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December 31, 2005
now it's time to say good night
God, 2005 sucked eggs, so I'm pretty glad it's over, I must say. I've been sitting here trying to think of the highlights of the past year and you know what, there were a lot of them; but highlights aren't necessarily high points, right? And how.
The best part of the last year was probably this past week. Christmas Day was what I hoped for, and I hope it was what Moo and Herself hoped for. The day after Christmas I drove to Connecticut and it took me six hours, I was tired but traffic was light and the kids were for once not harping at each other, and when I got to my sister's house my brothers and their wives and children were there and we ate a lot of really, really great food and drank some champagne, and the rest of the week it was more of the same.
Now I am back home and I am sitting here in front of my computer, which I have not done for a while, and it's almost nine o'clock at night and the year is winding down, or winding up depending on your outlook, and The Husband is asleep upstairs and Moo is at his girlfriend's house, and Herself is listening to music on iTunes. I haven't been writing a lot since September or so; I let myself get caught up in feeling pointless and hopeless, and while I'm not exactly sure how to stop doing that I hope to at least try in 2006 to be better at wanting to not do that any more.
A lot of people whose opinion I respect have spoken to me quite reasonably about what I need to do: get a divorce, let The Husband and the Spooky Girlfriend alone, get a better attitude, be happy, get another therapist, get a boyfriend. et cetera. Maybe I will do one, or all, of these things. Maybe I will do none of them. But thank you, everybody, for caring, and for seeing in me something I don't see any more. Or maybe I never saw it. Or if I did see it, maybe I never believed it. And thank you for listening to me and reading all the dreck I throw up on the screen; I'll try to be better, I really will.
I love you. Happy New Year. Happy 2006.
Posted by JudyLa at 08:44 PM | Comments (0)
December 22, 2005
fall on your knees
The sun is setting and the house is quiet except for the chime on Moo's phone that rings every couple of minutes with a new text message from his girlfriend. He is lying on the couch with his phone under the blanket she made him, which both he and Spike love because it is very soft and very warm and has a cowhide pattern on it. Moo. I get it.
The tree lights are on and Herself and I are on adjacent armchairs, dozing. Herself needs the sleep, having gotten almost none the night before. Her face is pallid and under her eyes are dark smudges. The medication she is on is making her miserable and sleepy, peevish. I tell her she will feel better in a few days, once her body is used to it and I know she does not believe me.
It has been a very hard 24 hours but right now everyone is quiet and I am warm and dozey, and watching the sun set and Moo and Jack lying on the couch, and Herself snoring a little bit under a blanket. I should be making Christmas cookies, or writing the last few cards to people I forgot about until I got cards from them this afternoon, or going to the store for lightbulbs--suddenly every time I flip a light switch a bulb blows--or starting dinner, but I can't bring myself to want to move, enough to actually do it anyway.
We will get through Christmas and it will be all right, and the day after Christmas we will go to my sister's house and immerse ourselves in the warm and reassuring bath of somebody else's normal life. I talked to my sister this morning; she has laryngitis but still manages to argue, in a rattling whisper, with my brother-in-law about whether or not she is coughing "a lot," which makes me laugh when I get off the phone. The dailiness of a normal marriage and a normal life, one that doesn't also involve daily antidepressants and antipsychotics and therapy, that's on my what-I-want-for-Christmas list--Santa, are you listening?
Posted by JudyLa at 11:30 PM | Comments (0)
December 21, 2005
in the bleak midwinter
"I never really believed in Santa Claus," says Herself to me; she is sitting on the armchair in front of the Christmas tree, feet swinging over the armrest. "I pretended I did because I thought you wanted me to."
When he was about six, Moo asked me did I believe Santa was real. I thought: Well, if he's asking he must have doubts. So I told him: Nope, Santa Claus is really Mommy and Daddy. Recently he reminded me of that conversation and said "I only asked because I wanted to know if you believed, not because I didn't! Thanks, Mom, for wrecking it for me."
