand gnawed off by a rabid raccoon. (I have no appointment set for that, yet.)

Even though this was not a great day, I realized that it isn’t the Worst Day Ever. I spent some time while washing dishes thinking about the bad days in my life.

And, although there have been some doozies, including the day a college classmate killed himself, the day my father told me that he was divorcing my mother, the afternoon my husband was fired from a job, the time my dad informed us that he had a fatal brain tumor, the day he died, the moment the doctor told me it was “unlikely” I’d ever get pregnant, the day the birthmother who’d chosen us changed her mind . . . oh, the bad days go on and on. The sick days stand out, too . . . the day after one of my sons had surgery and spent the night screaming in pain, the day I spent vomiting when I had my turn with a stomach virus, the night I spent in an emergency room waiting to have my toe sewn closed, the night my feverish daughter sobbed due to an aching ear.

But, I realized that none of these days have been that bad. None has been The Worst Day Ever. This is both good and bad. Good because I’ve been blessed in so many ways . . . bad because that means that looming somewhere ahead of me is The Worst Day Ever. When I look back at the contenders for that title, I have the benefit of perspective. Sicknesses end. The pain of loss really does fade with time. The birthmother that said, “No,” changed her mind again and said, “Yes.” The doctors turned out to be wrong and I had two pregnancies despite their prognostications.

So, although today was a rotten day and I have a dead tooth in my mouth that will require the spending of vast amounts of cash that we don’t have to spare . . . it could have been worse in so many ways.

I’m not sure if the best is yet to come, but I’m fairly sure the worst is yet to come.

And that is the gift of pessimism speaking, mixed in with a healthy dose of perspective with a tiny dash of optimism.

Do you have a Worst Day Ever? Or are you like me, certain that things can always get worse than they are today?

My teenagers have a teenage boy over spending the night. No matter what I threaten, they are unable to maintain any sense of quiet. And their room smells like a can of onion-flavored Pringles, though I am certain we do not have any Pringles in the house.

I want to write a lovely little tribute to my kids (something like this), but instead, I’m obsessed with mentally planning my funeral. I know! What is wrong with me? Well, I attended a funeral a few weeks ago which made me realize that I have some definite ideas about my own funeral and how it ought to be planned. And then this week, a local man died at home quite suddenly . . . as in, his daughter found him dead when she returned home from school. He was fifty.

So, instead of thinking up cute ideas to write here, I think about what songs I want played at my funeral.

Okay, how about this, instead?

My boxwood hedge has a boy-shaped hole in it. All the boys were playing some kind of shoving-tackling game (I believe called “Kill Me”) and someone landed in the hedge right by my front door. I’m not sure my hedge can recover from this sort of abuse.

Tomorrow I’m going to spend the morning scrap-booking. And I hope to eat lunch in a restaurant. Maybe I’ll return my overdue library books. These are my dreams.

(Also, tell me that I’m not the only not-quite-middle-aged woman planning pondering her own funeral.)