Hi Beth, Anxious...It's a word I had never really considered in my life before...I've never even really felt that much in the way of stress before. But in the last few months I do think I've become acquainted with stress...and in the last few weeks I do think I've come to know a bit of what it means to be anxious...
What makes me anxious these days? All the changes I have to work on at once...that's something...so too is the big, big shift in finances...working as a freelance writer has its historic ups and downs - and while things were fine just a month ago and look like they'll be fine again in January..December has sucked...mostly because a lot of the money I had set aside for holiday travel, holiday expenses, and the December drop in income - has gone toward picking up the cost of my W moving out - and of having to maintain a household on one income rather than two...
Add to that the anxious feeling that comes with looking at ghosts at night...the ghosts that come to me as memory and haunt me as my eyes refuse to close and my mind refuses to find a calm place to rest. There are ghosts here in my mother's house - ghosts in the absence of playing with my baby boy in the snow, as I had expected to, and the more damaging or damaged ghost of my wife searching through the snow for my wedding ring - after I had taken it off - and she had put it on and went outside to play with my S11...I had taken it off just after we arrived at my mother's home...and I found out about her affair...
There are happy ghosts that pierce my heart - stopping in to remind me of how nice it was to stop at a favorite cafe on a cold day like today, and sit with my W and talk about our plans for having a baby...and there is the ghost that I find within myself...that specter of the man I had hoped to become, and somehow that apparition still insists on dueling with me - as if to challenge my determination to begin anew...perhaps aware more than I care to admit, that I do not know or understand with calm clarity what it means to be, much less begin, anew...
My son and I were both feeling better today - he got over his cold with magical swiftness...while I woke with the head of a zombie...but just fought it out. We played soccer outside in the snow this afternoon, after our bout of last-minute Christmas shopping (no lines anywhere...talk about haunting)...and now we're just relaxing a bit at my mother's house.
Last night, my sister, her husband and their two kids came by my moms to say hi...and it was frightening to me to see my sister acting toward her husband in the same way my wife acted toward me...he was being kind and playful - she was snipping at him and correcting him and putting him down...and it seemed so unnecessary...I know they have their own issues at home...but I also recognized the signs of a real serious problem...the fixer in me had to be tamed...and so all I could do was mention to my sister that we can't fix our partners we can only repair ourselves...but she already seems far along the path toward becoming another WAW...
On the fixing front...I can see where I get it...just a day in my mother's house and I want to change her light bulbs, repair the leaky toilet (which I'll do tomorrow), add more insulation over the windows, and clean out some of the clutter (which I will not do). My mother also has a terrible cough - and both my sister and her husband asked me to tell her to go to the doctor because, according to them, she only listens to me. According to my sister, my mother will ignore their advice until I say the say thing and then tell them, "Well Carlos said that..." (only in Spanish)...so that's the role I've been raised to play...the fixer...and it's put an unfair onus on my back...which I am learning to set down without the attending guilt that used to seize me and make me strap that burden on tighter...so much tighter, for fear that letting go of the burden I would mean that I didn't love someone enough to carry it for them...and therein is my need for letting go...and therein is the hope I carry into the new year...
