Cumulative Essay

June 7th 2008

I’ve been depressed all day.  I woke up depressed.  Morgan Man left yesterday for Portland, and I didn’t get done all I thought I would.   He left the grass uncut, the dishwasher unemptied; trivial provocations.

I went to Noel and Marina’s and no-one was there, so I went back home and parked in front of the TV until almost 1:30 a.m.   Two stories dealt back to back with themes of heavy losses, and the 11th hour demonstration of love.  It was a hard night.  I ate too much sugar.

Cloudy windy and cold today.  I did some weeding in the onion bed but didn’t finish.  L&I refused my bill because I entered a wrong code, so I could be out to the tune of $600.00. I’m just letting down, like I do every time he leaves.  Letting down.  Like, it’s okay to cry, now, because I’m alone, but I don’t seem to be able to really cry.  So the grief must be drying off, which is a good thing. 

Anxiety over work and money, where I will live, and how long the former husband will be amicable.  Feeling very lonely and cold, realizing there is no-one I really feel very at home with.  Wondering if this is all the future; distressed, because I’m trying so hard.  I’m trying so hard. This is why a woman needs family, and community.

Is it this culture only?  Our expectation level is so high! This is America, and we deserve, after all, everything. We are so entitled, that when something isn’t “perfect,” we reject it and dysfunction sets in.  And all the efforts to help, all the efforts to live up to, to show that life is really worth living if you can just get your head out of your own diamond studded diaper, so we try and try and try, and then these spouses, these kids, these grandchildren, these whatever, they abandon, or worse, they betray.  I am exhausted.  I don’t want to hear any more stories.

The concept of community is lost, the reason for family is forgotten.  We need these things to survive, because life is really hard.  It’s dangerous, and there are predators, and there are accidents.  You can’t do it all alone.  That is a soap bubble. So all around me family is just splitting and rupturing and people are falling away like shredded paperwork.  Are we so devitalized that every thing is a reason to fall away?  Jesus. 

I stayed. I stayed and stayed until my marriage just literally dissolved under my feet and evaporated. I stayed because it was the right thing to do, not because I wanted to.  God knows.  I don’t want it back.  But I am embittered, because I did try so hard, and it got me, evidently, so little. It got me the right to go out and earn a living just as my peers are retiring. 

So Morgan Man and I cannot afford to be anything but amicable, and that is the blessing of poverty.  Poverty does not allow for spite.  And as long as he is amicable, I will stay here.  As long as I don’t have to listen to him badmouthing my son, my parents, my friends, my church, my car, my whatever, I’ll stay here.  Even when he does, I can go outside.  I can go to work.  I can go to someone’s house.  I can drive away.  I don’t have to listen.

I can’t listen anymore to badmouthing, its just too draining.  I can’t sit by eating hamburger while people call their abuse “humor” and just heap it on the ones they think so deserve it.  People don’t seem to realize what they have lost when they behave like that.  It’s like post traumatic stress disorder or something.  Cumulative loss that cannot be fathomed, only re-enacted.  We become the nightmare.

It is depressing.  I guess it is appropriate to feel this way.