Hope & Change

I am supposed to be finishing an assignment that is due in an hour. But somehow it just doesn’t seem important. Not when my 7 year old is throwing up on the bus en route to school, and I have awakened to another day of relentless unfinishable work, fighting kids, messy house, and a dog that keeps running away. I know that where I am in my life is a result of choices I made. Choosing to have children, choosing to divorce my husband, choosing to move to a town well removed from any semblance of a support network and scratch a life out of nothing. When I was a teenager I believed with all of my heart that I had been created for greatness. For adventure and excitement and world changing events. I believed it so much I asked god to send me to the deepest darkest place he could possibly find so I could triumph and serve him. He gave me children. And a crappy husband. God, what I would have given for a cannibalistic tribe in the jungles of Africa. Or an isolated outpost in the arctic frozen reaches of Siberia, cut off from warmth and love and civilization and cute jeans. But no. I had kids. A bunch. All of the isolation of Siberia, the cannibalism of Africa, the dark and deep abyss of bottomless struggle that motherhood is, I guess god did what I asked. I remember so clearly the burning passion in my soul to climb mountains and touch things all over the world that were as vital pieces of our past as I knew I was vital for our future as human beings. Now the burning is only in my lungs as my expediently aging body reminds me that I only ever made it 2/3 of the way up Mt. Adams, and really the most vital things that I have touched the world over would have to be the counters of a million McDonalds restaurants. Maybe I am bitter. Most days I feel like I am not. Until some struggling stay at home mom talks about how stressful her life is. …  Then it hits. If I am staying at home, it’s because I can’t get hired because the only skills I have to offer involve cooking spaghetti in bulk and cleaning up puke. If I am staying at home it means that the bills are piling up behind me like cars on 1-5 northbound to Tacoma at 4:46 in the afternoon. It means that now I can look forward to sweating bullets when the rent comes due and I am $800 short. It means that all of the latent anger at the derelict father of my children will come welling up in hot, furious tears when I see the ever shrinking child support check show up. It must be hard for him. Living on his own, supporting himself. I can only imagine how difficult that must be. Not that I have any personal experience having to take care of only myself. Yeah, maybe I am a little bit bitter. Why do we live this cycle over and over? Why do I get up every day, just to get up the next day and the next and never see any hope for anything better? I am raising four girls that I can see inevitably making the same mistakes I did and perpetuating the cycle. How do I stop it? How? I am 14 years in and it only seems to get harder. So I look at where we have come from. How things have changed. What we have accomplished. I am almost done with my degree. It’s only been 12 years of college. I was a firefighter and an EMT. Now I am fighting tooth and nail to reclaim those. More hours of classes, applications, begging and pleading just to be a volunteer. The kids are mostly healthy and well adjusted. Sort of. Halle is athletic and smart. She is ungrateful and whiny, but overall not a terrible child. MacKenzie is super smart, and just as sassy. Some times I actually think she has started to grow out of the pencil stabbing, teacher-hitting phase of absolute ridiculousness. But then again, maybe not. Natalee is a moody little thing, but intelligent and creative. She will make it. Aspen, well, she’s just Aspen. If I do nothing else I pray that I instill in my girls a sense of the absolute becoming who they are meant to be before they even consider procreating. Nothing makes me more sick than to imagine them having kids as young as I did. To see me as a grandmother before I am done mothering. I cannot imagine a worse fate. I suppose that sounds horrible and evil to many of the people I know – especially the people in my past. But it really terrifies me. If I could go back in time and project forward and see myself here I think I would have killed myself. The only reason I am alive now is the fact that there must be the smallest sliver of hope that keeps me going, thinking that maybe someday I won’t be living life this way. From day to day, just trying to survive. Knowing that offing myself is ultimately selfish. But why do I feel so selfish just trying to stay alive? I feel like a waste of oxygen. A waste of space. All I could contribute to the globe was four more consumers. Who will in turn produce more. We are a virus, humans. Eventually we will procreate ourselves to extinction. How proud I am to have done my part. But back up a minute. Putting this existence back on the micro scale that my life really is and I can almost tolerate it. I have a lukewarm cup of coffee (standby while I nuke it), my puke baby is rolling on the couch with an overweight hound dog watching the Lion King. Halle has a rugby practice tonight, from which I can ground her if she steps out of line. And I wouldn’t hesitate. We might not save any lives, solve world hunger or cure cancer today, but maybe we will find someone to make smile. I guess it all comes down to who I am as a person. Not on a global scale and why the human race exists at all, but me. Why am I here? And what am I supposed to do? Raising children is an obvious, and although I am reluctant, I will continue to do it. Badly, yes. Unhappily? Sometimes. But as well as I know how, absolutely. But in addition to, or in spite of, motherhood, who am I? Is there any chance that I will have an effect on the world other than through how screwed up (or not) my kids are? When I was younger people would say that being a mother was the highest calling – you can change the world with the kids you raise. It always made me so mad. It’s like saying my life isn’t worth anything but maybe you can help someone cooler do something good. I guess I am selfish. I want to be the worldchanger. I want to be the one that makes a difference, that gets remembered. If my kids are too, so much cooler – but that’s up to them, not me. And they have to decide how they want to change the world. It’s not my job to brainwash them toward a theology of world dominance and self-aggrandizing righteousness. If I could undo all of the programming they have already been subjected to, along with all of the propaganda that still poisons my mind, I would in a heart beat. I don’t want or need to be miss USA, or be able to bench press my buff fire buddies with one arm. I don’t care if I am the Sexiest Woman Alive. I do want to be loved. I want to be held. I think what hurts more than anything is the love that I see my kids missing. I wish I had it to give to them but I feel completely depleted of love and affection. It requires a concerted effort that is humiliating and exausting to reach out and give my girls the attention that the need, and deserve. This is where the failing as a mother kills me. I feel like I have nothing to give them but the disappointment and rejection that I have been fed. They are little sponges, seeking love and affection and I am a rigid, disaffected mother figure, withholding from them in my own weakness and stupidity. Why do I withhold? I want to give love. I want nothing more than to wrap my arms around someone and smother them with love. But not my kids. Why? Do I blame them, on some ridiculous level for the fact that I don’t have anywhere to get it myself? As if it was their fault for any reason that I am alone and perpetually rejected myself. Hurt people hurt people, right? How the hell can that be true between parents and children. Can it be that I am as abusive as the asshole who throws his kids through walls, but in a more silent and deadly fashion? Do I starve my children emotionally because I am emotionally starved? I feel like I resent the fact that they need love and nurturing when there is none to be had for me. How dare I? How selfish and small can a person be? I am the worst person I know. I should be stoned. How do I learn to give them love? God it’s hard. It feels just like when I was 13 and I had to be nice to Emily. Such a humiliating and maddening process. I must be the most unnatural mother in the world. Now that I have psycho analyzed my wretched soul, can I also prescribe myself anti-psychotic drugs?

