Stressed: a cry for help?

This is most definitely a cry for help, a call for validation, a plea for comfort. What THIS IS MOST ABSOLUTELY NOT, is a call for advice or an invitation for criticism. This is literally me not feeling able to express what I am feeling effectively to the people around be and turning to strangers on the internet to feel a sense of community.

So here I go. What’s on my mind today leading me to stop all the lifeing and adulting I’m trying to appear good at, to write this.

Today started with a crisis, a family member thought they were dying. I woke up to pee at 4:30 am, trying to go to sleep again so I could wake for my 5:30 am, and here is this person with an odd pain, about to call all the emergency services and I’m lost even before I’ve found my witts. The family member decided exercise would fix it, told me not to worry about it, and was off to start the day. I’m mildly traumatized now laying in bed wondering how I will find the strength to deal with funeral planning, and learning to live without this family member.

I did not make the alarm, or the alarm after the alarm. What I did not miss was a phone call that should have been a whole lot of blessing but just came at an odd time. But the person offering the opportunity walks with GOD in their soul, because they helped me figure it out, and now I can say that blessing was well received, and in between panic and rage, I had a good moment to settle into being grateful that good people exist.

Then comes the chaos…my eldest child, whom I would love to say is the product of his environment and not my obvious epic parenting fail, proceeded to try his best to get under my skin. This is a regular occurrence, I’ve grown accustomed to the accusations of not being enough. the indignant insistence that my responses to his behaviors are somehow proof of my own incompetence at humanity and his various infractions against me being justified because nobody else will lift a finger, a note, or a pot spoon in my defense. And why should they? It is after all a problem of mine of my own making and such my yolk alone to suffer. NO?

All of this while making breakfast and the cup of tea I forgot to drink. I was making breakfast though, not because it was part of my routine but because my dad is staying with us. He’s on medication, recovering from a major illness. I think this experience, the hellish details you will probably be able to read about during my next mental breakdown, has been the most significant event of my life so far.

You see, my parents are the most solid and steadfast people in my life, my dad more than my mom, because until now he has always been there. Always present and willing to step in and help which has been a thing through all other storms in life has been a comfort. Hell, it has been one of the immutable truths of my existence, my daddy is that rock that stands against all things and prevails.

And he almost died. And there was nothing I could do about it.

He’s recovering, but if any part of that depends on me being even competent at anything is more responsibility than being a small business owner, one of the hoard of the unappreciated (Teacher), a woman, a mother, and a wife. Well maybe not being a mother, that’s huge, and while the one kid seems to be an alien or pod person, the others are pretty okay ish so I figure I’m holding my own in as much as anyone can hold their own in that arena.

So with the weight of all of that, and the taking of the middle child to school and hoping that today is the day she is the picture of perfection to the teacher to whom she has not been the picture of perfect studenthood, the potholes, the rasta men who seem to like to take ought with my driving choices despite there own daredevil antics on the road, on the way to the job that has me in a state of cognitive fatigue and all other aspects of adulting…there was this dude who decided to angle his car not quite into oncoming traffic to allow his kid to pass across, instead of taking the kid to the pedestrian crossing in front of the school. Decided to loudly and obnoxiously verbally abuse me for not taking his slight angle and almost outstretched arm as a red light and a soul-deep obligation to fit into his desires and convenience.

I am not at all regretful in saying that I stopped calling him some of the filthiest things my mind was able to come up with in the moment, which in hindsight wasn’t the best I could do given the span of my vocabulary. But I think what happened in my head is the most important.

I started berating myself for not handling stress well. It’s something I have heard said about me time and again, and I guess something I have internalized to be true. Even as I sit here and the lady inside my head grumbles that that man should have dropped his kid off to school like a good parent, instead of releasing the child into oncoming traffic should be flogged with a cassie bush, I am here contemplating how I could have taken it better.

W T F self.

Yh that’s all I can manage right now. Thanks.

Echo

She stood in the middle of the baren room, and she sighed. The sound tiredness and uncertainty echoed off the walls where once stood towers of books. A lifetimes worth of lifetimes gathered and lives through the word. It bounced off the empty cupboards. We used to argue about how she could never remember to close them.

She took a step into the hallway, and the pitter-patter of her tiny heel clad feet echoed off the cavernous maws that used to be our bedroom and those of our children. She took slow steps as she passed each one. Murmuring about checking to see if we had left anything behind. But I knew that behind her eyes, she was seeing 7 years worth of tears and laughter and arguments and making up.

She lingered at the door when she finished. Took one last look and released one more breath and closed the door on the echo.

We didn’t talk on the ride away. She didn’t glance back, just squared her shoulders as I drove her into our future.

When we arrived at our new home. Our own home. She bound up the steps and entered the house with the names of our kids on her lips. The chorus of “Yes mom” greeted her and she swept all 4 into her arms. When they broke the embrace it was my turn and she whispered in my ear. “This is our home, it will ever echo.”

It never would.

Papolie

The St John’s fish market. In the time before time, as far as a little girl knew.

We called him Papolie. It was simply what we called him, us, the young ones. The little ones. The third generation that had sprung from his loins. They didn’t bother to correct us, he was Papa Willie. Mr William Jacobs.

