heads above water and bottles of emotions

The bad news start rolling in, and I quickly run down the list of available friends whose heads are above water, to see whose shoulder I can lean on without drowning them. And I do this month after month until it seems, right now, hardly anyone is left whose head is safely above water.

What is going on in the world right now?

Which is not to say that I am not happy. I rejoice at every bird I see on a telephone line, and every butterfly I catch at the corner of my eyes, and want to point them out , "bird!", "butterfly!", fully expecting a "duh" and wide-eyed smile in return - only it's not always to the little one I find myself making mentions of various animals.

They say your heart grows when your first child is born, and I believe that. But I am also in the midst of too much at once. Too many changes. And I am like a woman lost at sea looking for a little island of respite, knowing though from looking above that a big storm of change is coming. So I bottle the current emotions up, wondering when they'll get to come up.

And I think of holocaust survivors (yes, I certainly don't come short in the melodrama department). While current wisdom claims that stuff has got to 'come out', has got to be out in the open and spoken and analyzed, the holocaust survivors who were able to create a rather normal family life for themselves were in fact the ones who did bottle it all up and keep it all inside and repress it far far down.

What does that mean for the rest of us with mini-size dramas in our lives?