undone: part one - the strain

I’m home from work, taking a mental health day today. I’ve never done that before, taken a day off for the sake of sanity. When I was younger, I’d call-out to go to a concert or go to a party or whatever other thing I thought I HAD to do, so I didn't miss out on something. Or, I’d call in sick because I’d done one of those things and needed recovery time. The only class I ever had to repeat was the newspaper design class I got a “D” in after deciding, in the larger scope of my life, sucking down a puddle of liquid at a Dead show with my friends was more meaningful than studying for a final in a class I was probably going to repeat anyway. I was still tripping when I showed up for the 8 a.m. test, made a pretty pattern with the multiple-choice bubbles and left 10 minutes later.

Today is truly a mental health day. And it’s not about playing hookie to make poor choices or because of poor choices already made. Or maybe it is? It’s about feeling the fabric of me wear and thin and fray until I am completely thread-bare, without a sewing kit or patches. The fright of feeling those worn spots quietly begin to rip and knowing what happens when thin fabric starts tearing. And, of having no recourse beyond this keyboard and the raking sobs that shake me as I type. I slept for more than 10 hours last night, and the weight of everything undone has me staring back to the unmade bed ready to retreat.

It looks warm outside and I need fresh air, I need a good hike. I need to return the wifi card I bought last week, but don’t need. I need to return training wheels Josie doesn’t need. I need to take my car to the DEQ and the DMV (YEA! I have my own car that I’m not sharing with Scott. Yea for my friend Karin, who GAVE me this car. I love my friends. I love Karin!) I need to pay bills and deal with the collection notices pilling up. Who has the “no means to pay" file now? I need to do two weeks of laundry, but first I need to go to the bank or Safeway to get a roll of quarters for the machines. I need to clean yesterday’s lunch from the table and floor where Josie and Amelia were sitting. I need to make a cup of tea and break this habit of not nourishing myself. I need to grocery shop before the kids get back so I can do it quickly. I need to be quiet, let myself get quiet, and meditate. I need to do all of this, all at once, all the time, and every now and then the mundane stuff that keeps life going becomes so big and so present that I freeze. Can’t do any of it.

I need to cry, hard and long, to what Prema called "the zero feeling." And crawl back into my bed.

I need a week of mental health days to preserve my sanity. To deal with the weeks of life left undone.

The holidays were brutal. Is that what this is about? This week – post holidays – was total meltdown. Some things, I counted on, even forgave myself for doing, even before doing them. I knew I’d spend more time with Scott in awkward situations than I should. Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Christmas … I knew I’d say it was just for the kids and that it wouldn’t be, and it wasn’t. What I didn’t count on was how shitty it would feel to be at parties without him when I wanted to go alone. Places we have always been, together, where everything is the same and everything is different. Place after place after place, full of situations call that for recalibration.

And, I didn’t count on the strain of constant doing. Two people quite at work, shifting my schedule. Scott finally gets a job, another change in my routine. Now my rhythm – built on separating me as a mom from me as a single working woman – is shattered, just when I had it down. Start the work week Thursday evening –life without kids – sleep in Friday and Saturday, catch up on sleep and bills and writing and taking care of me until Sunday night or Monday morning. Shift to Mommy-mode where, sure, it’s taxing to be on ALL of the time, but doable. Then two people quite and Scott starts working and my separate worlds collide, leaving me with no time, NONE, for me. My work week shifts from four days to five days so Tuesdays become this marathon of parenting for thirteen hours, then leaving my girls with a sitter at 8 p.m. so I can go to work. Thursday nights they go to Scott’s, but I can’t punch the clock and be done, because, guess what, I’ll work until Midnight and they will be back before 8 a.m. No sleeping in. No bill paying time. No time to work on the freelance stories that are supposed to be paying the rent. What’s left is a little slice of daylight on Saturday before work, and every other Sunday evening – and those have been devoured by the holidays. It goes on like this for weeks.

Then. MELTDOWN.

Saturday night, I stay at work long after the room is empty, writing until almost morning. Take the 6:30 a.m. bus home, the lone passenger from downtown to way up on Sandy, and watch the earliest dawn streak dark blue across the sky. It’s going to be a clear New Years Eve day. I sleep the lucid, fitful sleep that comes with laying down at the wrong time, never sure if I’m asleep and dreaming, or awake and having really bizarre thoughts. Dreams of running, and falling, and sex with Scott. A flash dream, awake? About what I think should be a book. But, it’s not my book, it’s Jess’s, something from an email conversation we had in the middle of the night, both of us still up and pounding at the keyboard. It goes on like this until I rise, shower and ride the same bus with the same driver back to the paper around Noon. It’s a different driver when I head home for the second time on New Year’s Eve. Now the first streaks of dusk are showing dark against the cloudy sky and I take three steps in the door, drop my bag and my coat on the floor and my body into the unmade bed. I sleep hard and dreamless for hours.

It’s close to 9 pm., when I wake. My stomach is turning and I have work to do and I could turn over and sleep the rest of the night. My plan was a quiet New Years at home, alone by choice, seeking solace in myself. Instead I drag myself back to the shower, dress and walk five blocks up the hill, past the big houses on Alameda ridge, to have diner with my friends. They are five blocks away and I’ve seen them twice in the three months since I moved here, to be nearer to my friends. I should go, I coax. Most of the night I’m too aware that my family is not there. My kids aren’t running around with theirs. A lot of their lives, a lot of mine and Scott’s, have been lived in this house. I see Amelia sitting-up frog style on the rug, five-months-old; taking wobbly steps, 10-months-old; Jesse feeding her cranberry juice from a toy spoon long before she’s tried anything but breast milk, all of us laughing that this will be the first of many things Jesse will turn Amelia on to. Likely, the most innocuous. Too much of my life has been lived here for me to be here right now. At two-minutes after midnight I borrow their car and drive myself home in the cold.