Tag: environment

Humanity

NOVEMBER NONO- ELEVEN : brain dump

Lovelovemotherexpletive

Apologies ahead of time.

I’m not even doing this one in my journal first, its straight to the presses. good luck, readers.

  1. Its Veterans Day here. My dad, my former father-in-law, all of my uncles, two of the men I have dated and cared for, old friends, cousins, these are the men and women who have been willing to do what I cannot. I don’t forget them, or their choices.
  2. My daughter’s birthday is tomorrow. 8 years old. My baby. The times they are a-changing. I’ll be fine.
  3. Its supernaturally warm here, for November and I really desperately want to believe its a totally natural ‘Indian Summer’ but its freaking me out. There is too much to freak out about, still, and I want to punch Donald Trump in his fat head. Get out already. Don’t do some skeevy ‘destroy the country’ move. Don’t. See number one. Be like that.
  4. I’m ducking the real work I have to be doing, and this is like day 4 of that. I have no good excuse but man, I am dodging. I’m afraid I’ll do the work and it still won’t be good enough. that’s the key.
  5. My kids want a real tree this year, which is giving me agita. I switched to a fake tree when the idea of going to a tree farm on my own and figuring out how to put up a huge honker and not have it be a live flame in my living room was too too much. fake is fantastic. but i concede (unlike the fucker.) that there is no smell, and the whiff of cold and Christmas tree is an honest to goodness wonder. Tomten softness and quiet, if you know what I mean, you know. I don’t want to cut anything down, I mean, really. (see #3- hello, we need trees – globally freaky weather) I will sort it out somehow. I do like to keep the damn kids happy.
  6. When you know you are a people pleaser and you can see yourself reacting to someone’s displeasure with guilt and self-flagellation and you can’t stop it. but if you just give yourself another 5 minutes, you can stop and think again. and then you know that time in therapy is effective after all. 5 minutes, as opposed to 5 days. win.
  7. One of the significant sucks about being so profoundly hearing impaired is that I can hear a sound but not be able to identify what it is, and not know where it is coming from. So, living in an old farmhouse with two animals and three children and probably a slew of mice means that I am occasionally in full twitch, trying to figure out sounds to see if I need to respond. Was that a breaking sound? Something fell. Where? Was it a person? Was it a plant?
  8. I took a beautiful bath yesterday. I cannot tell you how long it has been. Literally cannot. My brain shattered all over the yard in the buildup and wait of this election cycle. It is not entirely gathered up yet. Self-care was a grenade in the shed, and the walls are gone.
  9. I’m a little bit proud that I’ve made it this far in the month. Eleven days of writing. Chuffed.
  10. I’m trying to figure out a way to console my Republican friends that involves making politics personal, and its not about Orangeman, its about their serious and stable fear that Democrats are some sort of devil. I just want them to see me as a model somehow, of a different perspective, but not scary. Fear is what is running all of this. It started in September 2001, and we’ve not shaken it yet.
Divorce, Humanity

Pitchfork…

Lovelovemotherexpletive
  • into this space please insert all the things i cannot and willnot leave behind for posterity about the many things i feel about the man who I divorced. let that be as powerful as saying I married him. why should i keep valuing one over the other?
  • i’ve got pizza sitting next to me that crisped up in the oven and i’m debating very seriously whether burning the roof of my mouth is worth it.
  • i’m planting things but have zero faith that i will ever get them into the ground because they are so spindly. and i am thrilled that the word ‘spindly’ is still around.
  • plus, how many carrots will my kids eat, realistically?
  • i wish i really drank, like on the regular, so that it was part of my life. isn’t that an absurd wish? now, when stressed or emotionally stretched out, i don’t have an easy fix… or if i do have a glass of wine, i have a headache before i even feel a buzz. so. that seems a miss. but i miss it, that brain shutdown, what we call the fall of ‘inhibitions’ but are really just normally healthy boundaries? i want to shed them more often and still manage to watch out for my kids, as a functioning fucked up adult. Does that make sense?
  •  I am worried that i’m not going to regain my proofreading clients when this is done, and that i’ll be back to a square i don’t want to be on.
  •  I am aware that if I were isolated like this and still married like I was, that I would be one of the people you should be worried about, the isolation and the misery combining to unsafe.
  •  The mental health of all of us in my house right now is becoming my ringadembells item, and i’m just as unhinged as they are, but am the grownup.  I am reminding them that all the feelings are okay and that they all will pass, with time, and that nobody has a ‘right’ way to be. its all i can do, that and feed them.
  • my kids have too much screen time. i’ll care later. i obviously care now, but see item previous item, and include ‘screentime guilt’ on the list of feelings that moms are allowed to have and to let pass.
  •  my eyes constantly fill with tears for and of these kids and these times… sometimes it is overwhelm, and disbelief, and sometimes it is laughter and those are the best times.
  • Pitchfork Unwifedmotherexpletive

 

Humanity

My 7-year-old plays Fortnite now.

