Obdurate

I've always been a huge fan of the written word.

Growing up, when I came across a word that I wasn't familiar with, I'd ask my grandfather what it meant.  He prided himself in saying, "Look it up," with a bit of a twinkle in his eye.

To make the process easier, my grandparents gave me a Webster's dictionary, companion thesaurus and encouraged underlining every word I learned playing Scrabble or reading novels from the library.  I still have the books and sometimes thumb through the pages looking at the scribble markings and pencil lines.  I even once showed them to my children hoping that they might find them fun to use.  They just scoffed and said, "Why would you flip pages, when Wikipedia is a click away?"

Recently, I learned a new word...obdurate.

Do you know it? 

In a nutshell, it's an adjective that means to be a belligerent hard ass resistant to change.

In a bigger nutshell, me.

I'm such a creature of habit.  I like things to go down the way I've planned them or the way that I'm most familiar with.  So, even when I'm trying to implement change that is positive...my entire being screams....FUUUUUCCCCKKKK YOUUUUU! Stop screwing with that which you know.

Last week was a tough one.  We discovered a leak in a panel on our roof and had to have an insurance adjustor come out which should not have been a big deal given that we've never made a claim on our home...except, we recently changed insurance providers.  Let me tell you...if you need someone to do battle for you when it comes to matters of home ownership and justice...I'm the fucking girl for you.

On the heels of the roof, the older of our two old Hondas had to be taken in with a minor problem that hundreds of dollars later turned into..."Here's how you can baby it for the next year until you need to replace the clutch."

And then the overpriced bids came in for painting the exterior of our home in the hopes that we no longer look like the condemned property on the block.  I may be exaggerating...a bit, but just a bit.  Why did I go to graduate school?  I should have been a car mechanic or a house painter.

And then, I wrote a tuition check for our older two for school.

And then, I wanted to drown myself in a vat of chocolate and sushi and wine and iced coffee and popcorn and caramel and, and, and....

There's a legend that says...the harder the change, the more the universe will fight until eventually wanting it badly enough, you will prevail.

This image struck me as my seven-year old asked me if it was fun to be a grown up.  "You know...because you get to stay up late, eat ice cream when you want, make kids do chores, say 'no' all the time."  To which I replied, "Being a grown up certainly has its' perks...but the truth is, it's not all that it's cracked up to be.  There's lots of responsibility and many times you do the right thing for the good of the family, when all you really want to do is just ride your bike to Mexico."  She just started laughing and said, "No one rides their bike to Mexico.  That's silly."  I suppose, she made my point.  Instead, obdurate or not, most of us, just do the right thing.

Picture me. Fighting against the wind. Determined.  Obdurate Kelly hell bent on getting it right even though I want to scream and said, "Ugh!" In the end, I'm sure it all works out.