Egg tempera weirdo

 Don't even know how to look at the metrics on this thing anymore, and don't know if it's being read at all anymore, but at this dry point in my writing life - Work is making it clear that the thing it values least in me is my ability to put one word in front of another, and Family is fine but a focus-pulling organizational nightmare until June - I think it's important for me personally to write down the bits of news I have that's fit to print. 

In June things changed, the Wupp place sold, sold well enough to buy down here last month. Our new landlady - the current apartment's heir - is happy enough to see us go early. So go we will to the new place, once the school year is done, and the boys will shift schools for next year. One more massive life shift for them; we're not good at this stability thing. But if we were, we'd be bad at something else. Choose your poison. In the meantime the new place is rented out to students by the room, at a decent enough rate to pretty much cover what we're  paying in rent here.

That is, what I'm paying in rent here. Peril of an overpaid business-type marrying an artist, even one with hustle, is a 3:1 outspend in a good month. With the living situation shifts it's now moving to 2:1. And his studio is going well, so here's hoping for 1:1 by year's end. That's not just about me feeling like I'm saving some money up for the kids' inevitable therapy bills or working towards the freedom to leave my increasingly silly job without having to immediately move into a similarly silly job. It's also about avoiding resentment. When I'm not travelling I'm the lead parent; hustling artists get busy in the evenings. And afternoons. And useless in the mornings. So the Family stuff is pretty 3:1 at the moment too. Something has to give, and what will hopefully give is me starting to have enough casual change in my pocket to take care of myself.

What I would like to give, or be given, is time and focus; people who write their own content seem increasingly like people who are still fucking around with egg tempera after the chemistry revolution of the early 1800's (good subject matter, needed better editor) but nonetheless, that's me. I'm the egg tempera weirdo. The move we're making, the school transfers we're doing, will give me that to some degree.

And so will the kids getting bigger. Godzilla is still a boy, but he's on the cusp of something big, big enough to borrow my winter boots. In some ways in love with independences, in other ways very much not. I'm in the school of children being able to choose their own distance, and he's choosing distance more and more though not actually in a way that puts any more time on my clock. But with this cusp of something big, I can't resent that. I can't resent these last years - months? - of him being my little boy with his warbling voice. 

If there’s one thing . . .

 . . . moving to Southern Europe has taught me, it’s that living in Northern Europe is garbage. Humans shouldn’t do it. They should just dig the whole dump up and let the beech etc forests take back over and figure out how to get the fuck along en masse down south. My first bit of eye contact with the Mediterranean, every time I come back, even if it’s a grey foggy mess like today, is like someone has just stopped punching me in the head. 

Anticipation

 As I age I wonder how the dementia is going to take me, if it does. The odds are there, if not terrific in either direction. When I get really tired my brain works less well, and that's how I imagine the dementia will be one day. The way my brain works less well is fairly specific; the past rises up and sort of fastens onto the present, and for a moment I wonder if I'm in one of the many, many, MANY places I've been or lived before. No - not even wonder if I'm there. Feel that I'm there in that moment. I wonder if this means I should be going to more places, or fewer. 

Lessons from the last few weeks

First. I'd forgotten how soul-destroying paying rent is. No - I'd *never understood* how soul-destroying paying rent is. Because up until those four years in the Big Wupp, I had always been paying either rent or a mortgage, and I suppose just accepted that as part of the unfortunate fabric of life, like menstruation and the need for an oral hygiene regime. But those four years not doing that - well, financially, they were wonderful. The freedom of it! We were never really profligate but during those four years I simply didn't have to think about money, I didn't have to think about distinctions between wants and needs, I felt rich. I remember enjoying it at the time, but now, locked into a three-year rental contract, I don't think I appreciated it enough. Those years and the cash we could accumulate are what gave us the freedom to do what we're doing now - we're using that freedom - but my heavens. We're in one of the bleaker-case financial scenarios we'd planned for at the moment. Nothing desperate but certainly counting the euros. And every one of them that goes to our perfectly reasonable landlord who's charging a perfectly reasonable amount of rent is one I deeply regret. 

