I am home after Daylight Savings so there is still tons of golden Southern California sunlight flooding the yards, asphalt, sidewalks, my girls hair, skin, eyes. Mr. Curry has taken Ever Elizabeth on a stroller ride. Lola is on her scooter down the pretty little condo paths with her friends, Dakota is with hordes of giggling girls and Ian is at his other home. Everything brighter is easier. Since we moved into this place a feeling of unreality has settled inside of me and will not be shaken. Dissociation is the word associated with multiple personality disorders. Or sleep deprivation. Guess which one I have? I float inside of myself as things happen. Even flavors are muted- things I normally crave fall flat when I stuff them in my mouth. The long winter is ending and inside of that ending is a small capsule of time I have swallowed and inside of that is me, screaming, like Dorothy in the Wicked Witches' magic bubble. Mr. Curry is unfolding from his long illness and to see the hazel in his eyes fill with the light of his mind again makes me feel more alive than I have in months. I cope without him but it is a hard coping. It is a rigid and robotic thing but it is safe and good for my children, the routines, the outings, the nights with movies and snacks. The explanations again of why Daddy is so sad. We are poor so this means Mr. Curry sees a state sponsored person for his magic blue pills, and Mr. Curry has Bipolar which is terrifically hard to treat correctly so this means that he is often prescribed things that are so completely and totally wrong and ridiculously dangerous for him to take that I want to bang my head into a smoothly cocked wall of the low income housing next to where we live. I do research all the time and read about the blue pills and which go together and which do not and just last week the nurse practitioner looked on her I-Phone and told my dear husband that he should stop taking magic blue pill X which kept him better for longer than any other thing ever has and instead he should take magic blue pill XX which has no indication at ALL based on research that it will do anything for him but make him much worse and go right back to being very sick. I have to go tell her this in a way that will not insult her I-Phone powers so that she will do as I ask and give him his old pill back. Our entire life could be in her hands and she might not care very much. Sometimes I feel we are RIGHT NEXT TO everything that could help but like a magic glass castle we cannot touch the food and the medicine and the therapist and the things that would make us better.
Mr. Curry and I found an amazing therapist who would see us for $75 which is a very good deal, and we went to see him and Dakota stood tall and lanky and charmingly awkward with Ever in the waiting room and watched her so Mr. Curry and I could go into this man's office and tell him where we are broken, and could he help? And I think he could, only we just yesterday received notice that I have to pay childcare for Ever at my work which I had not been asked to pay before and now we are royally and truly fucked and the first thing I thought when I heard this news was Would it really be so bad to live in Kentucky? because I have this idea that if we lived somewhere that we could actually afford to live, we might not be miserably crawling out of each day wondering how we are going to feed and care for our children properly that day, and the next, and so forth. Mr. Curry is looking for a weekend job and I think I will have to drop Ever's insurance at my work because otherwise we cannot pay our bills and rent because we simply do not have enough money coming in to pay that and childcare.
This is why I think "dissociation" might be a proper coping tool for poor people like us. I don't feel very much lately but I have to keep on. That's what they always tell poor people. Don't give up! they say very cheerfully. What else can you really tell someone, what other option do we have, but it rankles to hear it when they are shouting it from podiums with their sweaty intellectual arguments and hidden tax deductions. Fuck them anyway.
I hear music in the car and I think of Mr. Curry's eyes and his hands on me and how he tells me he loves me like he is thirsty and I am water and I think of our four children and their beautiful bodies moving in this world and their spirits so well loved and I know that I have everything. I also know that medications and insurance and these kinds of things that us poor people are so obsessed with talking about have the power to ruin our lives. If my husband takes the wrong magic pill because a psychiatrist should be evaluating him but instead an I-Phone is, that could ruin our lives. If he got sick enough badly enough he could end up hospitalized or leaving me or forcing me to leave him. All I can do is work full time and that is not full time enough.
