This blogging thing... this is my mid-life crisis. At least, I hope this is the "worst" of it, the sudden need to add my voice to the hue and cry of vibrating electrons clammering to fill up that netherworld we call cyberspace, the compelling drive to verify my own existence by seeing my words, my thoughts, out there and accessible to someone -- anyone -- besides myself. Yeah, I hope this is the worst of it but I have a feeling that it's only just begun.
Thing is, I'm really not the right gender or even old enough to be entitled to a mid-life crisis, not that there's any right age, I suppose, but balding white guys in their late 40s seem to have a monopoly on this mid-life thing. When former career-driven women like me hit their mid-30s and find themselves stuck at home with whining children, spreading hips, sagging breasts and equally sagging husbands, we're just called 'dissatisfied housewives.' We're prescribed Prozac, told to join a gym and change our hair, maybe go back to work and encouraged to ratchet up in the romance department, putting out consistent and quality sex for husbands whose notions of romance extend to setting down the remote control long enough to twiddle this, twist that and have one off before the commercial break ends.
Screw that.
So I woke up at 3:30 this morning to the feel of a dog's nose pressed against my bare foot, the only part of my body poking out from underneath the blankets. (I really need to learn to start sleeping in socks.) Dog started licking my foot. I started having a massively erotic dream. Dog started whining. Thought it was my husband. Vaguely remembered that he's been out of the country for quite sometime doing his duty for the US of A and the Army and, naturally, I shot upright in bed immediately plagued with that odd mixture of Catholic guilt and disgust. Took the dog out, shivered in the cold air, came back inside and cursed at the dog in three languages as he started snoring and pawing the air, no doubt lost in a fantastical dream about capturing the neighbor's cat. As for me, sleep was out of the question.
Two shots of bourbon and a sleeping pill later, I started drifting off into that warm, cottony pre-sleep. I always like that place, where the body is sublimely forgotten and the mind wanders through its troubles just don't seem nearly as interesting as the softness of the sheets and the creeping weight of slumber that pulls you down into blissful unconsciousness. I like sleep. Damn, but I like it.
Unfortunately, my 3-year-old son does not share my affinity. What he shares, he shares with the dog -- an endless supply of poop that must be cleaned, a need for middle-of-the-night attention and an uninhibited willingness to deposit said poop wherever is convenient if he is not immediately attended to. And so once again I dragged my sad self out of the bed to clean up yet another brown-eyed being's excrement, to pat its head and tell it "Good boy" and send it off to that wonderful slumberland in which I am, apparently, an exile.
At least I had a good buzz going and four more hours in which to sober up.
Four hours of sitting on the porch in the dark, wrapped in a blanket and holding the baby monitor in one hand, a pack of cigarettes in the other. Oh, what a picture that would have made, huh?
Four hours is a long time for a pissed off woman to sit thinking, alone in the dark.
What I'm wondering now is how did life get like this? I know I'm not alone in finding a moment when everything is still, when my mind suddenly pauses in the hustle and bustle of living and screams 'Hey, this isn't how it was supposed to be!' I have to think that the old raisin-faced woman who bags my groceries at the corner market, who has stood on that same patch of pine-smelling linoleum for the past 25 years doing the same damned job (so she tells me), surely she didn't intend for her life to get stuck in that very spot? The 48-year-old man who delivers my newspaper at 3 o'clock every morning, did he daydream in high school about being a paperboy when he grew up or had he once thoughts of being an astronaut, a journalist, maybe even a chef?
The sad thing is that I have the misfortune of being able to say that I already burned through most of my dreams. I just didn't appreciate the experience while I was doing it. Precocious, that's what my dad used to call me. Mom's input was "Slow down, you'll grow up too fast." Who knew she was right, huh? Who knew that 'precocious' was short-hand for "Listen to your mother."
So here I sit, in my mid-30s, watching teenagers and 20-somethings walk by in their freaked out clothes and casual hair and thinking to myself how comfortable they look, how I wish I could dress like that, only to realize that if I were to adopt that style I'd be as pathetic as my mom was when she started sporting off-the-shoulder sweatshirts and mismatched big earrings back in the 80s. Back when she was my age.
I'm supposed to go to the mall today. My neighbor offered to accompany me so I'd have 'company' on the trip. That's one of the things that sucks about being a stay-at-home mom... people always assume I need company, as if their mere presence will somehow brighten my day. Truth is, I don't want company. In fact, what I want is the ABSENCE of company -- no dog, no husband, no son -- just for a few hours or maybe even a whole day.
I want to wake up and know there's no one else in the house, no one waiting for my presence so they can poop, no one with a grumbling stomach needing me to cook food, no bare backs, bottoms or bellies waiting for me to dress them. I want to get up and make my own coffee, cook for myself (or not) and bathe without a pair of brown eyes poking around the shower curtain and obviously wondering how much longer I'll be in there. I want to spend an hour playing with my hair and makeup. (Funny, but back in the days when it really did take me an hour to get ready I kept wishing to get the time down to 15 minutes or less. Only now do I realize I'd also been hoping that the 15 minutes or less would produce perfection, and not this constant disheveled hausfrau look I've somehow managed to acquire.) I want to grab my purse and car keys and go somewhere without (a) checking how long I can be gone; (b) weighing whether my excursion is within the budget; (c) fretting about my household and family's safety in my absence, and (d) how my husband, son and dog will react when I come home.
Not two minutes after I get off the phone with my neighbor after cancelling our trip to the mall, my husband calls. It's after noon here but early in the morning (tomorrow) where he's calling from. Given the time difference, I'm tempted to ask him what my Wednesday's going to be like but I have a feeling he's not awake enough yet to get the joke. He asks how my day's going. I tell him it's 'precocious.' He doesn't get that, either, but what can you do? We try to talk and entertain each other, but the international phone lines still suck in this day and age and the static and echoes drive us both nuts. We exchange a few protests of adoring love and then, like an injured animal, we decide to put the tortured phone call out of its misery.
I read this in the paper today: Leo Rosten once said that "Everyone, in some small, sacred sanctuary of the self, is nuts." Guess I've just decided to make my sanctuary public.
2:14:10 PM ; 
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