Keeping the Faith

I'm doing my best to channel Pollyanna today amidst monumental stress. In my experience, real estate transactions are not easy. I'd like to shift that experience, but selling the home we own with my mom has been just like all the others - a roller-coaster of challenges and unpleasant surprises. Today is one of those days I don't want to leave my office because there is comfort here...the comfort of knowing I have a job and that if something bad happens, I will survive.

I know the stress is high when I can't laugh at the antics of my dogs and cat, Sarah Palin jokes or the sound of my associates cracking up in the next office. Thinking about my grandchildren isn't making me smile either. Today I cried while writing a letter to a lender about why they should be kind to Mom and me. Not even my favorite four-cheese panini from Skimmer's could bring me out of the funk. I just feel sick, wallowing in that "oh poor me" thing.

In 1995 when I sold my home in Conifer, CO a few months after my first husband's death, I arrived at the closing and was told the buyer's loan couldn't fund because the survey showed the county road passing through my property which created a problem with the title. I told them that wasn't true or how could we have purchased it? We ended up having to find the same surveyor and have him go back up the mountain and do it over. I sought help from neighbors who had a home office fax machine and I lost a day of work and about five pounds from so much stress. After seven hours in the escrow office or walking around the parking lot praying, we finally did close, so I didn't lose the home I was buying that same day. It was the most stressful day of my life, other than the day after Bruce's death, but I still had tranquilizers then.

Thinking back on that awful time of my life, and how I made it through the storm, I hear Pollyanna telling me again that when you're going through a storm the important thing to remember is to keep going. Pollyanna is also reminding me that the mere act of smiling makes me feel better. I'll try to remember to smile when I throw up later.