There must be something wrong. There’s bound to be. There is no other way to explain it. Otherwise I’d have to admit to myself that I’m a failure. A complete, utter, exhausted failure.
I have these breakouts every now and then. When the hormone levels rise and drown the voice of conscious reason, when I cry into my pillow at night and I have to resist the urge to shake my husband out of his sleep (how CAN he be sleeping so peacefully while I’m falling apart?!) and tell him how my life is ruined and it’s all his fault.
There must be something wrong.
I am a progressive human being and a free thinker. I read every spare moment I have. I write sometimes. I have a master degree and I want to go for a phd. I am a mother of a rebellious toddler and the wife of a more kind, loving, patient and supportive husband than I could ever hope for.
And yet, I have these doubts and fears that were so strong tonight, as I jumped out of my bed and crammed my glasses onto my nose, that they felt like physical pain in my chest, they made it hard for me to breathe, I felt as though I have a fever all over my body and an ache in every muscle I possess. That I have done nothing in life. That all this studying, all these flying colors, all these qualities that have been crammed into me since childhood I’ve grown to believe I possess them all were wrong, that they amount to nothing.
Im a bundle of nerves. I can barely talk to the man that used to make me smile with his mere presence without snapping at him for various reasons. I’m always running out of time and I can never ever get enough of it to do even a millionth part of all the things I want to do for ME. Not for the house, for the child, for the family. But for me alone.
This neverending race.
Nowadays you can Google anything and you can get random advice for about anything in the world with the click of a button. I read and I read and I try to cram into my head all this advice that if I do A, then B will follow, and this goes from relationships to childcare to healing your own childhood scars to losing weight to to to to…
I used to love having sex. I used to have sex any chance I got, on any surface, in any position. I used to love my body and know how to make it sing the song. I used to adore the sensation of pushing the buttons of other people’s bodies finding what makes them sing too. When my now husband came into the picture, I believe I’ve never felt such sexual attraction to anyone. We could have sex for hours. We couldn’t get enough of each other.
Now, we never even get to be around each other long enough to awaken even a whim of desire. The little sex we have is rushed and hushed, so rushed that I use lube because neither of us has the time or the energy for foreplay.
There must be something wrong.
Is it that we were just never really cut out for this life we lead? Our families consist of 2 digits: 2 adults, and as many kids as fit the equation. That’s it. Two people. To take care of the house bring money pay rent pay mortgage pay bills buy food talk walk laugh scheme have sex and most of all ensure that our kids turn into decent human beings. How do we ever hope to achieve all this? My husband spends 9 hours a day at his workplace. It consumes much of his thoughts and energy besides that too, because he runs his own thing. I spend 9 hours a day tending to my child. I cook, clean, shop, wash, over and over and repeat, repeat, repeat until I am so sick and tired of it all I just want to scream. That must be it. We were never meant to turn into this two-digit combo that must carry on its shoulders the whole puzzle of life. It is not bearable. It is not possible. Alienation is driving us further and further over the edge each day, as media pushes us to believe that’s how it’s meant to be and if we can’t make it happen then surely something is wrong with us. I meet up with other mothers of young children. Most are more or less as desperate as I am. They share the same stories. Children who are sometimes just so hard to handle. Partners who feel more and more unhappy. The killing routine that is killing their relationship as they stand by powerless to do anything about it, trapped in mortgage and bills there’s just no getting away from. The feeling that doing all you can is not nearly enough.
We all choose to put on the bright façade because if we do not, we have to simply go out on the streets and start howling in pain, It’s impossible that this was the grand design all along. We were not cut out for this alien existence. We were meant to cooperate, to feel as worthy human beings among equals, to contribute to the common good and to feel cared for in return. To lend a hand when somebody needs help and to be sure that a hand will be lent in return when we’re in a tight spot.
