Tag: faith

Humanity

Writing week. Thursday.

Lovelovemotherexpletive

I’m sitting at a car repair place again, this time, a dealership, because evidently that is the only way forward. hundreds and hundreds of ways. the man behind the counter is handsome and i’ve already glimpsed at a naked ring finger.

yes, that makes me sick, too. I will not take another step, just sitting my ass down, maybe not facing that direction.

i’m starting to feel a little bit like dating is work. and thats no good. weary and curious cannot exist in the exact same space.

but here i am, in the car repair waiting room. and i smell coffee but can’t find it, and thats maddening. it is not for me? is it not for me?

it was a big day yesterday. I had two ‘very important’ new things. (virtual via zoom, both of them.)

  1. a meeting with a spiritual director. she is an old, virtual friend of mine, though i have actually met her in person and even shared food. she’s finishing a program in spiritually directing people and i am a rambling, distractable seeker. Seeker. yes i am. we talked a lot about how to ritualize some of my daily tasks, imbue them with my feelings about the divine.
  2. a meeting with a potential new therapist. she uses a similar modality to the last therapist I liked, called IFS (Internal Family Systems) which encourages and allows all the different voices we hear in our heads, in our body. For example, the voice which tells me I’m doing just fine with the kids, in contrast to the voice which panics internally any time there is the smallest hitch in their happiness levels. Defensiveness, aggression, shame, pride, all the things are just fine, and working together to protect and defend my inner golden core. I’m good. I don’t need quite as much protection as they think I do, so its a matter of going in, diving down to see what my pieces are doing in there. it suits me very well, and I think we’ll be a match. Its amazing how explaining myself to someone can make me feel shame, and how much that is exactly why I am there.

Go get yourself a therapist. Everyone should have one. Yes, I mean you.

I also had another first date. Will let you know.

The waiting room is playing Sarah Mclachlan. Never fails to make me feel teenaged angst. Hello Dawson, its me… get off my fucking roof. Its not my favorite re-do, I’ll tell you that.

Did I tell you I’m 47? I am. Deeply.

love love,

me. ( i found the coffee!)

toddler wearing floral dress holding doll
This means something. How are you facing things today?
Photo by Саша Лазарев on Pexels.com
Humanity

Tether. February melt.

Lovelovemotherexpletive

I have got to call this a part one.

because it is just too broad, and while I am not exactly known for complete packages of ponderings, I know this one will have many ripples for me.

So. The last week or so sucked. And while there were specific causes and effects and all that stuff, one of the things that came up for me was how temporary everything is. all of it. life too, but all of it. people, feelings, snowstorms, seasons. everything. It all just keeps happening, and going.

and all the ways in which I have felt temporary for a long time. I certainly thought marriage was forever but no. other ways too though. I watch my kids and am achingly aware all the time of how temporary it all is. Every hug, every laugh, every yell and eye roll. Every secret they keep. All of it. The things I will not know about, maybe ever. The dinners I make. The laundry. the laundry. It is too much with me, this feeling of soon-to-lose. Maybe soon-to-change is better. Is it grief that I’m feeling, before its time? Real grief is a sledgehammer, so i do hope i’m not borrowing that. What a mistake that would be.

At the end of my marriage I was definitely vacant. It started very early on, I think, when I realized how far down a priority list I was, but I was in it, I was willing, I could wait, I had faith, so much of it. So I was in it, lying in the muck but so deeply attached. It was going to change, it would. I could wait.

And then something shifted. I don’t know what it was, but I needed a break or I was going to die. I was too far into the muck I think and it was too hard to breathe. To this day, I’m not sure I was in charge at that time. I have no real memory of hitting bottom, or making such a conscious choice. But I did.

Back to the present: I feel like the awareness of it all hurts me right now. Like, I am missing what I am staring at, while trying to memorize every moment at the same time. There is a sweep of melancholy in me that is staying. What do I do of this? about this?

I don’t have the faith anymore. Its gone along with the marriage and the vacancy. Long gone, really. I’m out of the fucking mud. But how do you approach living without the tether? There needs to be something which ties me to the ground so that I don’t float off next time I round a corner. What do I tie down to?

Its an ache. *

love love,

me.

**No amount of cinnamon bears fills that. or tater tots. or even sex. i tell you from experience.
Divorce, Humanity

Right Here.

Lovelovemotherexpletive

right here.

I think I wrote about this ages ago, when my dad died. BUT that was another lifetime ago, and I just tried to go look it up and find where it was,  and reading that stuff was too hard, and too foreign. The lifetimes having slipped far away down that river.

when my dad died, I was wrecked. Not only was his heart attack in my backyard, and my now former husband was giving chest compressions that kept him alive long enough for all his kids to get there to see a living body…  but the suddenness of the loss and the incontrovertible NO, HE WILL NOT MAKE IT. . . there it was, there it all was.

