Here it is, only the 7th day in July and I’ve already grown tired of summer. I’m tired of the miserable weather, the kids being out of school, and the people wearing short-shorts who really have no business doing so. I find myself increasingly tempted to just hole up in the air-conditioned comfort of my house, anxiously awaiting Autumn’s return. On particularly hot days, I want to stretch out on the cool tile floors…it works for the cats, after all. Every summer I wonder why I live in Arizona and vow to relocate as soon as possible. Unfortunately, once the cool weather returns I forget all about my plans and sink back in to my usual patterns of laziness and complacency. But now, in the middle of another sweltering summer in the desert, I am dreaming of moving someplace cool and green. Ireland sounds good…I could be quite happy in a little cottage in the Irish countryside…I think the cats would like it too (even in my daydreaming, I consider the preferences and well-being of my feline companions). But for now there is no escape in sight so I’ll just have to endure, my skin becoming increasingly pasty as I hide out indoors avoiding the sun. In a couple of months this will all be over…I hope.
Posts Tagged ‘home
Cruel summer
I was in a miserable state when my poor husband came home from work last night but he patiently talked me down off the ledge once again. I sobbed uncontrollably as I tried to explain to him how the home improvement chaos, my recent flare, stress over work, financial worries and my inexplicable inability to keep the checkbook balanced were all contributing to my misery and leaving me feeling completely undone. He listened carefully, made appropriate and supportive comments, and offered suggestions for things he might be able to do to help. He’s great in these moments…when I fall apart, he’s always a calming and reassuring presence. His main flaw is that although he always says the right things, I know from my years of experience with him that he rarely follows through with all the things he promises to do. I know that he means it when he says it but despite the fact that he honestly does intend to do whatever it was he promised, his tendency to procrastinate almost always gets in the way of his good intentions. So anyway…I appreciate him greatly for being there for me in these moments but at the same time, I need to remain realistic and not set myself up for disappointment by believing everything he says.
But I’ve decided not to think about any of this for now…it’s just too depressing and when I become depressed, I become immobilized and that is the last thing I need right now. I’ve got a lot going on at the moment so I need to stay focused and on-track. Work is going fairly well for a change, I’m enjoying the classes I’m taking as part of my teacher training program, my parents are coming for a visit in a couple of weeks, and my son is starting back to school in a couple of weeks as well so I have plenty of things to be happy about and look forward to. The house will get fixed eventually, my flare will subside, everything will get better in time…it always does. If I can just keep that in mind, I’ll be fine.
Argentina, here I come!
Ever have one of those days when it seems like everything is going wrong? Of course you have…we all know how much it sucks to be having a day like that. I’m in the middle of one of those days (possibly one of those weeks…maybe even one of those months or years) and I’m seriously close to running away.
To start with, my house is still in complete and utter chaos from our multiple incomplete “home improvement” projects. We’ve lived in this house for six years now and we’ve done so much damage that sometimes I think we’d be better off to just bomb the place and start over from scratch. After six years of abuse from our multiple pets (2 large dogs and 4 cats), a rowdy kid and all of his rough-housing friends, my husband who means well but often ends up breaking more things than he fixes, and my general lack of housekeeping and home maintenance skills, the house is in a pitiful state. The necessary repairs are too numerous to list but among them are:
- repairing the stucco by the back door where one of the dogs did a considerable amount of damage by frantically pawing at the wall next to the door when he felt he’d been left outside too long (Note: the dog is neurotic and freaks out if you don’t let him back in to the house as soon as he is finished going potty…and this is only one of his many eccentricities. He’s a difficult case that I think would make even the Dog Whisperer lose his patience.)
- patching several holes in the wall in my son’s room and replacing the doors to his bedroom, bathroom, and closet – all of which he’s managed to put holes in while engaging in various forms of jackassery
- pulling out all of our horribly stained carpet and replacing it with something that will hold up well under constant abuse and won’t show stains from cat vomit, blood, mud tracked in by the dogs, etc.
- repairing and repainting the stucco and trim on the front porch where the little savages my son calls friends like to hang out and kick at the wall (Why do they congregate on the front porch and chip away at our stucco, you ask? I couldn’t even begin to tell you the answer to that question.)
The worst part is that the things I’ve mentioned are only the tip of the iceberg. I had a minor breakdown over the general state of disrepair a few weeks ago and in an attempt to console me as I was curled up in the fetal position sobbing hysterically, my husband asked me to make a list of everything that needed to be done and promised that he would work diligently each weekend to cross things off the list. I made the list and things seemed to start off well: we cleared out our bedroom and pulled the carpet up so that we could experiment with stained concrete flooring. Of course, clearing out the bedroom meant moving all of our bedroom furniture to the living room and most of our living room furniture to the den/office, which was unpleasant but I figured I could easily live with that for a week or two while we got the project done. Unfortunately, several weeks have now passed and I’m still living with my bedroom in the living room and other than pulling up the carpet, nothing else has happened in the bedroom. No progress has been made on any of the other projects either. I’m almost at the end of my rope.
