It's cool

I just need to start taking things one day at a time, at least for a little while, because I'm starting to get slightly hysterical. But there are good things interwoven, I just need to stop and enjoy them when they happen instead of letting the fear-of-the-outcome-of-the-big-decisions completely overwhelm me and freak me out.

Yeah. It's cool. I swear. I am going to be okay, I really am--because I have to be, right?

Ugh, sorry to be so self-obsessed, dear readers. But yeah, you know. "It is what it is," as my dad always says.

I am giving some more thought to the possibility of teaching. There it is, I put it out there. Actually I always really wanted to be a school counselor, that's what I wanted to do from the very beginning of college. Yeah, I'm thinking about that lately. I'm thinking about how I let certain people talk me out of pursuing that and feeling like I should stop letting people talk me out of things that I actually want to do, or feel like I need to do.

Maybe it's time for me to start making up my own mind about stuff? Yeah, seems like it might be. But for now, just one day at a time, okay?

it just keeps getting worse somehow, or seeming like it.

RINK

Couple of days ago the thought occurred to me that it all boils down to trying not to feel bad. I mean, life as a whole. Like, just break it down to the simplest possible objective, and that's kind of it. Nobody wants to feel bad, so we try to live our lives in such a way as to feel bad as little as possible. I don't just mean like, I dunno, feeling good on the short-term, I mean, like you know. It reminds me a sunday school lesson I had when I was probably like thirteen, in regards to short-term happiness as opposed to long-term happiness, and yeah. I try to think about that when I can, things that will hopefully make me feel less bad in the long term as opposed to the short-term, but it turns out, I have often had a terrible lack of foresight at various stages in my life, and it has caused a great deal of messiness for me. Or maybe it's not so much my *lack* of foresight as just a general propensity for me to be unrealistic? Or maybe--okay because I honestly think of myself as someone who tries as hard as possible to plan ahead, plan *very carefully* in fact, but maybe I've planned things out *too* carefully, to the point that nothing could ever fall as neatly into place as the way I tend to envision it. Something always removes that keystone from my carefully-built futuristic structures, and then kablam! the whole thing comes crashing down.

The second part of that thought came yesterday when I was at work, peering out the window waiting for a particular job to come in, watching people down on the street, thinking about their separate existences and wondering how many of them felt bad and how many of them felt good, and understanding that sometimes I just will feel bad no matter what, but hopefully it will pass, and that's about the best I can do.

Enough of that.

I went roller skating the other night. I had never been to the roller-skating rink at night, only in the daytime, with my kids. Jeff was somewhat hesitant to go, I think, as he kept pointing out over and over that he doesn't really know how to roller skate, but then would say, "Well I'll go with you, if you want," but then again, "I don't really know how to skate, you know." I kept insisting it was easy, because I mean, you know. Lucy can do it.

Right when we got there, the neon sign that said "RINK" was blinking on and off in the rain and it felt immediately auspicious. I was in an instant good mood. A cautious good mood, because I mean, you never know. But it felt very likely that we were going to have a good time. Jeff kept trying to take a picture of the sign with his camera phone but it came out too blurry. It was one of those things that you just can't possibly get a decent picture of how cool it looked, maybe because it is mostly associated with a feeling.

I was so, so happy to discover that the organ player was working that night. I haven't been to the roller rink when the organ player is working in YEARS. There is a MASSIVE wurlitzer organ on a platform that hangs from the ceiling in the center of the rink, and it is commandeered by a little man in a booth, like the wizard of oz. The thing is deafening, and magnificent. He plays old stuff, like I'm trying to think of an example but can't, old standards from like the forties and fifties, and WOW it is loud. And magnificent.

Almost everyone there was old. I mean some of them were like, OLD. Like, well past sixty-five. And these people could SKATE. I can't believe hipsters have not infiltrated this phenomenon, because it was amazing to watch, and also completely surreal. It was like, David Lynch movies are positively boring compared to this spectacle. Jeff, as he was putting on his skates, looked mildly terrified. He said in a very quiet voice, "I'm going to fall." I said, "no you won't!" but, you know, he did, eventually. Still--

He wouldn't go out on the rink for awhile, he kept to the little area where people go when they practice. I kept trying to get him to go out on the rink with me and he kept saying, with this like nervous laugh that he has, "those people are skating really fast." they were. I went out on the rink quite a few times and I could barely keep up, plus these people were doing turns and twists and like, roller dancing together--all these old people, some of them in full-on costumes, like the ladies in little velvet skirts and the men in these long bellbottom pants with black skates, one very old guy who was a bit overweight was so like, Jeff kept saying, "he's floating on air!" and we would laugh but he really was, this guy. I mean, some of these people, if you had seen them on the street, looked like they ought to have been confined to wheelchairs, or at least have walkers, but--whoah. They could skate a hundred times better than I could.

