Remember those mornings, few and far between since becoming a parent, the ones you used to covet…dozing in the morning? Not awake yet, but you don’t have to be awake either, half dreaming. Those are my enemy now…that’s when my brain dreams stuff I don’t want to dream, stuff I can normally push to the back of my brain and ignore, because honestly why waste time on stories like that, trying to answer the whys…there’s no fucking point now in knowing the whys. Even my counselor said it would be helpful for me, though, since it makes it even more difficult to traverse my own healing with none of the questions answered. But if you realize, again, that there is only one person you have to deal with for the rest of your life, maybe what other people think doesn’t matter…of course, that’s not true. Which sucks. So the morning. It kicked my ass. But I got up anyway. The cable guy was coming to fix something. I had to be up and showered. Probably a damn good thing, because I’m not sure what I would’ve done if he hadn’t been coming.
I slept badly. Which also sucks. Damn cats. Damn brain, mopey piece of shit. Damn life…damn job. OK, but my students decided Friday was National Hug Day (it wasn’t) and about 30 of them hugged me. I think it was a conspiracy. My counselor was trying to talk me out of a label someone else gave me, of being negative, and she finished by telling me those kids wouldn’t be hugging me if I were at core a negative thinker…kids don’t like that. She’s right…it wasn’t me. I may be cynical, but I’m not inherently negative. Depressed? Damn straight. That’s fixable. I hope.
We’re still working on my stress reaction. I do all the right things (exercise, meditation, get outside, see people, write about it, try and manage whatever the fuck is causing it)…I’m missing the stress relief that comes from being in a good relationship, but the goal is to be self-sufficient, to cope with high stress without being reliant on someone else for how you feel. I don’t trust anyone else right now anyway and probably won’t for a while, so I should probably become even more independent than I already am? Except I was told I was too independent. I don’t know where to draw the line…independent as fuck on certain things, vulnerable and willing to get help on others? Confusing. Wish I could just go back to sleep…quiet sleep, no stupid dreams that wake me up sad and confused.
Meditation talks about the intellectual vs the emotional…the intellectual tries to fix what’s causing the emotion, ties it down and tries to get a confession out of it. In meditation, I am just supposed to rest in the emotion. I do. I do that all the time with the sad. I sit right there in the sticky marshmallow sad fluff and let it try to suffocate me. I just cry until the crying stops and the sad is still there, it comes in waves, sometimes so big they almost drown you, but always like a puddle of sad that you’re standing in, every fucking day, rarely do I get out of the puddle. Sticky mud grabbing my feet and keeping me cold. That’s sad. That’s depression. I can hold it off, stand in a mostly dry spot, for a few hours if I’m drawing or sewing…actually, that can be problematic. I sewed today and for the first hour, cried. Then I got the alpha waves. I get there faster at the gym with a good book. The physical drain helps more than the art drain. I need a treadmill with a sewing machine…
I did Quilting Impossible today: dark navy blue thread on dark navy blue background, right eyelid still twitching off and on, bad blinding light coming and going from cloudy day to sun, crying intermittently, blocking all necessary vision. Really stupid. But eventually it got me out of the stupid place. Remember how I said Sunday was going to be mean to me, fight me about getting art done? That’s why I quilted this morning…
for an hour and a half…
probably got a third of the way through the background quilting.
That bit has a lot of hair on it, fluff maybe too, which is why one of these is always on my machine…
A roll of packing tape for picking up hairs before I quilt over them, best I can. I remember going to the mountains once and forgetting that. Big mistake. Had to pick out all those hairs by hand. Pain in the ass. So the number-one use for packing tape in my house is not taping up packages…just so you know. And mostly at the moment, it’s because of this beast…
Who believes tea was put on the Earth for her consumption…
And gets mad at me if I do not allow her to sit where she likes (on the quilt that I’m currently quilting, in case you were wondering). Yup.
I kicked her off three times. She’s a stubborn beast. I bet you can imagine what she’s saying to me right now. Yes, she knows all those swear words.
So I thought I had beat Sunday, that the rest of it would be a piece of cake, because I had planned my day and managed to get myself up and out of bed and deal and actually do art-related stuff. Yeah. Stupid.
