One day bleeds into the next as my morning routines, now unencumbered by obligations around W., getting him to the train station, etc., fall into a steady, self-determined rhythm. I find it quite calming. I’m not sure why I let obligations to others, even when they’re unvoiced, unformulated, unwritten, even unexpected, destabilize me so easily. I suppose it has something to do with never having been sure of my (narcissistic) mother’s love, which was always somehow conditional. Meaning, it was not unconditional. There was a hardness there, in her, and an ability to cut ties, to end it all. I feel that in myself, too, incidentally: this sense that, if you push me too far, I’ll cut you off, I’ll cut you out – as I’ve done with friends who became non-friends. It’s not ever a question of becoming an enemy: these friends/not-friends just die; enemies continue to live, possibly fester, forever. The friends-who-become-non-friends don’t live. There’s just this point where, “Okay, you’re dead to me,” which, flipped, I suppose can be like “ghosting.” But I could never do that with my child, no matter how insanely vexed I might be about something, nor with W. But I could see my mother doing it to me, now that I think about it. Which is really quite disheartening. Curiously, I can’t quite imagine (see) my father doing it – not to us (his children) nor to her (his wife).
She, on the other hand, once actually abandoned us. Simply left without a word or a note, and we didn’t have a clue for over three days where she had gone – until my sister called to say she had shown up at her house, over fifteen hundred miles away. In the interim, my father had gone to the police in desperation, filing a missing person report. They didn’t take him at all seriously, which really put his nose out of joint, too. He wanted the harbor dragged, the woods searched. They told him to cool his jets. My mother did this in the wake of her diet pill-fueled anorexia, which was my father’s explanation for her behavior. I was shocked by it, but also somehow not surprised: it was all of a piece with the stranger she was to me. Her anorexia (aided by pills prescribed by the worst GP in the world: this was the doctor who put me on Valium for my cat allergy) was partly one she embarked on, narcissistically, in competition with mine (which was not aided by pills, but simply a steely-minded decision not to eat), so I was probably about 15 or 16 at the time. What a bitch. (Person or situation?)
Yesterday, another very warm day. Today, a bit colder. I felt very angry and antsy yesterday; have “cooled down” some today. So much inner turmoil around the external turmoils of our political-economic-environmental realities. Reading the Fabius Maximus website, an article about the dangers of the deep state and the MICC (military-industrial-congressional complex), which wants a Cold War 2.0 with Russia (hence Obama’s emphasis on nuclear weapons, and now Trump’s, plus the constant drumbeat of a public opinion war against Russia re. “stealing” HRC’s victory and helping Trump, never mind that we helped Yeltsin’s win way back – which eventually brought us Putin …hm…). Makes me think that maybe we should all just move to Montreal, get out of here. And then I change my mind and think, “Ok, let’s commit to B[this place].” But, really? Flailing in the shallows is painful.