Beer brings my voice back

I do understand, on an intellectual level, that drinking is not a viable alternative to a normal life, but it makes me feel so much better. Is that so wrong? This was a good day, the first good day in a while, really, and for no real reason. I'm so tired of thinking about myself and what I want, what's important, it's nice to take a break and revel in the fact that there were random Busch Lights hiding in the fridge, that my stomach is rising in that pre-nausea roller-coaster thrill way because I'm staring at the laptop screen, that I had a moment of prescience with my husband earlier that makes me feel hopeful about the future. That maybe I'm not an aberration, that I can be satisfied in life, that I'm not an unfit mother and wife. It's a rush, and beer just helps.

Silence

I've got a bad case of the mean reds today. I feel words drifting away from me, feel myself becoming still and quiet. I want to be a flower, to sit harmless and innocent under the sun and rain, but I am more like a weed, unloved and unlovable, drying up and blowing away.

My So-Called Life

I have a mental picture of myself, as I'm sure we all do. I think I know who I am, what's important to me, which way my internal compass is pointing. I think I'm a good person, that I think about others, that I know right from wrong and pretty reliably do the right thing. I'm starting to wonder, though, if my mental self-portrait is as inaccurate as the physical one - I'm always surprised when I look in a mirror and see my sagging post-baby body instead of the pretty young thing I somehow still feel like.

I moved to this city 11 years ago, and for ages it felt really foreign to me. Everything is different from what used to be home - the pace is different, the accent is different, the people are different, the climate is different. For several years, I lived with the assumption that I'd work myself back home eventually, but then I married a man with children who live here and the roots began to grow. After I had children of my own and stopped working full time, I began meeting wonderful people, mostly women, who were thoughtful and kind and funny and supportive and I gradually found myself enmeshed in a real community for the first time in my adult life. I can't describe the deep feeling of happiness it has given me to be a part of this group without sounding trite or hyperbolic.

Now I'm afraid that I have lost the love and trust of one of my closest friends in this tribe of mothers, someone who has been such a part of my life that my memories of my own children are tied up with her face. I have been talking to her in my head, trying to explain, trying to find the words to excuse myself, but everything ends up sounding like just that - excuses. I find myself engaged in an orgy of misplaced apology, begging forgiveness from cut-off strangers at intersections and bumped-into shoppers at grocery stores with an excess of fervor that must take them aback. I'm just full of remorse and regret. The good intentions I thought were a foundation aren't holding up to scrutiny - they turn out to be empty air and count for nothing.

Hey, Jealousy

Every once in a while, I toy with the idea of titling each post with a song title, but then I remember that I know nothing about music and never really have, so that would probably lead to even more protracted silences than usual. I do love the song Hey, Jealousy by the Gin Blossoms, though. It was popular during my brief foray into popular music during college, and it still reminds me of that time whenever I hear it.

Lately, I've found myself consumed with jealousy, and it really is a consuming and pointless emotion. Not relationship jealousy, but ugly middle-aged jealousy of youth. I see pretty teenagers in pretty summer dresses, thin and glowing, chattering like mindless birds, and I feel my eyes turn green. Of course I'd like to be thin, and not need makeup to remove the night-of-the-living-dead undereye circles, and wear mere suggestions of clothes without looking ridiculous, but what churns my stomach is the blank-slateness of their existence. I remember being that age myself and can't quite figure out the path that took me from there to here. I really missed the point of that whole Thoreau thing about living deliberately until it was far too late, and most of my choices had been made for me by chance or impulse or the path of least resistance. Is this the appeal of religion, the idea that you might get some celestial do-over? I want to be a different person, I want to have a different life, but the mirror is very clear on this subject - I'm calcified into who and what and where I am.

I'm so domestic

Every once in a blue moon, usually when the house has just crossed into the qualifying-for-federal-disaster-relief territory, I get a short-lived but strong impulse to act domesticated. This morning, I showered before my husband even left for work, then got all four of my monkeys dressed and out the door before 9am. To go grocery shopping, as I am a hero. They were so well-behaved that a kind woman commented at the checkout on their loveliness. I took big boy to the doctor to get an official asthma diagnosis, came home and made lunch, then put the twins down and cleaned for 1.5 hours straight. Which is probably 1.25 hours more than I've put in total in the past 2 months. It's still not CLEAN, exactly, but you can walk through every downstairs room and could actually eat at our dining room table. Oh, which reminds me, I also started dinner. AND, most miraculous of all, I'm in a calm peaceful happy mood (knock on wood) after all of that. If only being Barbara Billingsley was fun on a day-by-day basis and not just every once in a while.

I have a blog?

Oh, right. Hmm. Things have been a little off-kilter around here lately, nothing I can/should/will write much about, just the all-too-ordinary trials and tribulations of a boringly average wife and mother. I started my new job and it's very interesting, but my heart's not in it, or much of anything lately. The kids are done with school, the pool is open, my mother is away visiting my sister. My husband's ex is being the poster child for bad parenting and there's nothing I can do except watch with my chest hurting. My family is lovely, my friends are lovely, my life is just what I wanted. I'm sure this flatness will pass, and I'll be back here to dazzle you all with my wit and wisdom again.