31 December 2024

Crescent City beach, November 2024. Ironically, on my daughter’s twentieth birthday.

Long, strange trip

This has been the fourth holiday season in which I have not been with my daughter. I left her father’s house in September of ‘21, so it’s three years gone but four Decembers missed.

I don’t really feel anything particular about it. It is a sad situation, but I’m not feeling the sadness. There are times that my equilibrium gets upset enough by sudden new developments that I’ll be distressed or go into a pretty bad funk for a bit, but overall it’s just… dull. Almost like being on Lexapro — and I’ve done that before — except I’m not medicated.

I’m just tired of feeling things. They’re usually bad things: anger, anxiety, sadness, grief (so much grief, in twenty-five years!), jealousy, envy (not the same thing), betrayal, loneliness. I go seeking happy feelings but they run away from me. I am not sure what more I’m supposed to do. So I don’t. Shut it all down.

It’s not just about avoidance. I also have to hold myself together, because at this point in my life people only want me around for what I can do for them. If I suddenly became unable to do anything, I would be in very big trouble. If I incapacitate myself trying to “work through feelings,” I’ll be fucked. So as long as I can actually function this way, it is better than not functioning.

But I’m doing better than it sounds. I went from walking on eggshells around my angry, alcoholic father at the beginning of the year to living literally next door to one of my favorite authors at the end. I’ve met some interesting people and done some amazing things, some of which I haven’t even mentioned here because Reasons. If you’d told me five years ago that I’d be doing these things, I’d have said you were on meth. I’m still not a hundred percent sure that any of this is actually happening. But it’s nice that it (apparently) is, because that little bit of wonder is probably keeping me from slipping into the abyss. I’ll take it.

I also should probably stop saying I’ll “never” do things. I never wanted to live in California. Well, ha-ha on me, I guess. Or, maybe I should say “I’ll never be happy again” and that would sort me out?

Nah. Not risking it. Another feature of the way fate seems to work is that we are not allowed a cheat code. Oh well.

Some unwelcome drama

As pertains to my weekly odd job, the nonprofit I’m doing this for is going to move to Nevada at some point in the near future. They need someone to do some logistical work here that they will not be able to do themselves anymore but still need to have done here to contribute to the overall wellbeing of their organization and the performance of its basic purpose. It just so happens this work also benefits two households on my end (well, if you count L and me as two households in the same building, actually three households), humans and dogs inclusive, AND is my one regular source of income right now, because Neighbor pays me to do this so he won’t have to.

Nonprofit Lady has been concerned about this because I’m the weakest link. If I get sick or hurt, there will be no one to do the job on this end, she thinks. So we’ve been discussing what can be done about that because while I might be in the best health out of these three households, I’m not immortal nor invulnerable. L has a weight limit for lifting because she has so much bone and joint damage, and Neighbor physically cannot drag himself out of bed that early in the morning; having crashed and burned trying to do graveyard-shift work to a degree I wouldn’t have suffered in my twenties, and he’s thirteen years older than me, I can relate. After mulling the problem over, I finally figured out that we could do the job over two days instead of one if I was out for a week, and outlined to Neighbor how he could do it without having to get up at 4am like I’ve been having to do. Neighbor was amenable. I felt like I’d won the Nobel Prize.

Then I went back yesterday to do the job again and Nonprofit Lady was nonplussed. She seemed to like my backup idea, but yesterday was the first she’d heard of it, considering (1) Saturday or Sunday was the first I’d come up with the idea and (2) therefore she and Neighbor had already been in discussions separately. To make a long story short, Neighbor was also short… with Nonprofit Lady, basically saying, “L and I are writers. [This nonprofit work] is not our whole life.” He also said something about not having $800 per month to spare (he had suggested and was paying $200 a week to me, which we both agreed was a big savings over what he would be spending in his weekly budget otherwise, since I was basically freeing up twelve hours out of his day and he earns $100 an hour for one-on-one writing instruction, when he can get the students).

I didn’t say as much to Nonprofit Lady, but those two remarks pissed me off, for two reasons.

One, I haven’t been able to do serious work as a writer or as an artist, and some of that is my ADHD or whatever the fuck it is, but a LOT of it has been other people not valuing my time because they wanted me to do scut-work for them for little or nothing, and that has taken up so much of my life. My definition of scut-work for our purposes here being “lots of physical labor or working for long hours for little to no money.” Basically the same story any creative woman has to tell, particularly if she’s had kids. Neighbor as a man has never faced that sort of nonsense and his mother, unlike my fucking parents, always supported his creative endeavors. I WON FUCKING RIBBONS for my art. I had my parents INTERRUPTING MY ART HOMEWORK when I was in high school because I was supposed to participate in whatever argument they were in with my brother at the time; NEITHER of them ever networked for me to find more portrait work and both had full-time jobs with co-workers, ZERO effort whatsoever to encourage me in areas where I had actual talent. That is still true today, in fact; any time that I was writing on my laptop or got out my drawing supplies when I was staying with him, my dad thought I was just screwing around. When I was there three years ago, I was drawing this, for the record:

And at the time, I was getting support payments from my daughter’s father, who had offered them monthly for a year after I left. I was in the perfect situation to get established as a portrait artist while not having to have a job to cover the few bills I had. I left my dad’s house that first time less because he “expected [me] to work” and more because he couldn’t see that I was working.