Jeff told me about an incident that happened to him when he was about four, at the roller skating rink in sugarhouse, the one that I also used to go to, he said he fell down and a bunch of bigger kids sort of skated over his head, the same thing happened to me at the same rink, but I was older, it was on my tenth birthday that it happened to me. So maybe I wasn't so traumatized because I already knew how to skate pretty well when it happened. That rink was notorious for scary pre-teen rockers with tons of horrifying acne and big combs sticking out of their back pockets to completely mow over the littler kids on the rink while skating to the Steve Miller band or whatever. But at any rate, Jeff didn't seem like he was having terrible PTSD flashbacks or anything like that, though maybe it was cruel of me to eventually make him go out on the rink with me but I did.

We went around the rink a couple of times and by the time we were finished my face hurt from smiling so much, watching him concentrate all hard on not falling. I thought he'd only want to go around once but he kept going after the first pass. When we got off the rink he said, "That was actually fun!" he sounded surprised. I was surprised, too. He said he wanted to do it again another time, which I was overjoyed to hear, because I do too. Particularly if the organ player is there.

An addendum I add somewhat unwillingly:

I remembered, as we were leaving, a time that Thad and I went to that rink when Lucy was little, before we had Ruth, and the organ player had been there that time, and Thad and I had been fighting about something as usual, but we had a really good time at the rink with Lucy, even though I remember sort of feeling resentful about something as usual, and some other thoughts about that started occurring. And I started thinking that maybe, just maybe if we'd done stupid stuff like go roller skating from time to time--I mean, just the two of us, no kids--maybe we could have made it. Maybe there would have been badness sometimes, like I described above, that sometimes we would have felt bad, but it would have been good other times, and maybe all of this is just pointless and not worth it. But it didn't happen that way, so it doesn't matter, because that ship has sailed. But maybe this is a cautionary tale. Maybe you people with troubled marriages just need to get a baby sitter, and go roller skating together from time to time. Just forget about everything else once a week or once a month or something, and just do that. Try it, please, just see if it works.

art linkletter

I want to write down all the hilarious things that Ruth is doing and saying right now but there are so many of them that I keep forgetting. Also, her incredibly naughty behavior sometimes so overshadows the cute things that I am much more prone to repeat the story of her defiantly scribbling on the table with a sharpie and then engaging in a wrestling match with me while I tried to retrieve said sharpie, or trying to hit Jeff in the face with a rolling pin, or throwing groceries out of the shopping cart at Fred Meyer, than I am to tell about the time when she said, "let's go to outer space! But, oh no, we need a space helmet!" because that last story is not nearly as cute when I'm telling it because you miss out entirely on the cuteness of her mannerisms and the fact that she was wearing jammies with glow-in-the-dark stars and planets all over them, and also there is NOTHING WORSE than an adult telling a story about a cute thing that a kid said by trying to emulate a cute kid voice, oh man someone please punch me right in the face if I ever do that in your presence.

Well it was all cute last week when she suddenly announced, "I like Jeff because he is so handsome!" ha ha.

She said other cute things too, but I have forgotten them entirely due to them being superseded by her headbutting me in the face and giving me a fat lip. That was right after the throwing-groceries-out-of-the-cart thing, and right before the removing-seatbelt-while-in-a-moving-car thing. So, you know, overwhelmed by all of THAT.

hometown here come

I am giving a lot more thought to moving to Salt Lake, which is something I had planned to do anyway, I just thought it would be at least 2 or 3 years down the road. Now I am thinking that maybe it had better be sooner than that. Mostly for money reasons, but also for other selfish reasons, me wanting to be closer to my family reasons, me feeling completely alone here, like I am just barely treading water to keep it together all the time, which seems really pathetic. Other people do this, right? Single motherhood without family support? Why can't I do it?

