The Five Strands of A Sedentary Empress

New Mood On Monday

I’m stressed about what to do with my car. The lease ends this week, and I have to decide if she goes or if she stays. My Echo, my black beauty, my environmentally friendly, gas-camel of the asphalt. I love her so. The thing is, I am not much of an ‘outside’ person, and as such, the driveway has been more of a friend to her than I have. I’m fairly confident that I haven’t exceeded the mileage allotted on my lease, so I don’t think giving the car back will be an issue, but M. seems to be wavering about whether or not I should buy it out, and to me that makes no sense. I don’t have the money to buy it out, nor do I want to outright own it, mostly because I want a newer car one day, a hybrid, a shiny one, and maybe it will be red. Sometimes, what makes sense to him seems utterly insane to me.

Things feel different, lately, like there’s a loose thread and it’s being pulled. I have to admit that I am finding him less enjoyable than I used to. His strange way of doing things, the way he seems to edge me out when it comes to arranging things for our daughter. I’m probably one of the only women on the planet who is actually complaining about the father being too involved, but I’m a woman and it’s hard to satisfy us. We tiptoe around one another at times, bristling under the polite veneer, aching to yell or shout or anything which might ease the building tension. Today, I found myself sweating, mostly because he was so ‘in it’ while I was trying to get the wee one ready for school. He’s so laid back in general that when he gets anal and domineering I want to rips holes in his back with my claws. It’s too much, having two people like that in the same house. I love him, that’s certain, but liking him is always influenced by the environment.

It comes to this: will I ever be happy in love? Everyone asks this, because it’s never a simple thing even when the greeting cards tell you different. Moods in people are so interchangeable, so beyond stable, that it’s tough to look at the people we love the same way, everyday. I have a hard time accepting anger in the people I’ve come to regard as calm, and because I am reactionary and defensive, I seldom tolerate it. This might not be fair, especially since everyone is entitled to a bad day now and then, but I take it personally, like their mood is about me, and as such, I take umbrage.

He seems to be dealing with his own stuff, though, but he tells me nothing. He holes up in his office, comes out at night to watch the first season of ‘Heroes’ (my sister bought me the dvd for my birthday even though I’d never seen it before, but we’re kind of hooked on it), and we laugh at it and lose an hour or two before going back to our corners and letting go of everything in the middle. What do I think is going on? He is a workaholic, and even though I might be inclined to think there’s something more salacious going on, there isn’t. He’s into airplanes and building them, and he does it until the middle of the night, every night. It’s tough, knowing that I am third in the hierarchy, after the wee person and airplanes. He doesn’t say it, but I sense this to be so. I can’t fault him for the former, though. She is our love in the flesh, and the best part of everything we are. I have flashes of that scene in 'Sweet Dreams', the Patsy Cline biopic, where she comes home from singing all night to find her husband quietly painting his model (train? car? house? can't remember...), and she said something to the effect of, 'I've been out all night, don't you have something you'd like to say to me? Like you missed me, or you hate my guts, or somethin''. This is not verbatim, but you get the point.

One of my bizarre habits is that I read the obituaries from the town where I used to live in, online. My dad has always read the obits, and he has managed to instil that same strange fascination in me. Our logic is that if we’re not in it, it’s a good day, and also that you never know who’ll be in there who you might have some association with. It’s how I learned my next-door-neighbour died a month ago. His absence in the yard was not a tip-off. I read the names and I come up with a version of their life in my head. Odd, but interesting. Yesterday, I came across a name that seemed familiar, and I immediately got the image of a girl from high school in my mind. This was weird, mostly because the name was not hers, but was instead her daughter’s, and the surname was not the name the mother had in high school. No, I don’t know how I knew. The girl was eighteen and had died in an accident (a stretch of road near my old house which was a favourite for drag-racing teens in pick-up trucks), flipping in a pick-up truck with two speed-loving boys. They lay in a corn field for four hours before anyone found the wreckage. She was the only one who died.

I thought about her mother, a girl I’d seen in the hallways at school, one year obese, the next drawn and thin. She was looking to be interesting, having been locked inside a clumsy body for most of her younger life, and we all whispered about how she lost the weight, wondering if it was effort or something else. As happens with some formerly heavy people, she went a little wild, began hanging out with the lovely looking, yet dangerous, boys. She got pregnant toward the end of that last year, and I haven’t seen her since. The girl who died was the baby she’d had then, the child who had taken her life down a less-travelled path than the rest of us. I wonder how the mother must be feeling, not just her grief, but about what it must be like to know that the person who was the cause of your life switching tracks was no more. Leaving school, marrying someone who would ultimately become an enemy, embarking on yet another marriage which didn’t work, and then finally, a third. Middle thirties and a third marriage. A dead daughter and an empty pink bedroom. She had given up one version of her future for this girl, and now there is nothing left of the one she chose instead. There is a lot of loss there, and I almost cried over the tragedy of it.

I’m in such a mood…