On PMS

There comes a time, in every woman’s monthly cycle, when all things that were at one time sane and balanced are suddenly out of proportion and irrational. Or maybe it’s just me. Either way, I find myself looking in the mirror and wondering how it is that I can go so quickly from being on top of the world and sure of who I am, to a sniveling pile of insecure crabbiness. I know that the thoughts I think are not rational, and that in a day or two all will be well, and I will be responding to life appropriately, but right now: holy wicked tantrums batman! Even the simplest remark enters my hormone infused brain and twists itself into a stabbing insult. “Are you feeling ok?” From an innocent bystander becomes “You look like absolute hell – who beat you with an ugly stick and slathered 20 lbs of cellulite on your thighs?” in my head. Every little less than perfect event at home becomes a cataclysm of massive proportions: “What do you mean the dog just got into the garbage and it’s no big deal? Don’t you know we all could have gotten salmonella and DIED!!!! IDIOT!!” My poor kids are transformed from innocent, ignorant blunderers to intentional deviants that I can’t seem to punish harshly enough. For now I recommend to them that they hide out of sight. But make sure the garbage is picked up first. I hate how out of control I feel. I look at someone and fantasize about breaking their jaw with my fist simply because they won’t stop talking. Someone who certainly doesn’t deserve to be punched, regardless of how boring or stupid they are. Something I am not a good judge of at this point in time. Over the years I have learned that my best MO during this time is to avoid encounters, keep my mouth shut, and turn off my brain as much as possible. Tune out of conversations to prevent uber-snotty responses, hoping I place a non-committal nod or uh-huh semi-appropriately. As it stands I am staring at my geography weather and climate homework and taking it very personally. Luckily the 1 hour and 40 minute class allows me ample opportunity to watch the professor prattle on while I am off in nowhere land completely missing the reasons for convergent lifting and the difference between a cold and an occluded front. His plaid shirt and navy slacks are especially offensive to me today. For no apparent reason. And I am really angry that he needs me to reiterate to him the principal characteristics of monsoonal circulation in essay format. Doesn’t he already know this crap? So my day goes on, resisting the urge to shoot spit-wads at the skeleton women discussing their careers as personal trainers across the room, or draw angry epithets on the white board for my teacher to find later. I have learned, more so in the times that I am not a hormonal Frankenstein, that the ache in my soul right now is impossible for any well-meaning boy to soothe. He will inevitably screw up and his misconstrued means of helping me out of my emotional slump will be the undoing of any kind of relationship. To the poor bastard that wants to fix me: don’t. No, that’s not where it’s at, my remedy. It’s in the great funky song that a friend from far away dedicates to me when I say help. It’s in the giggling of my kids behind my back that reminds me that just because today feels like a total parental *^&* up, they will survive and I might have a chance to redeem myself over the next 28 days. My cure for the lady blues is in turning the harshly rejected advice of the idiot man who thought he could help into a challenge to disprove. Don’t tell me I lack style because I am insecure today. Not only do you risk your very life, but you become solely responsible for either an ill-afforded shopping spree or a complete rebellion to grooming aesthetic altogether. (You wanna see frumpy? I will show you frumpy. In your face.) So what if I wore my holiest sweats to class? Yes I am fat today, and yes this is a candy bar in my hand. Bite me. I bite back. I will drink all of this chocolate milk and claim it as the cure for my anemia. I dare you to argue with me. And if you say anything about my hair I will shave it off. Then see how you like it. Good lord. If I survive this month it will be a miracle. And it’s a dang good thing that kids are made out of rubber.