It’s a restless life I need to live. I need to have boundaries, and then I need to push up against those boundaries to see if they fit me, if I can live within certain constraints of polite society.
I just wrote my husband a letter this week, and in that letter I said when he met me I was so young and idealistic that I didn’t even know if I’d ever take his name.
Fast forward three kids, two of whom are still with us, and people question why I mention the third. I would not be who I am today without that loss.
And, that loss came CRASHING back into my life this year. It’s all a very convoluted story, and I’m not ready to publicly share it, but everyone who knows me well, knows how November 9th and May 15th are wrapped into my existence. Our second child was due on May 15th. My best friend’s birthday.
It didn’t happen. November 9th didn’t even happen in 2002. We found out the baby miscarried sometime in the month of October at a routine doctors appointment on November 7th, where they couldn’t find a heartbeat, and it just happened to be the very same day my mom had the heart attack that took her life. It was a hell of a week for my family.
This year, we moved.
That year, we also moved. 2002.
It was too reminiscent. My brain couldn’t process the traumas that I was enduring. Traumatic Brain Injuries. Death. Anxiety. Fear. Anger. It all leads to the dark side.
Fast forward.
It’s January again, now 2018. A new year, a new beginning, and a friend pens the words: Am I fundamentally miserable? Am I destined to be miserable? I understand the hate and contempt of the word CONTENT. Always striving. Constantly a state that is unattainable, just out of reach. We grasp and grip, and it (this fleeting life) slips through our fingers.
I respond from the depths of my core. NO! Absolutely not, but you are a restless spirit.
Someone I’ve been working for, has made me doubt a prior diagnosis of generalized anxiety disorder, non-specific, and a whole host of other mumbo jumbo that has been thrown at me, and made me question if there isn’t a quick fix in “Mydayis”. Another amphetamine quick fix to help with problems from ADD. Do I have it? Doesn’t anyone striving in America NOT have it?
There. I answer questions with questions all of the time.
But today, on my phone, are screenshots (attached—just to show that it’s one of those: “YOU CAN’T MAKE THIS UP!” stuff…because I wanted to speak with my doctors when I return to MN, see if this time an ADHD med could help. I swear I’ve tried them all…but this one is new. This one is shiny. This one looks like how I might perceive myself? Can I contain my restless spirit? Why isn’t happiness a mat that sits on my doorway? And, do you have to let it linger????
“The answer my friend, is blowin in the wind. The answer is blowin in the wind.”
I come home (my VBRO home away from home) to the news of 46 year old superstar, Dolores O’Riordan, lead singer of The Cranberries, suddenly and inexplicably dead…three children now motherless, and I think:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ejga4kJUts
She had no idea there was less than one year left. And, earlier at dinner, I’m trying to eat my glorious Monday night special at Applebees, and I’m hearing all about this mother of two, killed by a crazy twist of fate…mistaken identity, twisted love triangle, and I tell my dad, “She was killed because she had a job.” The other woman the assailants were targeting and were hired to kill, happenstance would have it, was also employed at the same place.
The violence is beyond my comprehension. The killers knew they had the wrong woman and decided to rob her first, torture her, and then just kill her anyway. More children are motherless. It puts me on edge, and I want to walk my dog before it gets dark. It’s all consuming. Get home before dark.
The story is reported on channel 9, wftv, and I see it as WTF tv. WTF.
It’s so beyond anything. You can’t make this up.
And, I’m anxiety riddled, because why???? Because why, you ask????
I’m taking a little vacation. It might just be forever. I just might refuse to return to what people in America call sane behavior. Will anyone ever blame me?