It’s always going to be like that. It’s never going to change. He’s seventy-three. He was “a hardass Navy chief” for less than a third of his fucking life but boy, he trots that out as an excuse anyway. I’m estranged from him for a reason. And neither of my other parents (mother and bonus mom) were any better. Mom basically was mentally checked out of my life. Bonus Mom was almost as much a hardass as my father was, and she probably still is. What I wanted and what I could do didn’t matter one fucking whit, and they still don’t today. Even Matt (my daughter’s father) was all about buying me the fucking art supplies and then getting weird when I would actually start using them. When I had time to use them, or space, or anything. And of course he had no control over whether my daughter needed me. That just comes with the motherhood package. So I was buried. As most of us creative women are.

But a man wants to be creative and everyone rolls out the carpet for him and pays him millions to, say, tape a fucking banana to a fucking wall. Even a pro-feminist man like Neighbor doesn’t quite grok that, I’m afraid. So I thought, Yeah, you’re a writer. I could have been a fucking writer. If it wasn’t people abandoning me because they didn’t like what I wrote, it was me not having time to cultivate my ability because I HAD FIFTY BILLION OTHER THINGS TO DO.

The other thing that pissed me off was the “I don’t have $800.” I wasn’t the one who asked for the $200 a week. That was all him. I’d have been happy with $100 a week, especially as he covers the gas to get back and forth. I’m not going to tell him that now, of course. I might have done in another few weeks if things had continued to go well (they probably will continue, I’m just speaking in hypotheticals), but now I’m not gonna do it. Sorry, my dude. You stuck, I’m afraid. If he speaks up and says, “listen, I need to cut this back,” that’ll be one thing but I am not offering.

The whole thing made me wonder how I come up in conversation when he and L discuss the general situation amongst themselves. Hope I never get that question answered. I’m trying very hard not to borrow trouble here. And the interesting thing is that when I got to his house yesterday evening, he asked some questions that made me think he was fishing to see what Nonprofit Lady had told me. I played dumb. I need to think about this some more.

I’ve been around him enough to know that while he’s not a violent man and does not seem abusive either, he’s a Sagittarius. If he’s the quietest one I’ve ever known, he still has a touch of hoof-in-mouth disease. (No, I do not believe astrology is a science. That said, I’ve noticed patterns.) At the time Nonprofit Lady and he had that conversation, he and L had been busting their butts putting together a presentation they were going to do today (at the time I am writing this, it’s all done) and, well, I already know he really doesn’t like deviations from his usual daily routine. So he was stressed out, and Nonprofit Lady is a bit high-strung. I can guess what happened. I have also seen many signs that he seems to like and respect me as a person. Those factors and not wanting to wind up homeless were the only reasons I didn’t go off on him. I don’t really think I would have found myself kicked out over that, but I don’t like even thinking I’m at risk of it. That is NOT why I came here. I came here to start over on a better footing than my own flesh and blood was willing to give me. Pissing off my hosts is no way to get there.

But if I’d had any reason to believe he really was being a dick and not just losing his temper from being stressed out, yeah. I’d have probably risked it, because sometimes I am just not my own best friend. Glad I didn’t have to test that.

It may be tempting here to point out to me that people losing their tempers from being stressed out Is Not Normal and Is Abusive. But I’m not talking about screaming and throwing things around and hitting people. I’m talking about one’s resistance to impulsive speech being lower than usual. Yes, that’s normal. Part of the reason our society’s so fucked up is we can’t let ourselves be human, feel things, and make mistakes anymore. Doesn’t mean I appreciate what he apparently said, but I don’t think he was being mean-spirited towards me about it. Though if I ever find out otherwise, things are gonna get interesting.

And now, in completely unrelated news

[looks around, whistles, kicks a can]

Oh, hey. If you happen to have a spare tenner or so after the holidays that you did not spend on New Year’s booze? Deep Green Resistance has an ongoing fundraiser and really needs your help. I’m not actually a member. I’m thinking about it, and I need to finally make myself sit down and read the whole book, said reading being a condition of membership; up ‘til now I’ve only skipped around in it. But I definitely endorse what they’re about. I will probably, in fact, talk more about that soon. See also “I lose friends because they don’t like what I write.”

But meanwhile, they are basically coping with a skeleton staff, way too many jobs to do, and not enough hands to do them. Having funds available to pay people for the work would be a huge help. (Disclaimer: I am not employed by them. This is completely not about me. But I know their executive director and I will tell you what, that woman is busier than a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest. Halp?)

—

Mmkay. I need supper. ‘Later.