It’s been a while

Yeah, it’s been a minute and I could give 10000000000.0 excuses as to why. Prime among them being imposter syndrome, a touch of depression, and the mounting changes that covid has visited on us all. I could continue to use those as a shield between me and the yearning to clickity clack my form of catharsis into the universe.

I could say that I started to die by my own lofty expectations of who and what I wanted to be and what I wanted to present of myself to the world. I could tell you that life has become work, work and more work. Regale you with excerpts from my inner monologue, and all the crap that has encompasses that hellscape but I won’t. He he.

And all those parts of the telling would be true but they really are just bits, they really are just symptoms of a disease that I myself have yet to name. A disease that I believe is coming to its end phase because I am fed up of hiding, dulling myself, saying less (an insipid term in this modern vernacular if you ask me), and just not being gloriously randomly me.

I mean I’ve grown so the me I present now isn’t the me I was when I first started this, I am now stronger in my conviction to be who I am and to keep learning who that is as life keeps knocking me keel over kettle (Is that the phrase? No? It feels right so its the one). So here we are, at the start of another one of our conversations. I have myself a glass of wine and an urge to engage.

Sadly all I have right now that I wanna put out there is work-related. I’ve done the remote learning thing, the google classroom thing and while it has been a challenge I feel all the better for it. Why? Why you ask? Well because it’s made life easier, more organized for my messy self, and offered me a level of security against a lot of the issues that arise when one is steeped in the business of teenage academia. What’s crazy is the amount of bad press associated with it and the fact that it all seems to be levered against the teaching service. Like really Broonhilda, really? We aren’t taking pot shots at internet providers, politicians, ourselves and/or the tiktok generation? Have you seen some of the content on tiktok? Send those suckers to film school please and thank you, Hollywood, Bollywood, and all the woods need them. The lack of equity in the cussing out has to be the most frustrating as well as the most amusing part of all of it. Anywho…

I’ve also found that I’ve expanded my social circle to a point where at times it feels uncomfortably large, which is fine because I now know it’s perfectly okay to not engage when my people meter is full. I also now fully acknowledge that opinions are like assholes, essential for some things but often full of shit, so really not to be taken too seriously. I’m rambling again, meandering though words because it feels right, abling on lyrically, not precisely sure where all this goes.

I wanna be random again, I think, no more of this structured non-sense. None of this to be a success in the blogging world BS, I don’t need that, this is my journal, my exposition on everything and nothing and anything. A means of escape and release and maybe even comradery where it presents itself.

It does not at this point feel like work like it did before, and so I am here and comfortable and letting the words flow from my fingers and fall from my lips in ways that for far too long I have refused to let them because I honestly don’t know. And who gives a crap it’s the past.

Yeah, that’s it, I’m done for the day. Bye.

With Love

Listening to Road Noise…where to fit?

Wow it’s been a while since I wrote one of these…been a very long time since I just let my fingers amble across my keyboard, letting thoughts pour out where they may.

I know why I haven’t been doing it. You see, somewhere in recent months I lost my confidence. No…that’s not precisely it. I’m not sure how to phrase it exactly, except to say I wasn’t sure that anything I had to say would fit into the rhetoric that people wanted to hear, wanted to read.

I figure in the worrying, I kind of lost myself. I was trying to fit in, and truth is I’m not sure who I was trying to fit in with. When I was younger fitting in was never an issue, there was always a rag tag band of misfits ready to take me in. We were out of the box and we liked it.

But now everybody has thrown away the damn box, everybody is a rebel in this boxless, structureless, social system filled with boxes to check so you can belong to some group of rebels, and I’m confused. I think I tempered into someone more radical but also more conventional than my contemporaries. -_- I know right?

I’m more reserved than the reserved people say they ought to be, but more out there than the out there people think they are. Experiencing and doing things they celebrate but without the need to extrovert it. You know? No? OK.

And a child walks in and starts talking and I completely lose my trend of thought. Errrrrrrr.

At the end of the day I find myself a fairly objective observer outside every group I come across, not feeling particularly inclined to join anyone because some part of the fundamental group rebellion doesn’t appeal to me, or because my soul just doesn’t take and they set off my jibbering rage monkey. Don’t judge me, you have one too.

My granny used to say something to the tune of “If you’re at odds with everyone else, then everyone else can’t be the problem.” so maybe it is me. Maybe it is me that doesn’t fit and has concocted for myself a moral, ethical and general personality framework that just doesn’t fit anywhere. And I do mean anywhere, not at home, not at work, not on the Facebook or the Twitter, not in person and certainly not in print.

So what to do? I can’t dump social media, that’s how I stave off loneliness, and there is my game with all the croppies. I can’t abandon my family, they live where my stuff is. I can’t quit my job, I’m kind of addicted to food, and I can’t stop writing, because it’s most of what I think about these days, even though I’m not doing a whole lot of it. So… blend in? Fake it, til I make it?

