Having some trail mix (then): Okay. Deep breath. Here we are. The time has come. The long awaited moment. Time for the serving of trail mix that I’ve been planning since last week. I get to have some trail mix! Carefully measure out three tablespoons. Scoop carefully to make sure it’s an even distribution of the different items bc if it’s too heavy on the raisins the calorie/sugar content will be higher than the label says, too many nuts = fat content higher, etc., and we have to stay on track here. Level tablespoons, don’t be a piggy now, you fat fuck. Make that scant tablespoons, to be on the safe side. Scrape some off the top. There. Ok. Here’s one serving. Now, I will begin with the boring raisins and peanuts as like a penance before getting to the coveted cashews and chocolate chunks. This is a process. This is the moment. This is all we get, right here. Slowly, one peanut at a time, to really draw out this experience, because even the boring bits are a decadent treat, and it’s exactly this many hours before we may eat again. Ok, now we have arrived at the good part. Soon we will get to eat a cashew. Here is the cashew. Savor it. Ew, you’re so disgusting for savoring it. What the fuck is wrong with you. Piggy. The serving is gone now. You’re still hungry?! After trail mix??! Why are you so fucking fat. Kill yourself. Better get the last crumbs because this is all you get. Ew, what kind of fatty licks the crumbs?! If they could see you now! Despicable! Ok, same time tomorrow? Shall we make this a daily habit? Shall we make 11AM 3Tbsp of trail mix a rule which, if broken, makes your whole day ruined and you an irredeemable failure? We shall!, whether you like it or not!. Now, go walk it off, fatty.
Having some trail mix (now): hungry. food time? food time. hmm. what’s this? ooh, trail mix. that’ll do. dump in bowl. looks like a lot. probably won’t finish. mm, cashews and chocolate chunks. take those first. yum. i wonder why they’re called ‘cashews’. funny. hm, looks like all the good bits are gone. now it’s just peanuts and raisins, boring. oh well, getting full anyway. Oh wait I had to go do that other thing i forgot about i’ll just leave this bowl here on the counter maybe i’ll
you’re sunk in the sofa beside your husband at night, bathrobes on, snacks out, fully vegetating, kids finally asleep, and you’re both transfixed, positively slack-jawed watching this whole stolen lego saga on youtube (fr though, are you guys seeing this?!), & it gets to the part where they’re out in friggen utah and the mormon mafia are on their tails, pulling them over repeatedly for literally no reason, just being bullies, going off about imaginary heroin & “not coming to a complete stop” & etc. etc., & sheesh, seeing all of this, your honest, immediate reaction that comes spouting up from your withered millennial heart and out your agèd mouth is “Why are they being so mean to them?! They’re just a bunch of 30-year-old kids!”
(& I remember when i thought 25 was full blown adult)
to a great marriage, if you want one stupid little blogger’s unsolicited advice, and if I may be so bold as to claim to have figured it out (the secret, I mean), after nine years married — which, despite nine being a relatively small number, I am actually quite confident (indeed, more confident than I am about most things in life) that I may — is: and I’m quite sure of this:
Dumb luck.
You have to get lucky. I’m talking stupid lucky. Absolutely idiotic-level lucky.
Because look at me. I’m a really terrible person. Every time I find myself in an irl social situation, I’m reminded of it: of how terrible I am, how difficult to get along with; of how unbearable, how agonizing is my company. I’m insufferable.
And that’s just in casual social settings. Don’t even get me started on living with me. My college roommates — I scared two of them right out of the room (they quietly requested to be relocated within weeks of getting stuck with me), and two others gradually became my sworn enemies, eventually openly hating me. And not even because of some specific disagreement over any particular thing. It was just me. I am just that annoying to be around.
This is not an exaggeration. I’m the kind of person you want to punch just because of the aura they give off, but you can’t ever quite find an excuse to do so, and in fact you inevitably find yourself mirroring my painfully awkward politeness and forcing chuckles at my uncomfortable, weakly sarcastic attempts to appear comfortable, until you’re so fucking uncomfortable yourself you just want to fucking snap.