I found my mind racing and racing and racing, and I couldn’t get back to where I needed to be to function as myself and as the mother and householdrunner that I needed and wanted to be. it was memory, and memory and more memory world-shift and fear and grief welling and complete detachment from the people I was sharing a house with.

and oh, the racing. the fucking racing of my mind. pinging from wall to wall. a highspeed badnews montage, looped.

Quickly after the death, I drew a hand and wrote ‘RIGHT HERE’ and I don’t know if someone suggested it to me or if the HUBSJatthetime suggested it, but I hung it on the cabinet door next to the stove. I saw it multiple times a day.  and I physically put my hand in front of my face multiple other times per day. I smelled my skin. I closed my eyes.

Here I am. Here is my skin. This is all that there is, RIGHT HERE.

the circles are small. the physical space I am is all that there is. when the quakers say ‘center down’, this is how I feel, all the energies bringing me back to the RIGHT HERE.

I kept it up there during the long and painful divorcing process. Really helped when I put out the wrong number of plates, or when all I could hear was his disapproval, even after he was gone.

Somehow the hand fell off the cabinet, or I replaced it with another missive. Its been quite a few years now.

And, this week, I noticed it moving from place to place in the kitchen, showing itself in my new time of need. In this new sadness that is so familiar.

so, i’m going to put it back up. because…

HERE I AM. HERE IS MY VERY OWN SKIN. BLESS WHAT IS RIGHT HERE.

 

Right HERE hand Unwifedmotherexpletive

Humanity

let me reassure you.

Lovelovemotherexpletive

let’s be frank, shall we?

i am not going to learn a new language during my stayathome pandemica.

i am going to read more books. many of them will contain dwarves or thwarted knights, or possibly detectives. None of them will address racial inequity or the doomed American government.

it has been noticed, that LM, in anxiety/frustration/pandemica exhaustion, will stab frozen ricotta. he does not stab people, which is what i want you to know. but ricotta? that sucka died.

i have purchased a new lawnmower, because i have saved so much money in having all my vacations cancelled. and while i hate that one night at a waterpark hotel is the equivalent of a garden tool that i will use for at least 5 years, and that one night is what ‘all my vacations’ consist of.

i’m probably not going to figure out how to cook Indian food.

my kids are going to watch too many screens, way way too many.

i’m not going to think good thoughts about men. they suck. too many of them have jobs that directly affect my life. i’m talking politicians here. they suck. across the board. it is not time to pretend that the women are just the same. what women?

there are these perfect, golden shard of light moments that keep happening. almost every day. i’m just trying to stay alive to catch them. i can’t collect them, or share them, they just melt away, but they are sustaining me.

one of my 7-year-old’s teachers is reading ‘The Magician’s Nephew’ by C.S.Lewis for the class on youtube.  I can’t get over how much I love listening to it with her. Its fulfilling my life’s purpose that at least one of my children will get my love for C.S.Lewis before adulthood.

so, golden shards, stabbing ricotta, lawnmowing in circles.

got it?

love you. hang in there.

uwmofo

Old Mower Unwifedmotherexpletive

 

 

Humanity

COVID MY ASS

Lovelovemotherexpletive

Yesterday Sucked.

I didn’t want to get out of bed. I had a headache and I wasn’t ever nice, all day. It was a little grey out, and rained in the morning. The kids watched screens for most of the day. I made muffins from a box kit. watched some Miss Fisher. Yelled about school work. Yelled at the LM, with legit disappointment in myself and in him.  Got them all outside for a hot second in the afternoon, onto the trampoline as a group. That was the only feel-good moment of an entire day.  The headache never left, was probably the inadequacy of acetaminophen against allergies.

TODAY IS A NEW DAY, again.

i guess, that one of the things learned is that they DO keep arriving, these new days. I, evidently need the reminder that the days just keep coming.  As my brain falters, and my steps stutter, there is always a new morning.

One of the things I hated most about my ex was his ability to wake up in the morning, fresh as a daisy.  No matter what had happened the night before, each morning he was FRESH AND UNSCARRED.  ( i will never discount the scarring it caused ME, mind you, to have to beg for acknowledgement all of those days…it was almost as if i was living a completely parallel experience, more evidence that i was alone in all of that, so definitely alone…) But still, it was a skill… think of how that must be, to wake up like that?! and now…

TODAY IS A NEW DAY, again.

the kids are resilient.  i know, we all keep saying that.  Resilient doesn’t mean happy or unhappy, anxious or calm, it just means Survival.  The kids are surviving, as am I.  Because we are so lucky to be together, to have the means, to have a yard, to have electricity, to have me being an educated in education person, with a ton of calmness and ability to provide all the bits and pieces to get them all through this… as I get myself through this too.

*regular things:

I did get my hearing checked, by a real ear dr., and got meds and relief and hearing. SO YAY. now i can hear all the yelling.

I’m cooking an awful lot, which is necessary, obviously, but LM is magically helpful. and, truth? i’m not bad at it.

i’ve got an entire zombie-fighting arsenal of resources at my disposal, and they are all inside my body, heart, brain … isn’t that fucking astonishing?

 

LOVE TO YOU, in your zombie-fighting.

UWMOFO