Unconnected

These are snippets I wrote on my phone and in my Filofax this year. Hurried, sometimes awful scribbles. Here they are in no particular order and with no reason as to why I wrote any of them or what any of them mean.

Part 1:

What are some of the things I want to say but don’t: The thing I most often want to say to people is ‘get your shit together’. Others are ‘you are not the first person this happened to but I get that it’s your only experience’, ‘ask for help, goddammit’, ‘stop being so utterly selfish’, ‘I hope this comes back to bite you in the ass’ and ‘I’m too old for your bullshit’. I say nothing because it’s not my place and they are probably thinking that exact thing about me...

Altogether separate:

I fear something is happening here. And I have no control over it. I feel like I am staring through a glass plate window but all I can see outside is absolute darkness. Not the green grass or the pool or the people on the lawn chairs I know for a fact are right there. It’s unsettling, this feeling. It feels irreversible, like morning will not appear to bring those things back into their rightful view. 

Another aside:

I’m always always ALWAYS the bad cop. From poking his fingers into sockets to making sure meals consist of more than white bread. From insisting on clean teeth before a bedtime to marshaling screen time. And it doesn’t matter if we begin on a good note. If we both re-affirm that we must have a good attitude and smile and try and use our words to solve our problems. At the end of the day it has all dissolved, that good will and intention, in the face of me being the Fun Police. 

More tangent:

I feel like I have all this awful anger inside me. An anger that doesn’t know it’s own strength. But equally an anger that will never see the light of day. And an anger borne of bad choices, lack of time, an innate selfishness that I have to be the centre of everyone’s universe. It lives in a duck blue box and is held together with a ribbon and is so very pretty it can never be opened. 

Tangent-O:

I’m happiest with:

A good podcast in my ears

A good book in my hands

A bar of Toblerone by my side

Feet in the sand

Idli - podi on my plate

Kadhi - chawal on the plate next to it

In WhatsApp land with my friends and family

My sketchbook of indecipherable doodles 

The understanding that life is weird and so many things are not true choices anymore.

Random:

‘I don’t know what I want’ seems to be my real problem because in actual fact there is nothing stopping me from achieving any of the things on my random list of ‘wants’. I’m just tootling through life I suppose, hoping I get it or It falls in my lap. I’m the laziest human being I know. 

OMG, I think I need a shrink. I’ve typed some of this out from my Filofax and copied the rest from my notes. And when read back, frankly, it makes me sounds cray cray. Maybe I am. 

I’m closing out this year and hoping that 2019 will be better. Be kind. It’s the only currency that brings us even a modicum of happiness. 

The 2018 wash

It has become obvious that having one child means I have a clean house, a perfect child with perfect manners, perfection in every way, time for exercise, a job where I don’t have to worry or feel guilty about the ‘children’, all the time in the world to collect information and organise things for people who chose to have more than one child. End of sarcastic rant. 

If only I got to play the ‘if I had a nickel for every time someone said’ game! I would use ‘life must be so much easier with one kid’ as the tag line where I accumulate the moolah. Give me the mon-eh!!!! In 2018 I’d have finally hit my million bucks and been able to clone my ONEperfect child and have 10 of him around the house to fulfil all my dreams. Happy?! 

But really, 2018 was a wash in so many many ways. Ok yes I don’t have much to complain about but my emotional health was not the greatest. Lots of different streams of self doubt (which will not be magically cured by getting a job or becoming thin lol), heaps of loss and grief, angst about all the stupid people who constantly vie to find ways to remind me I have one child and hope to somehow make me regret that choice. I’ve had some brilliant moments of quiet thought, so all is not lost. 

These moments of quiet thought, deeper than normal thought, came on holidays (yes yes ironic are the points of privilege - ‘you can travel so much because you only have ONE child’) in wild places where nature lets you know how insignificant these people and all our conjured up problems are. Where looking at the wild grasslands and endless desert makes one understand the futility of mean thought, the minute-ness of life, the sheer stupidity and magic of our material existence amongst everything in the universe. For those brief moments I wanted to be in a philosophy class, for someone to explain the ‘Who am I/ what is my purpose?’ type of thoughts that flood the mind. Of course the thud to reality is near instant, far longer and harder. I am this person. These are my choices, made of free will. These are the people in my orbit. And these are the consequences I choose to live with. 

This blog was possibly my biggest failure in 2018. In real life I did ok. I swatted away some of the thoughts of doubt. I found peace with eliminating/ shape shifting relationships where people made me feel small/ user. I had grand holidays (with the ONE child) knocking things off my bucket list at a faster pace than I imagined. I still have the love of my life right here, present in my every day. I mastered some bits of technology that had eluded me. I opened my ears to some new music. I decided not to sweat the very small stuff, loosen control on the everyday - although that personality trait is built way deeper than I thought. 

This blog was ignored, violently almost, because every time I began to write it seemed to be a complaint, a misery, an angst, something neither nice nor kind. I’d back off pretty quickly as my 1.8 readers were not the right audience for my misplaced ire. So I wrote a lot of posts, and I mean A LOT, in my phone notes and a small Filofax journal of yore and I never posted them. But they got out of my head leaving space only for the beauty and the idiot people who keep calling me out for having just one kid. In 2019 I’m going to skadoosh those people too. And hopefully write something cheerier or certainly more palatable.