Thursday, November 21
Nov. 21st, 2024 10:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gottawonderToday I am grateful for:
Getting my proper "stay at home" day this week.
It snowed last night, fluffy, sparkly stuff, and it's very clean and pretty and covers up all the animal poop.
I got decent sleep last night too, and it is nice when I have no pressing thing to rush to.
I talked with Trainwreck for a while, and again she seems very different when she's sober. Less dramatic, and maybe for the first time in a long time, aware of things like time and boredom.
She talked about having nothing to do, and no one around to care if she did anything. I had to laugh a bit, because I'm like "well, you're describing large chunks of my adult life, that's what I've been struggling with for YEARS".
When my husband works "away", and he's at his work location for ten days or more at a time and only home for four days, that's my life. Struggling to fill the hours in a meaningful way, trying to find motivation to do things like even bathe or do the dishes since no one will witness or care if I do them.
All I could tell her is what I've learned to do, which is to find groups to be part of. I am so adamant about pottery and riding River in a formal setting because I need to be around people and have structure and have goals.
She of course responds with "I don't like to be part of groups" and I said "you're going to have to learn to do it if you want to stay sane". That's all there is to it.
Whether it's just going to stuff for free at the public library like a book club, or join a yoga group, or ANYTHING, that's where you find some sanity. A place to go regularly, maybe more than one place, where you form a weekly schedule, have some sense of time passing, where people interact with you and you interact with them, and you get some kind of stimulation.
Then she talked like she always does, about "finding somewhere else to live". She ALWAYS seems to feel that somehow, wherever she is currently living is the reason for her boredom or unhappiness. When she lived in her shitty trailer in the middle of a ghost town, she was miserable and all she did every day was to drive to town to visit family. At that time, all she could think about was moving to be where her sons lived.
So, now she's living where her sons live, BUT, she wants some place where she can have a garden, or at least a deck where she can have potted plants. I don't think it's the right choice, because she can't afford to rent anywhere else except where she is at the lodge for seniors.
I told her to get a plot in the community garden, and she might do that, but she already sighed and had a list of reasons why it won't work.
I don't know if she recognizes this, but she never really gardened. She used to have pots and pots of dead plants everywhere, and sometimes a patch of weeds with some struggling potatoes in it. Often part way through summer she just gave up on it and quit watering/weeding it.
It was mostly about the "business" and purpose of WANTING to garden, where she would make lots of trips to places and came home with dozens of flats of discarded plants from the back of stores, things that the Hutterites would give her, stuff being sold for next to nothing as clearance items, and it would often sit unplanted in heaps all over her yard until it died not long after. It was an excuse to hoard old dirt, pots, tools, and all KINDS of garbage because she was "going to make a raised bed" out of it, or "going to make a trellis" out of it, like old metal bed frames, old chairs, old lumber and tree stumps.
Anyhow, mostly it was a fairly benign call, other than her never ending fantasy of "living somewhere else".
I worked with Wonder and Dandy out in the big pasture, and my Sweetie was home by then and we walked around together. They were more silly today, and left several times, but eventually settled down and made it all the way around the pasture without leaving.
Then we came in, and my Sweetie "forgot all about" me suggesting earlier that we get the bedroom in the addition cleared out so that he can FINISH THAT ROOM. We aren't working on anything else right now. NOTHING. We should always be working on something, and it's time to work on that room again.
I had it all cleaned out LAST WINTER so we could work on it, and very little happened. Now, it is piled up with stuff again, and you can't work in it. Sigh.
So, it looks like once again, I WILL HAVE TO CLEAN IT OUT, and he will likely do very little in it. I wonder at what point even HE will think it is taking a ridiculous amount of time to finish our house. Maybe one day he will hear himself talking to someone else about it, and go "sweet Jesus, I am SLOWWWWW at finishing our house".
We watched a movie, since we got to that point early enough in the evening. We watched an okay movie called "Baghead" that was sort of about making low budget scary movies.