We turn on any media source and we instantly hear how we’re wrong, but if only we invest time and money in – repairing our home taking that language course finishing our education go shopping go to that mall – then everything will be cool. But time is something we cannot invest – it’s already being stretched thin by the mere demands of daily life. So we cut something out to make it happen. In the end it’s always those closest and dearest to us who suffer the consequences of our shifting our time from them – because we think they’d understand. They won’t mind. That’s why they’re close.
And then time goes by and we realize these were actually the people we were never supposed to let suffer for our lack of time. We should have cut out the nonsense instead.
And then there is the SELF. What the self wants, what the self needs – time and energy to process the mess of daily life, shelve it and number it and store it for future reference and every once in a while take out a dusty file and examine it, make sense of it. Because that is how we learn from our experiences and process it and avoid making the same mistakes over and over. But we never have time for this. All we do is file and file away, until re-thinking our experiences becomes this novel we dreamt of but that we never wrote. Evaluating experience is done in silence. It is done in thought, in being alone with oneself in peace and quiet, at least for a while. And this is the time that goes first, whenever something else needs to be done. Needs our attention MORE. As if anything can matter more than whether or not we make sense of our experiences as human beings, in order to let it go down in our common memory and in order to improve.
That’s it. The whole idea is simply NOT to improve, cram so many tasks on two people and there’s only so much one can take. When there is only a repetitive cycle of sameness one is lulled into the false sense of thinking there is nothing to examine, nothing to make sense of. And so it rolls, and rolls and rolls while we tell ourselves we are fine because we simply do not have the time to stop, sit, think and honor how wrong we actually are and how much work we need to do in order to climb out from there.
We need others to do that. We need their support and their trust, we need to know others fight the same battle and we need to know some who have won small victories so that we do not despair. We need accomplices and we need comrades in arms. We need to break this cycle of solitude and we need to come together and laugh in the face of all that is trying to divide us. We need to form communes, utopias, we need to give and not expect what we get in return because then we would get the most, and of the kind we most need. We need to know that others have been sick before us and have been healed, and it is possible.
We need hope. We need to start somewhere.
We need to sit and think and talk. Now.
I have these breakouts every now and then. When the hormone levels rise and drown the voice of conscious reason, when I cry into my pillow at night and I have to resist the urge to shake my husband out of his sleep (how CAN he be sleeping so peacefully while I’m falling apart?!) and tell him how my life is ruined and it’s all his fault.
There must be something wrong.
I am a progressive human being and a free thinker. I read every spare moment I have. I write sometimes. I have a master degree and I want to go for a phd. I am a mother of a rebellious toddler and the wife of a more kind, loving, patient and supportive husband than I could ever hope for.
And yet, I have these doubts and fears that were so strong tonight, as I jumped out of my bed and crammed my glasses onto my nose, that they felt like physical pain in my chest, they made it hard for me to breathe, I felt as though I have a fever all over my body and an ache in every muscle I possess. That I have done nothing in life. That all this studying, all these flying colors, all these qualities that have been crammed into me since childhood I’ve grown to believe I possess them all were wrong, that they amount to nothing.
Im a bundle of nerves. I can barely talk to the man that used to make me smile with his mere presence without snapping at him for various reasons. I’m always running out of time and I can never ever get enough of it to do even a millionth part of all the things I want to do for ME. Not for the house, for the child, for the family. But for me alone.
This neverending race.
Nowadays you can Google anything and you can get random advice for about anything in the world with the click of a button. I read and I read and I try to cram into my head all this advice that if I do A, then B will follow, and this goes from relationships to childcare to healing your own childhood scars to losing weight to to to to…
I used to love having sex. I used to have sex any chance I got, on any surface, in any position. I used to love my body and know how to make it sing the song. I used to adore the sensation of pushing the buttons of other people’s bodies finding what makes them sing too. When my now husband came into the picture, I believe I’ve never felt such sexual attraction to anyone. We could have sex for hours. We couldn’t get enough of each other.
