 |
| snips are from cards over the years |
Exactly 5 months until Christmas Eve, the biggest holiday of the year that periodically mocks my life. I'm currently 2 days into my 5-day crisis management plan, the crisis being that every day of my life is governed by the continual crises of other people, the management being taking back my house, dagnabit.
For the most part, I am not a materialistic person. I watched confliction pull my mom apart from her own more materialistically oriented family (the kind of quiet wealth where she knew of at least one person a generation back who had a luxuriously golden bathroom, yes, real gold), and although it's nice to have nice things and look nice and be nice people, it's also very disturbing to see how ugly some people can be behind those very nice things.
 |
| Sorry if this is hard to read. |
When I was a little girl I was told "Pretty is as pretty does", and I grew up noticing how hard people try to hide how ugly they really act when they are trying their best to be pretty people with pretty houses. It made no sense to me that my mom was her ugliest on Sundays, when she was under pressure to get four children to church. Incongruity is one of my favorite words, because I thought about it so much.
Christians being racist make me physically nauseous, thanks to my beautifully ugly grandmother cutting her own son off from her life. I cannot even imagine rejecting my own grandchildren, and would never dream of turning a child of mine away from my house, and that very much includes a step child. She is mine. I raised her, I love her, I will never not care deeply for her and her child. I try to imagine sometimes going back in time and having a discussion with my grandmother, with her at this age I am.
My own life in this house feels like insane hilarity and jocularity in a sort of cosmic joke kind of way, where whenever I even attempt to pretend I come from nice and pretty people, everything around me explodes apart into crisis after crisis until I am so beaten down that simply falling on my face as gracefully as possible for the millionth time is wearing me out badly enough that I can barely function emotionally. I have to switch everything inside of me off to make everything else around me ok, and usually everything around me is so chaotic that all I see is other people flailing through their lives. They may think they're holding it together, but what they're really doing is flailing from one crisis to the next in pretty clothes.
I have very real PTSD over the compulsion to look our best. Both my sisters had eating disorders in high school, I was a chain smoking alcoholic when I looked my prettiest (skinniest), and I know other psychological disorders very well, thanks to extended friends and family with a variety of challenges, so I recognize that my own life is about surviving other people's crises all around me in my own home. I am surviving poor coping skills, a host of displacement behaviors, all kinds of fallout originally intended to fix the happiness factor that can't possibly be maintained, and I'm the one drowning.
I'm drowning in materialism. I'm drowning in things. I'm drowning in products that promise beauty and happiness and better living. My house is so full of junk continually coming into it that I can't walk through a single part of it and not see it. I can't escape it, I can't make it stop, I can't put it anywhere that it will stay. The funniest part is that I'm the one home all day long with all this stuff.
I could be an ugly person and draw big ugly boundaries so that I have a beautiful house, or I can choose to be a pretty person and allow spillways of people I love splashing through my life and have a beautiful home. Because of the emotional traumas I saw and went through growing up, I will never make a material object worth more to me than another person's feelings. I want to be happy to see the faces of the people I love, not angry because they messed up something material.
But I really need my bedroom back. I need to stop feeling like I'm swimming through my own house. I need a safe place to hide. Maybe it's time to make a boundary.
I could go on, but I don't want to be an ugly person. Being walked in on without knocking (not talking about the child) is better than not being spoken to. Sharing space with people is better than being alone.
 |
| These are the other people I wish I could see. It's been years again. |
Like I finally said out loud for the first time in my life the other day, though- I've been cleaning up after people since I was seven years old. That's how old I was when I started folding laundry, doing dishes, cooking, cleaning the house, and helping my dad with the chores outside. Come October I will have spent 50 years of my life cleaning up after other people and their animals with no pay or reward back except that I get to live in a house I didn't pay for. My biggest challenge lately is not feeling peevish. I think about all the women all over the world over thousands of years who could probably say the same thing. There is no escape or relief, there is nothing that can ever repay us, and our only reward is seeing our people thrive because we worked so hard behind them.
It's lately come to my attention that I've been keeping up all this time with a bone chip from my thigh bone migrating around the band of tissue holding my knee together. "There is a focal full-thickness chondral defect present involving the central weightbearing portion of the lateral femoral condyle measuring 0.6 x 0.7 cm in the transverse and AP dimensions with a mild degree of underlying reactive edema-like marrow signal abnormality. A similar sized chondral body is present within the lateral compartment adjacent to the posterior aspect of the lateral femoral condyle. Intermediate grade chondromalacia is present involving the patellofemoral compartment with surface irregularity and partial-thickness fissuring."
 |
| I went out to pic clover and zucchini for BunBun and felt sorry for the maters. |
Basically, I have this one week to rearrange my life so that I will be able to heal comfortably after surgery next month. I have a handful of days to do all the things for myself ahead of time that I know other people won't have the time to do for me later. After that everything will go wildly out of control again while I'm stuck healing, and as soon as I can get around, I will be swimming through more new (and used, thanks Goodwill!) things coming into my home.
I know a few people who will find it alarming that I've started matching up all my novelty sox in desperate effort to feel more organized. Yes, it's that bad.
*sigh*
Hang on, where's my just wonderful song?
