The Stars Have Lost Their Mother

The best thing about depression is the blanket it throws over your life.  No time to get your house in order, or make any difficult decisions, or work through complex problems, when it’s all you can do to get one foot in front of the other and you’ve got no energy. 

I resent my current mental health.  I almost said I resent my health, but once you see few friends die of horrible, painful illnesses, you won’t do that again.  But I do resent my relative mental health.  I think I didn’t refill my synthroid for three weeks, not because I was worried about the fifty bucks (which I was), but because I just wanted to pull the blanket over my head and hit the snooze button on my life for a few more weeks. 

It’s easier, sometimes, to cope if you don’t really get happy and sad just feels normal.  Today is a great example.  Jules has been doing really well at school.  He’s had some ups and downs, but overall he’s exceeded all my expectations.  I’ve finally allowed myself to get sort of hopeful that we could lose the paraprofessional and maybe, maybe some day he’d just be a kid in school.  Well we started scaling her back.  This morning, before the para arrived, he was screaming and pretending to hit people and one of the parents got so freaked that she took her kid home instead of dropping him off. 

Fuck me, I’m just devastated.  His long-suffering, lovely, teacher is doing everything in her power to calm me down in reassuring voicemails and texts (I had the temerity to think Decca had a right to a life and was in the pool with her when this all went down.) 

She’s a mess.  I feel like I have two only children.  The experience of mothering her is so incredibly different from mothering Jules I truly feel like I’ve never done this before.  She’s taken to calling her father by his first name, and she’s obsessed with losing me.  Every animal is “sad” because it’s lost it’s mother.  Inanimate objects are not immune.  We were getting out of the car a few nights ago.  It was moonless and black and when she looked up there were thousands of stars in view.  “Dey sad. . . dey los dey mama”  and looked right in my eyes.  I don’t know if pushing my forehead into her neck and throatily chanting “I love you, I love you, I love you, and you are never going to lose me” over and over helped any.

Off to have the dreaded conference with Jule's teacher.

Open Letter

An open letter to the repressed prig on the elliptical trainer next to mine:

The act of bobbing my head with my eyes half closed and a stupid smile on my face while listening to the Pogues on my headphones was not intended to fuck your day up in any way.  Apparently, you did not get the memo. The impulse to glare at me when you thought I couldn’t see you and then look out the window really fast when I turned my head comes from the same place in your psyche that says even if you just lie there like a corpse while he fucks you, you’re still doing him a favor.  So I’m sorry if all the joy has been sapped from you life and the only achievement you have to cling to is that you weigh the same as when you graduated high school, but maybe if you listened to more infectious music and didn’t mind so much when others enjoyed themselves in your proximity, you wouldn’t scowl so much.  Which, by the way, is giving you brow lines, you might want to look into botox. 

I hate how truly parochial this town is.  The physical beauty, Gary’s good job, the low cost of living, good schools for Noam, is all great, but there is this awful sense of “this is how things are done, honey, straighten up and get in line, or else”  I don’t see the diversity that Baltimore or Chicago had.  I would say I was romanticizing it, but I just got back and I miss Cath and Sue and PJ and Earl and Kerim every day.  And Angell I miss you more, because you were here and we had each other. 

 And to the shrew on the elliptical trainer, a physics class might also be in order.  Light travels in straight lines until it meets an object, that’s why I can fucking see you in the window.  

The Abandonment of Facebook

I had a rule.  It was a simple rule.  I would join facebook only if I kept my "friends" list to people who were actually my friends, and just happened to live in other cities.  As a part time resident of Baltimore, who's closest friends are there and in Charlotte, it seemed to make sense.  Time zone issues, life issues, we just couldn't seem to get it together between texting and voicemail.  It didn't.  I'm friends with my aunt, and my kids speech language pathologist, his old teachers.  When someone wants to "friend" you (lord, do I long for the days when that was a noun) it's rude to demure.  So fuck it, I can be as pointless and profane as I like and not send my dear sweet auntie to her grave a second sooner than necessary.  And this has spellcheck.  I don't know why I don't just keep a journal, somehow this seems to have more of a cathartic kick to it and fills some not-so-latent exhibitionism.  And these days, I'm all about the catharsis, apparently I'm not enough of an exhibitionist to put my name to it.  So welcome, gentle reader, I hope this can provide some source of edification or amusement to you.