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November 28, 2007 No No No 
What's that, you say? My comeuppence is here? Frances is no longer the angel-perfect child? Alas, Dear Readers; she is not the one throwing tantrums. I am. Last Thursday night, in fact, when she had gone to visit her father for an extra-long weekend together, and I saw the dirt and dead leaves and mudtrails from the stroller in the front hall, the table piled with paper, the coffee table covered in magazines and letters from the school, the dishes in the sink, the laundry piling up in the basket on the landing, the list of groceries on the fridge, Frances's birthday party pencilled in on the calendar, the necessity of assisting Santa Claus with his holiday purchases; and, in that fogged state that can only be brought on when one's child has been sick with a bad cough for a week which gets them up half a dozen times each night, and there is no one else to get up with her, or get her lunch while you take a nap, so that at 7:30 pm one is already longing for nothing but sleep; and one promised oneself to write 2000 words that evening, and work out, and possibly eat too--A large wall fell on my head. Normally, I run into the wall, and it knocks me flat on my ass. This time, the wall fell on me. It was taking nothing for granted. It was going to make sure it got my attention. Wicked Witch of the East style--SPLAT. No pint-sized heroine emerged to the raucous cheers of a gang of underfed munchkins, but there was, on this wall, a large neon sign blinking in capital letters way up near the top. It read, "HA HA HA." This was overly ambiguous, I felt. It required interpretation. Thus, I interpreted it to mean: "You will never again be able to do anything just because you want to." Hence, a tantrum: No - I don't want to, I don't want to. No - I don't want to , no, no. No - I don't want to, I don't want to. No, no, no, I don't want to. Oh no. Leave me...alone.* I wanted A DAY OFF. Does it seem like so much to ask? There is never A DAY OFF anymore. There are hours off, and those stolen from the margins. There is Thursday evening, and Friday evening, and Saturday until the afternoon. But an entire day? Sleep in, relax, no work that has to be done? No. And by Thursday, the chores and errands have piled up like ... well, like a large wall that has it in for you and is planning to flatten you like a sheet of tissue paper. Or maybe a kleenex, so you can blow your nose when you start to feel sorry for yourself. By Thursday, there are groceries. There is a week of meals that need to be made in advance, because cooking in the evenings after work just will not happen, and if I don't have something in the fridge that's ready for reheating, I'll eat chocolate for dinner every night. Not so good for the blood sugar, that. Then there is a week's worth of laundry to be done, beds to be changed, floors to be cleaned, more dishes to be washed. Bills to be paid, mail to be sorted, garbage and recycling to be taken out, a fridge to be cleared of produce that didn't get eaten before sprouting a civilization of its own. I don't want to be quiet. I don't want to be good. I don't want to do anything if you tell me I should. I won't listen to you. If you call, I won't come. All I want to do now... Is have a tantrum. That's what I call my "what I need to do to maintain custody of my child" list, and it is my top priority. Then there is the "what I need to do to maintain sanity for myself" list, which includes eating regular meals that do not consist entirely of differing proportions of sugar and fat, getting some regular exercise, and sleep. To this, add a novel. Add December, with both Frances's birthday and Yule/Christmas. Subtract sleep. SPLAT. Without the extras, this single-moming thing isn't so bad. Most of the time, I find myself wondering what I was so scared of, why I put this off for so long? It's like spreading warm icing on a cool cake. Then: subtract sleep, add December, add a novel. Now the icing's cold, the cake is warm, and the knife is scraping crumbs up into the icing so that the whole thing is a butchered, ugly mess. No one could eat this cake! No, no, no, I don't want to . I don't want to. No, no, no, I don't want to. No, no. This is not even counting all of the things that I chopped out of my life already: the magazine has not been touched in months because I can't do it. Scrapbooking now happens every other month or so (good thing I was caught up before I moved). No cable, no TV. No computer games. Have you noticed I don't comment on other people's blogs much anymore? I also have half a dozen actual paper letters to reply to. No movies. Life was stripped down to the basics: Keep custody of child, maintain sanity. From this, something can be subtracted without a meltdown (sleep). Or to this, something can be added without a