“You keep on trying, but
I like your blood on my teeth just a little too much…”
— Chinchilla, “Little Girl Gone”
When someone gets sick, I get depressed. I start thinking about mortality, the meaning of life, the point of it all. I look back and assess everything that went wrong and my part in it.
That’s the important thing: my part.
My mind is a chaotic whirlwind of what-ifs and I’m-sorrys, with a Diane Birch soundtrack, kicking off with “Magic View.”
Bungee, our dog, didn’t poop yesterday morning on our walk. I extended the walk, only to find beet-red bloody poop coming out of his rear.
Oh no…
I began to spiral.
The vet says it’s his anal glands and that he needs to be neutered to help them.
I weakly, but dutifully asked about the case against neutering, which wipes out his hormones and immunity for vaccines.
I listened to the vet’s reasonable response, and let it all go. My principles, my concern, my good intentions.
I gave up, I caved in, I joined the crowd of vaxxers, I vaguely wondered why the anti-neuter/spay crowd never mentioned anal gland issues, and said, okay.
I thought about our only son, James, and how he’s the one who wanted a dog. This dog. How he was like every other son (and daughter) in creation, using his words to make a strong case for a weak-willed, people-pleasing, guilt-ridden mother with an inferiority complex. How he’s in another state making his own way, having already said goodbye in a million times, and how I kept missing the hint. How, when I brought up him wanting a dog in the first place, he turned it around on me and said it was my fault for insisting we could keep it somehow even if our rental landlord didn’t allow pets, and how I bowed my head and took the shit, working my ass off to keep this puppy alive, to find someone, anyone willing to take him in until our home was completed.
I thought about why we moved from a place we’d planned to be our forever home, based on a promise I swear my husband made to me when his parents died and left him almost a million dollars, and a promise I then made to our only son. I thought about the multitude of times I had to move, because my father was in the Army and my mother wanted better for her life than getting beaten about the head by her adoptive mother, and how I wouldn’t do that to my only child.
I thought about the fateful day when I was going on about taking his driver’s license test and staying at his Domino’s delivery job a little longer when my only son looked me dead in the eyes and said, “You know I’m leaving, right? I was never going to stay.”
I thought about why I thought he would stay and take care of the dog he insisted he wanted and why he left that dog with me, when I couldn’t even take care of another dog and made my husband drop Manu off at the shelter.
I thought about why food vloggers Bill & Lisa still have their grown children around them as they go about their many travels and I can’t even have my only grown child come visit for the holidays for longer than two days.
I thought about my WA friends whose grown children still come home and hike and break bread and go on vacations and celebrate holidays, like it’s nothing.
I thought about my neighbor friends and all the friends before them who keep confiding in me, dropping bombs in passing about the Narcissist parent they bent over backwards nursing back to health and exposing his Narcissist ways to their young children, the husbands they’re dissatisfied with and want to divorce and now their husbands treat me like I’m the one who put them up to it, stupid backstabbing Dayna they try to hide from whenever she comes around walking her dog but then call my son a sneaky, lying, manipulative, fake underage drinker to his face without me around…but you’re different, Carol…why are they telling me this?
I think about all of it, and want to die. I want to go back to when I was seven, living in Ft. Shafter, and make difference choices. I want to put myself first for once. I want to have the strength of character to stand my ground and defend myself and say, “No. Fuck you,” and let it stand. I want to be young and skinny and healthy and go running forever…
It’s times like this when I’m disgusted and scared of people and their fancy, contradictory, self-serving words, mixed messages, and ulterior motives…and me, for falling for their lines every time.
Why am I still here? Why can’t I cry? Why don’t you love me?
What’s wrong with me?
I don't believe in perfect families and perfect children-parents relationships. But I believe that children who seem not to care about their parents after leaving the family 'nest', get to realize later in their lives how much they love them and wish they could go back in time to spend more time with them. At least your J. will definitely be like that, I am sure. Just hang on and keep creating. You are not alone.
Hey, Coggie, do you still have that photo of you and the world’s most disgusting bathroom at Cafe Dumonde?