I can’t help but laugh after reading my last entry, 6 years after writing it…
Six years of being married, having a kid, undergoing shit I never would have dreamed of as I wrote that.
Never mind the marriage. After having my daughter I literally didn’t sleep for 2 weeks. At all. I was pretty much a real-life zombie and I hallucinated regularly. My husband (yes the same fiancée I spoke of before) had to take some extra time off work to be around and make sure I ate. I also wasn’t working out (doctors tend to frown on getting right back into training once a living person has been extricated from your body); now, this might seem a bit irritating to the average person, but those workouts had become my way of dealing with daily anxiety (and there was lots of it, being married to a person whose personality traits just so happened to trigger my anxiety – thanks God…) Anyway, I got so stir crazy that I went and did the exact WRONG workout for my stitched up vagina and hurt myself. Fuck I’ll never forget that pain.
But look at me, getting stuck in time 4 years ago. Now, my daughter is four, my husband just started working out of town, and I’ve become responsible for everything at home. I was at about 80% responsible while he sat irritatingly on EI for over a year or so, as I wanted to graciously leave at least 20% to the partner with the Y chromosome. Doing chores made me grumpy…
So here I am, queen of my castle, cleaning out gutters, mowing the lawn, raising the kid, cleaning the house, trying to feed a picky eater, go to work three days a week…the pot helps.
I once read something in a Buddhist book that I liked, shortly before finding the Lord, about meditating on each dish that you wash, finding peace in the repetitive motions. For someone like me it’s much easier to meditate on yet another dish with a visit to Puff the Magic Dragon’s house before getting on with it.
And, while I’m grateful that I no longer crave alcohol like I did years before, or smoke cigarettes or take goddamned antidepressants (thanks God, legit), I’m terrified of churchy people to find out I still quite enjoy a good hoot nearly every day.
Becoming aware of that shame has really caused me to find some righteous indignation towards myself for allowing myself to feel that way. Why the hell should I be afraid of people learning what I still “struggle” with, when God has set me free from tons of other stuff that I should be celebrating?! I mean, when I still smoked tobacco and drank every day, I was surely more proud of Jesus and I was, I think, looking at Him more than I was looking at myself. So what changed?
I believe it has much to do with becoming a mom. I supersaturated my mind with parenting books and became obsessed with “not screwing up my child”, whatever that means.
She’s going through quite the defiant stage, hitting and such when I say no to her – although when other people are around she’s usually the most well-behaved child in the room. Sometimes I think it will last forever, and I’ll somehow be cheated out of the “golden years” (6-10 years old?) and go right from preschool to teenager instead.
That reminds me of a conversation I had with my daughter when she was three: I said to her once “Zoe, don’t ever become a teenager”. Her response, that I will be sure to remember on her 13th birthday, was “I’m not going to be a teenager, mom. I’m going to be a doctor.”
As I was saying about what it means to “screw up” a child, I more than once chided myself for allowing her to love Tim Burton movies at the same time I teach her to love Jesus. Huh? I love Tim Burton movies! In fact, we came home today from church and watched Edward Scissorhands together.
Lately I’ve been longing so bad for a community. I’ve had wonderful family-like experiences at smaller churches where everyone was quite aware of all my habits – which were much more numerous back then – but those communities collapsed for some reason or another. For instance, the church I got saved at and thought I’d be at forever ended up being overcome with gossip and slander and actually ended up VOTING OUT the pastor. What the fuck? Everyone split up, despite my bestie and I literally standing outside the church building and protesting this crap. I suppose that’s a bit like a young child surviving a divorce of her parents.
Which probably messed me up. That’s one thing I don’t think I could do to Zoe. Teach her to give up like that. Despite the yelling matches, the arguments, the personality clashes, I honestly don’t think I could look at myself in the mirror if I just gave up. Not that I haven’t faced that temptation before…
But that’s enough rambling on for today.
My Sleepytime Tea awaits.
Down In The Depths 