When all else fails, kitchen cleaning and comic books...

This week started off really promisingly. A friend came over for the day and we basically spent the entire time laughing and behaving incredibly childishly. My soul needed her so badly after last week's pervading sense of hopelessness! I'm a huge extrovert but my anxiety is often triggered by strangers or crowds, and I badly needed the recharging powers of someone who I just didn't have to stand on ceremony with (or worry about what she thought about the state of my carpets).

Then Tuesday, unexpected repair people struck. Now, landlord's agents getting access to our home and causing endless difficulties in the past are one of the deep painful root triggers for my history of panic attacks. I never had a full panic attack until that whole episode, and for almost two years after we finally got them to leave us alone I couldn't even answer the door unless I was expecting someone. So the landlord sending people to put us a new gate in without advance warning could easily have sent me into a spin.

I hadn't had chance to rely on any of my usual options for avoidance or minimising impact (advance tidying frenzy and usually someone else with me when workers turn up) so I settled for my tried and true last-ditch coping tactic of offering coffee or tea and trying to appear unflustered. Go, me!

I probably failed as far as not appearing too weird is concerned, but I did manage friendly - and not crying. Yay.

Yesterday they worked at the front gate, which required no access at all and barely freaked me out in the scale of freaked-out-anxious-person. Today was the turn of the back gate. We have no curtains at the back of the house. I felt like I spent my day in a fishbowl.

Talia watched them from the doorway, accompanied by her "friends" almost the whole day. I flitted between aggressively cleaning the kitchen cupboards, reading Hellblazer, and supervising mud pie making just to make sure the littles weren't tempted to touch the interesting cement buckets.

Nobody fell in a cement bucket, and my cupboards are sparkly. And no tears, unless you count Rowan loudly declaring herself not sleepy just now whilst yawning her little head off. I'm calling today a success.