Now, we never even get to be around each other long enough to awaken even a whim of desire. The little sex we have is rushed and hushed, so rushed that I use lube because neither of us has the time or the energy for foreplay.
There must be something wrong.
Is it that we were just never really cut out for this life we lead? Our families consist of 2 digits: 2 adults, and as many kids as fit the equation. That’s it. Two people. To take care of the house bring money pay rent pay mortgage pay bills buy food talk walk laugh scheme have sex and most of all ensure that our kids turn into decent human beings. How do we ever hope to achieve all this? My husband spends 9 hours a day at his workplace. It consumes much of his thoughts and energy besides that too, because he runs his own thing. I spend 9 hours a day tending to my child. I cook, clean, shop, wash, over and over and repeat, repeat, repeat until I am so sick and tired of it all I just want to scream. That must be it. We were never meant to turn into this two-digit combo that must carry on its shoulders the whole puzzle of life. It is not bearable. It is not possible. Alienation is driving us further and further over the edge each day, as media pushes us to believe that’s how it’s meant to be and if we can’t make it happen then surely something is wrong with us. I meet up with other mothers of young children. Most are more or less as desperate as I am. They share the same stories. Children who are sometimes just so hard to handle. Partners who feel more and more unhappy. The killing routine that is killing their relationship as they stand by powerless to do anything about it, trapped in mortgage and bills there’s just no getting away from. The feeling that doing all you can is not nearly enough.
We all choose to put on the bright façade because if we do not, we have to simply go out on the streets and start howling in pain, It’s impossible that this was the grand design all along. We were not cut out for this alien existence. We were meant to cooperate, to feel as worthy human beings among equals, to contribute to the common good and to feel cared for in return. To lend a hand when somebody needs help and to be sure that a hand will be lent in return when we’re in a tight spot.
We turn on any media source and we instantly hear how we’re wrong, but if only we invest time and money in – repairing our home taking that language course finishing our education go shopping go to that mall – then everything will be cool. But time is something we cannot invest – it’s already being stretched thin by the mere demands of daily life. So we cut something out to make it happen. In the end it’s always those closest and dearest to us who suffer the consequences of our shifting our time from them – because we think they’d understand. They won’t mind. That’s why they’re close.
And then time goes by and we realize these were actually the people we were never supposed to let suffer for our lack of time. We should have cut out the nonsense instead.
And then there is the SELF. What the self wants, what the self needs – time and energy to process the mess of daily life, shelve it and number it and store it for future reference and every once in a while take out a dusty file and examine it, make sense of it. Because that is how we learn from our experiences and process it and avoid making the same mistakes over and over. But we never have time for this. All we do is file and file away, until re-thinking our experiences becomes this novel we dreamt of but that we never wrote. Evaluating experience is done in silence. It is done in thought, in being alone with oneself in peace and quiet, at least for a while. And this is the time that goes first, whenever something else needs to be done. Needs our attention MORE. As if anything can matter more than whether or not we make sense of our experiences as human beings, in order to let it go down in our common memory and in order to improve.
That’s it. The whole idea is simply NOT to improve, cram so many tasks on two people and there’s only so much one can take. When there is only a repetitive cycle of sameness one is lulled into the false sense of thinking there is nothing to examine, nothing to make sense of. And so it rolls, and rolls and rolls while we tell ourselves we are fine because we simply do not have the time to stop, sit, think and honor how wrong we actually are and how much work we need to do in order to climb out from there.
We need others to do that. We need their support and their trust, we need to know others fight the same battle and we need to know some who have won small victories so that we do not despair. We need accomplices and we need comrades in arms. We need to break this cycle of solitude and we need to come together and laugh in the face of all that is trying to divide us. We need to form communes, utopias, we need to give and not expect what we get in return because then we would get the most, and of the kind we most need. We need to know that others have been sick before us and have been healed, and it is possible.
We need hope. We need to start somewhere.
We need to sit and think and talk. Now.