When this first started I used to be pretty good at blending in. You know? Just smiling and nodding, or giving the right non-committal sound at the right moment to make it by. Maybe even participate in the conversation just enough to satisfy and not bring on the revulsion of folks faced with an outsider.

Unfortunately, it’s not enough for me anymore. I want to be a part, I want to feel…not so alien. I want to feel included in something, but my person suit has grown too small and people are beginning to see inside. I’m not sure they’ll like it, and I’m not sure I care.

Any advice for a poor lonely sinner? I know the thought isn’t completely complete but another kid just walked in and there isn’t the slightest chance of getting back on track…sigh…the mommy life.

I really just want to pee alone…

It seems like every parenting blog I’ve read in the last few months is either folks crying about how little sleep they get, and poking fun at mothering, or throwing shade at the people who can’t sleep and have stuff to poke fun at. Guys, the trick to this parenting thing, is solidarity. It’s us against the small people, and while the specifics may vary the fundamental thing is that we are the parents and them to kids.

It was just this thought, or at least one of the thoughts, that occurred to me while I tried to pee in peace, while someone shouted at me through the bathroom door.

It’s actually a victory that they now stay on the other side of the door. Took a lot of threatening and a few hours of punishment, but it’s worth it to be the only on in the room when the event occurs.

But the peeing, at least, was not the prompt for my revelation. It was the topic of the ongoing debate that began just before nature called: the issue of Logan’s cell phone privileges. A cell phone, I feel obligated to add, which goes against one of these rules things I mentioned.

You see we the council of the tribe feel that children of a certain age, given the societal depravity, should have only a certain amount, if any access to things like the internet and communication devices. Further that theses devices be under strict parental controls.

The elders, i.e. grandparents, specifically one grandparent who shall remain nameless, did not agree, and of their own volition gifted an 11 year old with all access to everything. Thanks for that. Said child, knowing the stance of the aforementioned parents.i.e. arbiters of his upbringing, chose to not bother with the fact that having the thing in the first place was a breach of law, but that his privacy as it applies to that thing is something I as his mother should respect.

The first thing that occurred to me is that when I was 14, my mother would not let me be alone with a landline. Insisting that “if the conversation is one I’m not supposed to hear then it’s one you should not be having”. In the 90’s! In the Caribbean!! Let alone now in the age of sexting, meme porn and pay to play gaming.

My kid had used said device to:

• Get a girlfriend, apparently worthy of discarding rules like bedtimes and study time for. Who apparently, despite being only a few months older has parental approval in requesting a more ‘physical relationship’. Like really? I mean physical at 12? Aren’t you supposed to be still obsessed with Frozen?
• Acquiring music that is way over his age range, complete with profanity and lyrics that would have Susan B. Anthony rolling in her grave.
• And setting up excursions which have had him go missing for hours at a time while in said grandparents care.

Again elder/financier this is doesn’t seem like a plan that was well thought out.

It also occurred in those moments, as he asserted how it’s his business and I really ought not to be bothered, that I as a child would not have dared to defy my parents by accepting such a gift or even to request my privacy from them for fear of decapitation by both words and the force of a slap. Come to think of it, they had bathroom time, bedroom time, kitchen time, hell even riding in the car time all to themselves, as it was made clear that they were not to be bothered.

Does it mean that maybe I should revise this new constructivist/democratic approach to conflict resolution?

As he told me the girl was a good person somewhere on the inside, I remembered that: My parents would simply have taken the thing, and punished me to death and given their parents a good chuck of their minds.

The epiphany hit me, really hit me, like the feeling that comes after you’ve been holding it a really long time and get to the throne in a nick of time. That I was listening to the argument of someone who had discarded the right to any kind of privacy at all due to his wrongdoing, as I was deprived of mine. I think that I should be entitled, with kids at that age and a husband somewhere in the vicinity, the right to pee alone.

Indeed it occurs to me that I’ve instilled a sense of entitlement in my kid. The evidence being that he is even willing to make this argument at all, the fact that his is arguing for that matter. More than that, I was alone in the realization, and would be relatively alone in the solution.

It is truly depressing to come to these conclusions while trying to pee. I know I’m not the only one for whom potty time is time to contemplate, or read, or just not think.

So for a resolution, the infractions must be paid. In a way that is both memorable, a deterrent to further transgression and not necessarily cruel and unusual. What do you suggest? The device will be cleaned and since the Chief and I are at a stalemate when it comes to exile, is currently in closet limbo, and the kid, well the kid is getting used to the idea of a Momtatorship for the near future anyhow, with the first decree being that me and the commode are to be left alone. Period. Unless someone needs CPR or something. Punishment pending review, and possible addition to the conditions of punishment. Would you add anything?

What, fellow Moms and Dads, do you think of this situation? Am I too free with the autonomy stuff? What would you have done? Does anyone else have these problems with their kids? Or should I just retire and leave the Chief to run the show? Is peeing alone a privilege we give up when we have kids, or is it a right? Is peeing alone part of the Mom-na carta? Is there a Mom-na carta? Should there be?

I wanna hear from you, Please and Thank you.