the M word

my favorite dance song doesn't make me want to bounce around anymore - today it makes me want to weep. and weeping isn't an urge that needs encouraging today; it's a tide to hold back, moment by moment. i'm not a big fan of holding back.

now is the time for work, but i don't remember what's to be done. now is the time for a woman's work - shutting up, sitting on it, picking battles, waiting in silence for a better time. for him. i never was much good as a woman.

it's time for him to be encouraged, nurtured, made safe on a long, difficult and painfully new journey in his life. now is not the time for sulking, tantrums, interruptions or pleas for comfort or attention. i was never much of a safe harbor for anybody, really.

why is it always about me? i'll tell you why - because my voice is the only one I hear. even medicated, as i am, i still hear the banshee call of me hurt my feelings express myself get it all out screaming for attention clinging sobbing pouting pretending laughing weeping laughing weeping laughing weeping.

it's all about me because the banshee wail - for good and ill, but always loud - constantly screams and croons in my head. it's all about me because his voice is so soft. soft, yes. not always sweet and loving, but always soft and modulated. there are tones in the quiet, if i shut up long enough to hear them. tones of love, impatience, amusement, anger, hurt, disappointment. and after a weekend of pacing around each other - coming together to love, separating again for hurt, coming together to work it out, again, and separating because it devolved into pain. again. - there's nothing in the softness but silence. love, yes, always, but behind a film of...if I knew what the film was I'd use my ubiquitous words to try to push it aside.

push everything aside. see joy and love in his eyes instead of an anxious, tired affection. hear truth instead of shuttered facts held back to protect me. keep me in the dark. protect him. protect everybody. push aside the gunky film of relationshippy exhaustion so that he'll hear when i speak (and the gods grant that given the chance - oh for another chance - my speaking will be spare, simple, full to bursting with love). catch fire and respond when I have a thought. like before.

i want to help. remember that song, 'To Deserve You'? ...and if i could trade my voice for the silence i know that you need... i would do that. i would do that. i'd do a mermaid Ariel and give my voice up - the whole thing - just to help you. me shutting up would help you. me not thinking so fucking much would. me being a simpler woman altogether...ah, but you'll say then i wouldn't be me. like 'me' is what you need right now. i think it's clear that for a short while at least, you could use someone entirely different.

would that i could, my dearest heart. would that i could stop - just for a season - being so perfectly, steadfastly, inescapably, devoutly, helplessly, tragically, and entirely. me.

how i love you...

Shaking Off the Funk

Ah, spring. Seattle's showing us the first peek up her skirt which is the start of spring. Eventually things will progress to the full-on, Marilyn-style skirt blowup - no grandma panties - that I like to call summer. But for now it's the odd robin (yay!), tiny green buds on trees (WOO-ha) and the almost-warmish air smells like the sea instead of just...cold air.

So, how's my mood? TOTAL SHIT. Yep - a dreadful miasma of sticky, gray, leaden FUNK has been following me around for days now, making me alternately barky or sullen, sensitive like you would not believe, and whining, whining, whining about it to anyone who'll listen. So, that would be Ramon. Poor man. We've gone back to nitpicky tiffs about nothing (last contentious topic: my hair), bandying logic, forgetting who said what, apologizing later, but even that doesn't bring us back to harmony with each other. Just...what is WRONG with me?

Just two blog entries ago it was, "oh, heavens, the meds have fixed me! Happy day! It's almost too easy!"

It was too easy. I'm not sure what's going on, but apart from the rages and/or hysterical grief taking over, which they're not, everything's the same. The rage was replaced by waspish irritability. The hysteria was replaced by either hollow-eyed (I know. I looked in the mirror), chin-trembling fear that I'm still sick - the meds aren't working - or sullen depression. I think the honeymoon's over, kids, and I've got more work to do than I thought. The pills make me not crazy. They don't make me into a nice or well-adjusted person. Drat upon drat.

I'll be OK. I always get low when winter loses its hold - define irony. I'm still in therapy, and Merrill is helping ever so much. I'm still more easygoing and accepting than before. The family stuff is getting better and better. My hair's looking fantastic lately. I would do well to remember that many things are going very well in my life and some of them are even thanks to me. Nevertheless, I'm not happy these last few weeks and can't seem to pull myself out of it. I either can't help it or I'm just enjoying the sulkies too much. But it's wearing thin, for me and Ramon, and thus I submit my list of things that I can do to cheer myself up:

1. Exercise. I quit the gym - hated the new yoga teacher - and went to look for tasty yoga delights in a studio near our flat. It didn't feel that good, the facility, so for now that's on hold. I'm ordering yoga DVDs to work on at home for the time being, and Ramon said he'd do it with me. We both wonder if the long hiatus helped bring my sadness on. I'm also getting out and running around a bit, and I felt great yesterday when I tried it for the first time. It's fun dodging around cranky lunch-breakers.

2. Get that darn flat sorted out. Honestly. I've heard that a clean, well-organized living space helps the brain and the mood, and the following things are killing that right off [NOTE: we don't live in squalor, and both of us are equally industrious or lazy as the mood takes us. But we're 50/50% on this, and we're both fairly indifferent to achieving victory in immaculate housekeeping]:

• dishes - reminds me of our hygiene habits at Luzader House at college. The pile actually starts to smell after a while
• floor - Ramon sweeps pretty often, but a good mopping? When did we last...hm
• bathroom - OK, this is Seattle. The mold thing is not my fault
• laundry - may this cup passeth from me
• filing - ditto. I bloody well shuffle papers for a living at work
• getting the gee-golly closets sorted out. Waahhh

3. Sex. Sex is good for the mood.

4. Dancing it out. Crank up some tasty, tasty musical chaos (Euro-synth-pop is especially good - I'm looking into Hasselhoff. Just kidding) and bounce around the flat for a bit. It does indeed help, though looking sexy is problematic when I have to keep hitching my lounging pants up my bum.

5. Preparing tasty, healthful meals. Well, THAT'S not happening until the backlog of dishes are either washed and put away or crushed to dust with a big, big mallet.

6. No more - and I can't stress this enough - NO MORE FRIED PORK SKINS. The ecstasy (Hey. Everybody has thrilling delights they're ashamed of, all RIGHT?) of munching is followed by the somatic agony of having ingested pure fried FAT - fat fried in fat - which is bound to get one down, as well as the waves of self-loathing that roll over me at having just eaten a snack that is both bad for me and filthy in the extreme.

7. Sunlight. Such a thing, dimly remembered, is now rising to the forefront of our minds here in the Northwest, and we would do well to soak it up instead of just complaining of how long we have to wait for it to GET here.

8. Music. I think I should get some of this screaming inside out on tape, so to speak, and maybe make a cool Euro-synth-pop song out of it. Someone could dance it out to it. Wouldn't that be rad? Geez, Cerise, we've got the gear, for the love of Kraftwerk...

OK, sweety-pantses, thanks for listening to the angsty whine of a maudlin 33-year-old. I'll let you know how this whole thing goes. And say a little prayer for the better half of me, won't you?

P.S. Part of the reason I can even talk about this is that I'm wearing my lucky fishnets today, and gosh DARN it, believe me when I say that nothing brightens a mood more than wearing a nice pair of fishnet stockings!