The new story; the now story

3:29

I did not write an intentions blog post last year.  I remember exactly why.  I wrote down my intentions elsewhere, in my Ink & Volt exercises (and yes, last January I invoked Brad Feld and said, “I wish I could do what the cool VC guys do.”  I repeat myself.  It’s fine.  If I say it twice, I must mean it.)

I met my goals and lived up to my intentions beautifully last year, ahead of schedule. I looked back at my posts from January 2018 and they made me very sad.  I was crushing myself.  I was not at all a friend to myself.  I did some extraordinary and brave things and told myself I was stupid and heartless to do them.  No. I was right the first time.  Once I got some momentum going, living in truth was unstoppable, and I have lived in truth as best I could for 2018.  I look back at least year’s Ink & Volt lists, and the blog posts, and recall the conversations with friends and see how small and scared I was then.  I wonder if I will look back a year from now and see the same thing, next year when I am that safe giant.

Or maybe this will be a year for consolidation, for cementing all of that behavior change when it will get really challenging.  Maybe this will be the year that I say that it’s okay for me to have all the good stuff.  Because even as I’m typing and thinking about the move and how great it’s going to be and the rugs I want to buy, I have that old fear, that something bad is going to happen.  That it’s not going to be really great after all.  That it can’t really be great for me.

Here is the antidote: I note, record, and revel in how this has been truly the best year of my life.  This year, when I walked into many of nightmares and continued walking.  (Did I write that already? I think I did.  I must really mean it.)  This year I learned that I could do that, walk into the nightmare.  I learned that even a nightmare truth is better than pretty lies.  The solidity of knowing the worst is better than the wobble-board of fearing the worst.  And there were so many people holding my hand as I walked into and through the nightmare.  I never thought that would be the case, but they showed up.  This might have been the hardest year of my life, but I don’t think so– I’ll have better perspective later.  When I put aside the fear, I had more room for happiness and joy.  When I detached from a grading system that would always fail me, I felt more successful.  I made things possible that seemed impossible just weeks before.

So… Even if my new apartment is less congenial and commodious than I hope; even if my neighbors are loud; and the water pressure in the shower remains unworthy of the name; and the cable cord is strung along the ceiling rather than the floor and it vexes me every single day and I have to stay home and pay money to get it changed; even if I run through my savings and have to borrow more from my parents; even if I buy all the wrong rugs and lamps; even if my stuff won’t fit in my new apartment and I have to rent a storage space for my Pesach dishes and college memorabilia and suitcases.  Even if lose my job.  Even if friends break my heart by leaving me because I have left Daniel.  Even if I never find the love I hope for.  Even if all those things at once, the last year is indelible.  It happened.  I am the me that did that.  I am also the me that undermined herself for decades, see, consolidation, above.  But a strong counterstory is emerging.  “Is emerging” as if it were a gas or natural phenomenon.  No. I AM CREATING a strong counterstory.  I am living a strong counterstory.

My main intention in 2019 is Abundance.  I have elsewhere told myself it’s abundance, not excess, but I’m going to excise the negative from my intention. I know the difference between abundance and excess.  One makes me happy and the other makes me anxious, so I don’t have to wag my finger at myself and warn myself away from too much (I’ve overspent this past week, and I’m struggling a lot with that.)

4:04, with breaks

 

Safety

8:00, maybe?

I use the Ink and Volt planner for work.  My friend recommended it, and I wish I felt as comfortable as he does using a professional blogs for a range of musings.  Brad Feld does that, too.   I think if you are a successful venture capitalist, you have a lot of latitude.

Each December the Ink & Volt guru sends out four worksheets, one per week, that people can use to prepare for the coming year.  I don’t pay enough attention to week 1 (looking back on successes), although I should because this was among the best years of my life.  I don’t particularly like week 2, which asks you to think about relationships and imagine the movie of your life and your legacy.  That’s probably a sign I should think harder about it.  I am just finishing several days of week 3, culminating in the theme for the year.