I just have absolutely nobody here that I can really rely on for anything. Even dumb little things, like helping me at the *&%$ laundromat with a super spirited 3-year-old who is trying to climb into a washer and also screaming and kicking me and headbutting me while I'm trying to deal with folding laundry and carrying laundry baskets out to my car. You know, that sort of thing. I feel screwed and frustrated and resentful a whole lot of the time, and it's making me a really really bad mom.

Initially I was thinking that this is only crossing my mind because Jeff obviously wants to go back, but I know that's not it. It's part of it, but it's a whole lot more than that. Because I was thinking that I could go back there and he and I might not actually make it, I mean, we might even call it quits--not saying I anticipate it, but it could happen-- but I would still be so happy to be there. Or at least I think I would.

Very conflicted about it. There are a lot of reasons to do it, but the reasons not to do it, though fewer, are more compelling. I mean, just--well, being away from my kids for large blocks of time sounds kind of...horrifying, in many ways. I don't know if I can hack that. Like I said, I knew it was coming, just not while Ruth is SO little.

But maybe it would almost be better to do it while she is so little. Maybe it would be less disruptive that way?

I don't know. I only know that it will probably hurt me more than it will hurt them, or at least much of the current common wisdom seems to indicate that, anyway. I mean as far as how surprisingly adaptable kids really are. And how surprisingly adaptable mine have been.

Or is that just me trying to make myself feel better for being a potentially awful mom? Doing a potentially awful thing?

Would I be "abandoning" them? I mean, people used to send their children away to boarding schools and not see them for months and months and that was just normal. People still do that, in some cultures. But in this culture it's basically understood that you are a monster if you do something like this when you didn't absolutely *have* to.

I don't know what to do.

catharsis of work

I feel better today than I did yesterday, despite having had a very stressful day at work yesterday--in fact, it may have been because of the stressful day that I feel better, at least in part.

I screwed up a rush job and almost made it late, but we got it done in the absolute last minute nick-of-time. When my boss discovered I had screwed it up, he told me to fix it without really much emotion. I thought he'd be furious but he wasn't. He was kind of half-smiling, actually, in a way that said something like, "Of course. Of course this horrible rush job gets screwed up."

But I fixed it and it got done in the absolute last minute nick of time.

He called me into his office later and I thought I was going to get bawled out. Instead he said, "good job today. don't worry about that job getting screwed up, I'm not concerned about it. We have to be very careful about things like that in the future, but this one was fine. It got done on time, anyway, so I'm not too concerned." He then asked me if I had any intention of quitting due to the lack of work. I told him no. He said good, because he thinks it will get busy soon, and he's happy with the job I've been doing.

Then he reiterated that he wasn't worried about the screwed-up job. He said, "These things always seem to work out. We always seem to get things done at the last minute somehow. It's like a James Bond movie around here." he laughed. "It makes for good cinema," he said. He has an English accent so that somehow made it funnier.

I ran into my first ex-husband last night. He looked all weird to me somehow but I couldn't figure out what was up with him exactly. Then he told me he'd just crashed on his motorcycle like a week ago and he had a broken collarbone and cracked ribs. I asked him what the hell he was doing out and about, and he said, "I've been in bed all week, I had to get out! I was going insane!" he was sitting at the bar of this place drinking cheap beer watching a basketbal game, barely able to move. He looked all sort of swollen all over, and he was obviously hopped up on pain pills. I told him he should be home in bed and definitely not out drinking beer, and he grumbled at me and told me to mind my own business, but I think he was pleased that I even cared. Then he told me about the accident. He said he'd been about to go over some sort of ledge, and he had to make a split-second decision, either crash really bad and get hurt, or go over the ledge and probably die. He chose the former.

Yeah, I think that was the correct decision.

Makes for good cinema.

will this make me feel better?

I am really, really really down

I feel like everything is seriously just unraveling.

It will get better somehow, it always does I guess, but it's occurring to me now that it is actually possible to just mess your life up with no chance of redemption. People do it all the time. People in prison, people in mental institutions, people who kill themselves.

Those people really screwed up.

If I had a time machine, I would probably choose to do surprising things with it. I mean, not any of the things that people might expect. Mostly I don't have regrets, but I am starting to have one big one right now and that might be the one that leads to my ultimate comeuppance.

I think the time is coming for me to go back to Salt Lake, which in many ways will smell like failure, but I don't know what else to do.

I just want to be in my mom's kitchen, listening to my family talk to each other.