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I’d be embarrassed to tell you how long I scrolled on my phone last night.
(ok. it was like three hours).
That’s not so bad, right? We all need to check out now and then, and it had been a bumpy day.
In fact, around 3:30 p.m., in yet another attempt at barely-there-self-care, I made myself take a full stop.
I ran outside, stripped naked and howled at the sky.
Not really.
I did go upstairs and take a sensory break.
I was feeling all sorts of overwhelmed.
And so I filled my ears with wave sounds, and blacked out my vision with a weighted eye mask and sprayed my room until all I could smell was tangerines and roses, and I stilled my body.
Perfection.
The other night, I woke up from a sound sleep at 2 a.m. entirely parched, as if I’d been dreaming of the desert, or sleep-running a marathon.
I stumbled down the stairs in a stupor and drank a glass of water. And then I filled up the glass again and brought it upstairs because certainly my thirst was not fully sated.
And then the next thing I knew, I woke up again and it was 7 a.m. and a cat was staring at me.
I am certain that if I ever slept long enough, this particular cat (Maia) would begin to nibble on me like a turkey vulture on a dead opossum.
She’d just eat a toe. Or maybe an ear.
Definitely a body part that I have more than one of and I could live without.
This same cat now takes her water in a bowl that we’ve moved to the shower, because she insists on splashing the water’s surface with her right hand-paw, testing it, maybe, like a stressed father from an 80s movie trying to determine if the baby’s formula is the right temperature. And then eventually, after careful poking and quiet contemplation, she uses her hand-paw like a spoon, and scoops water into her mouth like it’s a delicate consommé.
She will do this forever if we allow it, and she also believes the cabinet in my bedroom where I store my yoga supplies is a wardrobe to Narnia. So sometimes she just stands at it and scratches, and I open it, and show her it’s just blankets and bolsters and blocks in there, and she stalks off truly disappointed, only to come back an hour or two later to see if conditions inside the cabinet have changed.
Despite all of this, she is my husband’s favorite.
At night, she crawls in bed next to him, and I think tries to convince him to take out a large life insurance policy on me.
Someday, Keith Morrison is going to be telling you about Maia. It will be at least a two-part episode, if not an entire series - “There’s Something About Maia.”
Netflix may get involved.
Please, if they interview you, tell them I was PURE Goodness and Light, and then tell them about the Dateline Binder I keep in my underwear drawer, which contains this photo from before I foster-failed and adopted Pablo* and shat all over Maia’s perfect world:
But what I want to say before we both forget, is that yesterday, when I took the sensory rest break, it was just like that one glass of water.
It was exactly what I needed. Enough.
I emerged with renewed energy, and so I started a gentle to do list:
water
order presents
order pizza
chill
survive until 8:30 p.m. and then go to bed and try again tomorrow.
But back to the list - one of those things is not like the others.
And so even this gentle to-do list was too damn much.
It’s important to say, though, that after my tangerine ocean naplette, I truly believed I was capable of ordering presents for my husband’s birthday without losing my mind.
He turns 50 this week, and he has said he doesn’t want a Big Thing, and yet there I was, hunched over my laptop, ordering balloons for an adult man, and 5 and 0 candles and a turtle cheesecake.
The balloons felt like a misstep even as I clicked “add to cart,” because I could envision myself in the very near future, sitting on the floor, trying to inflate balloons with nothing but my own life force, which seems to be sort of hovering around empty lately.
It was like I was purchasing future exhaustion, and yet he is turning 50!
I had no choice …
Right?
I knew then that things were getting out of hand, and so I stopped to order pizza for my daughter and me, because my husband was working late, and when that happens, a certain expectation creeps into my periphery.
It’s like a watermelon on a countertop - this feeling I get when I know he isn’t going to arrive home for dinner to “take the reins,” by which I mean offer an additional adult presence so that 40 seconds after we eat dinner I can retire to our bedroom for a MacGyver marathon while I stuff my face with pastel, dark chocolate, puffed quinoa, Unreal brand Pretend-&-Ms.
I’ve had this weight I carry for forever now, since our first child was born, that I can’t just do my nightly emotional shut-down without him here.
Somebody has to take care of this watermelon on the counter, and if it isn’t me, it will sit there forever, feeling abandoned. The resentment will grow, and someday the watermelon will tell its therapist:
She just left me there to rot.
So no, I don’t ever want to see That Woman again.
Except 17-year-old humans are not watermelons, and I had this epiphany recently that OF COURSE parenting one 17-year-old person has to look different than parenting a 17-year-old person and 14-year-old person simultaneously, but I haven’t figured the rest of that out just yet.
And so instead, I default to Julie from Love Boat - I want everyone to have a great cruise! **
And it’s all up to me. I am the fixer, problem-solver, party-planner, cruise director.
And so the plan was to order pizza and enjoy a Buffy marathon and knit and it would be great, this time together.
I mean, I wanted it to be. Desperately.
And yet, I had used up every last ounce of my energy.
Shit.
If we think of ourselves like cell phones - I had woken up that day with a battery charged to about 34 percent.
By 3:30 p.m., my phone was flashing a message that my battery was below 10 percent, and did I want to do something about that maybe?
And so, I charged myself - floating on my bed in a rosy haze, blocking out noise and sun and resting in trust, because the only cats in the room were the ones who adore me to the point of regularly rubbing their gooey eyeballs and fishy chins right across my face.
