My life’s had way too much of it lately.
I am beginning to doubt I will spontaneously recover from all this back and muscle trauma. For a while, I thought I was getting better, but then I made the mistake of sitting down on the floor while I was doing my Thursday Therapy and the things I had to do to get myself back on my feet seem to have made things worse.
So I dunno. I am doing the IV Antibiotics thing again tomorrow at 9 am and I could just walk over to Emergency afterwards.
We will see how I feel then. But right now I feel pretty bad. Even sitting here in my computer chair I have some pain.
My body seems determined to twist my spine into a pretzel and I’d really rather not.
I strongly prefer it remaining perpendicular to the ground, thank you.
Spending half an hour on the floor trying to figure out how to get up was interesting but not good for the dignity. Kind of makes you realize how lucky you were back when your body more or less worked.
It’s easy to think you should be grateful for all the problems you don’t have, but that’s a dead end. There’s just too damned many of them, and so very little of you. You couldn’t even fit them all into your head at the same time even once.
And even if you could, then what? Live the rest of your life in maximum gratitude all the time just to be sure you’re sufficient grateful for all the bad things not happening to you?
No, it only makes sense to do like we do : focus on the problems we DO have, and be grateful when they go away.
And, of course, be glad it wasn’t us when it happens to someone we know. Amen.
Today my Therapy was decent. Told Doctor Costin all about my eventful week, which was cathartic. Then we wrestled with my lack of progress on the road to recovery and how all I can do is keep talking out the pain and hope that one day it makes a big difference and I am finally able to breathe free.
Or at least get laid.
I talked about how hard it is to fight this constant paralysis I feel whenever I try to make myself do any of the things I know will make me feel better.
You know, all those millions of things I “should” be doing.
Don’t bother lining up, boys, I will never get to any of you.
In fact, just by being there waiting you insure that your task will never happen. Don’t ask me why. I don’t understand it myself. And I don’t want to be this way.
But if I so much as glance in your direction, the cold of the interstellar void descends on my battered heart like a killing frost and I have to get the hell out of there before I die that final Midnight Tundra death.
Bury me anywhere. It doesn’t matter.
Nobody will be looking for my grave anyhow,
More after the break.
The deal with babysitting
“Hey there kid! Here’s a new person – a very nice lady who will feed you and get you dressed and play with you and essentially be your mother in all ways while we go off and do things that are way more important than you will ever be to us. I mean, why else would we leave you with this stranger, right? We encourage you to love her and bond with her and learn to look up to her and in all ways be her kid. But the minute one of us gets home, you have to shut that shit down instantly because we fully expect preschool aged children to be able to turn love on and off like a light. And remember, if you can’t, we’ll get mad at you for hurting us! Oh, and lastly, remember that no matter how deeply you love and care about her, she doesn’t really love you back because to her it’s just a job like any other and the minute your parents think you are OK-ish enough on your own to not prompt anyone to call CPS, they’ll stop paying her, she’ll go away, and then she will go have kids of her own whom she’ll love instead of you. OK? Whatever. Bye!”
I know some of that is unfair and harsh but it’s honestly how I feel.
And nobody talks about this. It’s so bizarre. We just naturally assume this is all fine because otherwise we would have to face the possibility that in order to bond with our kids, we have to actually raise them ourselves.
When I started school, my babysitter Betty disappeared. This marvelous woman whom I felt much closer to than my actual mother because not only did she spend more time with me, she actually paid attention to me and did things with me, and my actual mother was always busy and distracted, and what little attention she did have to spare went to my siblings, who were much louder and more demanding baby birds than I.
And I didn’t complain because that was clearly what was expected of me. But having no more Betty in my life did not mean I got any more Mom. It was a massive loss for me and I couldn’t even talk about it with anyone without getting into trouble.
The fact that something’s normal doesn’t make it okay. The fact that a revelation has very disturbing implications that would imply that we have generations of mistakes to apologize for and that would require us to radically rethink a lot of our assumptions about raising kids does not mean that these revelations are not true.
The one saving grace is that it seems that we are naturally returning to the “one full time parent” childrearing model. Perhaps because us GenX’ers know what it was like to be the first latchkey generation and the first to grow yup with no full time parent, just parents too determined to “have it all” to worry about how little that left for the kids.
I’m sure cutting the amount of caregiving our kids get as compared to what we got at their age by well more than half won’t harm them in any way. right?
Because if it did, we might have to restrain our careerism and actually hang around the house raising our stupid children, which would be laaaame.
So it can’t be true. Right?
I will talk to you nice kids again tomorrow.