@$%&ing Snow

The snow was the icing on the cake of my decomposing sanity. It’s a little hard to remain sane when your creative and energetic seven year old has trouble falling asleep one night, outlasts your consciousness, decides to do an art project, can’t read, and ends up decorating your bathroom with puffy fabric paint. Of course, it would be easier if you weren’t just the tail end of a divorce, and in the middle of the breakup with your boyfriend. Then it fucking snows. It’s April for God’s sake! What the?

I used to have the perfect life. I thought, anyway, that it would be perfect if my husband wasn’t in it at all. Small thing. Turns out that the process of getting from there to here did not erase him as if he was a pencil sketch in the background of my life. It just made him into a dark smudge, and those do not go away.

Then comes this guy, all full of music, and love, and light. How do you not just go right for that? Maybe it’s like in Poltergeist: “Don’t go into the light.” How did I think I could do that and not have major and adverse consequences? For a bright gal, I’m pretty stupid sometimes. And I’m still just trying to figure out what went wrong. It’s like I got flattened by a truck and then it backed up. Except that nobody’s showing up with an ambulance, and I gotta get up off the pavement and go make sure everyone eats some protein with dinner and wears a coat (cuz it’s snowing in fucking April for God’s sake!).

I’m bleeding, and it’s not anyone’s problem but my own. No husband, no boyfriend, no father, no sister, no brother at the moment. My mom tries, but it took ten years of therapy to come to terms with her, and she’s still stretching pretty hard and lovingly just to come to terms with me. My friends are the greatest. Not a day has gone by that someone’s not been there for me when I needed them. They’re all so gentle with me, like I may break. Or maybe I think that just because I wish I could. I want to break. I want to stop functioning, just for awhile, just to recharge my battery. I’m so tired. I just want to lay down in front of the fire and just stop and just heal, and just get back to being me, the me who wasn’t always tired.

And my lovely friends still believe in my strength, even though the evidence of its’ failure is right before their eyes. There are things that even I can’t do. It’s a brick wall. I recognize it because I’ve hit lots of them before. People talk about being on the edge. There’s no edge, just brick walls. You hit them and you stop and you’re stuck. Going over the edge would be hugely better than just being stuck with your nose up to a brick wall.

Falling, freedom, suspended in air, suspended in everyone else’s life, yet alive, aware, healing with time stopped around me. That would be tits. Or if I could continue to hold my own feelings in suspended animation so that I could keep on getting on with the huge mountain of business at hand, and then deal with them later, when things were a little easier. Well, later turns out to be now, and now is not a hell of a lot easier than earlier. And I wonder when, and, shit, if, it’s ever going to be easier.

Not that I look back because the back way was totally impossible. Just one long year after another staring at the same brick wall. Hearing my kids growing up around me, yet unable to really see anything but that goddamned wall. So, I guess I am making progress. This is not easy, it’s amazingly, mind-blowingly, painfully difficult. But it’s a hell of a lot better than impossible.
But this fucking snow has put me right back to the edge of impossible, and I feel like I have to come all that way all over again. And my girls, I just want to see them happy, see them whole and feeling normal and comfortable and safe. I want them to be happy people. I just want to love them into happiness while everything crumbles around us, just cocoon them in sweet denial and make everything o.k. Speaking of impossible. And I’m just so tired.

Every day I feel like I can’t push on this big rock any more (that’s what I got in trade for my brick wall, the rock), but every day I do any way. And, miraculously, it’s actually going somewhere. I don’t really know where, but I imagine the wind blowing through my hair as I blow by that brick wall into the unknown. And that’s great, except it’s not happening fast enough to produce any wind. I’m impatient. I don’t know how to not try to move forward, to just go with it. It feels like I have to make so many things happen.

So, today, I’m taking a mental health day. It’s not the first and for sure it ain’t gonna be the last, but I think I’m taking less of them now, except this last couple in a row. You know, the black smudge, the bright light winking out of my life, all the bits of shit I have to deal with, and then, then, shit, this goddamned snow.