My theme is abundance.  As I was thinking about abundance, I associated it with expansiveness (not surprising), but also about safety.  This year I want to be safe, and I haven’t felt safe in years and years and years.  I might not even know what it really means or feels like, and I suspect I will cry for days when I find out.  But I don’t want to play it safe.  And I’m trying to work out in my head how being safe and playing it safe are opposites.  If I’m truly safe, if there’s a true place or feeling of safety and security and deep okay-ness, then I can be pretty far out there.  I can take bigger risks because not everything is riding on that outcome. I feel I’m explaining the obvious to myself.

My career is not what I would have hoped or predicted.  I look back at my 30s and most of my 40s and I see aching underperformance compared to what I know I can do now.  I was playing it safe, I was playing scared (how can those two mean the same thing?).  I would like to say that it was because I didn’t feel truly safe in my life.  Was that me, or my circumstances?  Both.  I think I have rarely felt completely safe, and a lot of my anxiety and choices derive from that.  I haven’t felt like I deserved safety and certainly didn’t feel like I could turn to others and ask them to help me feel safer.

This goes back a long long long way, to my childhood.  There was some economic anxiety when I was in elementary school through middle school and into high school (wow, that’s kind of a long time).  My parents were lovely and kind and every material need was provided for, and there were piano lessons and gymnastics lessons and plenty of good stuff, even during the anxious times.  But… but… there was a gap, a slippage, maybe, where safety should have been.  Maybe I felt safe, but only just, or it was only temporary, or I was always aware that safe was taking a whole lot of work.  Yes, that’s it.  I was safe, but safe was taking a lot of work and unsafe was always right over my shoulder so I had to work harder and harder and harder.  There was no room for slippage, no ability to let down my guard.  There was no slack.  Never ever any slack.  This is not at all what my parents thought they were giving me, but it’s what they gave me.  Poor loves.  The feeling didn’t come from them per se, or it wasn’t personal between them and me.  It was how they themselves felt, moving through the world.  No slack was how life was, or how they thought it was.  So passing on that feeling was just part of socializing me, like table manners (my table manners are not robust, my feeling of precariousness is quite robust).

There was a feeling of near scarcity.  We had enough, now, but we might not have enough later.  The opposite of abundance.

So I came into adulthood this way, and carried it along, and probably misread situations and thought there was no slack when there really was.  And then got into situations in which there actually wasn’t a lot of slack when there should have been a whole lot, and in which I was absolutely not safe or cared for.  And that’s just on the professional side.  Or maybe I misread safety as boredom because I didn’t know how to create, because I couldn’t answer the question, “What do you want to do?”  And home was not safe for me, even as I devoted my considerable (even abundant) energy to making it wondrously safe for Milo and safe for Daniel, who didn’t want the kind of safety I offered because, I suspect, it made him feel vulnerable.  I’ll never know.  Life is just twisted up and sad that way.

So, I just want to be safe, and gigantic, and abundant and expansive.  A very safe giant.  A safe, cozy, risk-taking giant.  At first thinking about being safe, and not knowing what it might feel like, made me cry.  Then I got on this giant wave and I’m feeling better.  I like the idea of being that giant.  It makes everything seem funny and possible.  I can put it on  a t-shirt.  Or find a doll-sized giant (that would be a miniature giant, and aren’t words super fun that way?) on Etsy and make it my mascot.  What, exactly, would a giant doll– not a gigantic doll, but a giant in doll form–look like?  Someone on Etsy has thought this through.  (A quick search for “giant doll” reveals that the collective Etsy needs to do more thinking.)

If I can make it play, I can do it.  I always thought unsafe was adjacent, but maybe super-safe is even closer now because it’s inside of me.  Now.

