If I don't write now, I may not get a chance. I need to just check in - am I alive? I feel like a robot. I mentioned in my last post the ability I have to not feel, and well, to work (literally, work) my way into oblivion. I'm operating on autopilot at the moment. This is the morning of my 8th day of working with no day off, which granted may not seem like a lot - but just given the status of things at the moment, I am expecting another 12 days before I actually get to have even one whole weekend day to myself. I am not complaining (me, complain? Never). All things considered, this happens maybe once every three months and that's really not bad at all. I am tired though.
I just go through the motions. 6:20 get up, 7:45 get to work, 8:00 read blogs, 8:30 start working, 7:30 finish working, go home, eat, email, return phone calls, go to bed, get up, do it again. Sometimes there is a meeting squeezed in there. I have to say - despite the level of stress I am feeling, I am handling it pretty well. I have to think it can only be because the number of meetings I am attending isn't suffering at the moment. Because I have been helping someone new, I have been going to more meetings than I normally would in the middle of being this busy at work. When I am at work 11 or 12 hours a day, and working Saturday and Sunday, something has to give. Usually it is the number of meetings I get to. This time though - I am sacrificing a bit of work time to be there for someone new - which is a good thing.
But I don't feel very human when I work like this. I did cry though. Yesterday, in Target. I went there at 7 on my way home from work. I was tired. I cried because someone died yesterday while running the marathon (which was cancelled about half way through because of the heat and only 4,000 of 24,000 runners crossed the finish line). It made me terribly sad to think about his family and all those people who trained for it. And then I thought about my mother and it was like my heart seized up and turned to stone. Rock solid and impenetrable. I was trying to figure out why I have had no reaction to our last conversation and the possible end of our "relationship."
The truth is - there is nothing there to miss. The absence of my mother feels, well, it feels the same as the presence of my mother. I've taken care of myself since I was a little kid. For a brief moment when I thought about what that would mean to never talk to my mother again - I thought - oh my god, I don't have a mother, what am I going to do? The same thing I have always done. Take care of myself as if I don't have a mother. I was thinking - you can miss what you have never had - you know the nice happy family with the happy stories, the really great parents who are supportive and there for you and loved you and took care of you. I can miss that - but it is really only the idea of it that I am missing. I don't even know what that looks like and I can't even really imagine it or articulate what it would have felt like to have that. I just miss the idea of things, that's all. But I don't really know what I'm missing. I only know what I know.
The truth is, everything is the same - in her presence or her absence. I am the same - and I am not lost. I felt a little bad for feeling so cold - for feeling like I didn't care. I felt like I should react, I should be devastated. I am not devastated. If I am anything - it is only sad for her, and even that is difficult to come by because the misery she lives in is of her own making. Maybe it's okay - to feel like I don't care. And to think about her makes me grateful because I have been blessed with a gift that she doesn't have - which is my sobriety. I have also been blessed with the knowledge that I have a choice to live differently. Not only do I know it is a choice, but I have been blessed with ability to choose differently and to live my life differently than she has and it is amazing to actually be able to put that choice into action. The irony of that - is that my mother always used to say - you always have a choice. Everything is a choice - you always have choices. That might be the one and only thing I learned from my mother.
3 comments:
Funny -- the two things my mom used to always say (which are coming into relevance now) were "everything happens for a reason" and "everything works out in the end."
And my mother always used to say "To decide not to decide is also to decide."
Niobe - your comment - maybe unintentionally - it cut to the heart of everything. My mom - she did decide, didn't she. I always thought of my mom as having this inability to decide to do the right thing, and within that, was the choice she made. She did make a choice.
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