And now hooray - I was back to around 23 percent, and that would have been enough to order a pizza, and watch some vampires, and maybe knit a few rows of something really simple with no real need for structural integrity, like a tiny rug you would find in the home of a doting mother chipmunk.
(a square, is what I am saying. a small square.)
I had energy to maybe make a small square AFTER being fueled by the fine people of Dominos.
But I’d made a strategic error, using my 23 energy points (my daughter calls them Awake Points©™️) to try to plan an entire party.
And so even after carbs and grease and a Ginger Ale, which is my current drug of choice when my energy wanes, I just stared at Buffy and Willow and Xander and Cordy and silently judged Buffy’s mom for being so caught up in her job at the art museum that she neglected to notice that her daughter was spending every night slaying vampires in cemeteries and maybe that was why her grades were dropping, Joyce. I mean - what kind of mother lets her 17-year-old stay out all night when that daughter could be home, watching you trying to keep your eyelids open?
I think there is a bit of misdirected anger and perhaps some details I need to sort out here …
But my point is, the minute my husband walked in the door, it felt like a permission slip to clock out, and go to sleep, but instead, I picked up my phone and stared at it until my eyeballs shriveled into little red rage raisins.
What I’m realizing now, a few days later, is that I have been in survival mode for so long now, that I am not in a place where I make great decisions.
I am coping. I am holding on by a thread.
I am a poster kitten - Hang in there!
I am angry, and that anger comes out the wrong way sometimes.
(other times, it’s well-placed and righteous.)
I’m a cauldron of resentment, and instead of adding goodness to this spell I’m cooking up, I keep adding wings from pissed-off bats and eyes from exasperated newts.
This is …
This is … not great.
But I am trying to practice self-kindness and compassion here, so I will also say that this is what surviving looks like.
It’s not floating, it’s drowning.
People think drowning looks like how it does on TV - all flailing limbs and shrieking.
But in real life, drowning is often quiet. An average passerby might not even notice it happening.
I can tell you that when it’s emotional drowning, they definitely don’t.
Tomorrow is my birthday. I’ll be 47.
I’m sad.
My therapist asked me what I was going to do to celebrate and I sobbed.
I don’t want to do anything, I said.
I tried.
I tried to think of something, anything, that would make my birthday “fun,” and I landed on stepping outside and screaming until someone brought me a cupcake.
Because I don’t really do fun, right now.
I do coping, which we may mistake for fun, because cupcakes are fun, right? Shopping is fun? Heading to Vegas is fun? Drinking a sparkly, fruity rummy drink is fun?
Maybe.
But those are also all things we may turn to to comfort ourselves - sugar, shopping, gambling, alcohol …
So how do we tell the difference?
I think it comes down to the desperation before and the relief after.
If you don’t feel desperate, and then relieved, I think you just had fun.
And then there’s the coping that looks a lot like “problem-solving.”
My particular brand of this is buying new organizational supplies, often something related to “planning.”
From the outside, this looks good and responsible.
But on the inside it feels like desperation, then relief.
And I’m telling you, that right now, I am willing to pay for relief.
And so last week, following a day that left me on empty by 3:30 p.m., and trying to rest, and then trying to rally, and pushing myself and pretending, the minute I felt like I could take off the mask and collapse into a MacGyver and chocolate coma, I pulled out my phone to look at planners.
A new planner would fix this, I thought.
I mean, I really believed it in my soul.
And the thing is, the minute I pushed “add to cart,” and then checked out, I felt relief.
I let myself sleep then.
You guys, I accidentally ordered the Japanese version of the planner I thought I needed.
Now, in general, I adore Japanese paper products. I love some good, squishy TomoeRiver paper. I write mainly in Stalogy notebooks now, and I use all the Washi and Meatball Tape that I can get my hands on.
A couple of times a year, I visit the Kinokuniya bookstore and buy supplies that I use every single day like Kokuyo notebooks and stickers and new ink for my fountain pen.
Those things are JOY. Those things are FUN.
Those things are different.
I don’t feel desperate before I buy them. (And I don’t buy items in a language I can’t read simply because I am exhausted and frantic.)
I don’t feel relief after either.
I just feel happy when I use them and grateful that I can be a picky little stationery princess with a grown-up sticker book.
And so I will tell you, I don’t know exactly what tomorrow is going to look like.
But I know that I can feel it …
I am hovering around something
sort of like a humming bird
sort of like Maia testing the waters
I can feel something building and baking
It might not be ready in time for my birthday
But I can feel it
Almost ready
To Break Free
* Pablo is the goodest, sweetest boy, and his favorite person is George, who is our other cat. But Maia is very much bothered by Pablo’s one not-great habit, which is eating all the cat food in the house. We are working on this, but still Maia wants to escape to Narnia sometimes. I suspect she thinks Turkish Delight has turkey in it.
** The actress who played Julie did a lot of cocaine, apparently, which I suspect may have helped her achieve her character’s signature unending energy and perkiness. So it might be time to stop thinking of her character as a role model maybe?
Happy Birthday, and thank you for giving US a birthday present with this honest testimonial. You are beauty defined. :)
Happy birthday! Thanks for sharing all the raw feelings. It makes me and others feel less alone. ❤️