8:35

Untold

7:46

(too much like Telling, from a few days ago, but apt anyway)

When I was 7 years old, Rajeshi Lev’s mother read my palm at Rajeshi’s birthday slumber party.  She told me I would die at around age 70 — horrifically unwise.  I remember signing up for my first 401K deductions and thinking, very briefly, “Well, if I’m going to die when I’m 70, then there’s not much point in saving now.”  Since then, I have been a ferocious retirement saver, but I do worry, occasionally, that my cells were programmed 40 years ago to expire at 70.  That said, her mother also said I would have two children, a boy and a girl, and that never happened so her credibility is shot.  She also predicted “islands in your love life” which meant difficulties, and I immediately thought of my maternal grandparents and their voluble, unstoppable unhappiness.  She said that there would be someone I loved but who, eventually, just wouldn’t matter any more.  She gave the example of her ex-husband in her own life.  I later came to wonder if, in my life, it was Jesus who was the beloved who fell into irrelevance.

Before she released my little hand, she asked if I had questions.  Perhaps thinking of her “just doesn’t matter any more” example — divorce was exotic in my Catholic elementary school, non-existent in my extended family (eventually my uncle toppled, twice, but he’s the only one out of my parents’ 5 combined siblings who has — I asked, “Will I ever be divorced.”  She said no.

Divorce so I can live past 70.  Divorce so I can live.

I think about this all the time, obviously. I hang on to the fantasy that I won’t have to do what I have to do.

Daniel’s overriding, overpowering way of expressing his love is gifts.  No mother’s day gift for me, not even a card.  He would dispute that.  When he went to get flowers, he brought home a lovely orchid, saying “this is one of your mother’s day presents.”  But nothing that required forethought or going out of his way.  A few years ago (2016, but who remembers), he skipped my birthday — birthday! — present entirely.  And for years the presents have been thoughtless, lazy.  It’s not the materiality, it’s the consideration — even as he feels sentimental and cozy listening to our greatest hits compilation of 2005.

Others get gifts.  He sends his sister music, regularly.  He was in bookstore on Friday — bookstore! — and didn’t think to buy me anything.  I sound so petty, so small.  How can he be so blind, though.  Dude, your wife has said “divorce” repeatedly since January, and you fall down on Mother’s Day?  You don’t even unload the dishwasher?  You are really not trying.  You don’t care to try.

Everything is about him and he doesn’t even notice the difference, and I would rather stay safe than tell him. I will be complicit in my own disappearance, until I disappear with a bang.  That’s so sad. I could consider changing it, but… I would prefer not. I’m not angry.  I’m a little angry.  I started writing to find a way to get to the anger and pour it onto the screen, but I find I lack the energy.  Anger bespeaks a remedy, someone to notice (I notice), some result, some eventual discharge. I recall his sister saying, “You have a lot of anger.  You’ll have to do something with it.”  As if my ounces even rate compared to her oceans and his.   I have vacated the space.

Well, here’s something that’s worth talking about with my therapist. I just got a message from myself that I am too scared to be angry.  The surface meaning is that I am too scared of his wrath and rage and bullying and stripping and de-personing to allow myself anger.  The only very very slightly deeper meaning is that I am scared of my own anger, scared of being that angry person that his sister saw.  Daniel has a monopoly on anger, and I let him. He presents such an ugly anger, such a poisonous, obliterating, selfish anger.  Why would I want any part of that.

I’ll get angry again when he de-persons me… but what is shrugging off mother’s day except the gentle version of de-personing?  The non-angry version… except perhaps his anger at me is boundless.  It is the endless inverse of the love I thought we had.

Do I still love him?

What do “still” “love” and “him” mean?  I might have loved a person who was not there.  Or loved the fraction, not the whole.  So what does still & him mean in that situation?  The him that he hid from me before, or the him that he hides now (is it there at all, or do I just dream?).  Still?  That implies a continuity, some bridge from our wedding day to now, and I see a brutal fall, falling falling falling down a terrible cliff.  If I wake up will it stop?  I”m pretty woke now. Love.  I am not sure I know love.

