Don’t Be Lasagne

One of the things I want you to know about my Renaissance is that it is not all plain sailing. That sometimes it plunges me into the kind of abyss cunningly disguised as a daisy sprinkled meadow and when I find myself spiralling down a craggy hole, I no longer try to grasp at the tangled branches of its walls, but instead just let myself fall, because once I hit rock bottom I know the only way is back up.

Last weekend a man I have long respected announced something so blatantly ridiculous that I was lost for words, so stunned by his duplicity and disregard for the feelings of all those who had believed in him that I got out of his car in the kind of silence I didn’t know I was capable of, but one inspired by my beloved Doctor Who’s advice not to be lasagne. A reference to the propensity of a microwaved meal to explode beyond the cellophane when the pressure gets too much. 

Don’t be lasagne! Don’t be reactionary. Be rational, collected and dignified. Or at least, do your very best…

But heck it is hard in the face of so many men’s mid-life crisis’s. For I have been on the receiving end of some frankly ludicrous behaviour recently. And having decided that throwing lasagne-esque paddys will probably not stop that married man stroking my hair or Finn’s usually quite sane dad, throwing a few paddy’s of his own, nor indeed fill the gaping hole that should be a soul in the personality of a man-child, I am left with the only true weapon in my armour: complete silence. A refusal to engage in the ridiculous. My right to say no. No, you cannot touch me. No, my son will not be doing your bidding, and no, I will not be your “friend”.

I am in fact trying not to be pasta of any variety really. For in her renaissance a person must learn that what has not worked for her before, will almost certainly not work for her in the midst of the kind of hormones apparently throwing a party in her ovaries.

For oh yes. What I thought had gone away has come back with a vengeance and thrown me for a six (what is a six?). Which makes being lasagne the kind of double jeopardy I probably shouldn’t risk or else all hell might just break loose and heavens, it’s not as if owning breasts that have gone berserk and feel like someone has filled them up with spiky rocks isn’t trouble enough without bating the irrational thought patterns of men who should know better, now is it?

No, Renaissance is very definitely not plain sailing and make no mistake, its initial highs can lull you into a false sense of security. Making you believe that you will be riding the crest of a wave for always, when the truth is that there is no real escaping the slings and arrows of the self-absorbed, no ducking the lash of the ridiculous, the embarrassing or the unjust. But instead simply renewed resolution to stay firmly in alignment with the goals and values born of your own belief in what is real and true at this stage in your life.

The challenge of course, is not to allow it to make you hard. Not to let it make you cynical. Nor to have it fix pursed lips permanently in place. To remain open to possibility, chance, hope. To believe firmly in your own Renaissance even when the road ahead seems fraught with the preposterous, for LIFE is fraught with the preposterous!

This week I bit in to a piece of scampi and broke a tooth! (Who knew scampi had a vicious streak?). I mistimed the cancellation of one wi-fi contract in favour of another so this post comes courtesy of careful, squinting typing on to my diddy phone screen and my washing machine made the most almighty noise and spilled its watery guts before keeling over quite as dead as the proverbial dodo in a manner I consider quite unreasonable.

Life is preposterous. Men in mid-life crisis are ludicrous. Electrical devices get together and time their simultaneous demise (my hoover and kindle have died too!) and even when my resolve isn’t crumbling, it seems my teeth didn’t get the stay strong memo.

Life is preposterous and sometimes it is beautiful and sometimes there are moments to be tucked away in the happy box even if they are destined never to be repeated.

Believe in it. Be real and true. Just don’t be lasagne.