I am so tired. I am so sad.
I feel I am in a strange place where everything I can do to care for myself best is something other people don't want me to do and it is seriously beginning to dawn on me that I am 42 and there will never be a time when what I need is OK with everyone else. There will never be a time I can create a life of possibly even happiness without hurting someone else or disappointing them and I know from reading hundreds of biographies just how many women accept and don't accept this bargain. I don't know what kind of woman I am. I am tired.
You have to become incapacitated for people to relent that possibly you must do what you must do.
What I am tired of:
My husband's bipolar. I was doing very well with it. I am doing 'self-care' or what I am allowed to do. It's not enough, so I am very sad, and anxious, and every night when I go to try to sleep the second I close my eyes I see myself falling from high places of all kinds, cliffs, hot air balloons, the hands of God, 9/11. I open my eyes and sigh and try again. Even during the daytime, when I close my eyes, I am falling from somewhere, someone, something. This has been going on for about four months. I am close to being a single mother for the last five months but it's much harder because (and I was a single mother for eight years so I know) the person who could is right there, inches away from me, or behind a closed door, and I cannot reach him. I feel grief. I feel rage. I feel scared. I feel confused. I feel disappointed in myself. I feel worried that I am not up to this task. And I have to protect the kids from his irritation and depression and lack of interest in them. I have to be his advocate to the kids and help them understand the disease. Meanwhile inside I have the same questions they do, and the answers run head-first into a cement wall and fall down dead.
Being the only one to take care of Ever. She talks all the time. She won't play alone. She is non-stop. She is precious. She is my life. She sleeps with me. We do everything together. We laugh a lot. We play. We shop. We garden. We clean. And every day there is a point where I am so furious that no one else can step in and take over for two hours that I hate myself, because feeling furious makes me hate myself, and it always has. He showers or bathes her every night and that is wonderful, for her and for me. But besides that, there is no one else to keep spirits high, to play, to observe with a friendly nature and answer the endless stream of questions, to teach the endless things there are to teach every day, to do. To be.
And the force field a person needs against for protecting against this kind of emanating dark energy requires, demands, a power source that I don't currently have: a traditional belief in God would probably do.
with no speical legend of God to refer to,
with my calm white pedigree,
my yankee kin,
i think it would be better to be a Jew
Facebook and Twitter.
Myself.
Everyone else.
Grocery shopping, sweeping the floor, wiping down the banister, vacuuming, flea-combing the dogs nightly (can't afford Advantage), planning dinner, making dinner, cleaning up after dinner. Lola washes the dishes, thank goodness.
The long struggle every night to sleep; falling asleep in fear.
Hashimotos.
People dying in horrible ways much too young. All over my Facebook, all over the world.
Trump and everything remotely associated with him.
Exhaustion so deep it sometimes makes me cry.
Feeling embarrassed for being so tired all the time, and looking it.
Unlearning. The older I get the less I know and it's not freeing. It's deeply disconcerting and distressing and leaves me floundering through things that I didn't used to.
Being poor/ish. I am working hard and keep adding clients that I write for, but we aren't there yet.
I can write about almost anything and do it very well. I do great work. I need more of it.
Children getting hurt.
Thinking about my dad. My sister. How they've been lost to me for so many years now. I'll never get over it.
What I am not tired of:
Beyonce.
Sylvia Plath.
Eleanor Roosevelt.
Love.
Grass, tree, bush, flower, bee, bird, sun, sky, dirt.
Hot water.
My children. Even when I am, I am not.
Poems, but mostly older ones.
Sincere plainness.
Sincere flamboyance.
Mozart.
John Irving.
Ottessa Moshfegh.
Feeling safe. I wish I could get there right now.
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