Maybe You’re Not a Trainwreck After All

It has been a rough couple of weeks. Daughter #2 was sick, to the point of spending a Saturday morning at the urgent care, and Saturday afternoon tracking down an open pharmacy (which turned out to be surprisingly difficult). Daughter #1, away at college, had committed months earlier to work the holiday weekend and was in a funk about not getting to come home for the holiday weekend…and then her car died. I was struggling to manage various commitments on top of my children’s crises, and then managed to add to my own woes when I came around a curve on a downhill slope not far from my house and got tagged by a passing state trooper (sigh). Turns out that a) that stretch of that road has a speed limit of 35, not 45 as it does a little further on, and b) my speedometer is misreading by 3-4 mph, which I had not realized. To make matters even more exciting, I have to report traffic tickets to my employer. My boss found it amusing, which was both an annoyance and a relief.

I traveled for Thanksgiving, which I had planned to do for months, but thanks to some last-minute changes in plans and also to some miscommunications, the holiday did not work out as I anticipated. On top of everything else, I’m involved in a new relationship; my new partner and I realized, belatedly, that with clearer communication we could have both attended each other’s family holidays, and met one another’s families, which made us both a little sad. I drove the nine hours home after Thanksgiving only to have a minor but painful medical procedure done on my leg the next day.

At that point, I was in a very self-pitying mood.

My new partner had gone with me to my procedure, so, he was handy to moan to. “Are you sure you want to be a part of this?” I whined. “Are you sure you want to get involved in this trainwreck?”

As it happens, trains are his hobby, so “trainwreck” for him has a very specific meaning. “Aw, honey,” he said (note to all and sundry: he is the only person who is allowed to call me “honey”), “you’re not a trainwreck. You’re more of a…minor derailment.”

“There are minor derailments?”

Apparently a “minor derailment” occurs when a single truck (the part of the train car that is attached to a pair of axles at either the front or rear of a car, so, half of the wheels of a particular train car) drops off the rails, bouncing along on the ties, until it reaches a grade crossing and pops back onto the rails. Or, sometimes, the truck will simply remain derailed until the train stops. But the important thing, he told me, is that a minor derailment isn’t an irretrievable disaster: it’s fixable.

And he’s right. My younger daughter’s infection was fixable with antibiotics. My older daughter’s car is fixable, or replaceable, or maybe both, and a rental car enabled her to spend a few days at home with her mom and little sis. The Thanksgiving miscommunication was partly repaired in the moment; going forward, we hope to prevent it happening again. The traffic ticket may not be “fixable,” but it is at least survivable, and the medical procedure was temporary pain for (I hope) long-term gain.

So remember, the next time everything seems to go wrong at once, that describing your life as a “trainwreck” is usually hyperbole. With a little time and a little perspective, maybe you’ll see that you, too, are just a minor derailment.

And those can be fixed.