I am in desperate need of a brain dump. I have been running around with such frenetic energy that I’ve been in danger of some genuine cathartic explosion, the kind laden with regret. I have yelled at my husband more than once, more than twice, more than thrice… daily…. for over a week. What, precisely, is the matter?
It’s always complicated to answer that. If I knew, with concision, what was the matter, I would amend it and call it good. But patterns are persisting that are eating me up inside. And the pattern, corrosive, is a pattern of what I am not doing. I am not writing. I am not living a life of the mind. Also, principally, I am not banging out an impressive PhD application as I intended. As I committed to, with accountability partners. As I reached out and asked for letters of recommendation for. The shame and self-loathing around my failure to make headway on this application, over the course of the last two (two!) months is substantial, it is also self-compounding, and it is, perhaps, itself, the problem.
I want, more than anything else right this very second, to be a person who can do this. I want to try for it so badly I could go cry on somebody’s couch if anyone volunteered such a service. Unfortunately, I am wired to be intensely sensitive to the emotions of the people around me, and I react strongly to them – which usually means being a peacemaker after a fashion. I do not try to remove problems from people’s paths, but I put energy into making sure they feel seen and acknowledged while they endure them. In general I think this is a good way to be, and I endorse my own behavior, but in my marriage it has gotten me into trouble. Being unequally yoked in empathy and in sensitivity to the emotions of others means that I generally move to accommodate the emotions of my spouse. I generally recognize his emotional state before he does, and I consistently make choices based on avoiding his resentment because, for me, resentment is the most painful emotional energy to absorb. I will recognize resentment from him months if not years ahead of when he will recognize it in himself. This makes it difficult to address, because if I say something head on, he can deny it. So my own resentment tends to build up into an irrational monster that emerges as the crazy lady I’ve been the past few days. I am cranky because I can’t seem to do the things that matter most to me because it is too painful to deal with the fallout of putting down the things that matter most to him.
So, pain either way. It feels like a miserable life. I don’t want to buy into the story that I’m doomed to a miserable life. I have lots of reasons to love my life, and I want to lean into them. There are genuinely a lot of things I love about my life. But this thing – this one giant thing – my need to be a writer, to spend the time it takes to create things with words and to edit them into something cogent, and to find ways to push them out into the world in ways that matter to someone who isn’t me – my husband cannot even comprehend the thing itself, let alone valuing it enough to invest the time it would take. Diverting it and calling it “pursuing a PhD” is easier for him to comprehend. He can see value in a degree (we valued his after all, and it’s proven a sound financial investment), and he can see value in the potential for employment at a University, in my ability to provide health insurance and tuition benefits, and contribute to retirement. He absolutely, 100% cannot comprehend the value in it beyond that. I doubt very much that he has applied any smidgeon of imagination toward what any of it would be like for me. The PhD program, the dissertation slog, applying for jobs, developing relationships, having discussions about things that never occur to him – any of it. Just like I very much doubt that he applies his imagination toward what my day to day life is like now, despite all the time I spend exploding about it. No matter how many times I try to describe what it does to my brain to be interrupted every 2 minutes all day long, how cut off I feel from the world, he insists he’s also interrupted all day long at work and shrugs me off.
I feel so invisible at home. I know there are places where my inner life would be seen and acknowledged and even supported, but I don’t know where to find them outside of universities. I love my family, but they are not capable of loving me in the way I need, and if I do not spend time in places that understand the way my brain works, I am going to break the way an engine breaks when it’s always running in a gear that’s meant for occasional use.
I require the “room of her own” that Virginia Woolf meant to mean space to breathe and to be and to feel the heft of one’s own priorities, to turn them over in your hands and fully admit that they are indeed precious heavy things. Right now I need time, and I need help with the things I’m most ineffective at. (Which, sadly, is most things related to housekeeping…. I can do them, and I can do them well, but I am not fast and I do not find fulfillment in them, therefore I never quite catch up.)
The thing, ultimately, about being a mother in a home… and I think this applies to both working and stay at home mothers, and all the mothers in-between…. is that the kind of work and labor that mothers provide in families is incredibly inefficient. Now, inefficient doesn’t equal unimportant, or unnecessary, but it can be maddening to spend so much of one’s bandwidth and get so very little accomplished with it. Every little need on endless repeat – all the picking the same toys off the stair, replenishing the toilet paper that nobody else seems to think to do, the thinking ahead (or failing to) to birthdays and halloween parties and homework assignments – it would be so much more efficient to do it in a way that wouldn’t meet the emotional needs of the humans as well.
I’ve streamlined a lot of processes in my home. I’ve stripped a lot of unnecessary “shoulds” from my life, and still I am left with days strung together of such jagged fragments. I know that I am made for deep work, and without a seismic shift in how my household functions, I cannot shoehorn it into my life.
There is hope, of course, that it will be “easier” when my youngest is in school all day, which is either one or two years away, depending on the fate of full-day kindergarten, but 9am-3pm is a 6 hour day, not 8, and it’s really only 9am-2pm because the older kids finish earlier, and that would be 25 hours a week, except there’s early out day once a week, so chop at least an hour off – down to 24. Then I can’t spend all 24 of those hours working – I need to exercise at least 5 of those hours – down to 19, and then there’s the email catch up and the budgeting and the housekeeping – which could easily eat up more than 19 hours a week, but could possibly be wheedled down to 6. So maybe, if I’m lucky and insanely efficient, I could squeeze 13 hours a week to work on things I care about – but I work best in giant blocks of time. Like full days. I get into a groove and I’m on fire and I go and go and get so much done. But this literally never works out for me.
Once, years ago now, Renn took all the kids to visit his Grandmother hours away while I worked on my Master’s thesis. I got more done during the two days he was done than I did in weeks of working piecemeal during evenings. Did I mention how inefficient motherhood is? This is part of it – and I don’t just mean being interrupted in a “coming to talk into my face while I’m in the middle of composing an email” way (though that happens every time I try to write an email) – but in the sense that my time is never my own and I’m never free to use it in the way that works best for me and the things I need most to do to work toward my goals. I have to patch it all together with whatever is left and it is heavily, mightily inefficient. I spend a lot of that time trying desperately to get into a frame of mind where I can work or write or think at all. I could not possibly overestimate the discouragement it brings.
So, I’ve arrived at a point where I know big, fundamental shifts have to happen. I cannot keep shoving my own needs in the corner and neglecting them. The resentment that builds toward the people I love most is toxic. But (even if motivated by love) getting my people to be willing to consider inconvenient change is painful. Getting my husband to be willing to financially prioritize my needs has never gone well for me. I’ve quit everything I’ve tried to do for myself since we got married – with the exception of my Masters program, which I only didn’t quite because it ended on its own, but I didn’t use the momentum of finishing toward anything that could have helped me, because his resentment had grown into something that hurt me every day at that point. I know he doesn’t see this, and he certainly doesn’t see his hand in this, and he certainly certainly doesn’t see that things could have gone drastically different directions if he’d been able to show a modicum of enthusiastic support. We’re still stuck in the “I don’t need your permission, I need your support” conversation on rinse and repeat.
Is there hope for me? I have to believe that there is. But will that hope hurt before it heals? Inevitably.
I’m asking the universe, God, and my fairy godmother for words of wisdom and preferably the perfect words for my husband to have an empathetic breakthrough. What would it take?
A Poet Is Somebody 