A particularly rambling ramble

Friends have asked whether I feel a weight lifted now that mom and I don't interact; the answer has been "yes and no," as emotions go. I had reason to think, today, about the practical perspective.

Let me set this up with an analogy: the weekend that F. and I broke up, I did, unmistakeably, feel that a weight had been lifted. I was emotionally devastated, but the sense of "he is not my problem anymore" rose above that devastation. If this ramble were devoted to the topic, I'd tell you how many other women have gone through the same thing--held on to something they knew was broken, detrimental to them, etc.--but I'm here to talk about practical matters. The practical aspect was that we had planned to spend that weekend together, but he'd bailed on me at the last minute, so I did other things, which I ended up enjoying a lot. So I thought about how much better the weekend was without him.

Fast forward to today, in which I did a number of things--henna, yoga, food shopping--that would have been less practical with mom. It's an imperfect analogy: only one of these things brought the whole issue to mind, and that was henna. The other stuff I do all the time without incident, and though all activities are more involved when mom is involved, I don't usually give a thought to that (unless I'm in Boston, where I have to think about doing yoga before mom gets up so as to avoid her running commentary, and where the quickest trip to the supermarket turns into an odyssey). But the henna really brought it home. It's such an ordeal at my parents' house, where I'd last henna'd before today, that I was surprised at how straightforward it was here. Mix a few things together, apply to your hair, leave in, wash out. The mixing takes seconds, the applying a minute. Then you do other stuff, then you rinse. I decided to complicate the rinsing by washing the henna into a small tub, so that I could compost it rather than have it go down the drain. This still did not complicate things much. The only issue was that once I'd rinsed, I wanted to bring the tub downstairs and outside right away so that I wouldn't trip over it (you do not want henna water on your floors). Only, when I looked out my bedroom window before going to rinse, there were canvassers, conferring.  Get-out-the-vote people, maybe, or people associated with a particular campaign. So after rinsing and deciding to get rid of the henna-watery tub, I had to think about whether I could run downstairs butt-naked without flashing the canvassers, lest they be at my front door (which has two glass panels that I've been meaning to cover up for ages). I decided to risk it. They weren't there, and so they weren't mooned as I deposited the tub at the back door. See, this ramble has a happy ending.