Long pause while I went back through “How to Love” by Thich That Hanh, which I bought in an airport in 2016 on the way to see friends.  One of the passages made me angry and sad because it suggested that I did not truly love Daniel.  I couldn’t find it again. Reading it now, I think I misread it, or saw it defensively. I thought it said something like if you don’t put his needs before yours it’s not love. But the closest passage I can find says something like true love promises solidity, joy, freshness, freedom and peace, and if you don’t feel that when you feel love it’s not true love.  So it was there, maybe once, and now it is so clearly not.  I have vacated the space.

So damn sad.

8;22

Unicorn

7:52

A completely random title.  I worried that I would start with “un” and spiral downwards. “Un”-disciplined, for example, because I gave in to a years-long craving and bought white jeans on eBay, even though I’m trying to save money, trying not to buy things I don’t need, and white jeans don’t fit my real life.  It would have been wiser to buy pale trousers or a skirt, but those cost 2.5 to 3 times as much.  I wear too much denim to work as it is — no one else at my level dresses as casually as I do, and these jeans have very stylish but not very director-level frayed hems.  I’ll look like one of the stylish youngsters.  On the other hand, “dress for the job you wish you had…” I wish I had a job that was so secure, creative, and awesome that I could be my stylish casual self every day.   And… 30 day returns from the seller.

Unstoppable.  Uncrushable.  Undaunted. Un-cowed.  Unique.

I thought I would write more — that often happens.  I spent the day on the wet, cold, windy sidelines of Milo’s sports event.  I packed a notebook, thinking I would have so much to say and write, having felt the impulse to write on Friday and on Saturday.  But… not so much now.  Un-loquacious, I suppose. Unloud.  With nothing to unload.

I keep remembering that when Daniel’s crisis happened, I was so surprised when women I worked with said, “I am so sorry what’s happening to you.”  I only just now have realized that they very probably meant, “I am so sorry that your husband has turned out to be such an awful guy and that you are suffering from being married to him.”  I genuinely thought that they meant, “I am sorry that Daniel is suffering and lost so much and that you are affected by that, too.”

Unmoved.  Unmoving.  Not moving quickly towards divorce, although I did significantly increase my monthly saving amount starting now.  Meeting with a lawyer — more accurately, a dear dear friend who happens to be a divorce lawyer — in 10 days, just to understand the landscape.

Unworried: There is nothing wrong with waiting till Milo is older, particularly now that the verbal abuse has abated.  Nor is there anything wrong with moving forward.  But I do think I need at least 6 months of rent and living expenses in the bank, and maybe more if I have to sign a year’s lease on a new place (plus moving, new furniture, first month’s rent).  Again, I could borrow from my parents, but there is not a sense of urgency.  For right now, at least at this minute, keeping my distance feels just fine.  It feels safe.  I gently, gently, gently rebuked Daniel today for not unloading the dishwasher when he saw it was full & clean — on mother’s day no less!  He was defensive and fractious.

Am I the frog in boiling water? Yes.

I still find myself wondering, “How bad was it, really, what Daniel did… to others, and to me.”  And yet, getting ice cream with him tonight (after asking several times) was pleasant enough.

I wouldn’t marry him again, feeling as I do now.  I mean, I wouldn’t marry someone about whom I feel as I do about him right now.  I am not sure whether I would marry him again at all if I had an informed do-over.  There were lovely things, specifically with him, and that being his wife enabled.  And of course Milo.  I would have had other kids, maybe, but Milo and I have a very special relationship.

Uninspired and unmotivated to write more.

8:13

Uncomfortable

6:53

My therapist called me out on not being truthful to Daniel, by refusing to share my good news (which I did, 24 hours later), and by declining to speak up when he said something that definitely merited further discussion.  We discovered that I feel I have to chose between honesty and safety.  It makes me sad to type that.  In another time, I might have chosen honesty.  But I don’t feel safe.  Even small eruptions or uglinesses or slights or eye rolls undo me.  There’s no protective coating, no cushion of happiness anymore.

