It sits above my brows like a low level drift, thick, impenetrable, sometimes with a low level buzz that keeps me on the edge of irritation at all times and is most likely caused but an overabundance of caffeine sizzling through my bloodstream. This is the fog in my head. I have been asking myself lately, “What the fuck were you thinking, going back to school in the fall semester instead of waiting for spring?”
I do this to myself periodically. I have some diabolical insane part of me that decides that life isn’t stressful enough trying to live the life of a modern pioneer, with children, but I must further complicate it by going beyond the bounds of even my own oft times questioned sanity.
Sometimes I think I have two crazy people sharing my brain that are in a constant competition of one-upsmanship.
Then I reflect in a more relaxing moment that I went back to school after a lot of thought and prayer and after truly feeling as if that were the direction I were being guided in. The challenge is to try and keep on top of it all.
Keeping on top of it is something I aspire to like a crack addict hoping for the next fix. Problem is I have no supplier and me and organization is not something that goes together. ‘Keeping on top of it’ implies that I should have (sh)it all together in a tidy pile to be able to surmount it. Reality shows in fact, that it is in a constant state of cave-in and I am more like an ant scrambling madly up the perpetually sliding sand hill.
My husband has accused me of being a hummingbird, flitting from one thing to another and never finishing. I do finish things….just not all together or all in the same day. He doesn’t realize that I have many personality aspects vying for control in my head. They don’t always agree on what should come first. So I end up sabotaging myself in quite a few areas and productive turnout is pathetic.
Take my kitchen for example. My hearth. The center of health, communion and sustenance for my family. The place that, traditionally, as a mother, should be warm and peaceful, a place of nourishment for mind, body and spirit.
What I have for a kitchen is a 15 foot camp trailer. It has two bunks that are used as storage spots. The regular table broke and I tried having a small coffee table in there. It serves as a place to pile stuff. Some useful, some not so. The same can be said for the seats. In fact, the seat by the door is piled with boxes from our storage unit and cases of canned goods from the case lot sale at B & B last month. I have a small propane cookstove barely large enough for a cake pan and not tall enough to brave baking an actual loaf of bread. I only have an icebox style fridge, so in the summer months there are things I just don’t buy. Like mayonnaise, butter or milk. They spoil too quickly. We get either enriched rice or almond milk, which keeps longer, or powdered milk, which tastes disgusting but works for cooking. We can’t keep ice long enough in the coolers. If we buy fresh produce it needs to be eaten within one or two days max to prevent spoilage. This does not always happen so I always have a gallon of white vinegar on hand to kill off the science experiment that grows inside dark moist coolers when vegetables or dairy products cross over to the other side.
It’s not like I don’t know what I should be doing. I know there are things I could or should do. Sometimes I even make lists. Where I consistently fail is in the practical application. Often I feel as if I am facing this maelstrom of ‘stuff that needs to be done’ and it hits me in the face as soon as I open my eyes. I don’t know where to begin. Or, if I begin, I am easily drawn into the next ‘important thing to do’.
Looking at those pictures of F’s filthy kitchen made me realize the only difference between our housekeeping styles at first glance is that I put all my food cans in a huge laundry hamper outside to take to recycling, and I have mouse poison under the trailer bed to discourage any would be tenant vermin. Ok, probably there is a lot less animal filth too, though the level of food spillage my children and I seem to generate is horrifying. Bunny, my now five year old daughter also has a penchant for conducting cupboard recon for the sole purpose of commandeering cereal. There is now an amazing amount of Count Chocula in the potato and onion bucket from our meager garden harvest.
I have NO PLACE to store anything. So things get piled on the bunks, on the table, on the counters. Then it avalanches and I cuss and shuffle it around and try to form new stacks. I swear I am cleaning the place up, but then I have kids who are hungry RIGHT NOW and will DIE OF STARVATION if they are not fed within ten minutes. But now I need a cooking pot because we got home too late the previous night to heat the water and do the previous nights dishes and they are all sitting, dirty, in the huge purple wash bin outside. An I can’t find my frying pan because there is still a bag of canned goods sitting on it from the groceries we bought two or three days ago that I have been meaning to get into the cupboard if only I could reach it because there are two coolers, a shallow pan of hand washing water and half a case of Coca-Cola sitting between me and the teeny tiny little cupboards I have to cram everything to feed six people in for two weeks.
I kick the case of Coca-Cola and curse the company for ever taking the coca out of it, because, having gotten to actually try chewing some coca a former employer brought back from her trip to Peru, I could sure use that kind of caffeine-without-the-jitters-or-irritability energy boost to get this shithole cleaned and I don’t think I am getting to South America anytime soon to lay in my own supply.
This is usually when I leave the trailer, step outside, right into the face of the entire full length trailer house GM used to live in that has completely collapsed, exposing its guts of moldering books, bed frames, clothes, car parts, tufts of hairy insulation, mouse shit, furniture and some appliances mixed with God only knows what else in a musty smelling carnage. My only bright spot in that view is that there is a boreal toad that lives somewhere in it, possibly under that bed frame pedestal and he croaks briefly throughout the day. Trailer trash habitat. Adaptive species amaze me.
Then I go hide in my outhouse.
This is pathetically, one of the only places where I can invoke the “LEAVE ME THE HELL ALONE” rights to privacy laws so scarce in a parent’s life.
Back when I lived in a house in civilization with actual running water I would lock myself in for either a library period or a hot bath. I don’t have the bath luxury now, and the length of library period depends on the weather temperature and whether or not my enzymes are doing their job at odor control. But for a time, it is a place where I can hide and they can’t come in. Oh, I do take off up the mountain sometimes, and Boo, my foster dog turned family member will sniff me out every time. But I can’t just leave the kids like they used to do in the olden days to go out and get wood or work the distant fields. Not only is this frowned on now days, but modern kids aren’t equipped to deal with things on their own. In fact, you can bet that as soon as I am out of the house Bunny gets it into her head that all former house rules about safety, respect of others property, and general rules of proper conduct have left on my heels and there will soon emanate from our humble domain such a shrieking, caterwauling, thumping, or worse, ominous and pregnant silence you have ever encountered. Most times I will return to find my baby, Nunkee, with new war paint either in the medium of marker or biggest sister’s pillaged makeup, objects once high upon the shelves stomped into the floor, every toy box, jewelry box, container, or suitcase upended and scattered, and a five year old Bunny proclaiming in prim report, “Nunkee did it, I saw her!”
Which is usually where my voice maxes out at the sound barrier, children attempt to flee in terror or pick up as quickly as humanly possible, and I stomp back up to rail in vain at the general disarray of my life and kitchen space.
Then I kick that Coca-cola box again.
I know one thing that will help me maintain my sanity. I can keep writing. I will be making time every week, possibly more than once (baby steps!) to come into the college library and maintain my thread of communication with myself through this outlet. That way GM won’t be trying to sneak peeks over my shoulder to read what horrible family secrets I may be spilling and I won’t have to minimize the damned screen every two minutes, breaking my thread of concentration. That thread is the only way I have of finding my way through the fog.
I know there are few certainties I can count on in this life. I am certain hanging on for dear life to this thread is my necessity. My emotional sustenance and survival. My way of seeing it through and maybe, just maybe having it make sense in the end. It is my one, unbreakable link to sanity in the chaos.
Or so the voices tell me.
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