Lately I have felt like I have been teetering on the fence post that sits between sanity and one hundred percent nutter-butter-crazy. I’ve felt pretty together the last few days, which is new for me, but there are times when I feel like if I have to watch “Lady and The Tramp” one more time I’m going to pluck out my eyeballs and mail them to France.

So I’ve just been kind of hanging out up here on this fence post, watching the people walk by on either side. All the people on the sanity side are smartly dressed in their khaki pants and neatly pressed polo shirts. They all seem to have a destination in mind as they march by in straight lines, chins up and eyes forward. They have everything completely under control in their lives, I can tell. On the other side, the crazy side, things are a little more interesting. You’ve got that one guy who calls himself Lederhosen Joe who stands on one foot while trying to juggle three vicious looking raccoons. The lady in the green hat just wanders around until she finds a corner to wedge herself into so she can cry for awhile, and the little albino boy that trys to do handstands always ends up knocking over the stacks of tuna cans that mysteriously appear every morning. I watch these people, the Normals and the Crazies, from up here on my fence post and I wonder… which side is right for me? As we all know, I’m just not that into ironing, so I don’t feel like I really belong in sanity land with the Normals. But I’m also not that fond of tuna, so I’m not sure if I really fit in with the Crazies either.

One thing I’ve been learning a lot in therapy (ha! aren’t you so glad I’m in therapy?) is how to find my “gray area”. How to stop looking at the world in terms of black and white and find the middle ground, the magic “in-between” that works for me. In reality, I’m too spazzy to ever be classified as Normal. When I hear the phone ring it makes me have to pee, and I’m still semi-convinced that if I look up at exactly the right moment I might catch a glimpse of Santa on his way over my house on Christmas Eve. But I also don’t believe I’m a certifiable Crazy, either. I drive a minivan for Pete’s sake. If you look up “suburban” in the dictionary you’ll find a picture of my neighborhood, and I’ve been known to pontificate at length on the utter joy that is Papa Murphy’s pizza. I want to be different enough to be interesting, but regular enough to live a safe and stable life. Just because I might feel a little loony some days, that doesn’t mean the next logical step is a padded room and some Valium.

My therapist (who has two boys about the same age as my girls) tells me, “It’s not a matter of whether or not you’re going to lose your mind each day, just how much of it you’re going to lose.”

I love her.