Lovelovemotherexpletive

and holy shit guys.

what’re you up to now that the world has shut down?

in truth, so far, about once a week I have a complete sobbing meltdown. the fear, the anxiety, the worry for the kids, for LM, for my mom and for everysingleperson.

LM is here, as he has severely compromised lungs and my place is best for not being full of germshare.

my kids dad doesn’t believe in the benefits of social isolation, so gave them to friends for a sleepover a little over a week ago.  he does not have much respect for my being an informed adult and seems to think i am a hysteric who gets her news from gossip.

so i am doing all that i can when i can and cursing his soul.  i hope he feels it. and yes, i am a little kidding, and some of me is not kidding at all.

and then there is hope. because, as hard as it is for me to believe, beneath all the layers of fear, anxiety, cynicism, despair, niggling worries, fear of schooling my children and deep betrayal lies a golden molten core of beauty and brilliant LIGHT that, evidently, cannot be dimmed.

and so she SHINES.

sometimes. when the night is dark and dreary, she flashes.  and i’m seeking her out, and holding hands, and

SEEKING HER OUT.

and i think it is saving me, and so there is that.

Carrots Unwifedmotherexpletive

and i’m hoping to re-enter this world here more often. but lets not hold our breaths.

Humanity

Do one small thing. #doonesmallthing

Lovelovemotherexpletive

Sometimes in the bustle of my day, I get lost.  I mean, the actual being who inhabits this body becomes irrelevant in the hustle to get work, do the laundry, feed the kids, do the taxes.  When my dad died, several years ago now, I had to stick my hand in my own face to remind myself that I existed. I was in a pretty hard marriage at the time and getting lost in grief without a backdrop of reliable love was astonishingly hard. (all grief is hard.)

SO, anyhow. Between the fingers of the hand-in-the-face maneuver lay my need to keep moving, to do one small thing every day that was just for me, just one small thing to foster life within me, with-out me, all over.

I feel a need to bring it back down to brass tacks like that again.  i’m not in crisis (at all) but the stresses of the world are hitting too close to the bone. the environment, the politics, the dis-ease of the whole planet is making it impossible to do even keel.

yelling in the kitchen is one small thing.  I’ve done two others here that are making me feel more grounded, in action.

  1. making my own laundry detergent. so damn simple. such a great smell. no plastic bottles. no chemicals that i cannot identify going into my septic system, which is ground that we all live with every day.  The simple recipe is in my instagram feed, linked down below.
  2. no more plastic drink bottles.  ooooh. the kids know, and are not fans.  Sports and the drive home from them used to involve a stop at the quickie mart.  no more. No more Gatorade.  YIKES.  This one will prove a challenge when baseball season starts.  the challenge to me is that i will need to be packing food more substantially. the challenge to them will be to value my reasons.  No more ‘fun’ cups for kids at the restaurant.  jury is out, til further notice.

what are your things? what are you going to do?

on instagram, i am @unwifedmotherexpletive  

#doonesmallthing

No plastic cups UnwifedMotherExpletive

Humanity

It is not that simple. It is, though.

Lovelovemotherexpletive

part one:

sigh. the world.

its a natural process, this change in environment. yes.

in the garden of eden, or shortly thereafter, or before maybe, god gave us the task of taking care of things.  our sons began killing each other almost immediately.  we did not take care of things.

then. a flood. a world-ending flood.  99% of the world perished.

uh, we still did not take care of things.

so, yes, its totally natural for us to not take care of things, and to have calamity strike almost all of us down.

there is exactly one bunker that will make it through, if the math holds,  and i bet its in the Ukraine, somehow.  Just seems fair.

seems pretty straightforward to me.

slow to learn, i guess.