Monday, October 15, 2012

October.

I feel that I ought to remind myself that I love days like today. Days when work is almost unnaturally smooth, when the kids are so self-sustaining that I can actually read a bit at times, when even my worst bus run is tolerable, when homework time is blessedly quiet and we suddenly start making bats out of construction paper, and that carries us through the rest of the evening, and then suddenly there's a bat garland in the art room and they all loved it.

And then I get off work and the air is cool and clean and clear, and the sky looks like a three hundred and sixty degree fairytale. It was beautiful.

Tomorrow Ian and I are going pumpkin picking, I think. I ought to do some planning for carvings tonight. Doctor Who will probably be involved, because I'm suddenly obsessed this fall, and I've dragged him down with me. Evidence? I drew this in my shower sometime last week:




A few days later, when I wasn't looking, he drew something else in my shower and then went home, leaving it for me to find. He drew this:



I laughed through the first ten or fifteen minutes of my shower, and responded (with slight spoilers, if you are a fan who hasn't watched all the Eleventh Doctor stuff).



In case you can't read my shower-crayon writing, that says "Would you like one of these souffles? They're killer."

Thursday, October 4, 2012

It's that kind of day.

Do you ever just...collapse on the kitchen floor, and start sobbing over things that happened years ago?






Right. Me either.

Forgiveness. Is that a thing?

I did a really stupid thing this morning, which probably in the long term, grand scheme of things wasn't a big deal, but for me it is so symbolic of my personal eff'ed-uppedness that I am very ashamed and I don't want to talk about it. And I sent Ian a text about it, and he, in an attempt to be kind and helpful, sent back (among sympathy and other things) reasons why this wasn't my fault. The same reasons I had come up with myself. But really, the bottom line was and is that it was my fault. Entirely. Yeah, things could have been different, could have been easier for me, or the other people involved could have made more of an effort, but they shouldn't have had to. I wasn't where I needed to be, doing what I needed to do. I was the irresponsible, lazy one. No excuse will change that.

While I was going on about this, Ian pointed out that I have a tendency to beat myself up. And while I guess that's true, I don't feel like I'm doing that right now--or at least, I don't feel like I'm doing it more than I deserve, which I guess is the issue.


I realized, not for the first time, that while I am pretty good at forgiving other people, I am really not good at forgiving myself. And that's pretty normal, I guess. But it still isn't healthy or good. I don't ever do it. There are some things, a lot of things, I think, that I sort of just let slide--I consider them to be an acceptable symptom of an issue that is "in progress," or whatever, I let them go, I move on. But then sometimes I do things that are much more difficult to let go of. Usually this involves breaking/losing something irreplaceable, doing something unfixable, and/or doing or failing to do something really stupid that would have taken little or no effort to do correctly, if only I would just be where I was supposed to be, doing what I was supposed to do.

So instead of dealing with this or forgiving myself or whatever, I obsess over it for a while, and then I push it away and forget and refuse to think about it until the next time. And today I realized--or remembered--that while I do a fair job of convincing myself (when it comes up at church or in conversation) that 'I have got that shame thing under control; that's not an issue for me,' I don't. In actuality, I have a denial complex and I am pretty good about temporarily forgetting things when I want to, and what looks like a clean slate is really a sheet thrown over this big ball of unresolved shame and anger that I carry around. Doing stupid things like I did this morning, or obsessing about having done them, brings back memories and more negativity about stupid things I did as a child, even, and spins in circles of why-am-I-such-an-idiot?


I don't write this as a pity party. I write this in hopes that I will remember it this time so that I can work on it and so that one of these days I can, I hope, find a solution.