Borrowing Dreams

I’ve been living a lot of life on auto-pilot lately.

I don’t know what’s so scary about having feelings, but apparently I don’t want a damn thing to do with them. I get concerned when I notice I’m doing things without thinking about them. I made a whole pot of coffee just now completely unfocused on everything around me. I rinsed the pot, ground the beans, poured the water - filter, grounds, shut the lid, button, hisssss, gurgle - then found myself sitting down still thinking about coffee. ‘Well it’s already going, isn’t that convenient?’ she thinks to herself, knowing full well that she was the one responsible for it, because who else is going to do it, the two-year-old?

It’s messy, living in my brain right now. So many things are disconnected because I don’t want to feel the connections. It’s easy to say “I have depression. I suffer greatly from depression. (And anxiety, oh my fuck, the anxiety and the constantly second-guessing everything that comes out of your brain, when you finally manage to squeeze something out of that wound-up space.)” It’s harder to say “I don’t let myself feel things because I’m afraid of my own power.”

I’m afraid of how deeply I love.  Not just my children, my partner (when I have one or allow myself to feel for him the way he deserves to be felt for), my family, my close friends. Everyone I meet I care about. I care about people I’ve never met. Every small success they have makes me feel good. But I don’t care about what I’m doing. I feel like I’ve invested too much in living vicariously, and I haven’t altogether found what makes me tick. I have my art, in it’s various facets. I don’t love every minute of parenting, but there are joys buried in the mundanity. 

I don’t like the way that sounds, because the words feel as though I don’t care about the rearing and raising of my kids and I always feel like I have to clarify that of course I love and cherish it, but holy shit am I ever exhausted all the time. And so much of it is repetition. And I don’t know what I can do differently to make it more fun for all of us. I feel like I’m wasting their childhood on them, and that they’ll never have anything but resentment for me based off that. It still falls under auto-piloting, and being afraid of potential. What if I set the bar too high and they have to live with the anxiety of living up to that? I don’t know. Better to come from relatively little and blow it out of the water, right?

The worst part of loving you (but not wanting you) is wanting you to know that I still love you, but not wanting to tell you because I don’t want you to be hurt by hope. Hope doesn’t live here anymore, in the nooks and crannies of our shattered relationship that we’ve swept up into an awkward pile for friends and family to look at - to let them see that we are doing as well as we can with what we have. The only hope that I have is that we can get our bills budgeted, sorted, and paid down so that I can enter my new phase tabula rasa. Without the marionette strings of creditors, tugging your attention this way and that, fraying what few nerves I’ve finally managed to coax off high alert. I hope that I can stick to my guns and move on without you. That all the careful knots I’ve tied to keep my feelings safely away from you will hold tight until I can break free.  I hope that it feels like I’m free, and not like I’ve made a terrible mistake.

I`m glad I don`t love you anymore I`m gladder still that you don`t seem to love me either. Of course we said we`d never stop loving each other, because that`s a thing that people say to each other, to keep the darkness at bay.  I know that the sooner I get myself together, and get us out the door to a new life, the better off we all will be

I would move mountains But they move much too slowly I’ll go from here, Focus on things that are growing.

My heart is shrinking, compressing around the space you fill, Filled, Trying to make up for the dwindling flame, As it gutters in all the things said and unsaid.

--

I’ve been feeling really overwhelmed lately. I’m procrastinating on important stuff, and deadlines are coming up, and it’s getting to the point where I’m going to screw myself out of something I want because I don’t actually want to do the legwork. Plus I know I’ll be taking away from doing what I really want, just in the name of trying to get a little ahead. 

Anyhow. The thing is school. It’s been six years since I left college, since I was too sick with my early pregnancy to finish even my first semester (in my second year). I could have had a nice little University degree, since the school I was accepted to made the switch from accredited college to straight-up university in my second year, if I’d managed to stick it out. Or at least half of one. My son was born in May, I had plenty of time to at least finish my first semester once my hyperemesis was under control, I’m sure the professors would have been understanding, and I could have caught up and undone the damage from missing so many classes when I couldn’t even keep water down.

But I was afraid. I was afraid to be pregnant alone, I was afraid to be mostly alone in a huge city, trying to walk or bus to school from the home I was renting, and afraid to come back and not know the father of my child. I wanted to get to know him, I wanted to give him a chance, I was willing to give him any number of chances because I was afraid. I was afraid I’d become my mother, alone with a child. Alone with more than one child. I wanted so badly to be the stable home that I’d craved as a child. For a while we had it even. We’ve been struggling to maintain something that looks like a successful environment, but we’ve been barebones-ing it for almost two years. It’s been hard.

It’s been hard denying myself every little splurge, because I know that if I spend that $40 now I’m gonna really want it by the end of the month when the fridge is looking pretty empty. And knowing that my partner isn’t exercising the same restraint really irks me, because maybe we could have had more money for extra little things like going to the movies, or getting ice cream, or saving up for a trip somewhere to do something awesome together, instead of just scraping by because he’s got enough for all the little things he wants.

I’m tired of being bitter about things that I think should be common sense. I don’t know why I have to have conversations about empathy and responsibility with an adult. I’m raising toddlers, and have a teenaged sibling living with me, and I catch myself having conversations I’ve had with them, with my partner. Wtf? Why am I still correcting this behaviour in a person who is supposed to be helping me correct these behaviours in little people? Parenting fail, inlaws. Parenting fail.

My obsession with being accommodating really is beginning to wear on me. It used to be second nature to just say yes to things, and then feel beholden and grudgingly attend things that I’d not planned to. Or to flake at the last minute and find any excuse to stay home. Any excuse would do really, but since having children “Child (insert A or B here) is feeling really under the weather, I think it’s best we keep our germs to ourselves” is a real winner. Most people want you to keep your tiny germ factories to yourself and are more than happy to reschedule if possible. 