Today is the shortest day of the year, the first day of winter. The leaves have finally taken off from their branches and cover my lawn in a brown carpet. The other morning when I was outside to get the paper I heard the crack and thud of a tree branch falling: the holly tree in the front yard is slowly breaking apart. I close my curtains at night against the cold although I fall asleep so fast I'd never feel the chill anyway, hurtling into unconsciousness like something or someone is waiting for me there.
On Sunday late afternoon I sat by the window and watched the tree lights as the sun went down and felt, just for an instant, the anticipation of Christmas being only a few days away. That feeling in the pit of my stomach. (Actually come to think of it, I have that feeling all the time, only now I know it's anxiety.) "I'm so excited about Christmas!" says Herself. She counts the days to me every morning and I think "Will I ever get my shopping done?"
Posted by JudyLa at 06:00 AM | Comments (0)
December 16, 2005
even so
Song
The weight of the world
is love.
Under the burden
of solitude,
under the burden
of dissatisfaction
the weight,
the weight we carry
is love.
Who can deny?
In dreams
it touches
the body,
in thought
constructs
a miracle,
in imagination
anguishes
till born
in human—
looks out of the heart
burning with purity-
for the burden of life
is love,
but we carry the weight
wearily,
and so must rest
in the arms of love
at last,
must rest in the arms
of love.
No rest
without love,
no sleep
without dreams
of love—
be mad or chill
obsessed with angels
or machines,
the final wish
is love
—cannot be bitter,
cannot deny,
cannot withhold
if denied:
the weight is too heavy
—must give
for no return
as thought
is given
in solitude
in all the excellence
of its excess.
The warm bodies
shine together
in the darkness,
the hand moves
to the center
of the flesh,
the skin trembles
in happiness
and the soul comes
joyful to the eye—
yes, yes,
that's what
I wanted,
I always wanted,
I always wanted,
to return
to the body
where I was born.
ALLEN GINSBERG
Posted by JudyLa at 06:00 AM | Comments (0)
December 15, 2005
frightful, but
Schools to the south and northwest of us are closed already in preparation for the ice storm heading up the coast, even though it isn't doing a thing outside at 5:00 a.m. except being cloudy and dark. This morning's paper is full of alarmist articles all going gee whiz it's cold and it's not even winter yet!, as if nature's breaking some kind of rule by lowering the temperature so early in the season.
When I woke up, courtesy of Spike batting my nose, my head felt like nails were being driven through it. I suppose that's the weather coming in and I hope it is not the effect of the little white pill I swallow every morning with my vitamins.
For the past week I have been taking something different from the something I was taking for the past year, that having ceased to do anything for my mood and general outlook on life. My life, anyway. I think I feel better than I did last week ... or at least I feel different. Dizzier, for one thing. Slowed down and speeded up at the same time, for another. But the main effect, which I guess is the one that's most important, is that this new drug allows me to not care so much. I still know that my life has fallen apart in some crucial way, but I can go for hours without thinking about it--and when I do think about it, it's from a distance. I know I'm sad, but I don't feel sad.
This is both a relief and a disappointment to me. My hope is that I get to a place where I can put things in perspective, where I can let go of what I need to let go of, say good-bye to what is already gone. And my fear is that when I am able to do this, I will also be at a point where I feel nothing--where "feeling" is an intellectual exercise rather than true emotion. On the other hand, it's wonderful to feel sane for a moment, rather than tiptoeing along that fine line between madness and insanity.
Posted by JudyLa at 06:00 AM | Comments (0)
December 09, 2005
oh, what a Christmas to have the blues
Libra, December 9: In over your head? That's what those swimming lessons were for. Don't panic. Breathe, relax, float. Let yourself be gently rocked by the very thing that scares you. Eventually, you'll come to your next move.
It snowed, or rather, it rained, freezingly, last night. I heard it against the window in the middle of the night, heard the wind. This morning when I got up the leaves on the pear tree--which are still hanging on for dear life to branches that are probably more than ready to have their children leave the nest at last--were frozen solid. Leaf popsicles. The paper had been delivered and lay under the car so that I had to get down on hands and knees and stretch my arm way out, and I gave up and got the broom and used the handle to poke the thing onto the driveway where it got wet but at least I could reach it. Funny paper delivery person.