Second. If you're in a rich country, the last bastion of really romantic or exciting travel is boats and ports. Rail has been tamed. Roads need someone to drive you on them. Air travel is half penitential, half existential crisis, all boring. But boats, well. The last time I literally jumped onto a departing mode of transport as it left was onto a boat. Try doing that with a train these days. And what can all the other modes offer as a thrill compared to seeing the pilot boat pull up alongside the big boat so it can be guided in and out of port? A cousin of mine changed my opinion on turbulence; he said he quite liked it because it was the one time he could actually appreciate that he was in an airplane, travelling through the air, rather than just sitting in a loud tube. Fair. But how does that compare to a big ship rolling queasily along for a few hours just to fall tranquil once Sardinia and Corsica are breaking the waves blowing in from the west, and then to start rolling queasily again once the islands are cleared? 

And ports - ports, even more than railway stations, are such a fulcrum, such a precious but limited urban space. They're a constant work in progress, a little bit going up at a time, a little being overhauled at a time. And always a mess. Always a mess of people and cars and containers and bad signposting. The mess makes it human; you can't go on autopilot in a port, you need other people, you need guidance and questions and answers. And the view of a city coming in or out . . . well. More of that sort of thing, I think. Maybe it's worth paying all that rent for the benefit of living in a port town. 

Tiger by the tail

 So if you just stay in one place long enough, you start seeing weird shit, right? Everything is Twin Peaks a few years under the surface. That's the thing that makes me most nervous about how much we've moved around - that I'm not preparing the children adequately for the fundamental weirdness of existence, the way the uncanny and unexpected ripple through the day-to-day like the fake-liquorice-goo through pseudo-orange-ice-cream in the great tiger tail of life. It's not just their family that makes me take them back to Canada every summer. They need to be able to watch a place change, and learn to see all the smoothed-over crooked shit, and with four-year tenures everywhere we've been more or less since they were born they haven't been able to do that where we live.

My work, however - I've been involved with this company for a kajillion years now and a kajillion years does give you the time to see weird shit evolve and some of the weirder shit I've seen has been there. I'm too old and indifferent and remote for workplace conflict, but if I had any, it would have been with this long-standing co-worker who, it came painfully clear this weekend, is many kilometres deep into some sort of rabbit hole, to the point of no-further-comment-from-the-hospital-but-they-won't-be-home-for-awhile. 

I'm spending some time now thanking God for my oldness/indifference/remoteness. There were a few points where this person was temporarily in a position of slight authority over me, and used it poorly, when I would have been rude if I was less indifferent. I considered being confrontational, needlessly confrontational considering the briefness of the position of slight authority. Pre-motherhood me would have had some choice words that would have felt good to say in that moment and that would have been hard to remember now, now that it's painfully clear any of the punctilious, superfluously demanding or otherwise shitty behaviour this co-worker was showing to me or their colleagues was probably only a dying echo of how shitty they were to themself. Themself is a word. I just made it up. It's all rather discombobulating frankly. 

Give me the shits

 As I reach an apex (I hope) in the amount of international travel I have to routinely do, I’ve realized a lot of my planning now orients around “will this itinerary allow me to take my normal morning shit without holding or hurrying it or having to pay to use a theoretically public toilet?” Which means trains. Lots of trains. Preferably train routes close to their point of origination so other train passengers haven’t yet had a chance to sully up the toilet too badly. 

There are a lot of reasons to prefer trains, but I feel like that one is really underrated. Budget airlines flying into dumps like Charleroi - those dumps have pay-per-use toilets (but here is a secret: small regional Italian airports are miracles of convenience and efficiency. Not just the bogs. They’re what all airports should be: a simple place that gets the job done fast, where you can get a brioche, a good coffee, and probably a fresh-squeezed orange juice). And whilst on the flight, I just can’t relax enough to shit; too busy imagining some hideously malfunctioning “Get Smart” scenario wherein I’m unwittingly doing a very exact sequence of actions that is going to lead to the floor collapsing and me tumbling into the void. 

And coaches - nothing to object to on their own. I rather like how they take you through a city. But they’re traffic and they’re driven by the hideously underpaid so appalling delays are routine; you can’t count on even a ballpark arrival time. And more than half the time, there’s no bog. And when there is, it doesn’t have good ventilation, so you make people smell your shit, and while like most people I *believe* my shit don’t stink, my common sense informs me that in fact, it certainly do. 

