I just need to get this all out. Warning, long and whiny.
All the things I can control in my life are going okay. I have a job. A pretty good job with a great boss and lovely coworkers. It’s not the most exciting thing in the world, but it’s steady and pays well and has responsibilities and benefits and all that. I have enough money, at last, to pay my bills on time and even sock some money away.
That part of my life isn’t awful.
I have pets, two healthy cats. One did have a health scare recently, and it has taken some money to help him, but he is now as bright-eyed and chirpy as he ever was.
That part of my life isn’t awful.
I have housemates who… I can’t really call them out for being bad at housekeeping because I’m not great myself. They’re patient and understanding and kind people.
That part of my life isn’t awful.
I got my master of science. It was a damn big accomplishment and it was damn hard to get and I feel gratified and proud of it.
That part of my life isn’t awful.
Those are all the things I can control (well, housemates aren’t that controllable, but still).
I can’t control my father who went, basically, from being Captain America to being Tony Stark. It’s some kind of belated mid-life crisis, I guess; that or he’ll live to 120. He’s gone from being a stand-up pleasant fellow to having a hair-trigger, to being quite possibly a functional alcoholic, to divorcing my mother and marrying another woman less than half a year later. His therapist says he has the emotional capacity of an infant. He mostly calls or emails me when he needs a favor, like watching the dogs or house-sitting. We used to be close. We really aren’t anymore.
I can’t control my mother, who is now suicidal. She was married to my father for thirty-four years and, a year into her divorce is having a hell of a hard time coping. He kicked her out of the house at the end of the year – the settlement was fairly equal, so she can live on her own without too much financial strain, but she bought a house she can’t easily maintain. It’s a beautiful house and just the sort of place she’s always wanted to live, but it’s a hundred and fifty years old and rather indifferently maintained. There’s constantly another new problem, which is stress she doesn’t need. She’s only had the house for a few months, but it’s obviously taking its toll. She’s also disabled, which means she can’t fix most things herself, and she lives a bit more than an hour away from me so I can’t necessarily drop everything and rush up there.
She’d like me to move in, but apart from my not wanting to drive an hour one way to work, I… don’t want to live with her. She’s hard to live with at the best of times, and this is not them. I want to have a life outside the tiny town she’s moved to. I would love to work on her house – I just got a degree in that – but moving in with my mom out in the country is the literal opposite of what I want to do with my life. I can’t fix her. I can’t even begin to try. I talk to her every week and give her pep talks and it helps, I know it helps, she says it helps, and I don’t mind doing that at all. I enjoy it, in fact, and I enjoy going to visit, but I immensely enjoy being able to go home afterward to my quiet bedroom.
I can’t control her mother, either, who emails me constantly to tell me my mother seems depressed (no, really?) and that she’d just love to come down except oh, she just doesn’t think she can make the drive herself, and she refuses to fly, and she can’t stand the thought of another winter in Wisconsin. And of course this is her big long way of explaining that she wants to move in with my mother, and I wish she’d just ask my mother “Can I move in?” and I wish my mother would say “Yes please” and it would be out of my hands, except it will never, ever, ever be out of my hands.
I can’t control my friend in North Carolina, who tried to commit suicide fifteen minutes after talking to me and is now in a closed ward for the weekend after the hospital found out. I can’t do anything from here, and even if I were there, I can’t control her and I can’t watch her every minute of every day.
I can’t control my friend who went into emergency surgery this week. I don’t even know what happened, but given that the site on which the calendar for assisting his wife is a site for brain tumor survivors, I have a pretty good guess. And he is brilliant and his wife is wonderful and I am terrified and cooking for them this month because God only knows I can’t do anything else.
And I could probably control the fact that I’m fat and slovenly and haven’t had an intimate relationship in twelve years, but it doesn’t help that there is no one who can help. My support network is shattering like glass and I am not allowed to break, because I’m the one stable table leg left and everything is resting on me and I just. Want. Out. I want to sell everything I own and run away and live in a tiny place and change my name and never ever ever look back and naturally, being raised Lutheran, guilt is embedded in my bones. Bad things obviously happen because I didn’t work hard enough.
And being an only child, it’s all on me. I have never felt the loneliness, the aloneness, so intensely. Escapism into fantasyland works for a while, but the world is always waiting for me when I come back.