The children were nestled all snug in their beds, having no school again today, and I called my boss and told him I planned to make cookies and would not be in. Spike barked at me, a trick he must have learned from Jack. I read the paper and listened to the sleet and the house was warm and suddenly it was a three-day weekend.
Yesterday when I saw W. for therapy, thanking God we did not break up and when she opened the door to her office I could have kissed her, I cried for the entire 50 minutes. At the end of our time she looked at me and the pile of sodden kleenex on the couch next to me and said carefully, "Do you think that maybe the antidepressant you are on might not be working?"
Twenty-four hours later, armed with a new prescription and a deep appreciation for the American pharmaceutical industry, I am ready to take another stab at the holiday season. It's dinner time; the kids are eating subs and I am having a glass of wine. Herself watches tv and eats upstairs and Moo watches tv and eats downstairs and text-messages his girlfriend, continuing a conversation that begins when he gets out of bed in the morning and ends when he gets back in it at night. And look, I even made cookies.
Posted by JudyLa at 11:30 PM | Comments (0)
December 08, 2005
I want to know what became of the changes we waited for love to bring
Last night during a conversation with The Husband he said in a weary voice "Can't you just not think about it for a while?"
Here is my (main?) problem: I can't stop thinking. I don't mean in the schizophrenic or manic sense; I don't have any trouble sleeping and I'm perfectly capable of paying attention to one thing at a time and there are no mysterious "voices" in my head; I mean I can't stop thinking about my fucked up life and how much I do not want to be living it, and even though it's been "long enough" in everybody's mind, and in my own, for me to be back to being sane I'm not; I'm not there yet and I don't know when I will be. Never, maybe?
I thought that this Christmas would be different from the last one in that I would be happy about it being Christmas, but apparently that's not going to be the case, and I don't know what to do about it. To be honest, I don't know what to do about anything right now. It's very strange: I get up in the morning, I get Herself to school, I go to work and I do my job, I come home and I'm a mom ... but I'm not really here. I'm just passing through on my way to somewhere else. Or to nowhere else.
The Husband said to me that I should "find happiness in the little things." Why, because all the big things suck? Thanks for the great advice, but no thanks. Happiness can just keep its hands to itself. And what's the point of trying to find it at all--it doesn't last, it isn't real, and if you manage to get something that remotely resembles it, it will turn out that it wasn't meant to be yours anyway; happiness had the wrong address or it was all just a misunderstanding, a case of mistaken identity.
This week every conversation with The Husband feels like a variation on the theme of I Don't Want You And Here's Why. This is not The Husband's fault; it's mine. Mine, because I won't stop, or can't stop, thinking about it. Thinking about my life and what I did to it--all those bad choices rolling out behind me like Marley's chains; how did it happen that I made so many of them? They hold me down so that I'm forced to consider them, hour by hour, day by day.
Posted by JudyLa at 06:00 AM | Comments (0)
December 05, 2005
from tender stem hath sprung
The first snowfall of the season, heavy and wet, lies on the branches of the trees outside, covering the leaves and making them look like cotton balls. Moo and Herself are hoping for a snow day tomorrow but I think we will only have a two-hour delay--just long enough to be an irritant and not long enough for having fun. It's beautiful outside with all the Christmas lights shining on the snow. When I let Jack out to pee just now I could smell the smoke from a neighbor's fireplace.
I am trying hard to get in some kind of a seasonal mood and once in a while if I hear the right music I get a hint of it, like nostalgia, like a faint scent in the air. But mostly, though, I'm nervous about not buying enough, or buying too much, and decorating and baking, and all the mechanics of the holiday. And about hiding from Moo and Herself how much of an effort it is to be the spirit of Christmas present. One midnight last year after the tree was up and everybody was in bed I sat eating peanut M&Ms and drinking a martini and looking at the lights. After a while I went out on the deck and threw ornaments into the dark, listening to them break. It was very satisfying. I don't expect I'll be doing that this year, though, having a firmer grasp on my emotions than I did last winter.
I haven't put up the tree yet; that comes this weekend. This will be Spike's first Christmas with us and I wonder if he'll climb the tree, like my rabbit, Harry, used to do.
