You know how sometimes you're chugging along, doing your thing, and something comes along and hits you like a mac truck?
Maybe it was something you were prepared to have interrupt your routine, like, say a trip to the top-middle of the country for a wedding...
You tie up all your loose ends, doing laundry, emptying the fridge of perishables, and taking out the trash so it doesn't fester in your seven day absence.
You arrange for the dog to spend the time with your Dad in Maine where she can run about in the woods and be fattened up with sneaky table scraps.
You get a friend to stop by the house and feed the cat. You transfer money and budget for gas. You make seventy six checklists and you shockingly get out the door on the day at the time you planned for, and like tumblers in a lock, everything clicks like it's supposed to.
Then, a mid-west relation on your husband's side, someone with too much make up, or bad breath from a sour stomach, shakes your hand, touches the baby's cheek, or kisses you hello beside your eye, and introduces a fucking cold germ.
The trip continues to go pretty much as planned.
I mean, sure, the world is in chaos, terrible things are happening that make your too anxious to eat regularly. You make some poor decisions like drinking diet coke at four in the afternoon because you're doing that whole "vacation with a baby not sleeping thing," and you maybe eat two frosted rose cookie favors from the wedding while lying in a hotel bed one night after you flee the wedding because it didn't start until 6pm, and so the baby went into meltdown just as they brought out the entrees, and so you haven't eaten anything but half a bread roll and three forkfuls of wilted romaine in italian dressing.
But these are all details that get lost in the relief as soon as you set foot in your own house a week later.
Except you wake up the following day with a head full of bees and a throat paved in crushed glass.
You, your Beard, and your baby, are sicker than a pack of dogs, and due to all the travel and emotional strain, it knocks you out for yet another week.
By the time you get back on your feet, it's almost the third week of August.
You're hurtling well toward Autumn with many stores already shuffling in their Halloween decor, and a desire to drink hot coffee and sit outside beside a smoky fire and eat apple after apple.
or at least that's what you want it to be.
That anxious feeling in your stomach never went away.
In fact, now that you have the biggest financial commitment of the year, and the requisite gnarly cold out of your way, you have nothing but the hideous world to focus on.
You want to be enjoying the last beach days. You take the baby to the beach during the eclipse thinking it will be magical, but instead the water is choked with foul smelling algae, and you flee the stench after ten minutes under the sickly half-sun.
The class you've had to reschedule twice now has to be cancelled due to an open house, and your baby won't take a nap, and your fall classes don't have enough sign ups to run yet, so you're anxiety takes hold of money fears, and you find yourself swinging back and forth between nausea and ravenous hunger, fear and survival, self loathing and self preservation.
Your need for stability and reassurance is constant. You get no succor from talking to people who ordinarily make you feel better, hopeful, like you matter, like you can make things better.
That's what it all boils down to.
Control.
You have so little right now.
With a child who you want to leave a wonderful world, a world better than the one you brought him into.
With an old demon that threatens its ugly rise every time you feel ineffective and lost.
With all the small grievances snowballing against you its really difficult to stay warm and be certain you'll get back to safety.
I feel like I'm trapped inside an avalanche and I don't know which way is up.
But, I've got to spit, and see which way it falls, and then start digging.
I have to dig my way out, and trust the sun is shining once I'm free.
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