Believe me, I am aware of this, and I hate it as much as you do — probably more tbh, because at least you get to request a room change! You get to walk away. If I knew how to not be like this, best believe I’d not. My presence is a curse, and to interpersonal connection I am anathema. That’s why I have this blog — to try and connect and communicate with people minus the crippling obstacle that is my horrible human form. It’s also why I never managed to have a romantic relationship last more than six months, for the first twenty-six years of my life, despite numerous attempts.
Now, imagine, if you can, an individual who’s not only able to tolerate such an absolute disease of a person, but to get close to them, emotionally, despite the horrors.
And more than just that, but to be able to actually crack the thick hard shell of agonizing awkwardness that imprisons the horrible girl, and, for as long as he remains around her, to alleviate for her the burden of being so horrible — to allow her to actually relax and have fun and breathe and feel semi-human. Could such a person even exist? He’d have to have a really rare gift, as rare imo as actual supernatural powers, like legitimate ESP or something, if not rarer.
Now, what are the odds that this one-in-a-billion individual with this superhuman power exists, and exists not only in the same time period as the horrible girl — being born, in fact, portentously, on the same exact calendar date as she, just four years earlier — but also in the same country? Nay, within a hundred, or even fifty, miles of her?
And that, on top of that, he also happens to be, among other things: loyal, kind, funny, smart, and attractive?
And — and this one is the least likely of all — that after being around the horrible girl he actually likes her and wants to marry her? And then, to stay married to her?
What are the freaking odds?
Just dumb luck. That’s all it is.
It actually kind of pisses me off, how dumb my luck was and is. How many people more deserving of a good relationship will never be as stupidly lucky. I wish that everyone who longs to find love could find their very own version of my husband. Unfortunately for them, they will not. Because he’s one in a billion, and I got the only one — stupid, horrible me.
I’m a nightmare of a person. If anyone were to ask me the secret to a happy, healthy marriage, I would simply shrug and point at him, my husband. Oh don’t get me wrong, I don’t just sit there and let him carry me through this marriage; I try, I do try to be a good wife, a wife worthy of him — but my best is, imo, not very good. He picks up my slack without ever a complaint (without ever even admitting, or seeming to realize, that he’s out of my league). He is the glue that holds us together, that holds my life together. He takes care of me completely. For some reason. If anyone ever deserved to have been doomed to a life of loneliness, it is I.
Dumb luck.
“No Mith,” you may be saying, “it’s not just luck! Don’t make it sound easy! The secret to a great marriage is [hard work] [self-sacrifice] [prayer] [apologizing first] [never going to bed mad at each other] [insert whatever you believe the secret to be]” — but I can assure you, plenty of people out there bust their butts and pray and make sacrifices and do all the things, and still their partner abuses them or cheats on them or leaves them. The right person won’t do that (or, I dunno, maybe they will, if that’s been your experience, but it sure hasn’t been mine, and personally I wouldn’t think of abuse/infidelity/separation as symptomatic of a “great” marriage, which is what this post is supposed to be about). And to find the right person — especially if you’re a difficult person yourself, like I am — you just have to get stupid lucky.
Plenty of people out there deserve a happy ending and never get one. Why me? I literally have no idea. It doesn’t make sense. I suspect God has big plans for my children, and really wanted them born.
Or maybe, dumb luck.
Anyway, happy nine-year anniversary this week to my husband.