meltdown (novel, December). Both at once? SPLAT. No, no, no, I don't want to . I don't want to. No, no, no, I don't want to. No, no. A day off. This idea presented itself to me in a golden, glowing halo, possibly wearing wings. A day off! Sleep in. Get up. Feed self and only self. Do the housework and errands, get all caught up. Then loll around. Just loll. Loll is such a lovely word, I think; so underused and unappreciated. Poor loll. We all need some more lolling. I thought of this at 7:45 pm, when I'd realized it had taken me an hour to write 800 words, and I owed myself another 1200, and I so badly wanted to go to sleep and just pretend that all this stuff that had to be done would be taken care of by someone else--the munchkins, maybe, or the pint-sized heroine, or even the yappy dog--that I could just go to sleep and wake up the next morning to a beautifully iced cake, instead of a crumby, lopsided mess. I felt pretty damned sorry for myself (never mind that the novel was self-imposed). Good thing I'd been flattened out into a tissue, because I needed one. I don't want to be quiet. I don't want to be good. And I won't cooperate if you tell me I should. I don't want to behave. I won't go to my room. Gonna rant, gonna rave Gonna throw a tantrum. Taaan-trum OK, more than one. I'm a wild child and I'm gonna make a scene. I'm a wild child let me show you what I mean: How dare the mud and leaves follow the stroller into the house? How dare a cold set up shop in my daughter's lungs for a week and wake her up all night? How dare it rain almost every day in October and November so that riding my bike to work is impossible and I have to fit exercise into my evenings? How dare the garbage can fill up so quickly? How dare the laundry machines be taken in the only thirty-minute free segment I have today? How dare Christmas be a month away? How dare all my spare weekends between now and Frances's party be full already? It's amazing how quickly this form of exhaustion can sweep downhill to rage, and then build. How dare life continue to make demands when I am barely functioning already? No, no, no, I don't want to. I don't want to. No, no, no, I don't want to. No, no. The Art of Saying No has been finely honed in the last few months. Handmade invitations to my daughter's birthday party? No. Handmade Christmas cards? A few, for a very few very special people. Presents for all my friends this year? No. The traditional full complement of baked goods? No--maybe three or four recipes, after my holiday vacation starts. Any handmade presents this year? No. Like that loss exercise I wrote about a week or two ago--it felt like I had written on slips of paper all of the things I do that make me feel like me. And, one at a time, I was adding them to a little bonfire: which one can I give up? Now which one can I give up? How deeply can I cut and still be me? We're down to the bone now; any further cuts will be limbs lost, not flesh. Like last night, when I looked in front of me at four glorious days free of childcare (in which I would miss Frances like a missing limb, but at least would have time to myself), and saw that almost every minute was already accounted for. I had four days off and they were full already! I had four days off and the to-do list was long enough that I probably wouldn't get all of it done! I was never, ever going to catch up. There was never ever going to be a time when I could just do something because I wanted to do it and not because I had to. No, no, no, I don't want to. I don't want to. No, no, no, I don't want to. No, no. All of the different problems and issues got rolled together into one big, sticky, snotty mess. By the end of it, each brick of perceived grievance--loneliness and exhaustion, and groceries and laundry I would forever have to do by myself, and mud and leaves in the front hall that were not going to clean themselves away, and dishes that persisted in piling up in the sink, and christmas presents that were not being constructed by industrious elves at the north pole, and a birthday party, and bills--goddammit! bills!, and who in hell invented the torture device of christmas cards? and why wasn't someone coming to relieve me of the burden of living my life? where was the person who was going to save me from the consequences of my own decisions?