My heart is so heavy today.
My week was already on a rough start and basically doing a mighty fine job of keeping it that way. To the point where I barely slept for days at a time, tossing and turning, and waking up with chest pains.
Then I come into work and my heart was relieved. Relieved at the expense of someone else's hardship and pain. I wasn't sure whether I should feel happy that I was finally relaxed for the first time in over a week, or should I mourn for the person who took away my pain. The same person who just proved to me that if I had it bad, she had it worse. And rightfully so.
As I was at the host stand, letting time pass me by, fanning myself with a Happy Hour menu, a young lady in a nurse outfit walks in and asks for "Jill." Let's call her Jill to help protect her and everyone else too.
I respond to the young lady and say, "I'm so sorry, Jill is gone for the day." Then she says, "Sarah." I say, "Yes, Sarah is here. Let me get her."
The young lady takes Sarah to a corner of the restaurant and begins to cry. There she was. Pregnant. Crying. Losing control. Losing control of everything she apparently has tried to build and hold on to. Crumbling and turning to sand. I stand there wondering what was going on. Resting my chin on my hand, staring and waiting.
My manager interrupts "Sarah" and tells her, "It's down to closers." So she wraps up her conversation with the young lady, only to continue her story with one of the bartenders.
As Sarah walks to the back of the restaurant, I walk with her. Intrigued, but concerned. Hungry for the story, but not happy with the tears I saw earlier. It's as if I wanted a story to help take away some of my pain. As if I wanted the world to prove to me that it wasn't just me with problems. And that's exactly what I got.
That young pregnant woman in the nurse outfit, is the current wife of a former server at that restaurant. It turns out that he was having an affair with another former server (who was also married with children). Let's call her Trisha.
Trisha was all about family, faith and saving face. I can even attest to that. But there was something dissuading about the incessant reminders about how much she loved her family, husband and children. Personally, I live by the motto: "If you have to talk about it all the time, then you probably don't have it or live by it."
Anyways, I continue to get more information out of "Sarah." She tells me that the affair has been going on for a while and the young lady being cheated on, surrendered to the people whom she thought were her enemies (i.e, her husband's coworkers). She AND Trisha's husband ("Mike") hired a private investigator to help prove that Trisha and the young lady's husband were cheating.
As soon as I begin to reminisce about Shania Twain's story, little did I know that even Shania had a better ending than the young lady. When Trisha was with her 1st husband, she was cheating on him with Mike (her soon-to-be and current husband). But at that time, Mike knew very well that Trisha was married.
Thus, finding a faithful couple to help make this story better seemed inevitable. It seemed that that young lady was standing alone. And little does Mike know that his last child may not be his.
The more the story unraveled, the calmer I got. I got calm, but cold. I eventually sat down, far away from the host stand, thinking about how horrid this story was. How stressful this story was. How heavy this story will be.
Here is a pregnant working woman, trying to deal with a soon-to-be broken family. With no one on her side, but a husband who cheated with a married woman (only to be cheated on now). Who do you trust and who do disregard? Who do you forgive and who do you side with? Who is who?