Today, when there was very little pressing at work (for the second or third day in a row), I felt exhausted, uncomfortable, all over the place.  I walked a lot in the city, noticing as I did that I felt awful, to and from an eye doctor appointment, which prevented me from reading, which I so wanted to do — it’s my favorite way to disappear.  I wondered if this is the tax of being in my marriage or of being dishonest, or just the aftermath, the hangover from the period of work insecurity.  That period was very long and I was very brave and relentless and vulnerable and honest.  It is like me to feel terrible once it’s over — once I’m safe in that way.  Safe and not safe.  Poor lovey, no wonder I’m worn.

Daniel knows something is up.  I am slow to say I love you, so he says “I love you [pause i which I don’t respond].  Don’t you love me?”  Yes, I do, and I know — per safety — that this reluctance will be thrown in my face like hot oil later.  Such violent metaphors.  I feel violence has been done to me, and my experience tells me that it will never be acknowledged as such — and the rejection itself will feel like violence.

I feel like I am moving without meaning from point to point, to the weekend, to sleep, to the next televised baseball game, to the next workout, to the next meal, as if these are markers on the way to a destination rather than the substance of life itself.  (That said, there are exceptions, there are periods of deep happiness and contentment at work and home.  Daniel’s desperation for my forgetfulness and absolution, and rubber-ball resilience, and a goldfish’s sense of personal history is high now, though, and that’s coloring things.)  I am desperate to be going somewhere, and that feeling is exceptionally strong at home.  At home I am a shark, in constant motion, looking for the next thing to do.  Not doing is not pleasant, although, to be fair, I consciously slowed down today while waiting for my eyes to resume their normal dilation.  I rested for 30 minutes, then did gentle yoga, not accomplishment yoga, then went for ice cream (well, groceries & ice cream)– before I walked the dog, which is a radical act of putting myself first.

And here’s Daniel in my head, telling me that I don’t slow down for anyone else, that it’s always me first.

I am so wounded by him.  And yet, when he’s nice, it’s nice.  He clearly wants me to join him in this happy meadow, forgetting the scorched landscape behind us.  Why, he would ask, do I want to keep going back to the scorched landscape when we could stay in this lovely meadow?  Why am I reaching for the blowtorch?  Oh, dear Daniel.  I’m reaching for it to keep it away from you.  And we need to get really clear about the source of the scorch, and you think it was me as much as you.  That’s not true.  I was about to write, “I wish I could give in, surrender, and go along with the niceness.” I am not sure that is true.  If it were true, I might do it, I might surrender.  But it doesn’t feel safe.  My domestic life is not okay, and I have to act as if it is okay.  Or, I chose to act as if it’s okay while I sort all this out and get really honest with myself, at least, in a place of relative safety.  Daniel knows it’s not right, but choses for his own reasons to go along.  He suffers, though.  I am sorry about that.

Why, with Daniel, is there a huge reservoir of poison, anger, rage, meanness, but not of love?  Why doesn’t that get drawn on?  Because he doesn’t have it for himself, and all the putting himself first in the world doesn’t fill it up.  Poor Daniel. I mean that sincerely.  It must be no fun at all to be him.

What would make my life at home feel real?  What would feel like love to me?

7:19

Telling

9:17

Or not.

My grant will come in.  The grant that will see me through the end of the year (if another grant comes in on top of it).  The grant that came about because I went to a funder/friend and said, “Let’s talk about 4 options: 1) a giant grant; 2) a big grant; 3) $150K to see me through a rough patch; 4) a different job. And I need a decision by June.”  This was a “just because we love you and your work and it’s an emergency” grant.  This was a “you are important to us grant.”

I got an inkling last week that it would come through, the $150K version.  And today I got the call confirming it, and the spirit of “we wanted to help you” was so evident.  My funder/friend didn’t even know how much of my time I could give him from this grant.  He will assuredly take more than I told him I could give — he’s like that and his employer is like that, and that’s all okay right now.

