6:12 a.m.||||2004-09-19
It's 6:12 in the morning, and I'm sitting here with my hair that was freshly dyed before bed last night and is now curly and big like Curly meets Eraserhead. With a deep intense burgundy brown.
Yesterday I got to spend a buncha my spending money (ie, the money left over after my mom budgets the rest of my stuff - it has come to that) on clothes for work and I might now be the fanciest receptionist on EArth. This weekend has so far been about cleaning house and taking names. I got two meetings in as well, which was great. I never disliked the meetings...I just never took any suggestions in all my years of going in and out.
I cleaned my car, which was smelling like a rusty beer can, and we bought a carpet cleaner thing, portable, so today after church I'm taking it the rest of the way to sanitary. Got the oil changed, and it goes into gear now without complaining...
Got new closet stuff for the remaining closet organizing project that also takes place today.
I'm tired already - I'm in this honey mood period where I fall into bed exhausted around ten and wide wide wide awake by 6 am. This is not me, not my normal metabolism, so this productivity is like a little gift until the normal me returns, leaving me tired and cranky at 6 am, and unwilling to ever get up early. I wish I were a normally morning person, but I'm not. Dang.
Last night before I drifted off, I played with mental post cards from Josh's early childhood. I thought about it all, from the moment they placed him dripping and waxy on my belly with his trademark frown, through the eight months when his bed was his swing, through the days when I took him on the stroller on the bus to Harry's, allll through Linda's and then my Mom's. When he started to sit, when he finally rolled over. When he started to walk and when he became more independent.
I couldn't stop the rollodex and as I was thinking these thoughts I was unhappy and sad mostly, thinking, those days are gone, I can never get them back, they're already so hazy and for some reason I kept bumping up agains the darkest of my memories and feelings about him.
Although I didn't know it at the time, it was the scariest time of my life, and I was really reallly displaced for a lot of it. I was also extremely self-centered for a lot of it, and threatened by his baby-ness. Of course there were moments of joy and I will always think of myself as having been a fairly successful parent of an infant, but for the most part? It sucked, and I was pretty immature.
It's interesting though. I had to really try to remember what it felt like to hold him when he was still amoebic. Remember that tactile feeling of small baby in hand, noodly diapered pajama'd fifteen pounds of non-resistance. I finally could feel it but it was hard.
I cast aside a lot of memories of my own childhood too. There is a mechanism in my brain highly skilled at that - taking memories good and bad and putting them to sleep, in a dark pit, and sequestered out of reach in my head. I resent it. But I do it because I can't deal with pain and my entire life I have equated recalling the past,no matter how good it was, as painful. I don't get to put things in right perspective and order because I hide them too quickly.
One day I am going to remember what really happened when I was molested as a kid, and then maybe my life will be returned.