Is it Life, or Just to Play My Worries Away?

There's this scene in every child of the eighties' favorite music video that illustrates so well how I feel. A-ha dude's trying to break out of his comic strip box, and he's slamming himself against the walls until he smacks the comic out of himself and becomes a real boy. I feel like I'm slamming against the walls, but I just can't seem to break out of the box, shake off the black and white, and get back to the real me. There are few things that are better in black and white. Once I bought a DVD of It's a Wonderful Life, not realizing it was colorized. It was awful. I couldn't even watch it, and I love that movie. Black and white has its place, but black and white is no way to view the world. It's not black and white. It's full of color and nuance, and if you try to reduce it to black and white, you'll be missing something. My take on germs right now is black and white, and it's not working. The fact that 99% of germs are not harmful and are often helpful should get me to relax and settle for washing hands after using the restroom or after taking out the trash, but instead I'm trying to sanitize every.single.thing that comes into my home, and it's a losing battle. My kids go to school. (I have fleeting thoughts of home schooling, but I'm still sane enough to know that wouldn't be a step in the right direction.) My husband goes to work. So I do what I can. They usually shower or at least change clothes after school/work, and then I try to sanitize their stuff---cell phones, keys, glasses, wallets, credit cards, bottoms of shoes, the floor where the shoes have been, etc.

I try not to keep my family from living life, so we go places, yes (though a large amount of hand sanitizer is employed throughout). We go to the movies and to Gettysburg and to church, but it's hugely stressful to me, because when we get home, it's time for me to sanitize stuff. You don't even want to know what an ordeal shopping has become for me. All of this attempting to sanitize is a time consuming nightmare, and it isn't possible anyway. I try to tell myself that it's a done deal, so there's no point. If there's some horrible germ on the stuff, it's probably already in the kid. Besides, I won't, nor could I, bar friends and family from ever visiting (though it is a much more stressful occurrence for me than it should be as I try not to think about all their non-sanitized stuff). I'm tilting at windmills, so why can't I just knock it off? I keep trying to logic myself back to normalcy, but so far, logic hasn't fixed crazy for me. I feel like I have to do as much as I can to keep my family's environment safe, but in a cost benefit analysis, are my efforts increasing our safety enough to be worth it? I'm pretty sure that's a no. Maybe the song's got it right, and it really is "no better to be safe than sorry." Now go get your A-ha on. I know you want to. (Has the synthesizer ever been better employed?)

And let's face it, even if I ever do shake off the black and white, I'll still never look this cool.