I haven't written in a while. If you have children you can understand that time is short and, since my last post, I have also started working again. Granted, not a full time job, but it was a huge step when I hadn't spent hardly a moment without her in nine months.
As I sit here tonight, after trying to get my screaming one year old to sleep, I am baffled. The woman girl I knew two years ago as Amanda no longer exists. She has been replaced by a woman with hair that hasn't been brushed in a week (don't worry, it's clean), wears sweats, and wouldn't know where her "good" shoes were for anything. I actually had a conversation with my sister this evening regarding, mostly, that very subject. The feminine has been left behind somewhere.
You know what?
I am okay with that. My girl is fantastic. There are a lot of days that I want to rip my hair out and hide in the closet and that is okay, too. I have come to grips with this funny little life I am now living. Trips through the grocery store at break neck speed have been replaced by strolls as I stop every few feet to entertain a bored child. She is easily bored. My obsessively clean house has been replaced by piles of toys and the occasionally surprising pool of baby spit up. Those are like cat vomit. You've heard the gagging and hacking noise, you know it is around somewhere but you never see it until you are doing the "OH GOD! What have I stepped in?!" dance. The only thing I'm still a bit bitter about is my books. I've been reading the same one for three weeks now and I am only two-thirds of the way through. I don't even remember how the story started at this point. Makes me feel a bit senile.
My little family is infuriating. My husband is like a giant toddler at times as I walk along behind him picking up flotsam and listening to the same story he has now told for the tenth time. My daughter as I chase her through the house giggling just to catch her just to realize that he diaper has leaked and I am now covered in excrement. My dog as I stare at him in complete frustration that only lasts two seconds as he puts on his "shame face" and we end up sitting on the floor together with him getting ear scritches. My cat...well. Cats are just bitter and rotten at all times. How can you ever tell what is going on with them?
My point being, life gets me down. It gets hard to the point you are sitting in a closet and crying. You get angry, you feel lost, you hate yourself and everyone around you. But at the end of the day, no matter what has happened, I can't help but love my family. No matter how angry or at my wits end they make me I still love them.
But it doesn't mean that a vacation wouldn't be a nice change of pace...
Is it that I fail to understand the human emotion? The constant swing of vastly dissimilar emotions as if a child hanging on the monkey bars, undecided whether they wanted to continue forward or go back the way they came. Angry, happy, sad, excited, depressed, neutral, neurotic.
Now, don't get me wrong, I certainly feel. I have the range of emotions however the part that confuses me is how in the vast populace how emotions seem highly misguided.
Let us take for starters tabloids. Every time we go to the checkout in a supermarket or any other large retail chain we are greeted by countless glossy magazines. The covers boast about some Hollywood celebrity or another and how they are too fat or too thin. Who they have been going to bed with and who may feel snubbed by the supposed physical union. The ones that agitate me the most are the ones showing the pregnant celebrities and how they are coping. There are times I feel sorry for these people and that their lives end up in the tabloids, other times I feel that they are asking for it but acting as audacious as they do at times.
Either way, why do people care?
The reason people care is something I simply cannot, in the greatest depths of my mind, fathom. The senseless fanatics racing to see which star of the big screen has cellulite this bikini season.
Is this obsession a holdover from the times of empirical power? The kings and princes, lords and ladies all strutting about in their finery to show that they are above the commoner. Would the same fanaticism erupt during the Roman period if they had a simple means of advertising themselves?
I suppose they did in a way, if you think about it. Take the gladiators for example. Individual gladiators had their own fan bases, their own supporters. They had people who would spend money to bet on them in their latest fight. One thing I can't do is bring myself to believe that the fan bases gave a hoot what so-and-so who won their latest fight was wearing. I doubt they cared if some concubine or the other had been made available to them as payment for shedding the blood of another man. I may be wrong but I feel that is a concept only cared about so intensely by the more modern peoples.
What spawned the rant of this evening? Well, a rather famous comedian died of suicide. But he lived his life, he made his choices, so why does the mass populace care so much? Why the obsession? I simply can not get my head around it.
If a normal man, one not in the spot light, had chosen to off himself no one but his family and close friends would pay any attention. The man may get a blurb in the local newspaper, depending on where he lived, but that would be that. There would be no mass out powering of grief from the country (or the world, in some cases). People would not be racing to their social media outlets to express their condolences. They are people who live their lives and make choices for themselves but all life ends in death.
Death is in no way rare and it at some point will touch every person.
With that thought, good night.
I was sitting on my couch this evening enjoying a glass of cheap wine, a tacky novel, and listening to the Chopin station on Google Play when I realized I had no idea why. I couldn't remember the last time I had simply relaxed like that. The last time I had sat around in fuzzy socks and did absolutely nothing had been well over a year before and something occurred to me in that moment.
I didn't like it much.
Even a year ago I would have enjoyed an easy read, a bottle of screw top wine, and some quality couch time. Now? Not so much. It set me to pondering what all had changed in the last year. The most obvious thing was the birth of my daughter, now nine months old and the absolute light of my life. But that was too easy. It would be too simple to just categorize my personal changes into being a mother and setting the thought aside to be unexplored while I picked back up my well thumbed novel. No, it was time to invest some time into exploring myself.
After five minutes all I had managed to do was irritate myself. How did I come off so pompous as to decide to "explore" myself in peace and solitude? Bah! That wasn't time well spent. So, to take my pompousness to the next level, I decided to blog about it. Maybe I'd discover something wonderful in the process. Or start to hate myself, it could go either way.
This is my life, this is who I am, and how I got here. My loves, my hates, my opinions, and random (and occasionally dirty) thoughts. It's time that I rediscover me.
