Pinch me

When you've been in crisis mode long enough, and then suddenly the crisis goes away, there's some mental weirdness that comes along with it.
It's like you've been running in a thicket and you abruptly stumble out into a clearing, blinking in confusion. What just happened? Where is that puma that was just behind me?
What am I supposed to think about now?
The news was finally in the Star today with Mike's farewell column. He's being promoted back to full-time. He regains all the benefits he lost--eyeglasses coverage, paid vacation, long-term disability, life insurance. And he gets a good raise. Not as much as we were making before, mind you. But we can once again pay our bills.
For two years and four long months I've been fantasizing about this day (or days like it, involving other employers). In my daydream, I would put on some raucous music and dance giddily. I would buy a bottle of champagne, which we would spend the evening drinking and toasting our good fortune. Perhaps I would even cry a little with gratitude.
So far, none of that has happened. Instead, I find myself at the Walgreens cosmetics counter with my daughter, looking at fingernail polish. I've been wanting nail polish for two and a third years. I could buy it now. But I don't. In fact I have a long list of under-$10 things too impossibly boring to itemize here that I can now buy. But yet I somehow can't.
When the big layoffs came, our income was cut by one-third, not including the value of the benefits. With a little skillful cutting and renegotiating, that gave us just enough to pay our everyday living expenses--the house payment, gas, food, utilities. Anything beyond that--for example the nearly $300 it takes to register your kid for public high school--had to come from a savings that had been depleted to put two kids through college. Or we raised it by selling lumber, bunk beds and whatever else we could part with.
Today, many more things are within reach. Tires for the car, shots for the cat, new glasses. Yet here I stand at the counter, strangely paralyzed. We've had a couple of weeks to get used to it, but somehow I can't quite believe we're coming back to the middle class.
Mike is getting a new job that will allow him a breath of fresh air and more room to grow professionally. He is getting showered today with kind words from his readers who will miss him. Elsewhere on the Internet, his conservative detractors are no doubt looking at it as a big humiliation for him. Perhaps some are even giving themselves credit with bringing him "down."
Maybe what is needed is a pricey cup of coffee. I should finally have that latte the financial advice columnists are forever telling me to skip. And as I sip it, I will consider our newly rightside-up world and try to make sense of it all.