Not so silly now, huh

 So, she asked, my 87-year-old aunt, the one who all the other aunts and uncles called silly. Why did the baby die? She asked of my cousin's baby, who had indeed died. Was the mother too old?

I don't think so, I said, not wanting to get into other people's bodies, especially the dead bodies, especially the mourning bodies, and resisting the urge to tell her it was none of her business, none of her silly-aunty business. Most new mothers in Italy are around that age. I think the baby was just born too early. 

Yes, but, said silly aunty, and then a little silence. My baby's heart wasn't working properly when she was born, she continued eventually. She died after a week.

Oh, aunty. 

I gave her a bottle, and she was too tired, you know. To drink. Pause. She died before I could go home with her. Anna Maria. Such a pretty baby too.  

When was that, aunty?

After S_. Anna Maria was the youngest one. The last one. Pause. We had a little funeral. 

How many times have I left a place? I can't even count them all up anymore. And it has taken until *this* time, this umpteenth time, to realize the funny feeling on the way out, even if it's a move you're chomping at the bit to do, is fear. Or a lot of it is fear. There's a lot that pisses me off here but they're all known quantities. This is a familiar place, and soon I won't be in a familiar place. That's frightening. It'd be frightening for any animal, let alone a human animal with a consciousness of mortality. Because I know who *I* am here, and whoever I am next, wherever I am, I will have different challenges and be older . . . . eventually frailer . . . that many more minutes closer to death. If you don't have these life stages all harshly chopped by a complete change of environment maybe it's easier to ignore that. Probably hadn't realized that until now because me at 18 vs me in my 40s haven't felt much different health- and energy-wise. But these days as soon as a mirror pops up it's clear the crone stage is on her way. Fair enough but it does take getting used to. 

Sometimes I get a feeling that every feeling we feel, all that bewildering and subtle range of emotion, is some exacting cocktail of maybe four things. Fear, joy, love, hunger, and sleepiness. Is there anything else happening up there in our spandrel-ly little brains? Maybe not. Honestly, that's already a lot. 

As I stuff my face with red currants and gooseberries on my way out of Day-to-day Northern Europe, I'm having a moment of intense nostalgia for Yorkshire. I was having drinks with a Midlands friend in Brussels last week who asked me if I was reverting when I said I was thinking of buying the family some pet ferrets. Hah hah. I haven't been there since I was pregnant with Godzilla and Granny was still alive. Nigh on exactly 11 years ago. But it struck me as soon as we got to Deutschland - how familiar it seemed here. Not like northern France or Belgium or the Netherlands. Here and northern England recall each other a little. There's something intensely similar. The rooks probably, or the red currants. Or the gooseberries. The brambles. The language. I don't know. But I think my grandparents would have felt something comfortable here, if they hadn't absolutely detested Germans as was reasonable for their generation and many others. I will miss that - the rooks especially. Fuck me, will I miss the rooks. Oh well. I'll visit. Perhaps not here, but I'll visit rooks somewhere. 

Truly blogging into the wind now. Oh well. Forgot my diary in this country I'm leaving behind. I act like it didn't strike a chord with me, I don't believe there's been a big emotional attachment, but I haven't spent this long in one country since I moved out of my parents' house. Curious about what I'll miss. I'm guessing mostly the green - at least we get one last June of it - and the desperate bids to salvage the bits of pre-war architecture, even the industrial stuff, that hasn't been knocked down yet, while allowing enough renovation to make it livable. Let's see. At the moment, with so much admin done but so much grunt work to do to get to the next place, I'm thinking harder about what I'm leaving behind than what I'm getting into.

Just turned down the boys' school places here for next year. It was the hardest bit, emotionally, of this whole process, which is ironic because this whole process wouldn't have started unless we hadn't decided they shouldn't be going to school here. The childhood-ending Gymnasium Godzilla isn't going to is really nice, for a childhood-ending institution. It has a vivarium in the atrium. Nice big one. Recent total rebuild. Looks like well-lit Star Trek. And the Monkey King knows what's going on too, and he's sad about it. The pandemic really fucked up the years we've spent here, but it's still their place, their friends, their sense of everything. What are we doing dragging them out of this sense of place? 