Getting my proper "stay at home" day this week.
It snowed last night, fluffy, sparkly stuff, and it's very clean and pretty and covers up all the animal poop.
I got decent sleep last night too, and it is nice when I have no pressing thing to rush to.
I talked with Trainwreck for a while, and again she seems very different when she's sober. Less dramatic, and maybe for the first time in a long time, aware of things like time and boredom.
She talked about having nothing to do, and no one around to care if she did anything. I had to laugh a bit, because I'm like "well, you're describing large chunks of my adult life, that's what I've been struggling with for YEARS".
When my husband works "away", and he's at his work location for ten days or more at a time and only home for four days, that's my life. Struggling to fill the hours in a meaningful way, trying to find motivation to do things like even bathe or do the dishes since no one will witness or care if I do them.
All I could tell her is what I've learned to do, which is to find groups to be part of. I am so adamant about pottery and riding River in a formal setting because I need to be around people and have structure and have goals.
She of course responds with "I don't like to be part of groups" and I said "you're going to have to learn to do it if you want to stay sane". That's all there is to it.
Whether it's just going to stuff for free at the public library like a book club, or join a yoga group, or ANYTHING, that's where you find some sanity. A place to go regularly, maybe more than one place, where you form a weekly schedule, have some sense of time passing, where people interact with you and you interact with them, and you get some kind of stimulation.
Then she talked like she always does, about "finding somewhere else to live". She ALWAYS seems to feel that somehow, wherever she is currently living is the reason for her boredom or unhappiness. When she lived in her shitty trailer in the middle of a ghost town, she was miserable and all she did every day was to drive to town to visit family. At that time, all she could think about was moving to be where her sons lived.
So, now she's living where her sons live, BUT, she wants some place where she can have a garden, or at least a deck where she can have potted plants. I don't think it's the right choice, because she can't afford to rent anywhere else except where she is at the lodge for seniors.
I told her to get a plot in the community garden, and she might do that, but she already sighed and had a list of reasons why it won't work.
I don't know if she recognizes this, but she never really gardened. She used to have pots and pots of dead plants everywhere, and sometimes a patch of weeds with some struggling potatoes in it. Often part way through summer she just gave up on it and quit watering/weeding it.
It was mostly about the "business" and purpose of WANTING to garden, where she would make lots of trips to places and came home with dozens of flats of discarded plants from the back of stores, things that the Hutterites would give her, stuff being sold for next to nothing as clearance items, and it would often sit unplanted in heaps all over her yard until it died not long after. It was an excuse to hoard old dirt, pots, tools, and all KINDS of garbage because she was "going to make a raised bed" out of it, or "going to make a trellis" out of it, like old metal bed frames, old chairs, old lumber and tree stumps.
Anyhow, mostly it was a fairly benign call, other than her never ending fantasy of "living somewhere else".
I worked with Wonder and Dandy out in the big pasture, and my Sweetie was home by then and we walked around together. They were more silly today, and left several times, but eventually settled down and made it all the way around the pasture without leaving.
Then we came in, and my Sweetie "forgot all about" me suggesting earlier that we get the bedroom in the addition cleared out so that he can FINISH THAT ROOM. We aren't working on anything else right now. NOTHING. We should always be working on something, and it's time to work on that room again.
I had it all cleaned out LAST WINTER so we could work on it, and very little happened. Now, it is piled up with stuff again, and you can't work in it. Sigh.
So, it looks like once again, I WILL HAVE TO CLEAN IT OUT, and he will likely do very little in it. I wonder at what point even HE will think it is taking a ridiculous amount of time to finish our house. Maybe one day he will hear himself talking to someone else about it, and go "sweet Jesus, I am SLOWWWWW at finishing our house".
We watched a movie, since we got to that point early enough in the evening. We watched an okay movie called "Baghead" that was sort of about making low budget scary movies.