And I didn’t tell Daniel last week that it looked good.  And I didn’t tell Daniel tonight that it came through, and the spirit in which it came through.  And that is telling.  I don’t want to celebrate with him. I don’t yet want him to know this.  Or maybe I want him to ask, to keep it in his mind, all my deadlines and balls in the air, and know that to inquire.  But mainly I don’t want him to be happy in my direction me about this.  Not yet.  I want a separate happiness for a little while.  His happiness for me, and relief for himself, would be overwhelming.  I would have to accede to the idea that everything is fine now.  Everything is fine.  Let’s go back to the way it was.  Or his idea of how it was, rather than my actual memories of what was, which I keep wanting to talk about and he keeps wanting to dismiss and to bury under a torrent of rage and nasty words about me and how I never let go, never forget.

(We just had a heated disagreement about a MeToo situation).

I don’t want to go back to how it was, not the reality of how it was, not the how it was since 2005.  The how it was in 1995? “Yes, she said, isn’t it pretty to think so.” But no.

9:59, with a long interruption.

Treachery

8:23

An exaggeration to be sure… but how sure?  I came home to a sentimental and tender Daniel — both of those attitudes directed towards me.  He had unearthed a CD I made him in 2005 for father’s day.  This was the first in a series that lasted for at least 7 years, until I couldn’t come up with enough new music.  This was special, two mixed CDs, including the song we danced to at our wedding and the song that played as I walked down the aisle (“When I fall in love, it will be forever” OUCH).  Daniel danced with me in the kitchen.

It was a glorious CD, but I remember giving it to him, and even then it was a difficult time.  We had a hard time from 2003 to 2006 — I remember it clearly because Daniel had come home from visiting his mother in 2006, and Milo had made a drawing for him, and for a long time that drawing, carefully dated August 2006, hung in our kitchen.  He came back restored to me in mercy, and I was so grateful.  But 2005 was before then.  I remember that father’s day, and giving him the CD.  I remember getting a cute Louise Brooks haircut that day.  I remember my Lucky brand cargo capri pants (so cute! so of the moment!).  And I remember the heaviness, the feeling that this had to be perfect, and the feeling that it wasn’t enough, it wasn’t right, it wasn’t safe.  Even then.

So maybe not treachery.  Maybe mercy.  Maybe clear-eyed vision, finally (my glasses are held together with a paper clip.  It’s not at all professional, but I don’t care. I don’t really even notice).  Maybe being kind up to the very last possible minute.  I’ve lived on the cliff’s edge long enough to know it’s not a good place to live, and I don’t want anyone I love to live there.  So Daniel won’t have to live there, not by my actions.  I’ll just throw him right off the cliff.  Not treachery, mercy, right?

I had hoped to write well again, but it’s beyond me.  Sleep fled last night, and two nights before.  I fall asleep at midnight (I think, I never look at the clock) and wake up at 5.  I get dizzy when I stand up.  Maybe I can be in bed at 10 tonight.

Will we be able to be friends? No, not for a while.  Maybe later. (Treachery.  He won’t see mercy.  And, to be fair, it’s not merciful to him to present him with consequences, especially when he believes he’s suffered from excessive consequences in his professional life.  And, really, consequences are never merciful.  They might or might not be just, but they aren’t merciful.)

I need things from my husband that I will never get from Daniel. Even if he promises me these things, I have no reason to believe him, and a million reasons not to.  I need deep fidelity and truth.  I need accessibility.  I need erotic energy and focus.  I need someone who will refrain from doing things that hurt me, and, when he does them — because people hurt each other — doesn’t hide or lie about them, but is honest and reparative-minded.  Daniel has shown me in every way that I can’t have those from him.  So it’s treachery to myself to stay.  I keep coming back to that.

