The Bad Place

 When I was actually excited (but still anxious) about going out. 

Surprise, I’ve been struggling lately. Every so often I try to quit social media because I feel so shitty about it and/or post something embarrassing and want to disappear. But then I still have so much in my brain that I can’t share so I come back to this neglected space and dust off the cobwebs and word vomit all over the place. 

I don’t know if it’s hormones or just the state of the world but I never feel okay or safe anymore. I’m scared all of the time of something bad happening, especially to the baby. I feel so out of sorts and I can’t quite pinpoint one particular thing making me feel that way. Tiny House just sort of…stopped scheduling me and basically ghosted me without a word? Which is sort of a relief but also adds to my general feeling of worthlessness and never-good-enough-ness. I volunteered to come in in the middle of my vacation to cover someone who said they had asked for the day off and didn’t get it. It was an opening shift I hadn’t worked before, which I made clear but said I’d come in if it would help out. I ended up working with the owner, who probably thinks I’m a total idiot…despite my saying that I’ve never bartended or done more than serve very basic drinks like on-tap hard cider. I’m usually a fast learner, but learning all of this fancy cocktail shit when I’ve always been a beer-and-seltzer girl and only work one usually busy evening a week has been a struggle. I assumed it was okay to ask a lot of questions and try to keep learning as I went but it seems I was written off as a lost cause. My little bit of extra summer fun money, My Own Thing, my excuse for getting dressed and interacting with other adults is gone and it’s back to being the overwhelmed mom with sticky floors and no breaks. Also pretty sure the person I worked for didn’t even say thank you…

Travis worked last Saturday and has been working late almost every night this week so we’ve felt pretty out of sync. He busted ass to get done earlier on our anniversary and I still had to rush all of the kids around myself and show up late to our date. We had asked my sister to babysit and I had a feeling going into it that it wasn’t the best idea, but we didn’t have many other options and Clementine and her stranger danger aren’t cool with a lot of people right now. It’s been rough. Every conversation we’ve had lately has been further proof it was a mistake to add my neediest (well…probably second-neediest, honestly) child to the mix. But I desperately needed this night out and while I was disappointed that we were going to have to get back so early, especially when I already had to show up late, I had every intention of sticking to the agreement. We had no intention of milking our time. I kept thinking “10:30ish, as long as we leave by 10:30 at the latest, we’ll still make that ‘-ish’. We just kept running into people we hadn’t seen in forever (because we almost never get out), and were struggling to break the conversations. I told Travis repeatedly “we HAVE to get going.” But I also drank too much too fast on a nearly-empty stomach, trying to make the most of our two hours, and I was starting to forget about anything else. 

In any case…things didn’t end well and we haven’t talked since. I know it was my bad for being late but I don’t think things were handled well on either end and attempts to talk it out never go well for us so I guess we just…don’t talk anymore? The worst thing is I had to ask my ex-husband to babysit Sunday night for the Bright Eyes show we’ve had tickets for since my birthday…that I don’t even really want to go to anymore after how things went the other night. I know he won’t make me feel bad (in the moment anyway) or rush me but I also know Clementine won’t be happy and I don’t want to be tempted to drink, which I always am, no matter how bad things get. It’s just terrible timing all around. 

I feel wracked with guilt and shame all of the time. My mental energy is consumed by how bad the news is all of the time. I want to do so many things with my kids but I just feel frozen. It feels like so much work just to be alive and be a person.