I don’t know though. It’s hard to say no to people, especially when you’d really like to see them, but really don’t want to go anywhere to do it. 

It’s been such a calm week I haven’t really had anything to say. I survived some late nights and early mornings - neither of which really bother me unless one follows the other ouroboros style.

I’m definitely allergic-as-fuck to whatever the floaty white puffy tree-sperms are, itchy eyes and non-working sinuses can attest, and I’m still overly sensitive to mosquito bites, which is really too bad, since we’re having an absolutely brutal year for them. 

But yeah. Nothing to report. 

These posts feel incredibly bipolar, but if I don’t post when things are normal, and only post when things are insane and horrifying and sad, then I’ll never remember the good spells that come with the bad ones.

Preschool graduation was adorable. That was pretty much the highlight of the week today. 

I think the main reason I felt weird about it was that I never felt old enough to be considered a parent, most of my friends were actually the young people my parents kept around to feel cool and with it, who I identified with, but they were acquaintances and most of them were five, ten years my senior (or more) and very few of them had children of their own. And then I just didn’t really feel like a parent. I’ve put in the man-hours, god knows, but when you’re spending a lot of your time once they’re in bed trying to figure out what all of that actually means, or trying to reclaim the rest of your identity that isn’t “Mommyyyyyy” it gets hard to be at peace with all of it I guess. They’re what my heart beats for, my kids. I don’t want anything more than I want them to be safe, happy, and in my arms.

Sometimes I wish I’d had a bit of a chance to figure out what being an adult was like first, but there’s time for that. My youngest was born just before I turned 24 - that means assuming I’m not poor forever I can get my travelling on in my 40s, which isn’t a terrible deal.

There's no manual for the working class. All they tell you is to chin up and get into the middle class and get safe and settled, so you can avoid all the unpleasantness when people come asking you for money you don't have.

There are no classes in high school that teach you what laws or codes you can cite that will get people off your back for another week, two weeks, a month. All you can do is hope the person calling you is having a better day than you are, and will show a little compassion that isn't tied to the bottom line that management is breathing down their neck about.

If life were more than a neverending chain of people breathing down other people’s necks, up up up all the way to the top of the tier where people with more money than god sit laughing at the ants as they toil... well, then I guess I wouldn’t be writing this.

Maybe I’d be somewhere else, in a cozy nook with a book, secure in the knowledge that everything we need is in our home or within arm's reach, and not a week or two away, whenever the money cycles back in to go back out.

Maybe I wouldn’t have to learn how to be so goddamn resourceful. I don’t want to know what groups can help me if I’m happy to spill my guts and all my personal finances and records for the last ten years with them. I want to be free. I’m tired of the system. The system has been broken for so long I think it’s spun itself into believing that it’s fine.

It’s not fine. Fine is a dirty word, remember? Fine means there’s a shitty side, a side that’s being hidden. Lots of people are happy to look the other way and let it stay hidden, but it’s not going to be able to stay that way much longer. Hoarding the majority of the world’s assets in the 0.01% is going to break everything.

Today is a day of many thoughts, trying to spill out my fingers faster than they do my eyes. 

I’m on panic attack no.3

Welcome to the working class. We never thought we’d be here, we never thought we’d stay here. The driving urge to be better than your parents is always deeply instilled into children of the working class. We always think we’ll do better because how could we possibly not, when so much has been sacrificed just to try and get us even footing with children who start with what our parents have scraped for every day. What we could lose just by missing one paycheck or two. We could be cast down from working class to just poor. Homeless. Lose our families and everything that we’ve been working for.

The ship is sinking, and I was trying to leave before it started tipping up, everything falling down the deck and tumbling into the water, smashing as it goes.

Mainstream happiness looks a lot like settling to me. I might have had a lot of things happen in my life, that maybe I wasn’t ready for (are we ever ready? There doesn’t seem to be a lot of evidence to say we are...) but I’m still not ready to settle and accept that it will never be more than what it is right now.

I wonder if I need to give more and be more to have more, surely what you put in is what you get out, but I feel like my output is always more than what I get back from the people around me. And really, that’s only one person, the one person who I want more from, who doesn’t seem to be able to change and do that. I loved you. But you’re so afraid of change.

I’m dying for a change, it could actually be killing me. Languishing in a dead relationship, feeling the jumper cables spark us together again and then being bitten by the reality that really I don’t have any more for it, and it’s starting to make me a different person. I’m walling myself up, trying to avoid feeling any more about it one way or the other, it’s clear I can’t get away cleanly from this. I shouldn’t have expected to. The bomb dropped too soon, and now all that’s left is fallout without a plan to patch up whatever is left, however we have to, together or apart.

The hardest part is that it’s not just me. If it was just me I would have just packed and left. But I can’t pack and leave when I don’t have any means. “Does he beat you? Has he hurt the children, or behaved threateningly to them? No? Then what the fuck are you doing at emergency housing? Go home silly girl, nobody actually gets to be happy, safe is as good as it gets.”

I honestly can’t even tell you what I mean when I say I want more. More. Just that nebulous something that is bigger than what we are. If you’re happy where you are then that’s good, that’s great, I’m so glad for you, but there is more to life than just scraping by. Sure I’d have loved to get there together, but it’s taken you five years (and me trying to leave twice!) to do the growing you should have done by the time we had our first child. I can’t wait another five, ten, twenty years for you to be the man I know you could be, if you’d just try.

I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine. How long have I been ‘not fine’? I don't know, but it’s easier to say I'm fine than tell the truth. When we say we're fine, we're really saying “I'm wounded, but I don't want to waste your time”.