Wednesday 15 August 2012

Fluorescent Adolescent

August appears to have me in a strangle hold. It's not fun being flat on your back, on the mat, when you've been standing up for a while. When you thought that you just might be winning.

The sky is grey and I stomp up and down the stairs to my new desk on the fourth floor of the building. Mornings. Lunch break. Afternoon. Going home. Stomp, stomp, stompity, stomp.
Or, in my Rumpelstiltskin-like incarnation, stamp, stamp, stampity, stamp.
Let me stamp right through the stair case, through the floor and deep into the earth.
Bye bye. Bye work colleagues. Bye computer. Bye shops and sandwiches and cans of Diet Coke.
Be seeing ya.
I'm off on a journey to the centre of the earth. Accompanied only by anger.

Mad as a cut snake. Mad as a jar full of wasps.

I take my iPod out and jam my earbuds into my ears. Old music.

I stare out of the window. I scowl at the screen.

Why don't they see me?
Nobody understands me. Sob. Glare.
GAH! BLARGH!
I don't know what I'm doing here.
Why am I still living in this stupid town being boring, boring boring?
Why am I so FAT all of a sudden?
Why is my HAIR so lame?
Why do I have a massive SPOT developing right in the middle of my eyebrow?

And I thought I'd stopped caring about all that junk.

WHY is she DEAD? WHY did she have to die?
Because I still can't figure it out.

Although I have long ago accepted that there is no reason and, therefore, nothing for me to figure out.

Picture Window plays and I start to cry.
I was crying over the Olympics Closing Ceremony.
Tears are just lurking around. Ready to stream down in teenage self pity.

My friends have started to announce third pregnancies.
And I am senselessly jealous and stupidly cross.
That it won't be me soon. Or ever.
We can't afford it. Our house isn't big enough.
Surprise twins was the only way we were ever going to have three children.

Oh? Oh right? That already happened didn't it?

And they seem so placid and certain and sure. These expectants of a few months hence.
Whereas I am still, at thirty-three, all at sea.
Living out a strange protracted second adolescence.

With thanks to Jill A. from Glow for pointing this out because I had wondered what that flicker of recognition was as I jammed the ear buds into my ears this morning. Hey adolescence. Long time no see. How you doing old chum? Though I was done with you but . . . apparently . . . not. 

Wondering who I am.
Wondering who the hell they are? My peers. These people who are me in another universe, where she doesn't die. They seem so knowledgeable and settled.

I've been here before.
So long ago that I was listening to a Walkman.
Aeons ago. Lifetimes ago. Especially if you measure in the lifespan of my eldest child.

See, second adolesence. That is my only excuse for that last line. Melodrama and angst.

Thanks a bunch life. Way to set a girl back. There I was, strolling along, being 29 and pretty much comfortable in my own skin. Then BLAM! Hey you get to be 12 again! Ummm . . . yay! Except you get to be 12 years old whilst housed in the body of a thirty something. Ummm . . .less yay?!

You're thinking you've got it all figured out. You've got it made.

And then you are cut adrift. Pushed away from your thirties and back to being fourteen.

Because I really wanted to revisit that particular coastline (insert snark) Except the cool kids are probably calling snark something else by now.

See I even like this song again. My dear Billy. Sing it for me. As I mash the buttons for the escape route.

August. Leave me alone. I'm too old and I'm too tired to be a teenager again.



16 comments:

  1. Despite all my rage...
    Greif, not a rat, is our cage in this sense.
    ~Cava

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  2. Oh Cava. It feels like it sometimes. Caged. Despite all my rage . . . indeed. To think I used to imagine that I knew rage before she died, when I was fifteen. Not yet. I don't think any situation I could ever encounter in the future will make me angrier. That she was so robbed of her whole life. Angry and hopeless. Much like being a teenager really.

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  3. Oh, sweetheart, I'm so sorry. It is just so fucking miserable. The endless, endless pain and heaviness and anger and getting so tired of it all. Of all the work and healing coming undone, again. It's not like you are asking for much. You just wanted Georgina to live. That's all, just to have your daughter here with her family.

    I send to you all the love in this mother's heart. I wish I had something that would actually help. Eventually, after way too many years, you again get comfortable with who you are. You can again live in your own mind and heart. And years after that, you reach a point where you don't want to be different. Where you are finally O.K. with who you have become. Yes, you'll always want your daughter back, but you don't want to go through all this changing again and you can no longer remember very well who you were or who you were going to be. And that's when being at peace with yourself becomes a reality.

    I like that Smashing Pumpkins song. I went back to Janis Joplin, Joan Jett and Billie Holiday. Smashing Pumpkins and Guns 'n Roses were two bands I added after my daughter died. And some songs I just can't listen to any more because there is way too much emotional pain attached to them.

    Jill A.

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  4. "Why don't they see me?
    Nobody understands me. Sob. Glare.
    GAH! BLARGH!"