Radio ‘round these here parts typically sucks, this being one of those small Southern towns, heavy on the bro country and Prot pop (ugh); but every now & then it comes through. Internally, the radio has also not been great lately, due to recent events aggravating the ol’ AVPD, cranking up the volume on my symptoms, the paranoia heightening like spiny gray urchins of static, ballooning, blurring out even the good channels, the important channels. An objectively horrible person, tense, scattered, sleepless, this morning rushing out the door already late for an appointment I’d forgotten about, now speeding along sans caffeine or makeup, jabbing the radio buttons, seeking something, anything, to do the job of caffeine & makeup for me – when what should I hear but, of all songs, “Let’s Go” by Trick Daddy, a song they never play anymore, much less in this town, a song that I haven’t heard in many years – a song which bears the honor of being my official “coming out as a rap lover” song 20+ years ago, the one that I came out of hiding for back in high school, having pretended for so many years that I was too cool for that shit, turning up my nose at it, pretending to exclusively like the obscure, “cool”, “edgy”, “punk rock” stuff that the cool, edgy, punk rock kids would approve of, until one day I heard this one & knew that i could not, would not hide a minute longer. Windows down, volume up, sunshine, the cool spring wind in my scraggly unwashed hair! It’s ok after all! When I tell you it hit like a hefty dose of the best drug, and all those spiny edges melted, momentarily illumined inside, all fresh & soft. I know as a Catholic I’m not supposed to like this shit, but man, when I tell you it felt so healing, it felt like the Voice of God right beside me, gently whispering:
nos·taul·sea /nəˈstôlzēə/ (n) the synchronous sensation of queasiness and homesickness, of fondness and sorrow and disgust, that one feels upon returning to their place of origin/the location in which they spent their formative years
I was back in [name of town redacted] today.
The way it all comes back to you, just flying rudely in your face, lurking around every turn waiting to attack: the cringe and the horror, hitting like a punch to the gut and leaving you breathless. (Ugh, that really did happen.) I hate it here.
But also, lurking around the very same turns, the fond memories of innocent times. The sweetness and the sadness because this place is different now, and the place where I grew up will never exist again. A ghost town even in six lanes of traffic. The ache of grief for something irrevocably lost.
The way it all comes back to you, the smell of mom’s minivan on a hot day and those blue cushions in the kids’ section of the public library that’s since relocated. the obnoxious tune of that one radio jingle you haven’t heard in decades. Realizing how old you are and how relentless is the passage of time.
An abandoned overgrown lot where there used to be kmart – the smells of Little Caesars and hiding in the cheap clothing racks, small.
The way it all comes back to you.
How immediate the past is, always, after all. It’s just time, just days and nights are all that separate us from the past, isn’t it, which sounds obvious but doesn’t always feel that way – sometimes it feels like there’s a locked door or at least some kind of barrier, but it’s just days, nights, and days. You can go somewhere else, but you can’t escape it.
The inevitability of the place.
Like looking too hard in a mirror.
I love it here, honestly. It’s objectively the best place in the world. I can’t stomach it. The nostalgia. I never want to come here again. Get me as far away as possible. How could I ever want to live anywhere else?
When I die, tell them to bury me here: to return me to what I’m made of, dust to dust. It only makes sense. The inevitability. The nausea. It never could have been any other way.
the funnest part, by far, was creating new Sims: choosing their name, appearance, outfits, personality, voice, strengths & weaknesses, basic relationships, & etc. I’d spend so much time on this, on figuring out who my Sim was. It was pure molten fun, almost too much fun. I get a little ghost of a thrill even remembering the Create A Sim screen and its little elevator music.
Designing and building the Sim’s home — that part was exciting, initially, but it got boring quickly. All that constructing, shopping, installing, color-coordinating, making sure things were in the correct places: it got kind of tedious. I’d often rush through it, towards the end.
And then, the game itself: actually playing. Doing life. Events, occurrences, interactions, incidents. Eh; that was cool and all, but significantly less thrilling than making a new Sim. I’d often get bored with the action and just go back to the drawing board to start over with a new character. Designing the Sims themselves, that was the most engaging, and for me the most time-consuming part – the one part that I was a perfectionist about.
Sometimes, I get the sense I’m doing this same exact thing with my actual life. Spending all my time trying to figure out the character, rather than just playing the game.
Look at this blog. All this navel-gazey business of “figuring out who I am.” Questions that keep me up at night. My thoughts. “About Me.” Look at me, I am this way, I am that way. Personality typology. Daily prompts. What is going on in my brain. I am this, I am not that, I hate this, I love that, and why? Even writing this post, right now, I’m doing the thing. I’m still in Create A Sim, at 36.
Maybe this is a bad way to be? Maybe this is the wrong way to play the game? I wonder if after I’m dead I’ll look back on my earthly life and go “damn!, I spent all that time figuring out the character, and so little time being her. Did I even play? Where was the action? What was the plot?”