He was our great grandfather, he was old. Older than old, he was the beginning of time as far as we knew. Because there was no one older than he in our surroundings, and nobody told us about where or who had spawned him. But we were the fruit of the trees that had sprung from the trees he had planted. He was Papolie and we, the young ones had to respect him.

We knew him as the drunken man, who’s senility only let him float in and out of our reality. You see, there were days when he knew us, days when he would greet us warmly and robustly. Then there were days when he looked at my mother and saw Mem’ his wife, long gone to the here after before him. On those days we would here in real time how they interacted, how he spoke to her and how she would respond to him. We would get a sense of the women he had married. A strong woman, a determined woman, the kind of woman who tamed the world around her by the force of her will. The kind of woman who had tamed him in his prime. She was legend.

She was the mother of the old ones, the one who had raised and tamed and loved and whooped the leathery skinned juggernauts whom even our mighty parents dared not challenge. Let alone us? The children or the children of the day.

But those days were also the days when he let himself be taken, by the drink. And we were never sure, us children, if his delusions were just because he was old, and that was what old people did. Being from the time before time and all, or if they were the kind that the rum bought. We weren’t sure if the stories he told, heavily scented by rum were real. They were so fantastic.

Stories of great locomotives and village matters not for childish ears. But still ones that anyone worth their salt would want to hear. He spoke of his daughters and sons and their shenanigans. Them, the old ones, our parents’ parents could never do the things he said, not when we would face a tongue lashing then a real one if we ever dared. His stories could not have been truth, stories of ghosts and Jack-o-lantan , of Sukuna and Jables doing battle with this man in his youth, in the late of night in the time before electrical lights to guide his way home. Him and his donkey after a hard day in his fields. What seems like half a world away, a few villages over.

We knew it was pride in his eyes on his clear days when he looked at us though. He told us as much. He told us tales of the people we would become. He infused us with his hopes, and his dreams. All built on his understanding of the difference between then and now. He saw us with the opportunities hard won by the sweat of his brows, and praised in us the manners, and ingenuity he had sowed into the ones he had fathered directly.

He was Papolie, and a woman of 31 looks back at her 8 year old self and wishes she had listened more closely to his account of how things had been. Listen and heard about the late night adventures, about the legend of Mem, about the Old ones who had be born just after the beginning of time as I knew it. I wish I had taken to heart his hopes and understood that his prophesies came not from the bottom of a bottle, but from the knowledge of watching the three generations before me grow and evolve, watching then thrive, and become a foundation that if I chose to, I could build on.

I wonder what Papolie, Papa Willie, Mr. William Jacobs would say to the times I face. I wonder if he would think that his sweat had been well spent. I wonder if time had given him more than his 97 years if he would look about at his great family, or what’s left of it and still feel proud and hopeful. I wonder what he would think of me, and my little tribe. I think some days I miss Papolie, what little there is of him left in the memory of an 8 year old girl.

Amazing the things we remember. And a wonder why this specter of my youth would come to haunt me now. Do you have an old one? Did you know well enough to cherish them when you had the chance? What were they like? What did they teach you?

Things they won’t ever tell you

In response to A Good Woman’s – A Tuesday list of ten. Ten things I wish I figured out sooner.

1. There is nothing short of death you won’t live through.
2. Being overwhelmed does not mean I’m incompetent.
3. Getting angry is sometimes necessary.
4. Bring food and come naked is sometimes the only thing needed.
5. House work, work work and all other forms of exertion will still be there tomorrow.
6. Validation doesn’t come from outside. Most people can’t give it to you anyway, because they don’t have it themselves.
7. Children Cry. It’s what they do. Sometimes they just need to.
8. Treat myself. If I don’t think I’m worthy of reward, nobody else will either.
9. My kids are not the Beaver, I don’t need to live up to sister June.
10. It’s never as serious as it seems.

These are ten things no one ever tells you when you have a kid, or enter into a relationship.

Indeed many a night I have found myself in fetal position, eyes swollen retching agony onto this plain, simply because someone told me that I wasn’t mother enough, house wife enough, or woman enough. And I believed them.

I myself forgot that I was only human, working hard and hardly sleeping just to eek out a living that I could be comfortable with. There are still days I stop and wonder why I’m doing it. Because Lord knows I have little to show for nearly 10 years of thankless servitude to the man (who has sometimes been a woman) and his brother the side gig. Seeing mothering and lovering as some herculean task that needed some huge meticulous production. Not such a thing. These things are purely products of my individual situation and thus are dictate-able by me.

But see now I know, that feeling of tired satisfaction, those moments with the kids sleeping or giggling or playing despite it all, and of course those moments with the Chief when we just vibe, are the goal.

As we said in my Granny’s eulogy, life is made in the small moments. So those are what we strive for, find rapture in and hold dear. Everything else is just chaff, and the winds of time blow them away.

Rice Crispies

Rice crispie treats are yummy, and sweet. One would think any kid would go gaga for rice crispy treats. Not so with my little baby boy, who screams and yells at the very site of rice crispy treats but hides under the bed with a bag of the plain cereal munching away… thank god sound travels, and that babies don’t know that.