I ordered a book my rabbi mentioned, Divorce is a Mitzvah.  I sent it to my office, because Daniel assumes that all Amazon packages are for him and opens them.  I’m not sure how I’ll manage to read it at home — probably steal and re-size a book jacket from a hardback lying around, and there are myriad.  A boring hardback, too, like “the Institutional Revolution” or “Smart Citizens, Smarter State” or “You Have More Power than You Think.”  That last one would be a nice joke.

8:41

 

Temporary

9:16

And the next morning, it was all gone.  I heard Daniel talking in his sleep.  He has lovely, sexy morning dreams from what I can tell.  He’s not to blame that when he says “I love you,” in a tender way in his dream that he’s not talking to me.  But it made me so sad.  I’m not in the category of his mind or his love anymore.  Nor, perhaps, is he to me.  We are radically disrespecting what we once had.  This is why Van Morrison will forever make me cry.

I’ll write more and better tomorrow.  Now this is just record keeping.  I’ve decided to behave differently professionally.  A friend, who is president of a significant organization and acts like it, inspired me.  My way of showing up won’t look like hers, but it will look different than what I do now.  And, now that survival at work looks solid, I’m going to leap toward… abundance!  Growth!  I decided in January to set the bar at survival.  Now I’m resetting.  Survival

(restarting at 9″45)  Anyway, survival isn’t enough, it’s not fun, and if I’m still in survival mode in 12 months, that looks like failure. So, there.  I said it.  I intend it.  I intend growth mode.  Lots more to write tomorrow about this, and about my supportive friend, and about my no regrets position, and how the smart people do all kinds of risk mitigation.  I am all in with myself, for myself.  That doesn’t necessarily mean having blinders on about work.  I am all in, and persuadable if something else — more ambitious, more secure, more fulfilling — comes along.  I am all in on my own behalf, and on behalf of the theme of my work, but not necessarily my institution.  And that’s as it should be.

I made myself literally sick with anxiety Friday worrying that Daniel would not come on a 4 day work trip with me, that he would invite another woman into our home while I was away.  He is resisting, and that makes me sad, even as I have scheduled a meeting with a lawyer.  F. Scott Fitzgerald quote about the sign of a truly brilliant mind is to have two entirely opposing ideas at once.  Yes, that’s me now.  It might as well be nice until it’s over.

Salve

7:46

Such a nice word, no?

A juicy yoga class, just enough to keep good tension and let bad tension go.  A funding reprieve (maybe — if it goes through) till the end of the year, which is what I wanted when the year started.  (Intentions are powerful things.)  A beautiful spring day.  Watching the baseball game from bed, with dinner on a tray beside me, and a new coconut cream dessert (from the co-op spending spree).  No obligations for the night ahead, or at least none that I’m going to attend to.  Daniel not home yet, so nothing to fake or fear or even, mildly, to interfere with my small pleasures.  I can live like this for a while.

About the funding.  If it comes in… I might feel relief.  I might feel relief for the first time in six months.  Or not.  It will be interesting to see.  Small glimmers of a fantasy: if Daniel has economic security, and I have economic security, could we find our way back to being happy?  Nope.  I mean… no.  Too many lies.  Too many questions: the urban outfitters tag, the Neiman’s bills that keep showing up.  The years of me thinking about divorce without taking myself seriously about it.  Pity, because I love him.  But not enough for repeated self-immolation.

So what, exactly, is that deus ex machina? I should send Daniel a link to this blog!  That would do it.

I will do the right thing at the right time.  Now is the right time to watch the game and feel good, even for just a little bit.

7:58

Strained

8:32

I wanted, four hours ago, to call this post “Silly” because I had, ridiculously, spent $200 today visiting a friend.  It wasn’t exactly like that — it never is.  Daniel took the car this afternoon to take Milo to an activity.  So I rented a Zip Car, to spare myself the cost of an Uber.  I wanted to drive, and that’s something I rarely feel, so I gave into it.  I believe, now, that I didn’t want to be alone with my thoughts for the 30 minute ride to the suburbs, and I certainly didn’t want to be with a driver.  Driving gave me something else to think about.  And the cost wasn’t much more, if any more, than an Uber.   So that’s $45.

