Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sarah

Lately, I wake up every day, drink my coffee and do my make-up, go to work and have conversations, listen to music and live my life with the steady hum of my brain's gears churning through the math problem of my future plans. 

I've never been good at math. People who I trust and adore have told me from a young age, my math abilities (like my small motor skills) are not a strong suit.  I actually use it as my "What is your weakness?" answer when some not-too-clever interviewer asks me that lame question.

Yet here I am with the din of mathematical noise playing steadily in the background of my every activity: 

If we get a house...well, if we can even find a house that we like to get and then we can also afford it...well, let's just pretend we get it, then we will have to pay x more dollars per month for our housing expenses, minus x tax credit if we buy before June. So we get the house and if the market starts to go up and if we also do not lose our jobs then we can potentially start trying to have children on Z time frame...maybe I will make a different spreadsheet. Ooh! But if we start trying and it takes a year or more, maybe we should start trying sooner? But if we were to be successful, we would be screwed...shit...

I'm serious. I have a spreadsheet that articulates all possible life experiences we are considering and a timeline woven throughout it of possible baby making-and-getting scenarios. Usually, all of my scenarios end in me realizing a fatal flaw and muttering an expletive before building a new worksheet on my THISISIT.xls document.

At Christmas I wanted to be there with my family, growing a person underneath my v-neck sweater at the dinner table. Then I got home, and filled with a "maybe we could do this" glow, I started considering the fact that with a baby I would need to either change the budget to include daycare or change the budget to remove my salary - THAT would gum up getting a house. 

Everyone keeps telling me you will never be ready and that it will all work out. I am comforted by neither.

My sister-in-law, who is 9 years my junior, asks me when I am going to ever have kids as I wonder where her two are, while she is talking to me for an hour at a time.

My other sister-in-law is only newly 28 and has been married all of 6 months, but has been frustrated every month when she gets her period. I wonder what her rush is at the same time as I wonder if I should be in one.

So should we buy a house first, then have a baby and then figure out the rest as we go along? Or do we stay where we are and have a baby and then hopefully have enough money to buy a house when the market has started to go back up again? The phrase "Timing is everything" flashes across my brain. Why do I do this to myself? What does that mean if I don't know what the right timing is?

The Order of Operations is a really helpful algebraic concept IF you can remember it in the first place. Herein lies the problem. 

I remember beautiful math problems that seemed too easy. I would confidently hand in my exam and before turning a full rotation away from my math teacher's desk (an aside - her name was actually Ms. Graph), my stomach would sink and I would hear mom's voice in my head - "A free dinner can be too expensive." 

What does that even mean?,  I would sass back in my head. 

But I felt like I was committing a crime - ME doing well on a Math quiz?? I don't think so.

Sure enough, there was about a 50/50 chance that I had solved my problem perfectly, but in the wrong order and therefore I was all the way wrong.  There was no partial credit. Sometimes I did not want to do the wrong thing so I just did nothing. I stared at the blank page and tried to remember the acronym. Here is a window to my internal monologue (at whatever age I learned this crap):

Please forgive my favorite aunt Farrah? What?

Ummm.... no, no. 

Okay...come on, you can do this. No I can't. Why would I even say that to my self? that was meaningless, I know I can't do this, why would I fake pump myself up. That was dumb. Okay, you might be able to remember this if you really focus. 

Please Excuse my favorite aunt Farrah....Excuse...Examine? What does the E stand for? Excruciating? Agh! I hate math. I am totally going to ITTech. My dad is going to decide he does not love me anywhere. This is all going to be so embarrassing. 

I did not go to ITTech. 

This simple fact should comfort me. 

I know myself well enough to know that I like to consider all possible outcomes, and that the terrible ones I worry for very rarely happen. Because I know my next steps are far more subjective that algebra, I technically don't have to worry about getting it wrong. Technically, I know that. 

Yet every day begins and ends with me staring at the page, hoping I could just figure out an acronym to make my next pencil mark be correct - God! I would love to get an "A" on this test. Actually, I would just settle for definitely not failing.