    I see you, I understand you. I'm in this with you, sister.

    xo

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  5. Oh Catherine, your words illustrate the feelings so well. August is the beginning of my decent into anniversaries and I can already feel myself beginning to pout about it all and sink into the gray. Sigh.

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  6. I'm reading this during a wild thunderous lightning storm with driving rain. Seem to punctuate the anger and fury to describe. "Too old and too tired" I let the tears come.

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  7. I often feel like an angsty adolescent, too. There's no doubt I can be a whiny pain in the ass sometimes, but it's part of who I am, right here right now. I don't admit that with any kind of bravado, but I have to admit it just the same. Why? I don't know. And I don't expect anyone to care, either, really. I guess I've never been the type to employ an air of mystery and instead feel compelled to be mostly transparent--at the risk of being judged, but always hoping to be accepted for who I am, gnarly bits and all.

    It's a weird coincidence that you've written about how you feel like an angry teenager again, because I've been hammering out a post with a similar theme today. Perhaps we are tuned in to the same frequency?

    I'm sorry that you're suffering so grievously. I'm so very sorry that Georgina died.

    Stamping with you,

    K

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  8. All this week I have been wondering why I am so fat all of a sudden and why my hair is so lame, so I'm kind of stuck on that part of your post. Sometimes I feel like Anja dying plunged me into the absolute depths of a full-blown midlife crisis. Re-thinking everything I have ever done or decided, pulling grey hairs out of my head by the dozen, wishing I could run away from it all, buy a VW van like the one I had in my twenties and head out on the road again. But this description of another adolescence is somehow very apt, too. Uncertainty, confusion and insecurity all around.

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  9. Dear lovely rumplestiltskin-ish Catherine W, I know that stampy feeling, and it's horrid. And it's almost harder than being a teenager the first time around, because now you expect adult behaviour from yourself and you have the ability to see what is happening. But don't beat yourself up about it. Adolescents are really good at feeling these kinds of feelings - so if that's what you need... at least you've got fabulous music to feel shoddy to. (I still LOVE this song) Hang in there dear one. xxxxxxx h

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  10. Only this: I read your posts, this one, the last one, the one before that, etc & etc

    (several times each on several days each)

    I tell my husband about them

    my mother about them

    myself about them

    and in the howling wilderness - at least - a set of footprints says, "Someone Else, here."

    Which {improvement of Missouri waistline or attitude; none, none} comforts me, still.

    August, August, Georgina, Georgina.

    Saying her name in a biting wind, daily,

    CiM

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  11. Catherine, I find myself where you are. But I cannot put my agsty, scowling self in writing as eloquently as you have.

    Thank you for this post. and giving me a chance to swear at it all today. It is goddamn spot on.

    umm... less yay all the way. It all fucking sucks. Sorry.

    Keep stomping it out... stamping it out. I'm here, hearing you all the way.

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  12. ...but at least there's an honesty in those teenage years? Back then it was the raging hormones that compelled us to all to be so passionate and dramatic and raging... but this time round, that was grief's job. I know what you mean though. I don't want to be seen as petulant or melodramatic or ungraceful, so it takes enormous reserves of energy to squash those feelings down (in polite society you know?). So if listening to a rage-y piece of music or angsty lyrics offers some release - I'm all for it.

    I just wonder though, why are we required to squish these things down at all? It reminds me of another Ben Folds (Five) song... I guess it's not cool to care:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Y1wm7CFRCQ

    And Picture Window - that song kills me. I had Seamus alive and safe and warm inside of me when I went to a Ben Folds concert. He played that song and it gave me chills. That and 'Still Fighting It" which made me bawl. I'm glad that I got to bring my boy to that.

    My heart goes out to you this August - I now this month haunts you - I hope that life is gentle on you.

    Thinking of Georgina with love xx

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  13. "Why don't they see me?
    Nobody understands me. Sob. Glare."

    I'm right there with you, smack dab in the middle of the same universe. Telling August to fuck off too.
    Sending much love from another timezone of the same world. xo

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  14. Only losing a child can age you such lifetimes and take you back to such youth - one of the paradoxes my brain is too old and tired to figure out.

    I think August deserves a good teenage strop ... I think October does too ... and every other month where rage is the appropriate response to a parent staring down the barrel of a dead child's birthday.

    Holding you close in thought Catherine - all of you and especially Georgina.

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  15. Holding you both in my thoughts and heart Cath...

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  16. It helps, a tiny bit, to see that it's adolescence all over again. Maybe it's the perspective, or the bit of humor.

    Dot has taken to screaming and roaring this amazing, raw, primal, uninhibited (and very, very loud) roar when thwarted, and I find myself listening to her and wishing I could roar like that, too. I certainly *feel* like making that kind of noise these days.

    So maybe it's a bit like toddlerhood, too. Toddlerhood minus the opportunity or the lack of concern with what other people think that actually makes the roaring possible. Which just sucks, now that I think about it. Forget I said that.

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