But on the other hand, ya know, maybe, this is how I be this character. Our society loves doers, but thinkers are just as valid, aren’t we? Maybe this is an okay way to exist. I do love a good character-driven story; plot is, after all, overrated. And I mean, The Sims was a game with neither plot nor rules, after all. I think that’s why my brain liked it.
was not any of the animals, but: the unsolicited kindness of other women: the solo one who, while walking the opposite direction, saw my three-year-old trip and fall, and stopped to make sure he was okay before proceeding on; the field trip chaperone who, in the cramped and stuffy indoor desert exhibit, noticed me trying to get through with a stroller and barked at her pack of unruly adolescent boys (who either didn’t see me or didn’t care) to move over, there’s a baby right there, and allowed me to pass; the older one in the ladies’ room who saw me trying to manage my four- and six-year-olds while also trying to change baby’s diaper, and asked me if there were anything I needed; the college lacrosse player in line for the restroom at sheetz, where we stopped on the way home, who noticed me holding my three-year-old and was the only one of her large group of teammates who allowed me to cut in front of her in line; and all the other moms pushing strollers and holding tiny hands who smiled at me in quiet acknowledgement as we crossed paths: I see all of you, God sees all of you, & I hope that He rewards you greatly. Because women who, for no reason at all other than plain & simple kindness, go out of their way to help other women as we try to navigate this hectic world: you really are, imo, some of His best ideas.
in a certain mood or at a certain hour & if a certain type of song is playing, this little wisp of an idea alights upon my skin like a feather, tickling, and it occurs to me, I start to think: maybe i should try & write That One Book again… the one that i’ve written start-to-finish approx 4x in the last fifteen years, started rewriting at least 25-30x, re-drafted endlessly in my head, endlessly, and furiously, depressedly thrown in the trash approx 500 times… the one that i once printed off a physical copy of and literally buried in the backyard and planted a melon-sized rock on top of its grave, to try & put it to rest once & for all… the one that i keep swearing off, that keeps haunting me (it’s never gonna leave me, is it?) (wtf is it about that one?!), but man, i tell you what, literary agents everywhere can count themselves lucky, LUCKY!!, that i quite literally ain’t got time nor the thickness of skin to deal with all of that right now, who can relate?
At first I felt a lot of guilt. What if it was something I did?, what was wrong with my body?, etc. I got over that in time; I no longer feel like it was my fault. It just happens. 1 in 4 pregnancies, in fact.
But now, five years and eight months on, I still have guilt, just of a different kind. Two different kinds, really:
I’m no longer sad about it on the day-to-day. So I feel guilty for not feeling sadder. And also, I feel guilty for feeling sad at all: for grieving the baby that I lost – because if that baby had survived, I wouldn’t have my living daughter.
Three long, agonizing months after the miscarriage, three months of grieving inconsolably and waiting impatiently, I finally became pregnant again, this time with a baby that stuck. That “rainbow baby” went on to be born in June: three months after what would have been the lost baby’s due date.
March 14, 2021 was their due date, in fact (pi day baby). So if they’d lived, they’d be turning five right about now. – But as it is, I have my bean, my beautiful, funny, mischievous 4.5 year old bean who will turn five in June, and I wouldn’t trade her for anything.
There’s no possible universe in which they both exist.
So like how do I do this? I can’t be sad that pi died, because that implies wishing that pi had lived, which implies wishing that bean had never existed. Which I do not and could never.
But – do those implications really necessarily follow? It seems so to me, logically… but maybe not all things are subject to this kind of logic. Things can be both bad and good. It can be hard to see things that way, especially tragedies; but this whole miscarriage conundrum really shows me how true it is: our little labels of “good” and “bad,” which we are so quick to slap onto our perceptions of events and occurrences – the stories we make up to make sense of things – are really so inadequate, so futile. Maybe in the grand scheme they’re actually even kinda meaningless.