But one thing that's effortless, that I'm having fun doing, is watching Moo learn how to have a girlfriend. I love his surprise that he thinks about her when they aren't together. He walks around looking faintly astonished, eyebrows raised, at the stunning development that he likes somebody and somebody likes him back.
It's Christmas and everybody's in love. Everybody else, I mean. The most wonderful time of the year.
Posted by JudyLa at 11:30 PM | Comments (0)
December 04, 2005
to face unafraid the plans that we made
In the movie The Blair Witch Project, the characters wander and wander through the woods trying to get out and the end of each day brings them back to the same place where they started walking. This morning I woke up at 4:00 and lay looking out the window at the trees, the bare branches forming a maze that I imagined crawling through, trying to get to the clear sky beyond them.
Moo has one foot through the door of adolescence and is learning how to be somebody's boyfriend. Last night he said to me apropos of nothing, "I was awake that night." I knew without him elaborating that that night was the night I found out what was the deal with The Husband and The Other One. That night, after I found the e-mail that told me what I needed to know and had known all along, really, I called The Husband on the phone and screamed at him for a while, and after I hung up by beating the phone's receiver against the bookshelves I ripped the shelves from the wall and threw the books, wailed like a banshee. Of course Moo would have been awake; how could anyone not be, how could a child sleep through something like that? Even though the door had been closed and even though the family joke has always been that Moo could sleep through Armageddon. I guess Moo could not sleep through Armageddon after all.
Yesterday afternoon when I was getting my hair cut the receptionist was talking about her husband's ex-wife. "She's a psycho," said the receptionist. The woman cutting my hair said "One of my clients was married for twenty years to her highschool sweetheart" and I thought stop, but she didn't hear me, I guess. "And then he told her he was gay. She's okay now, because what could she do. There was nothing else she could do."
"Which was worse," said Moo to me last night. "Which was worse, when you got divorced the first time, or is it worse now?"
Which is worse, the gas chamber or the electric chair? Which is worse, being lost in the woods forever and knowing you are lost, or being lost in the woods and thinking each day that you know the way out--only to find, as the sun goes down, that you are back where you started?
Posted by JudyLa at 06:00 AM | Comments (0)
December 01, 2005
crabs walk sideways and lobsters walk straight
A morning's reading. This:
DECEMBER 1: Finding love tends to be an instinctual endeavor for you, but your personal life could improve if you used a more conscious approach. Write down what you are looking for in a relationship.
and this
"... It is a choice. You can choose to distance in ways that are going to be emotionally healthy for both of you. Until you are willing to make that difficult choice, you will still experience more sadness. See him as little as possible. Do not share your daily activities with him and don't ask about his. It sounds harsh. It isn't. Please take care of your own needs and your own heart."
I suprise myself by realizing that I don't want to be anybody's girlfriend. This revelation comes to me while I am in an elevator with a date, who is kissing me. He is happier about this endeavor than I am, or at least more enthusiastic, and my mind wanders. I have to pee, and I'm tired, and I want to go home because it's late. That surprises me, too; wasn't I the one who just a few months back was moaning about how nobody wanted to kiss me? And here I am, living the dream. But I feel nothing kissing this man--who is perfectly nice and cute, even--nothing at all except that my chin is being scratched by his beard and I wish I was home in bed.
Aside from the man whose sole purpose for meeting me was the potential for fellatio, the men I have thus far encountered on match.com don't really want to date, they want a relationship. They exchange one e-mail with me and then they send me their phone number. They want mine so they can call me up and chat. They want to meet me, and now. And what do I want? I don't know. I guess I just want to hold the world at arm's length right now. So maybe I need to turn off my Open For Business sign for a while.
Apparently Moo has a girlfriend, a fact that slips out during a conversation at dinner. How about that. While we watch "House" later in the evening, we see a commercial for the movie Pride and Prejudice. "She wants to see that," says Moo, and I laugh. "You know you are going to have to see it, right?" Moo looks at me. "And then ... after you see it ... you will have to ... talk about it." That's when he screams like a girl.
Posted by JudyLa at 06:00 AM | Comments (0)