--added themselves to all the other bricks into a big mean wall in the sky. Instead of getting out of the way, like a sensible person, I shook my fist at it. That worked out well. Leave me alone. DON'T Leave me alone SPLAT. The world looks a bit different when you've been flattened into the dimensions of a tissue and are contemplating it from beneath a large wall. Maybe, I thought, maybe I ought to think of this as a logistical problem, instead of a mammoth injustice being perpetrated against me by faceless forces of evil (and dirt). Logistical problems tend to have solutions. Maybe, if I lie here quietly for a moment (not that I have much choice, with this wall on me) I can get myself to remember that nobody made me become a single mom, and I did this because I wanted to, because I thought it would be better; and so, if this is turning out to be pretty hard sometimes, it's up to me to find some way to make this easier. Maybe I can go for a long walk instead of my normal workout, clear my head and get outside; maybe I can change Frances's sheets next weekend; maybe I can stay in this weekend and get a grip on things here; and maybe I can stop banging my head on this next scene and write a different part of the novel instead. And lo: the wall did disintegrate, and I did manage to write the next 1200 words, and I did get a bit of housework done, although I still felt like a tissue. Well I'm gonna be quiet and I'm gonna be good and I might cooperate if you tell me I should I've got something to say and you never will guess if you ask the right way them I'm gonna say.... Some things don't change. For example: I stil think A DAY OFF sounds like a pretty great idea. And in about four weeks, I'm going to get one. ~~~~~ *Lyrics courtesy of Sandra Boyton's song "Tantrum" off of the Dog Train album. Posted by Andrea at November 28, 2007 10:15 AM under Decision 2007 , Me EMAIL this entry (comments fields are below this section) Comments Under that wall a tantrum seems reasonable. Get your day off...take it. Maybe sooner than 4 weeks. Julie Posted by: Julie Pippert at November 28, 2007 11:32 AM
We'll see--I'll see what that wall looks like next week. Posted by: Andrea
That's when I take a day off from my job. That's what sick days are for: getting out from under the fallen wall. (After all, if you've met the wall, it's only a small step to you getting physically ill and forced to take a sick day... why not do it a bit sooner and avoid the illness?) Posted by: cinnamon gurl at November 28, 2007 12:24 PM
Lady, I hear you. I have a spouse and I still feel this way sometimes. When my kids and I were sick for the whole month of July and it began to seem that I would never, ever be healthy again, my daughter boycotted sleeping. Which, of course, affected my sleeping. Over a three day period I slept maybe 8 hours. On the fourth day I was so tired and ragged and my daughter's screaming was so insoluble and so high-pitched that I came to this realization: I needed to go to jail. Prison would be PERFECT! People in prison don't have to do a damn thing except sit quietly, and wouldn't that be PERFECT? I invented this whole scenario in which I'd get arrested for speeding -- it would have to be fast enough to earn some time in jail, but not so fast that anyone would be injured... Finally I got some sleep. It wasn't even much -- maybe 7 consecutive hours. But I was fixed! So, so. If you can't get a whole day off, maybe you can just take one evening off, and go to bed early? Posted by: Jennifer at November 28, 2007 12:51 PM
Honestly, the best logistical solution I ever came up with was to hire a part-time housekeeper. It was one problem solved. I stubbornly refused this idea for a long time for a variety of well-justified reasons, but I found it allows me to be much more functional. Dishes magically clean themseves, and bed linens are mysteriously changed while I am at work! It may not be practical on your budget, but for those of us who can be stretched thin at times it can be priceless. (note: this is not advice... just a personal observation) Posted by: Sue at November 28, 2007 2:19 PM
I was going to suggest hiring a housekeeper, too, if you can afford it. I have a wall with shaky foundations right now and I fear it's just a matter of time before it collapses on me. I probably won't handle it as well since my usual MO is to either bury my head in the sand and ignore the collapse or to scream and rant and rave, which accomplishes exactly nothing. The wall is still collapsed except now people think I'm crazy. Posted by: Major Bedhead at November 28, 2007 4:45 PM
Believe me, there was plenty of ranting and raving at the time. Posted by: Andrea
I often feel the same way and I think I have less on my plate than you do. I hope you find a comfortable (and effective) way of coping. Posted by: Miche at November 28, 2007 6:56 PM
An occasional tantrum has been known to save my sanity. I hope that when your day off arrives, it will be golden and full of hugs and a big cup of tea. (((Andrea))) Posted by: Megin at November 29, 2007 10:46 AM
I hear ya. Last week, in my doctor's waiting room, I was totally irked because she DIDN'T make me wait an hour; it was something like 5 minutes. I was really looking forward to having nothing to do but read my book! Posted by: Mary Lynn at November 29, 2007 12:05 PM
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