My friend Annabeth has cancer.  Bad cancer.  So $25 on flowers, that being the very least I could do.  And she is a gem.  We have seen each other maybe three times in the last dozen years since we graduated law school.  Folly!  She is a gem, and I need more of her in my life.  And she has cancer.  She’s remarried, and I mentioned that I’d last seen her right after she got married again.  She said, “Yes, the modern era.  So much better than before.  You know the first marriage was bad when now, even with cancer, is much better.”  We visited for an hour (“visited” is a verb from my childhood, usually used in past tense without the final consonant, as in, “It sure was nice visiting’ with you.”  Occasionally in the quasi imperative, “C’mon over here and let’s visit.”), and she got tired because she’s had a treatment recently.  She was delightful, then tired.  We laughed.  I didn’t ask her about her illness.  I did tell her the truth about my situation — she knew Daniel from our law school days, and he leaves an impression.

Then I went to the food co-op in her neighborhood.  I used to shop at a different branch, since closed, and I was so happy to be back.  I spent $150 on kombucha, beer, soap, chocolate, and environmentally righteous menstrual products.  Why?  Because Annabeth has cancer– bad cancer.  Because she has a truly, deeply loving husband, and a little girl who asked me if I did all the housework in my house (er… um… kind of, not really… yes it feels like it).  Because I don’t want her to die.  Because I don’t want to be married to Daniel.  Because I realized today that the feelings I wasn’t feeling weren’t feelings of relief or happiness, but of deep sadness.  And maybe I can drink and eat and bleed and wash all that stuff away.  Maybe I can surround myself, intimately even, with all this eco-luxury and that will make me feel entirely better.  At the very least, it was a reminder of a time when I had less clarity, and believed I was happy, and worried less about money.  I am worrying about money — the money it will take to buy my freedom — all the time, except when I’m filling my cart with luxury objects.

Then we did a family logistics thing — no need for details — which is always a recipe for extreme tension.  Milo and I are both on the ceiling right now, and he won’t talk to me about it, which is entirely age-appropriate but it makes me sad.

Annabeth makes me sad, too.  I am so sad.  Sad I haven’t seen her more.  Sad she has cancer.  Sad she is missing out on even a minute of happiness with her husband.  Sad about all my missed minutes, too.

What will I do?  Her cancer is not about me.  But this blog post is.  What will I do?  I know what I have to do.  Daniel came home from the grocery store and was actively nice for a bit.  I liked it.  I fell for it.  He believes it’s all fine.  It’s not fine.  It hasn’t been fine for a long time, and it will be so costly in every sense to make it so.  He’s already threatened me with an awful divorce.

I realized last night that when I first mentioned divorce, he said I couldn’t because of Milo, not because he loved me.  Maybe he gets a pass because he was angry and surprised.

I could decide to spring myself.  I could decide not to take the next round of grants and leave my job in June.  I could decide to leave Daniel now.  The money is there, from my parents.  If I said, “Daddy, I need the money, loan it to me, and you’ll have it back in two years,” I could do that.  I could do all those things.  I’m just so sad at having to right now.  I’m too sad right now.  And then I’ll be sad throughout.  And I still trust myself to do the right thing at the right time.  This is being brave for myself, and I have to be brave for myself so that the next good thing will come.

There was a point with Annabeth when I thought, as I have thought sometimes, “and yet, I’ve never been happier.”  I”m getting back to myself.  I am restoring my soul to me in mercy, and it feels pretty good.  I’m renting a car and driving to a granola suburb and spending silly money without justifying it to anyone, and it feels good.  It felt good.  Clarity is better than what I had before.

I should stop.  I should just read now.  I’m going to do health insurance reimbursements and iron instead.

8:56