First of all, the toaster just died. I’m sure this was God telling me how he disapproves of me. If you actually believe that, please don’t tell me about it. I’m sure it was just its time to go. Deep breaths, though, because that’s more money going out in a month when it seems like I am bleeding cash. No, we cannot survive December without a toaster. Lame, eh? The electric teapot or the fridge will be next. I hope not. So I had to go out on another errand and find a new toaster. Girlchild was doing research at one of the local universities, SDSU, which if you live out here and know where I live, is west of me on the freeway. She had permission to drive, her dad had given her a map, and she was meeting people there. She was supposed to be home at 5. At 5:30, now dark, I called her dad because her phone wasn’t picking up…she’s notoriously bad about charging it. We started trying to call friends, but didn’t have the numbers for the people who were supposed to be with her (yes, we actually had to call one of her soccer coaches to get one number). Time kept going on and we were trying to decide what to do, since no one knew where she was, and she finally called, an hour late…freaking out…crying…from a Barnes and Noble in Mira Mesa (25 minutes north of here…not west…not even on the right freeway) because she had recognized it from my monthly stitching meeting. She borrowed a stranger’s phone and I told her how to get home (yes, I offered to drive up there and she said no). She walked in the door and into my arms sobbing 25 minutes later. Hard to be mad…but easy to be scared, both her and me (and her dad). So we’re revising some rules…but definitely making sure the phone charger is in the damn car is one thing. Scariest part is knowing that we will send her off to college in a year and a half and she will have to negotiate this stuff on her own. Make good friends, kid…meanwhile, we’re also having her memorize the freeway maps of San Diego County…she said the sign for Riverside is what scared her. Yup. So I grew at least 400 more white hairs tonight and my stomach is still a mess and now I’m grinding my teeth (yo, counselor…where do I put this into the stress scale?), but she’s here and safe and hopefully appropriately freaked herself out so she will pay better attention next time to phone and directions. Some things we all need to learn the hard way.
I keep telling myself that. Some things you have to learn the hard way, and apparently over and over again.
So it was a good thing that I had held true to my promise to get the damn tree…
It’s a little frazzled at the bottom, but it won’t be for long…
I started putting lights on it and it smells up the whole house in a good way.
I sat and cut out crazy-ass pieces for the Silver quilt…yes, that is the bottom of a bird wing…owl, I think. Call me crazy. You won’t be the first. Sad, scared, frustrated. It was a day. It tired me out. I’m taking it to bed. Hopefully the early wakeup call for work will scare off all the stupid dreams that betray my heart. Give it up, babe. That ain’t the way to happiness. That road is burnt out and a wasteland. There’s nothing there that will make you happy. Walk on. Once you get through all the sharp pointy rocks and the charcoal, there will be new growth. Next year when you’re putting the lights up, you’ll feel differently. You’ll be looking forward to the boychild coming home from college. It will be different. You will be different. All you have to do this year is get through it the best you can.
Kathy Nida 
Your daughter’s scare was probably a good thing. For me and probably some others, growing up felt very theoretical. I wasn’t even sure what it meant or how to prepare for it, other than getting the good grades which seemed so important to adults. There wasn’t a checklist of things like “Learn to prepare income taxes. Learn how to maintain and repair a car. Study maps. Save money for retirement.”
My “Oh, crap. This is really happening.” moment occurred when I was out with my driver’s ed instructor, a scrawny sour-faced individual who reeked of cigarettes and would speak about five words during the course of a class. I did something really dumb; happily, I can’t remember what. The bottom line was that I was used to people telling me what to do, where and how to drive, what clothes I could wear. Even though I’d been up and down the streets of that town a million times, I couldn’t have told you how they were laid out.
The instructor turned – I hadn’t known he was capable of moving his head – and actually looked at me. “You are going to be doing this by yourself,” he bit out, “You are going to be driving by yourself, with nobody to tell you what to do. You’d better think about it.” Oh, crap. He was right. Not only about driving, but about the rest of life as well.
Maybe one of the functions of a good home is to provide some space where people can stretch their wings, and a bit of a safety net in case they fall. Going through that process is a sign of success, not failure.
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