Finding The Words

This past weekend we went up to the new house for a few hours.  J is still on his schedule of coming home on Friday and leaving again Sunday.  He expects it to be this way at least through the end of June.  I won't say this hasn't been getting to me, he's barely home and then he's off again.  He's talked about asking for the week of July 4th off, but hasn't put in for it yet.  Even if he takes it off, we won't be taking a vacation.  We'll use the time to make several trips up to the house. But we will be together.  Each time we go to the house, we load the truck up with our stuff.  At this point, we are just dropping things off- pottery, baskets, books, items that are easily boxed up but things we can live "without" here for awhile.  It's going to be this way for the next year or so.  But it's also pretty cool because now I walk into that house and hey, there's my stuff.  This IS my new house, soon to be home.

This Saturday we took the first of the furniture up.  We took the guest bedroom set, so we will have a place to sleep now.  We usually get a hotel room when we go visit his family.  We left the old mattress here and bought a new one up there.  I've got my old bedroom set down in our basement, and we'll move that upstairs now for my parents when they come to visit.  They will be here for the Memorial holiday.  I told J the other day, I resent the fact that I have to give up an entire room in the house for "guests" because, let's face it, no one comes here except my parents, and that's only 2-3 times a year at the most.  Here, with four bedrooms, it's been okay.  Going to three bedrooms at the new house, I almost wish I didn't have to have a guest room.  I swear I would rather just let my parents stay in our room and we can use an air mattress when they visit.  But I suppose having a guest room is the "proper" thing to do.  I just really harbor a grudge about it, and I admit that makes me feel like a selfish heel.  It's a room in our house that WE basically can't use, and we have to give up that space so it can be used by someone else three weeks out of the year.  Ggrrr.

Earlier last week I sent J a long rambling email, apologizing for my irritable behavior lately.  Sometimes it's better for me to communicate serious subjects that way. It's not that I can't talk openly or easily to J, it's just that when I email I can take my time to compose what I want to say in the right words.  I tried to explain to him about this latest bout of depression I've been having.  This one has gone on nonstop for about a month now, and I can't shake it off.  It's been a bad spell and I don't see an end in sight, and the body pain that comes along with it seems to be settling deeper into my bones every day.  Of course as a man, my husband wants to "fix" things and I tried to assure him this isn't something he can fix.  He took me to lunch on Friday, at my favorite pizza place downtown on the square- a place he hates and never wants to go to.  So there he was right away, trying to make me happy.  He wanted to talk about it.

I had great trouble trying to put it into words for him.  He was looking for tangibles, concrete evidence of how I was feeling and why I was feeling that way and mainly, what was causing it.  I told him it wasn't a "thing", it was just a heavy feeling inside my chest that overwhelms me with sadness, making me feel lost, robbing me of any normal happiness.  I don't think I made him understand, he seemed to get frustrated.  As usual, his response was for me to see my doctor or find a therapist.  If I can't find the right words for the person I love the most in this world, how can I do it with a stranger?  I don't discount therapy, I just don't think it's right for me.  J said, well there is medication for it, and I said I won't go that route.  I take SO many pills right now for physical ailments, I can't add more prescriptions to my regimen, I just can't.  I know how it goes. It's a slippery slope of playing with dosages and labels, I've watched it happen to friends and family before.  If I had someone here with me to monitor me, I might consider it.  But the fact that I'm home utterly alone for the week, scares me.

It's not that J can't understand or sympathize.  J gets paid a lot of money at work to identify problems and correct them, it's what he does best.  So it's hard for me to explain to him about these gloomy feelings that come into my soul, unbidden and unwelcome.  J is looking for a hard edge to grasp in his hands, he doesn't understand my confusion, he doesn't accept it when my answers are "I don't know" when he asks what is wrong.  For J, every situation has a solution. It's difficult for me to break it down like that.  I don't see my life as a situation. I see it as a long tumultuous road of ups and downs, nightfall and daybreak, warm springs and sharply cold winters.  J is always by my side, always supporting me, but this path is mine to walk alone.

J believes my depression has a root cause that he can reach out and fine tune, he's looking for a knob to dial down the static in my head and instead play a happy song for my heart.  He worries that it's because he's gone all of the time with his job, he thinks it's because I don't have close friends here or because I gave up my job and I need a purpose now, he wants to know if this move is causing me undo stress and suggests I slow down, he asks if I'm just still sad about our kitty who recently died.  Sure, it's all of it and none of it, I know.  He doesn't want to believe there is something wrong with me on the inside.  He wants to blame my depression on some external force, some monster hiding in the closet that he can heroically chase away.

