Thursday, August 22, 2013

Crazy Cat Lady

I once dated a woman I met on the psych ward. (In hindsight, this was a bad idea.) Then I dated her again. (Don't look at me like that.) There followed, after breakup number two, a period of dry years. (In more sense than one.) 
Then I fell swimmingly, dizzyingly, head-over-heels-over-head-over-heels in capital-L Love with this amazing girl, only to have it set off a host of abandonment issues that not only broke us up, but created a rift between us so wide we can't scream across it and won't ever try.

2 years after that, I crawled into bed with someone I never should have slept with, ever in a million years. And that has been the extent of my love life, save the boyfriend I had for about 3 months during my senior year of high school and a date sprinkled here and there like stray confetti.

Why am I telling you this? Because.

I'm at "that age" -- you know, the one where 99.9% of the women around me are pregnant and I'm buying more toys for the cat. Before that, I was at the age where 99.9% of the women around me were getting married, and I was sharing powdered donuts with my pet ferret. But I didn't mind the marrying as much as I mind the babies.

And I mind the babies because I'm jealous.

It's true. It's horribly, awfully true. It's also true that I never wanted children before I hit, oh, about 25, and that I never believed in such a thing as childbearing as a biological imperative up to that point. And maybe for some women it isn't. Good for them. Because all I really know is that my brain has been screaming for a baby for the past three years, and I can't shut it up.

It sounds vaguely ridiculous: me, a mother? Me? Forfeiting sleep and changing diapers and bandaging ouchies and chasing a little person everywhere? Ha! Saying the words, "I want a baby" out loud makes me feel kind of stupid, really. 

The first thing my folks say is, "Oh, but you're so young!" but even they're adopting again -- an infant this time, not a teenager who shows up at the door hungry, like a stray cat. They're getting a baby. My little sister has babies. My little cousins have babies. My friends have babies. I have a cat.

Also, I have no prospects for babies. Not even some nice girl to consider settling down and adopting with. Not even a fourth of the financial security I'd need to go it on my own, sans welfare. Also, I have a lease that prohibits the adopting of more cats! I CAN'T EVEN GET ANOTHER CAT!

I'm going insane. Wacky. Cuckoo. Fruit crackers. I've just begun to come to grips with the reality that perhaps I was meant to be single -- damn those abandonment issues -- and now I'm looking down the barrel at coming to grips with not having the opportunity to be a parent. Not even a single parent, because I am eternally impoverished.

I know, I know: I'm so young. Chronologically. My body is much, much older than 28. I can't shake the feeling that I don't have as long to do these kinds of major life things as other people do. Maybe that's just trauma speaking -- I know by now that survivors of chronic childhood abuse such as myself often exhibit a foreshortened sense of the future. Somehow we expect to die young. (And given the lasting toll of chronic stress on the body and brain, maybe we're onto something.) But then I have this disability too, and … sigh. I don't know. I just know that I feel like I have to hurry. Which doesn't help the general sense I've had lately that life is passing me by and I can't do anything but watch it go.  Which is where half of my stress comes from in the first place: hurry up; fit it in; there it goes. It's a vicious cycle.

Always the bridesmaid, never the bride. Always the auntie, never the mother.

(How do I be happy with now? How do I find the patience? Some serenity, some 'Que sera, sera?' Someone? Anyone? I know I need to slow down, stop taking life in huge gulps of anxiety. I just don't know how.)

Sigh.

I could use my mommy right about now.


So. Many. Frustrations.

Older childless friends? Older childless gay friends? Older, childless, gay, disabled friends? Um ... halp? 

Tuesday, August 13, 2013

Penned

Lately I've been suffering from a sense of pervasive, um, ick: I just don't feel like doing anything. I wake up. I eat. I go back to sleep. Repeat ad nauseam. It's like ever since I came home from Bradford Woods, and from seeing my sister and niece and nephew, everything is so boring. I have a renewed sense of being trapped. Caged. Stifled. Curtailed. Penned up and pent up.

BW didn't fit for me for a lot of reasons -- chief among them hunger, exhaustion, and being surrounded by people about 10 years younger than I am: I discovered, at BW, that there is a huge difference in outlook and maturity between 19 and 28 -- but I did do a lot of new things. A lot of different things. I slept on a beach. I relived my adolescence by invading Stake n' Shake at midnight on a Saturday to inhale French fries smothered in cheese sauce. I learned about Down Syndrome via the total-immersion method. I heard a member of an American Indian tribe give a prayer in a language I never even knew existed.

At my sister's place, I watched a Monty Python movie adapted into an opera and performed live at the London Philharmonic. I tried kung-pao for the first time. My 3 year old niece told me she loved me and melted my heart into a puddle. For 3 weeks, there was something new, something different, every day, and I ate it up: even before I left I'd been feeling caged in a town that's not big enough to hold me anymore, with no job and no money to move to where I might more easily get one: someplace with more lights, more people, and (dear holy God) a bus system. Think of the novelty: me, going where I want when I want instead of practically begging to be taken to Wal-Mart so I can get out of Lock Haven for 10 minutes every 3 or so months. And it's not that I don't love this town; it's that I can't readily leave it. I'm plunked down in this one valley between the mountains and the Susquehanna, and I know I can't go anywhere else unless someone takes me. It's maddening. It drives me to apathy: Why get up when there's nothing new to do? What's the point?

I've had to start being strict with myself again. Anti-blob rules: 1. You must go outside for at least 30 minutes every day, even if it's raining or hailing or cold enough to freeze your tits or hot enough to melt your face off. 2. You must engage in at least one meaningful exchange with another human being. 3. You cannot wear the same thing 3 days in a row. Do the damn laundry .... and other things along the same vein. Otherwise I'm afraid I'll let my chronic depression slip in through a crack in my defenses and lay me out flat.

So I've been out photo roaming with my new camera. I forced myself to go to a free concert on the riverfront and found that once I was there, I actually enjoyed myself (DO NOT ISOLATE; DO NOT ISOLATE!) Day after tomorrow, I have a coffee-and-books date with a friend. I've joined a group of lovely fellow gamer geeks who are going to start meeting at LHU to play Dungeons and Dragons. I've started foraging, with the intent of learning to make my own herbal remedies and sachets and soaps. (You should see the amount of stuff I canned in olive oil, steeped in whiskey, bundled, froze, pressed and/or tied up to dry today alone, and today was the first day!) I'm devouring books at roughly a thousand pages per millisecond, on all kinds of subjects I know nothing about, just because I get a thrill from learning: the human genome, Nature vs. Nurture (and why it's a false dichotomy), how the brain creates the mind,  early Christianity, early, early, early Christianity, Gnosticism, Jewish and Christian mysticism, saints, deities, pantheons, and on and on and on. (For instance, I'm reading my way through Plato's, The Trial and Death of Socrates, and have come to the conclusion that good old Socrates was quite full of himself.)

I'm trying to be happy. I'm wrestling with my inner naysayer to find inner peace. I keep asking myself why I'm such a malcontent, why I always need more! new! different! to be truly in my element, but I haven't figured it out yet. I remind myself of my great-aunt Carolyn, who was such a wanderer that she built a new house and moved roughly every 2 years just to have something different to look at(!) Here? Same 4 walls, every single day.

You know, sometimes I think I'll never really settle. I can see myself walking around with my feathers ruffled thinking peevish, penned-up thoughts till I'm old and gray. I really don't want that to be who I am ... but what if it is?