I thought I had accepted it, but I hadn't: parenting is choosing your poison. Not for yourself, because that's just life once you move out of your parents' place. I'm totally comfortable choosing my own poison. It's choosing your poison for other people, for the people you love most in the world, the people who you would literally set the world on fire to protect. But you still have to choose a poison. 

So last week was a pretty big international life admin week - safe to say biggest of my life by some measures and the groundwork for my whole midlife crisis, which should last about 15 years, minimum. And at the point where I bought my fifth piece of real estate - second that week, and fourth country - the agent congratulated me, and it caught me totally off guard. I mean they're very nice people for real estate agents and I was absolutely polite back but honestly, when someone blows all that measurable money on something with such a basically unmeasurable value all at once, isn't the correct response "good luck" rather than "congratulations"? 

All of which contributes to saying, things are trucking along. The F-word's studio got packed up and shipped last week. Everything else gets packed up and shipped in a week and a half, including the boys and I - off to the family to wait all this out for the summer, and let the F-word repay with the sweat of his brow all the admin work I've been doing for the last year or so. It feels good. Weird. One of the things that went with the movers at the same time as the studio was my bike, so when I got back from all the international admin work and I realized I wasn't going to ride a bike here anymore, I got a little misty. I really liked riding a bike here. Keep thinking "oh, I'll just pop on my bike and go get some pasta cheese" and then think nope, nope you aren't. It's a little like when someone who you still need to tell something dies, and nope, nope you can't tell them. I've often thought that moving was a bit like a little death, a practice for death maybe, and the older I get the more I think that, with growing horror. 

Nevertheless, she persisted. Hahahahahahahahah. Idiot. 

The emotional implications of capital gains tax

There's a sort of conspiracy out there, I think, to present life-changingly important, huge things as boring so that people won't know about them and won't change their lives, and keep paying attention to things that are not life-changing and ultimately are fucking boring. (I may be in a minority of one here but a high-cost dramedy about Rupert Murdoch and his shitty kids is a weird thing to invest dozens of hours of your life into.) I say this with the proviso that I am doing life-changing things in three languages that are not my own so very likely I'm missing things that are obvious to the natives, until they come to me as a big surprise or revelation. Or I just keep missing them - I like the way we've chosen to live our lives but I do sometimes get chills thinking about all the shit that's just going straight over my head. All the unknowns, known and unknown. Fuck me, what am I fucking up right now that I have no idea I'm fucking up?

Anyhoo. That's all a long-winded way to say that this week we found out the finer points of local capital gains tax law, which is leading us to sell up here instead of rent out. There is obviously a depth of relief here that I can't even quantify, a fucking Lake Baikal abyss of relief, that we won't have to faff around with the cost and the worry and the risk of running a furnished rental from very far away, which in itself would be life-changing. But even more than that is the consciousness that when we sell, we are functionally done with this country, or at least this region. The few friends I made despite the handicap of the pandemic have all moved away from it. And our town - oh man, especially with the dressings of spring upon it, our town is beautiful - but, like the beautiful town we left behind in Oz, there's no compelling reason to come back to it. When we leave, when we sell, it's not a chapter in a book ending, it's the ending of a Part. (OMG. Part. Parting. I just got it.) 

Now, that's weird enough for me. And the F-word had his first real professional, living-on-it success as an artist here so I guess it will be weird for him. And the Monkey King has a real sense of place here. But it's Godzilla my heart aches for. There's a certain irony in that, because the reason this move went from fantasy to reality as far as I'm concerned was him, and concern over how the rest of his childhood and education goes - a concern that his primary school teacher of four years shared. The F-word and I can't really pinpoint the moments our moves from Europe to Australia, and then from Australia back to Europe, were decided. But I can pinpoint the moment I decided we were moving away from here - during a parent-teacher conference when Godzilla's teacher told me he was too smart for the general stream, but that the academic stream would crush all his curiosity and intellectual initiative. To hear your own suspicions put into words like that by the person who was most in position to know. . . anyways. That's when the decision was made, as far as I was concerned. 

