Sunday, April 5

[gottawonder]

I've been cycling through feeling okay about things, and feeling really trapped and out of control.

With our goat dying, that made me feel a lot of loss, helplessness, and eventually resignation because it seems like so little can be done for a goat once it is ill (as has been demonstrated in the past). I felt some peace that I was able to keep her comfortable, that she didn't seem to suffer, and had a quiet death.

We were able to inter her yesterday, in spite of the ground still being frozen, by having a fire on top of the ground. After the first foot or so, the ground isn't quite so hard. It wasn't horrible to bury her, and I was grateful that we could do so, and didn't have to resort to just leaving her in the bush somewhere, or letting the municipal landfill (there is a mass burial area for animals) take her. I was grateful she could be buried at home, quickly and simply.

Then, last night, one of the mares got herself into an awkward place under some roof sections that my husband insisted we keep from the trailer to make a possible hay shed. I didn't want those roof sections in the horse pasture, and we did argue about it last summer. I do my best to keep EVERYTHING out of the pasture, and my husband has a tendency to hoard things he thinks we can build something from. I failed to keep that crap out of their pasture, because he just INSISTED that we at least keep them until this year, in case I changed my mind. So, last night, I went out to feed, and she was standing under one part of this salvaged roof, but she couldn't get out. I hauled my husband out of bed to saw her free, thankfully she was calm through all of this and didn't injure herself. I was shaking from being so afraid she would hurt herself, and from fury because my husband simply wouldn't listen to me and let those roof joists go to someone else instead of storing them in the horse pasture.

Now the horses are in a smaller corral because I don't want another incident, and I'm angry about all of this, because my husband STILL wants to keep them and build a hay shed. Here's the thing. We have so much work ahead of us with the house, I know this shed isn't a priority. I can't really be sure he's going to build it right away, meaning what, the horses can't use their pasture this summer? Not only that, but my husband tend to HALF BUILD things, and then decide they are "finished enough" and moves on to something else, and I'm pretty sure this hay shed would only ever get "built enough" to suit him. Not me. The only reason our barn got properly finished in a timely manner is because it was built by a construction company, not him. The inside is still not finished, because, you got it, that part was his job, and it's never been important enough for him to really, truly do the whole job. He just finished it "enough".

I want those fucking roof sections gone, but there's no way of getting them out until it thaws. I'm furious. I'm angry that he didn't listen to me in the first place, tired of our yard being full of piles of shit from the house project (something that he promised me wouldn't happen when we started this), and sick from feeling like I have no control over any of this. We haven't done any work at all on the house this winter, and it's all cracks in the walls, everything still feels makeshift and impermanent, the back door is roughly framed in with a ragged hole of plaster around it and insulation sticking out, and will not be finished this year in all likely hood. We were supposed to have the addition framed in last summer, so we could work on the interior over the winter, but no dice there. We have done nothing. Since I've been with my husband, I think I have always lived in a house that is unfinished, and always in the process of being renovated. He even had my apartment all torn up within about a month of us meeting (with the landlord's approval). For almost 20 years. Always something raw and unfinished, sometimes a lot of things. If we were at least working towards something, I could feel a little better about things, but everything has come to a grinding halt.

It was exciting the first time we worked on an old house, sort of necessary for survival with the trailer, and now I am just worn out. I knew it would be like this too, and yet I know we had to replace the trailer. It was like being dragged inevitably towards yet another endless house project. Likely another ten years of this. I also knew that it was never going to be an option for him to move a new house here. Never. He would never do something that simple. No, it has to always be the epic battle for him.

So, the combination of losing our dear goat, and the ongoing struggles with isolation from Covid and the loss of my normal life, and these fucking joists, and the complete inability to clean our yard up or even work on the house (we are unable to do anything more now until real spring) has left me absolutely ragged.

There are large stretches of time where I feel almost completely paralyzed with my inability to make anything happen, and if I feel anything at all it's rage. Yet, rage with no appropriate outlet. No way to turn it into productive action. Impotent rage that just eats me up inside.

I go on trying to build some kind of life for myself, and it's like an ever shrinking ice floe. Right now, I have my art, and riding River, and my animals at home. I try to feel like it is worth living for, and it's not easy.

Certainly I have a lot to be grateful for, in spite of everything, but I am tired of not having some kind of appropriate action on the things that are constant sources of frustration and stress for me. Every time I go outside, I have to navigate piles of broken wood, concrete, dirt, old ducts, old refrigerators (we have two sitting in the yard right now), our old bath/shower stall, miscellaneous shit everywhere. I have careful pathways in the snow that I have to follow, or I risk injury. It's ugly. It's a constant visual stress because I can't fix it. I literally have to squeeze around a backhoe that's been sitting beside the house all winter to do chores. I have to be very careful moving the car around in the yard to get out. I've had the basement full of human waste twice this winter. I walk around extension cords all over the floors because they power the heaters that back up the makeshift heater in the basement, because we don't have a real furnace, in spite of having had people working in our basement all goddamn winter long.

Almost everything is a compromise, trying to deal with unfinished things. Everything visually is a physical stress, because everything I look at is incomplete, damaged, dirty, or needs hauling away. I can't deal with it anymore. I can't deal with being unable to affect any positive change in my world.