Quietly Waiting

“But I don’t have any stories that aren’t awful,” I whined.
“Then be quiet and listen,” he said. He promised one day I would have good stories. One day, the life between the shit and the present would have had time to grow, slowly stretching out into my childhood dream of just being free of my cage and doing as I pleased.
The truth is, a lot more shit happened, but not only shit. Some really amazing things happened too. But… I realized, in the midst of accomplishing long standing goals and seeing years’ worth of plans become reality, I never really learned to be happy and some of the shit that still happens is a direct result of my mentality.
This is the phase we’re in. I can tell better stories now. I have experiences aside from the ones that make people’s skin crawl to hear about. There was that time we got sucker punched by the ocean. The time we met that other family that lived in a bus and we got our own sugar gliders. There was the guy in the middle of nowhere Wyoming who gave us a thousand dollars. I realized acid isn’t scary at all and, in fact, my beloved mushrooms are far more sinister. I learned there are girls who hold their liquor far more classlessly than I, and that even a little wine can lead to shattered elbows, or something like that.
But in the midst of living, you have to be able to “sit with your feelings,” as they say, and I still hate that. And past damages and decisions reverberate and, until I learn to deal with old trauma without being traumatized anew, this is cyclical.
How do you learn to live with certain consequences? Certain reverberations. I live right now in a state of mourning the way things are. We’ve reached self loathing, I think. I’m grappling with my brain misfirings and yes, I know, as much as it feels like more acid will make everything just make sense, that’s far from the truth. I’m back on the medication ship with a cbd lifeboat and now what I feared in the beginning is another part of my new reality – not having the pills now is way worse than the pre pill worst. And the bad parenting I so loathe? I’ve done plenty of that.
How do you live with That?? Genetics are a beast too, but hot damn how does one recover in the midst of fucking up a child? In my experience, and my husband’s and pretty much everyone else we know, the adults barrel forward, admitting nothing, until the kid in question is old enough to be blamed for everything. We’re improving on that method, but every angle of working through parenting fuck ups and plain old, “I’m too insane /depressed/manic/exhausted to parent right now, just eat the Lucky Charms for dinner and wait it out,” is miserable. Spoiler alert, when you’re eighteen and think creating the family you wish you’d had will make your life all better, you’re Wrong. And, if you’re a decent human being in spite of being debilitatingly stupid (or just naive, if we’re being generous), round about your mid twenties you’ll fall onto the rough patch of, “Dear god what have I done?”
Sorry can be a really big word. No one ever really used it at me. It’s one of my only comforts-I am a mother who says she’s sorry. I am a mother who is always honest. It’s the least I can do.
And while I’m stumbling along, trying to figure out what “mental health ” and successful parenting look like, I’m quietly watching for the good stories. They’re waiting in the elephant plants where the kids like to dig, in odd places amidst bus breakdowns like Kaycee, WY, and right now stories are just days away on the Pacific coast or, at the very least, more practice sitting with my feelings is floating on the surf.