All of that notwithstanding: Godzilla loves this place. He loves his school, he loves a couple of his friends, and beyond that, he's used to it here, and that's huge for a kid. He didn't bat an eyelash when we switched towns when he was younger, but now, we are separating him from his fabric, and he's sadder than he is excited about what's coming, and my heart just aches for him. 

Something similar happened to me at his age - something my parents, I assume, thought about very carefully, in terms of it being for my sake. At least partly - one part of it was certainly not for my sake at all and they should have seen that; I suspect after so many years of kids, many of them stressful beyond my current and probably future comprehension, they were tired of weighing their decisions in terms of what was good for their kids. Decided to do something just for them. Well. Nearly 40 years later, I'm still angry about it, because it was a fucking blunder. It was a bad idea. Two bad ideas at once. There are children starving in the world right now, I'm conscious of my lifelong privilege, but at the same time it's not an exaggeration to say their decision blighted my childhood. Didn't do them much good either.

This decision started for me as an escape hatch for Godzilla from premature academic streaming but there's no doubt I'm super-pumped for it as a lifestyle change. It's for me, this move, absolutely. For us - the F-word is even more pumped than I am. And I'm nauseated when I think that we might be repeating my parents' blunder beat for beat. At the same time I'm confident it's the right decision, or at least the rightest decision available. And we have been and will keep scrambling to find ways to make it easier for him, which from memory my parents did not. But it's only him, looking back 40 years from now, who will know if it's a giant fucking childhood-blighting blunder or not. 

Self-care Italian Style

There are five extraordinarily difficult and high-stake things happening right now which would each in themselves be enough to make me feel put upon, and that's on top of the normal work of being an intellectually curious breadwinning family woman. Fucking five. And I am only fully enthusiastic about one of them. I'm not fully unenthusiastic about any of them, so that's something. But I'm extremely fucking unenthusiastic about this degree of sustained stress. We are close to the apogee at the moment, and will hit it over the next month, and by September I hope to be reasonably human again. It makes me wonder how people with real problems cope. Sometimes they don't, I suppose. 

I'm making a conscious effort to take care of myself mentally and physically through all this, with more or less success; still lots of phone-gazing and the occasional pre-menstrual sugar rampage. One thing that has been absolutely marvellous is Alessandro Barbero. He speaks and writes with so much welcoming, inviting enthusiasm about whatever he's speaking or writing about, which hasn't been my experience of Italian intellectuals before, either because I was paying attention to the wrong ones, or I wasn't paying enough attention, or because there is indeed a strong Ivory Tower syndrome there. In any case the Italian language has some built-in barriers to the uneducated, which certainly includes me when it comes to Italian. 

Anyways. Barbero speaks and, often, writes in a way that is extremely accessible and welcoming to people like me, and for the past six months his books have been my bedtime reading. The books come in three categories: academic, conversational - almost a transcript of his lectures - and somewhere in between. The conversational books are no mental effort to read, linguistically. The academic ones send me off to sleep in half a page. And the ones that are in-between are perfectly relaxing. Very engaging but also, structurally, complex enough that after ten or so pages I'm floating in and out of meditative consciousness.  

I'm wrapping up his history of Charlemagne right now; one of the in-between ones, and it's amazing. A history rather than a biography - details about the man himself but firmly contextualized in his time, organized by theme rather than chronologically. I was never particularly interested in Charlemagne as a person or subject, but I find myself during the day looking forward to bedtime and reading. Same thing with his Frederick II biography, which is conversational - on a scale of one to ten, my interest in Frederick II was never more than three, but I couldn't put that little book down. 

Haiku for middle age

All of my problems 

are rich white woman problems

they still give me hives 

Woman of the world

 Today, at the end of a week of staycation - enough of it in the F-word's studio to convince me that what I already thought was a Good Idea should be a Family Business - as I walked my foldy bike and no luggage through one busy metropolis's train station on my way to another busy metropolis's train station a couple of countries over, it struck me that I'm living the dream. One of them, anyways. The one about being an international woman of mystery with a foldy bike. Calm, assured, knowing what to do, where to go, in several countries, in several languages.

