The boy is down early tonight. He had a hard time getting to sleep last night, convinced there was a centipede in his room. Or a spider. Or whatever. After the third time he got up, I sent him to my bed and said I’d be in soon. He sacked out in there, diagonally across the bed but primarily on my side, so I had to squeeze in the other side in the dark. He’s a bed hog and a cover hog, that boy, which is bad enough, but then he rolled over and socked me in the face with his little fist as he did so. Another time he sat bolt upright, not even really awake, and I snuggled up against him and he went right back to sleep. But it wasn’t a restful night for either of us, so he’s in bed a little early tonight. I’ve been sleeping like shit for weeks now. I wondered today at the deep, dark grooves under my eyes. I guess they are never going away. I’m not one for face lifts, but I hate how tired I look.
Kid ate a pretty decent-sized dinner consisting of the remainder of last night’s leftover mac and cheese from a restaurant, some mushrooms sauteed in butter, garlic and white wine, and some leftover roasted sweet potatoes and onions, which he wasn’t real hot on but ate an obligatory bite. And a mini Tootsie roll he got at school today for someone’s birthday. Then he proclaimed, “Now, Mom, I’ll have some healthy food.” What might that be? “Sausages!” he replied, as if it was a stupid question. So I fixed him a couple of the chicken apple breakfast sausage I usually have in the freezer, and he gobbled them down. Then ready for bed, and asked me to read him a book about dinosaurs, which I’ve sort of skipped through before as it’s pretty wordy. At the end, it talks about how nobody knows why the dinosaurs died off. Well, wonder no more, as my son knows. There was a meteor, you see, and it bumped into the Earth. It was a fire meteor and when it hit the earth, it caused all the food to burn up, even the dinosaurs up in Antarctica didn’t have any food, and it caused the volcanos to throw up, which destroyed the rest of the food, and so they died. I told him that was a pretty good theory he had, and asked where he had heard it. “I just know, Mom, that’s what happened, for real.” And who can say he’s wrong, really?
I resisted the urge to tell him it was from smoking cigarettes in case he starts running into kids at the K-5 school this fall who smoke. I remember going to a girlfriend’s house when we were late elementary or early middle school, and her showing me how to smoke cigarette butts from the ashtray or how you could get a little beer out of the bottom of the bottles that were sometimes laying around her house, where she and I were unattended for several hours at a time. And kids are starting everything earlier now, I hear. But I didn’t say that, because he was so hung up on his meteor theory.
I’m going to a concert tomorrow night, my first evening completely “off the grid” unavailable since my Mom flipped her lid. Today she reached the point of telling me to butt out of her business, that she’s not crazy and really intended all these years since retirement to spend all her money like it’s going out of style on home repairs and items from QVC and whatever. But yeah, that $40 prescription was so expensive she had to call me a 4th time yesterday to complain about the cost. No, nothing wrong with her judgment at all. At this point, I have to just wait for her to do something really bad I guess, and then start the expensive and time-consuming process of getting guardianship of her, which I really don’t have the money for. In the meantime, I wait. Nervously. I can’t concentrate very well on much of anything. I dump the laundry out to fold it and it sits on the floor for hours before I get to it. I clean half the kitchen. I make chicken salad, then forget it’s in the fridge and then it rots and I throw it out. I’m channeling about all of my good thinking time into my day job so that I don’t screw anything major up and can ride the ramp up with all the work they’re giving me now. It’s good work, and work I enjoy, and work that is interesting and challenging in a good way, but doing things halfway there would be very bad.
I feel like I haven’t had a really good cup of coffee in about a month. It’s a different kind of tired than I felt for the last two weeks when I was running around all the time taking care of Mom’s business and visiting her in the hospital. It’s a mental fatigue. And a physical ache that’s hard to describe. If someone says something kind to me or asks how I am doing, I feel like tissue paper someone poured water onto, and it’s all I can do not to dissolve. Thin and fragile, like you can see my veins under my skin everywhere. I don’t even know if I’ll enjoy the concert tomorrow, as it will be hard to shut off the fountain of pointless, aimless worry and mental “what if” planning that’s going on subconsciously all the time. I promise to try. I think that being back in my old stomping grounds where I used to work has a chance of pulling me into different memories of happier times and the music could refocus me. Or I might just sit in my car a while and never even go in.
Rockandrollmama's Blog 