I’m a person who needs privacy and order in my life…living in a chaotic environment with no place I can go to be by myself is beyond unsettling to me. When I look around at all the disorder around me, I feel like my very world is falling apart…and it’s like my crumbling house has become a metaphor – the very embodiment of the way I feel my life is falling apart. Completing these unfinished projects on my own is beyond my abilities and I can’t afford to hire someone to take over and put my house in order…so I feel trapped, which in turn makes me feel like running away. I’m becoming increasingly tempted to pull out my dog-eared copy of SCRAM: Relocating Under a New Identity and head for South America. I don’t need much to make me happy…the only things I need are my laptop, a few books, and some companionship (my kid and my cats…or wait, maybe just the cats – they don’t talk back, after all) – as long as I had those things, I could live happily anywhere. I’d be perfectly content living as simply as a monk (hmmm…maybe I ought to look in to that) – the idea of giving up most of my worldly possessions is very appealing to me right now.
I’m hoping that things will get better soon and then I won’t have to flee. If I could just get a few of these projects finished so that I could put my house back together, then I’d feel much better…a person can only deal with so much chaos at one time, you know? But just in case things don’t improve, I’m formulating a plan. If I post my next update from Argentina, you’ll know I finally reached the absolute end of my rope.
At the end of my rope
When I found myself standing in the middle of my kitchen at 3am, frustrated to tears over a broken toaster, I knew I had finally lost it. I’ve been in the middle of a flare for the last several weeks, which is both physically and emotionally draining, and after trying so hard to cope for so long…well, a breakdown was inevitable, I suppose. My chronic migraines have been more frequent and severe, which is bad enough in itself but on top of that, I’ve been experiencing fatigue so overwhelming that I find myself exhausted after the simplest of tasks, often returning home from routine errands feeling as though I’ve just run a marathon. My muscle are sore, my joints ache, and on several occasions I’ve felt so tired and worn out that I crawl in to bed fully dressed and have to spend a few hours napping to recuperate. After feeling like this for a few days, I find myself becoming increasingly irritable and in a melancholy mood…after a few weeks with no improvement, I’m feeling hopeless and desperate.
When I’m in this kind of situation, everything bothers me…I don’t sleep well, I have trouble eating because the headaches often leave me nauseated, I alternate between feeling feverish and clammy – I’m basically just a mess. I eat almost nothing but toast and strawberry popsicles because these are the only edible items that I can reliably keep down. Since I can’t eat normally, the few things I can eat become ridiculously important to me…and that’s how I ended up having a breakdown over the malfunctioning toaster. I felt like my world was falling apart around me and now to add insult to injury, even my appliances were turning on me. My misery was complete and overwhelming. After shedding a few tears, I set the traitorous toaster out by the trash can and went to bed.
The next day Ken found the toaster and asked what was wrong with it. I told him it was broken but he likes to tinker with things so he took it back to the kitchen and just a few minutes later, he announced that it wasn’t broken after all…in fact, he eyed me suspiciously as he explained that he couldn’t find anything wrong with it at all. His accusatory stare told me he’d drawn his own conclusion about what had happened and in his version of reality, I’d decided to discard a perfectly good toaster so that I could have the thrill of shopping for a new one. Incensed by what he was implying, I retreated to my bedroom and spent the rest of the evening avoiding my family. Given the circumstances, there really was no other viable option open to me.
Stuck at home
It has been a hectic week and I have been so busy running all over town to appointments and such that I haven’t had much time to myself. Today, however, I’m housebound and actually not minding it too much. My husband has been working a massive amount of overtime for the past couple weeks, putting tons of miles on the car driving back and forth to Tucson each day – he normally drives a company truck to and from work but since the rest of his coworkers are staying in a hotel in Tucson rather than coming home each night, he’s leaving the truck in Tucson and driving one of our cars each day. He had been driving our Daewoo but it broke down yesterday so he had to take my Saturn in to work today.
When I realized that I was going to be stuck at home, I was upset at first because I had several things planned for today and I didn’t want to have to make changes to my schedule. Now that I’ve made all the calls and gotten everything rescheduled, I’m feeling kind of relieved to have a day at home. I’m getting caught up on several projects that I have neglected for far too long and I may even have time to work on cleaning out the garage, which is something that I desperately need to do but never seem to find time for.
Some friends of ours are moving in across the street from us and they recently asked to store some boxes in our garage in advance of the move – I was embarrassed when I had to open up the garage for them and help them find space for the boxes. There is way too much crap out there and everytime I start to try to organize the chaos, I just get overwhelmed by the immensity of the task. If I could get it cleaned out and all the excess stuff donated or thrown out, I would feel much better. In fact, I should probably go work on that right now…