Then I got on the Thalys and it took me five minutes to find the button to flush the toilet 

Fixed on the Now

 So it's taken me until middle age and a really inconvenient number of countries of residence to fully appreciate I don't just or even primarily like moving to new places; I like leaving old places. Not the scorched-earth-and-bridges-bird-flipping-out-the-window sort of liking leaving, though that has certainly had its place in some departures. It's more the intensity knowing you're leaving brings to your attitude to a place. Seeing the seasons cycle for the last time, watching the rise and fall of the rivers, the states of dress and undress of the locals. Last Christmases (though I must say the Christmas here at the moment is communicating a pretty strong don't-let-the-door-hit-your-ass-on-the-way-out; the Christmas market isn't even a tenth of what it normally is for some reason, and what's the point of Germany at Christmastime without the markets if you're interested in not blowing your own fucking head off?), last ceremonies, last hard-rubbish nights, and always, every day, that sharp, sweet, sad consciousness of it being last, last, last; keeping your mind fixed on the Now, your eyes and ears sharp for every little bit of it. 

I've got really shitty for German culture for enforcing Sunday Silence rules. These grumpy morbid fuckers need a day a week to practice being dead, I've grumbled. And here I am, spending my whole adult life to date practicing the art of the Ending. 

No regrets but I really have to cut this shit out, it's not fair on the kids, though I don't think I'm lying to myself in thinking the move is very, very much in their interests. Kids have a sense of place. I assume. Of course they do. My internal geography is still the shitburg I grew up in and couldn't get out of fast enough. I could find my way from one way to the other of it blindfolded, though I assume the drunk drivers would take me out first. 

In fairness to us, this next move is the first we've chosen, ever, based on being pretty sure it'll be an enjoyable place to live. There was Australia of course, but I don't think I was excited for that on the basis of thinking it would be enjoyable so much as a sense of adventure, of something completely new, and of being really sick of religious architecture and northern European winters. Also I remember I wanted to be able to afford a house. Man, 13 or whatever years on, what a weird thing to remember thinking. "I wanted to move to Australia so I could afford to buy a house." Hah! Sounds as stupid as the line I used to spit endlessly about having moved to Germany for the weather. The city where we were living in Oz was basically washed away in this year's floods and we'd still probably need a 50 year mortgage if we wanted to move back.

Anyways. Let's see. 

The pandemic is hitting me psychologically most strongly in the sense that this present orgy of premature reopening, this disregard for basic science in rich Western countries, is keeping me from any near-term prospect of seeing my family back home or down south. 

There it is. Isn't that dreadful? That's what's keeping me awake at night. Hundreds of thousands of people are going to die without a good reason and I'm all pissed off because the fact that western Europe and the USA have decided on a "model" meaning years of waves of infection while we wait for a vaccine that might not come, or herd immunity that might not be that meaningful, is going to spin out the time until I can see my family overseas, and maybe in the meantime some of them will die.

But the other way it's hitting me psychologically is this realization I thought I'd already come to many years ago, that I didn't think could disturb me anymore, but it turns out it does when I see it in mass action - the political leadership of the richest Western countries really does not give a shit about people. At all. There is no meaningful social contract in the USA, the UK, and maybe not even here, I'd say, despite how fond Germans are of patting themselves on the back over how well they think they're handling this.

All there is, is dominance. Power. You can hate paternalism all you like. You can even hate socialism if you like. But if you don't have those two things and still have a political power structure that makes the rules for your commerce, your behaviour, and tax collection and redistribution (or fucking lack thereof), all you're left with is power. A power that uses you and does not give a shit about you and will happily see you dead if that lets it maintain itself. 

All the cynicism I practiced when times were good didn't prepare me for this. 

So whonely

I guess this blog is inching towards being defunct. But it isn’t yet. Now that life is regaining some sort of shape after a particularly, acutely crazy year, I am wondering how that is going to translate into what I write and what I spend my bits and prices of time on.

And frankly I’m wondering what happens to me. What with one thing and another in terms of having young kids, aged parents, no friends in this new town yet - no friends in spitting distance - over the last few days, it’s came home to me that there’s no one to take care of me anymore. Everything and everyone around me wants a piece of the Spliffe. No one is handing out pieces.