So I try to smile, hoping HE will start to feel better about all of this, and stop worrying.  I don't want to bring my husband down.  I don't want to be a burden.  He says he worries about me constantly while he's gone. What wife wants that?  He hugs me and says he wants me to be happy, to take better care of myself.  He wants me to eat better, take vitamins, go for walks, call my mom, soak in the fresh air and sunshine, take a fun class, go back to yoga, ask friends out to lunch, start a new painting.  I want to tell him, if I thought any of those things would cure me, I would do them.  But I just smile, again, and say it's okay, I'll be fine. Neither of us ever believes it, but we pretend, and we go on.

I know the darkness will lift eventually, it always does, and then I have long periods of contentment.  It's just hard to be in the middle of one of my spells. We've got a lot going on right now, we've got company coming, we've got a couple of shows on the calendar, we've got this bright new future of ours to work on together.  And I'm grateful for all that J does, for all that he is.  When I'm weak he is strong, when I'm anxious he is calming, when I'm overly emotional he is logical.  He's the only one in my life that is there to tell me everything will be okay.  I know my heartaches have nothing whatsoever to do with what's actually going on in my life.  But it's tough lately to push through it and keep moving forward.

MISS GEE

Use A Pencil Please

One of the things I like least about having a husband who travels full time for work, is the loss of our old routines.  There weren't many, so giving them up created a much more obvious and gaping hole in my life.  Nothing is certain with us any more, even our weekends, because work can pluck J out of my date book with one text message.  I've had to cross lines through many a written down plan this last year.  We've given away concert tickets, we've lost nonrefundable craft show fees, we've rearranged reservations.  We've celebrated anniversaries or birthdays "not" on the actual days, but whenever he can be home.

And this isn't going to change, not as long as he keeps to his current position.  From the discussions we've had lately, this will probably be the job he'll stay in until he retires, as long as the company will have him.  So routines are gone, plans are pencilled in with question marks instead of inked with confidence.

Maybe I'm whining because he didn't get to come home the last weekend.  The warehouse he's been working at lately went on strike, so panic ensued and he had to remain in place to man the helm.  I had to work a planned craft show by myself, a miserable experience.  I had a few acquaintances say they would have set up with me, but alas they already had their own plans.  Yes, I did too- my plans were to work the show with my hubby!  This isn't the first time J has not come home on the weekend.  There have been a few other times when warehouses either went on strike or threatened it, which is just as bad because then everyone sits there hovering on their chairs, waiting.

And this definitely won't be the last time either.  Although most of the divisions in the company aren't unionized, he is after all a troubleshooter, and the union warehouses seem to have the most trouble.  So this is something that I will just have to shrug off, and learn to roll with.  They wanted him to stay through again this weekend, but he said no I won't be gone three weeks.  And although he came home Friday, here it is Sunday morning and he is already long gone, back to a gloomy soggy North.  But I remind myself that this job is the reason why we have a wonderful life and have this amazing future to look forward to together.

Most of the routines I'm talking about are just the simple daily ones, nothing profound, nothing world-changing.  I'm talking about having dinner together in the summer while watching baseball on TV every night.  Picking up a Redbox movie (yes, really) after our Friday date night dinner out. Shooting basketball in the driveway after work.  Morning coffee and reading the paper before he shuffled out the door to the office.  Things I can certainly continue to do by myself now, but they sort of lose meaning.  I still eat dinner of course, just at 5:30 instead of 8:30, when he would get home from work.  After 30 years of getting up at 5am to go to work, my body still wakes up early on its own every day, so I'm still up before the sun making coffee and catching up with the world news.  Just by myself now.  And even if I wanted to sleep in, the cats don't allow me that luxury.

But I am dealing with it, as we approach the One Year mark of his travels.  I am making my own new routines every day.  I might love to dabble with art and be creative, but I also like schedules for myself.  I like to know that my day has a beginning and an end.  Maybe that's the former accountant in me, I don't know, wanting to tick off all the boxes.  As I mentioned before, change is hard for me, even the smallest, most insignificant ripples in my day.  But change is part of life, and I'm finding lately that the best way to deal with change is not just allow it to happen unchecked, but to meet it and challenge it with my own expectations.  If this is being taken away from me, then I will do that instead.  You can't always control things, but I can control my reactions to them.  I talked about that enough in my last post.

No matter what happens I just want to be able to, at the end of the day, at the end of my life, look back and say yep, it all came out alright and I did okay.

MISS GEE