The tragedy of a thing doesn’t make the joy that it made space for any less joyful. Nor does the joy really alleviate the sadness. They don’t cancel each other out. They coexist. Both are true at once. It’s weird. Human brains aren’t really capable of seeing things from God’s perspective, but situations like this kind of give us a hint, I think. In the mind of God, there are none of our human limitations. Both can exist there, both siblings side by side, equally, eternally alive.
was my four-year-old’s straight-faced, matter-of-fact reply this afternoon when I begged her to explain to me why, why, why she was still whining and angry and tantruming even after all of her requests had been fulfilled (a bandaid for a tiny boo-boo that wasn’t even bleeding, quesadillas made with cheddar only (because last time i had the audacity to make them with a mixture of cheddar and mozzarella, in an attempt to use up the giant bag of mozzarella shreds in our cheese drawer) (she ate 1/4 of these btw), and her cup of water brought to her on the couch. Why was she still mad? Sometimes, when they’re in this mood and I’m overstimulated, I’ll start loudly singing “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” to lighten the mood a bit (it really helps, you should try it!), but today, I just pleaded with her to explain to me why. As an ILI in socionics I have creative Te which means I want actions to serve some purpose — why?, what for?, what is this accomplishing??! I can’t deal with pointlessness — and also vulnerable Fe, which means I struggle with loud and histrionic displays of emotion. “Why are you mad?!” is probably a dumb question to ask a whining four-year-old. I’m aware of this. But sometimes it slips out. Being an ILI mom of littles has its unique challenges.
But now that I’ve been informed that, apparently, my four-year-old simply has this intentional, regularly-scheduled Scream Time written into her little daily agenda, I guess I can understand it a little better. “There always has to be a part of the day where I’m screaming.” I guess it serves a purpose for her. She’s a clever bean; maybe she’s on to something. Maybe we should all schedule some daily scream time. Maybe that’d be good for us. As someone with vulnerable Fe, though, I think I’ll stick to just rambling on this stupid little blog. This right here is my scream time.
, but I do have one perhaps-slightly-redeeming quirk, when it comes to housekeeping.
Thing is, I’m neither tidy nor organized nor much of a clean freak, and left to my own devices I’ll neglect a mess until it can be neglected no more. I don’t have adhd (that i know of) but i do have a plethora of “doom boxes” incl. doom baskets, doom corners, doom kitchen drawers, & doom piles in every room. The whole basement? One big doom box. Tbh I’m just lazy. What am I even doing, I sometimes wonder.
Also I suck at cooking. This one is partly nature, partly nurture. I never really cared about cooking, and my family of origin never really ate meals together or had much in the way of family tradition around food; then in my early teens I developed an ED that stuck around, so food and I just never really got along. Zero joy in that relationship. Can’t cook, can’t clean, but let me tell you how I got this ring: my husband, he has weird taste. What do I do well? I’m such a scatterbrain my preschooler and toddler are constantly reminding me of things I forgot to do. Why did I come into this room? What am I doing here?
My one thing, the one small streak of neat-freak-ism, my little pet organizational neurosis, is: the dishwasher.
The dishwasher has got to be loaded a certain way. Specifically, the silverware. The silverware container has separate compartments. You must put spoons in one, butter knives in two, forks in three, baby utensils in four, and so on. Why would you not do this. Why would anyone not do this. I don’t understand people who just shove any utensil in any compartment haphazardly, jumbling them all up. It makes more work for you later.
If I open the dishwasher in the morning to unload it, and I see that someone else finished loading it last night, and the spoons and forks and knives are all jumbled up, I am hit with a palpable wave of horror and disgust. “Eugh!”, I’ll inadvertently exclaim, recoiling, my nose wrinkling as if something smells. The sheer overwhelm. Hands wiggling at my sides like they don’t know what to do. Because where do you even begin?! When the spoons are all in one hole, you can just grab a fistful of spoons and go. Then a fistful of forks. If they’re all mixed together, what do you do?! I have to sort them into the correct compartments before taking them out of the dishwasher. Is it just me?
But I’d never harass my sweet husband about loading the utensils the “correct” way, because that’d be anal and naggy, and I’m honestly just grateful to have a husband who helps with the dishes. Because really, the silverware is such a miniscule matter. Twenty seconds saved, maybe less. Really, if I think about it, this is not even really a “redeeming quirk” at all. So like what am I doing here.
