Sunday, June 3, 2012

I feel so freaking frustrated.
I am remembering once a long time ago when my first husband and a carpenter friend of ours were restoring a cottage house on our property that we'd moved and I said one day in a pique of tied-down motherhood, "You are simply building me a prison! A beautiful prison but a prison nonetheless!"

They gaped at me in disbelief. Where had this come from? What was I saying? I had my two beautiful babies, I had my garden, I was about to move out of a ten by fifty foot trailer into this old Cracker house that I loved and adored which they had jacked up and replaced sills on and put a window in by the back door that I had wanted and we'd refinished the floors and they'd built a front porch to it and it was everything I wanted and I wanted it so badly but...

I think I knew even then that I was not one to go out into the world so much, even though I did go more than I do now and that deep inside of me I was aware that I am quite capable of being my own captive in my own world of what I create to keep myself supposedly safe.

Oh, I'm frustrated. I spent a great deal of today in the garden, ripping huge weeds and digging them out and I did plant another row of beans and I don't even care. I don't even care. Beans can be bought at the store. Tomatoes rot on the vine from one pest or another and they only serve to make me feel guilty because I am not tending them the way I should. I gave myself half a heat stroke, most likely, and had to come in and rest for awhile and then I went back out and ripped and pulled some more and for what? For what?

Sometimes, probably most of the time, I am completely content, or at least mostly content, with what I have here. What my husband and I have built together and scratched from the ground together and maintained together and I love it. I love my chickens and my flowers and I love these trees and the way the light filters through them in the morning and in the evening both and I love the birds as they sit and sing and even the squirrels as they chase each other from tree branch to ground and back up to the branches. I love my simple cooking and of course I love my children and my grandchildren to come out. I love the way Owen has a world of his own here, a world that fosters fantasy and play and wonder and learning about animals and where eggs come from and where food comes from and and I love living in this house where people have lived and danced and been conceived and born and died for so many years. I love it when people come over, as they did last night, to sit and stand in the kitchen as I cook and there is laughter and there is talk and drinks and light and friendship.

I do. I love it all. And even when I don't love it, I appreciate it so much.

But sometimes. Sometimes I feel as if I am missing out on something. Everything maybe. Oh, I have my reading and I have this, this way of communication and I have my writing, my words, my joy there, but why am I spending entire days, weeks, months of my life ripping weeds out of a garden and doing the same laundry over and over and over again...

Wait. I just had a complete phone conversation with Owen. He is on his way home and I guess his mother called me for him.
"Where are you, Mer-Mer?" he asked me and we talked like real people. "Are you home yet?" I asked.
"Not yet," he said. "Not yet."
Oh my god. That boy. "I love you, Mer-Mer," he said.
And this, this is what it's all about, I guess and I know and I need to take a shower and make some salad for Mr. Moon to eat when he gets home with the pizza I'll heat up. My Fisher-Man, home from the seas.

Full moon tomorrow night and maybe that's what is causing this, this...what?
Dissatisfaction. Frustration. Anger at myself for building myself these beautiful prisons of labor and love.

I will never live in Paris or know what it's like to wake up in an apartment in New York City and I will never learn Spanish and I will never get a book published and I will never hike the Appalachian Trail and no one is stopping me from any of these things except for myself and I stop myself, I get in the way of myself in a million different ways.

I am old enough to know that.

I am old enough to know that weeding the garden isn't something I am required to do. It would be so easy to tell someone else who is thinking like this that she can do ANYTHING she wants. No one is stopping her.

No one. Except for herself.

Myself.

Well. Something to think about. As if I don't think enough already.



