Tag: parenting

Humanity

July’s end

Lovelovemotherexpletive

I’ve been reading a lot. I’m waiting for the patches to dry and then I’m repainting the walls in the kitchen. I’m beginning week two of my daughter being at summer camp and I’m officially over it. My 18-year-old has been working every day and then evenings with his dad as they over there are preparing to move into a new house. lovely man bob is down with another heart thing (not open-heart surgery again so that is excellent) and i’m just done with all of it.

ALL OF IT.

i’m dreaming about escape to a waterfront cabin in far north maine, where I will spend my winters with nothing but books and a fireplace. fuck it all. let me nurse the wounds of leaving motherhood all by myself. maybe some bread, cheese, a weekly beer and a television that only works once a week. No need for a plow because I have nowhere to go.

the last time I was this fixated on escape, I was married with young children and had no company. that, I still understand. this time around? I don’t really understand it as much. I mean, I have a life, friends, man, job, and a great ability to find all the shimmer and joy that there is.

Now? it is loss, so much change of an internal, self-identity sort that I cannot process it all. My middle E, 18, was singing and playing the guitar on my sofa and singing, still in his lifeguard uniform, and I shoved him out when he was done because I was about to sob in his face. I’ve spent a lot of time pretending I’m fine. It’s fine. It’s fine.

I’ve started writing for myself again, journaling if you will, but what I keep circling back to is the need for me to reforge myself. I’ve been burnt already and now, since I am currently in a melted pool on the porch, it should be a straightforward process?

How do I make myself into the main character?

I was a good daughter, good grandchild, decent-enough wife (though clearly, not ACTUALLY enough), and then a mom, and in all those relationships, I was in service, or that is how it feels. and so now, when I am no longer approaching things like that, no longer serving others… I become an entirely different being.

I mean, don’t I? Do I?

more to come, more to come.

-lovelove

Humanity

I do not know

Lovelovemotherexpletive

Second birthday is done now. Onto the Christmas thing.

Just made three different kinds of cookies to give as gifts. It was hours in the kitchen and I gave up on holding onto my sanity and it went right out the front door. I watched it go, that skanky bitch. She had a fucking swagger, she did.

My eyes are dry and I’m slightly sticky from all the sugar. I don’t know, man. Its a chance to say thank you to people, to show them a little generosity: of time, of thought, sometimes of money. I like it, actually, but not the wild stampede of my guilt and overwhelm as I try to fit in all the things and the planning and the grocery. Its all the steps that get me, the ways in which I am overwhelmed three weeks before the thing, the way my brain carves a groove in the ‘is this worth it’ platter holding the cheeses we’ll eat on the Eve.

My kids have Christmas with their dad the day before they have it with me. Mine is smaller this year than it ever has been and I’m just so done with all the things I think about that. Man, I need a good therapist, and I’m just so damn mad at myself that I am still falling into old patterns, ones which I’ve already tired out a few therapists with. OOOOLD news. so fucking old.

I don’t even care about them anymore, those old pieces of shit, to tell you the truth. But they come up AGAIN with the overwhelm and the fear that I’m not doing enough, that I’m not appreciated, that maybe I’m still invisible, like I was then.

so shit. i do not know. and here i am, all cookie-d out. and i look forward to giving them out tomorrow. I have to be in early, and its cozy day, so i’m just wearing a gigantic sweatshirt that almost comes to my ankles. I may not ‘rally’ and ‘be lively’. I predict a sort-of dazed experience of the day.

Love you guys. Be merry if you want to. 🙂

Cookies! So many goddamned cookies.

Humanity

A doozy. And a birthday. And heat.

Lovelovemotherexpletive

1. I was outside watering my garden and a young buck came strolling through. I called out to him as he came close, asking if he saw me, checking in to see if he was alright, thinking, I think, that I’d go get him a carrot. He was close enough that i could see the fuzz on his antlers and count the elk spots on his flank. When I called to him, he just looked at me for a minute and then moved along. No beef.w

He came through near to the chickens, and then my dog noticed him and lunged towards him and he ran off through the bushes. There was no real emergency, my dog is a member of the cowardly lion crew.

2. I turned fifty. My lovely man got me the gift of my best friend for the week, and i took all those days off. It was a real joy bomb and I’ll take it, again and again.

3. I’m wearing booty shorts, at my daughter’s painfully awful softball game because it is in the 90s and humid and if I could lie down until the fall, I would. Welcome to my booty.

4. i will write more. I got myself a little bitty keyboard that sits on my lap so i can type onto my phone. I’m using it now. I’m a tech-genius and now I can write anywhere I want to, pen or no pen.

See my cute keyboard? And my barely theres?

5. 50. It might be time to get a job that can sustain me and the kids. I’m going to have to sell the house, and the more I say it, and share it aloud, the more okay I’m going to be with it. There is time still to get along with it. But it must and will be done.

6. I’m very stubborn. Very. Very. Very. It is very hard for me to handle number 5 and I rail against it. So small and demeaning, and it activates my stubborn nature, and none of this is helpful or practical or rational. Digging in for the sake of digging in is idiotic.

7. I’m 50 now. I should grow the fuck up. And write more. I hate feeling sheepish about coming here. That’s utterly ridiculous.

Love you though. Do.

-me.

Humanity

questions… 5 am.

Lovelovemotherexpletive

Being almost 50.

  • how do i let go if i keep remembering?
  • no really, if I’m still stuck on how a landline works, how’m I supposed to get satellite signals equaling real and true sounding voices?
  • is this it then, the culmination of my life, that i work all the time and worry about the kids?
  • How do i get my fucking jade plant to thrive? i think about it way too much.
  • why are accidents so much more poignant for me now? because i feel my own mortality so much? the ways in which small things can be enormous in a life?
  • Can i work forever? when the kids are gone and i’ve moved into a tiny house with my man somewhere, can i just wake up and go to work, forever? there is always so much to be done. everywhere. all I i want to do is plant stuff.
  • do you know i have to change clothes two or three times a day just to be clean and non-contaminated, depending on what i am doing at the farm, or at the school? the car is a jumbled up closet of farmshoes, and school clothes. the back seat is unusable. yesterday i laid all the seats down to deliver eggs to a store 45 minutes away. then, i played playdough. outfit changes. Is this adulthood?
  • Want some eggs? I have a lot. Finally got rid of a bunch of roosters, and now they are much happier ladies out there. Nobody needs or wants that much cock. No question.
  • I need to go away for a week by myself. Think that will ever happen? No, me neither. And I would miss everyone so much, and I can’t afford to miss a week of work anyways. But I’m pining for it. Ever heard of Woolman Hill? (this is not an invitation for my sister or boyfriend or brother to buy something. got it? don’t piss me off.)
  • Self hair cuts? Yes? or no?
  • I think i’m done here, I’m losing my juju.
  • Love to you,
  • me.

Some of these babies have already been planted in the field now, that’s how quickly things grow these days. and they’re off!!

Humanity

three, now. three. bittersweet.

Lovelovemotherexpletive

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