This came home to me the other night during a date evening with the F-word, wherein we were having a lovely time, and at a certain point, after a little liquid courage and a lot of deliberation, I told him one of those deep dark suspicion things that you even forget half the time that you’ve got because it’s SO deep and dark, and so fundamentally challenging to who you are and who your loved ones are that you almost have to make an effort to remember. (Nothing criminal. Nothing dangerous. No panicking, thank you.) He responded with about 30 seconds of titillated shock. That’s about it. And then back to talking about the bitch at work, basically.

Admittedly his work is rife with bullshit, and a big problem. But to have had all of this deliberation and doubt about sharing this idea or this feeling with him, this thing that’s been weighing on me for the last four years or so, wondering what will change by me saying it out loud, and then 30 seconds later back to his work bullshit - which at a certain point just feels like a variation on the work bullshit he’s been complaining about for the last 13 years - 10 minutes later back to his family bullshit, the same bullshit I’ve been handholding through for the 20 years we've known each other . . .  and this - Thing - of mine down the memory hole like I’d never said it - I don’t know, man. I mean I can’t even talk to him about what happened and how I feel because if he forgot what I told him, he can’t be trusted to know it. Does that make sense? If this Thing is so inconsequential in his eyes that he could get back to his Bitch at Work schtick 30 seconds later then he just shouldn’t know about this Thing and I don’t want to remind him of it.

Anyways, the F-word is what he is. His problems are what they are, and they’re real. But that moment made me realize how alone I am with my own problems. That’s who I am, and where I am. And I’m not sure how I’m dealing with that.

I'LL SHOW YOU THE LIFE OF THE MIND

I'm starting to suspect I have no inner life. Not in the way that I used to. My brain is just not being what it was; it's like my imagination has lost its attention span, or like some sort of fantastical muscle I took for granted has atrophied.

There is this combination of me spending too much time with trivialities on my phone instead of giving my thoughts space, and of being a combination of super-tired and super-preoccupied for seven years because of the children. Those things play into each other. The children don't give me much time to think, so instead I read about 19th century female spies or whatever trivia on my phone, which means I definitely don't have time to think, so I just look at more trivia on my phone, and then fall asleep before my brain has had a chance to explore its own inner life in the way it used to. It's a nasty situation. But there you are. It's also acute. The kids are getting less and less tiresome. Things won't be like this forever.

At the moment though, that's combined with being jumpy and twitchy as we summit this sort of fulcrum-point I feel like we're at as a family, financially and practically, of moving into a new place and calmer, less-worrisome shores . . . a good place, but one that I guess I'm a little petrified is either illusory or out of our reach in some way I haven't yet understood.

For reasons specific to this year - the move, the changes, and the fallout of having used an absolutely terrible financial advisor and of having to use contractors I don't trust as a foreign stranger in a city . . .  because of them, even though money isn't a problem (in the sense that we're not desperate for its lack), it's squatting on my brain, this dread of being ripped off or of ceding control for a second and letting someone else's incompetence cost me . . . oppressing me, in a way very similar to seasonal affective disorder; I had to realize rather than intuit that money was the problem. When you have SAD you feel the depression, not the weather.

Anyways. Again, fairly acute . . . I hope. I hope! Because with all this acute stuff, this not sleeping, these worries, these money paranoias, the constant triaging crisis of trying to be a decent mother to two young kids, and carrying around the world's best distraction device in my pocket . . . I feel like I have no inner life and I don't know if I can get it back. I don't know if I can have a brain-case that's not full of fretting, washing-dressing-cleaning-sleeping routines, interesting kitten gifs, and a dull, pounding, endless exhaustion. The endless rose garden it used to be up there is looking pretty concreted-over.

Concrete is what it feels like, really; like one of those valley rivers in an old mill town outgrowing its usefulness to the Philistine money-grubbing developers around it, getting concreted over for some shitty housing blocks and commuter roads. And I'm starting to be afraid I'm not going to be able to get planning permission to demolish all that shit and rehabilitate the river, even if I manage to manage all this acute stuff better, or move past it. Maybe I'm too old, or too tired, or too corrupt.  And we all know what happens to concreted urban rivers, right? Or maybe we don't, because other people spend less time on their phones than I do. Well, they get shitty and smelly and dangerous.

Well. One can only try. And delete the Facebook app from one's phone.