14 comments:

  1. oh hon, you would feel so claustrophobic in a new york apartment! and if you lived in one surrounded by scaffolding for the past 4 years because every little brick of every wall needs to be resealed, then you would want to scream. i come here and look at the light in your trees to be soothed.

    the thing that is most remarkable about this post is that all the things you love about where you are--that was the biggest longest paragraph, and then your adorable grandson called to tell you he loves you, and that is what it is about.

    i think people made like you and like me, we feel like this from time to time, and we think it has to do with our surroundings, whatever they may be, but i suspect, no, i know these feelings would assail us periodically no matter where we lived.

    well, maybe not in your soul place in mexico.

    rock with it, love. this too will pass. night will fall. (for me, these feelings are most intense at twilight, and it is then that i need to be out the house, with sky overhead. or else i just watch the light and try to breathe.)

    hugs hugs

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  2. Angella- I know. And it doesn't have a damn thing to do with where I live which is where I love. And it's not even just AGE- I've always felt this way.
    And you are SO right. Twilight is the witching hour for all of it. Every damn bit of it. Which is not that hard to figure out. Another day, almost done and what have I accomplished?
    Sigh.
    We think too much, girl. We think too much.
    Your words comforted me.

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  3. Some of these things like waking up in a NYC apartment are romanticized in our minds. We forget that what you would probably hear in that NYC apartment would be lots of sirens from the streets, horns honking from the cars and cabs in the street not to mention noise from fellow apartment dwellers. In no time, you'd be wishing for the country and its joys. I dream of going to Paris too, and probably never will but when my sister went and stayed near the Lourve, she said it was crowded and loud in the streets and was very happy when they left for home. Just musing along with you....You do a wonderful job of being in the moment, I think, so this is probably just a restless phase. Maybe you are going to have some kind of wonderful breakthrough moment!

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  4. You should call May, because you are obviously sharing a brain right now.

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  5. DTG- Jeez. THAT'S never happened before.

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  6. I've always felt the same. About avoiding that prison of the caregiver. And the same about the twilight hour. And of course, the full moon. Not that being a caregiver isn't a good thing, but rather that there is so much more to know and see outside in the world. Cities offer anonymity and thus, a heck of a lot of freedom.

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  7. I think the grumpies are, well, ok to have sometimes. And you can be damn grateful for your current life AND be underneath all that too. I call it my original sadness and I honor it. I earned it. And it wants to be loved and seen. (lord, I hope I don't sound preachy).

    If I felt good all the time, I'd be bored.

    And I honor your brave heart for putting it all out there. Cuz it's real and it's part of who you are.

    XO Beth

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  8. Different scene here. Same words.

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  9. My 2 cents: You WILL publish a book. And you just are a woman that has to do everything you do just so and so when you are ready to move on to Paris or wherever, you will also do whatever that change brings you just so. It is good to be so interested in life that you want to do so many things. As long as you have your babies and Mr Moon, I think you will continue to fly. I would put $ on that.

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  10. I have had the feeling lately of running out of time--of the days going faster and faster, and me getting older and older. I want to relish each day and do something that is spectacular and not just rote. I worked so many years doing exciting things somedays and paperwork the other part. I want to slow the days down and not wake up 30 years from now in some nursing home or hospital bed and wish that I had lived an adventure--instead I worked and weeded and was the home handy man. There is more.....I know that.

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  11. I was in San Francisco a few years ago with my sons, and as I tramped around the streets with them, falling in love with the city, I suddenly felt all the years of my life on top of me, Sophie back home in LA with my husband, the rest of my family on the east coast, and I knew in that moment that I'd never be a young person in a new city like San Francisco ever. I think it has to do with age, with life moving on with and without us. I think.

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  12. I read this just before bed last night . . . You gave me a lot to think about too.
    I'm gonna try getting out of my own way.
    You're right, of course, it's easy to tell someone else.

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  13. Ah and yes the full moon too. I've always felt I wanted family around me then when they are (with the exception of my son and if he has children I'm sure I'll feel the same of them) when they are around, I feel anxious and trapped. This has always been the case. But maybe I'll always feel trapped three headed dog no matter what. Maybe I am trapped in my own skin.

    xo

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  14. We all have those days or those moment Ms Moon. I am living a fairy tale life right now in England, with a wonderful husband, no money problems like I had in my previous life caring for 3 boys on my own... And yet there are days that I am yelling at a tree in the car, feeling frustrated and not fitting in... Wanting something, but not know what. I have it all, why am I feeling miserable? Yet I know it passes. This crabby and unhappy mood passes, the day after we will look at our life again and all that made us unhappy the day before is gone, yet nothing really changed. I blame it on being sensitive and having eyes for the world and people around us... Special antennas if you want...

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Tell me, sweeties. Tell me what you think.