Carnivale
by Zoeyjane
I’m going up, locked in at waist and chest, but there’s enough space between the gulf that my hipbones protrude from and protection that I’m not safe. I know this. Still, I can’t help but wonder at the blueness that surrounds me. The single seagull, swooping, as if in slow-mo, calling someone far away. He’s beautiful, graceful and in time with his sailing, I feel a smooth ascension, too.
Then, the tipping point. There is no down, only straight ahead and it seems like, for just a moment – one that seems as if split into five million moments – everything will freeze. The pure high is breath-stealing and I think, hey, maybe I could stay here forever.
But that never happens. What rises must plummet.
The problem with my recipe for madness is its overwhelming difficulty in management. Even when it seems that up is safe and down doesn’t exist, there’s still recess in the basement and the roof gets scaled at the worst possible times, in the least safe ways.
Medications lose their efficacy, or cause side-effects that become unbearable, or cause damage. The single pill becomes one, twice a day; then added to that is something to help with the X; and then before you know it, every morning is started not with the restorative cup of coffee and leisurely smoke that you want, but with you standing in the kitchen, counting your day’s pills into a little cup and putting that cup where you’ll see it – because if you don’t do it right away, you will forget and if you don’t leave the cup in eyesight, you will forget. But you also have to make sure that your kid cannot reach it.
And then you give her a chewable vitamin, so that she doesn’t feel left out.
And then, doctors fuck you up, too – as if the organics and the medications aren’t enough. It’s no wonder I have absolutely no faith in physicians, yet constantly hope that they can near-cure me. It’s sadly like daddy issues, on a MD-level.
When I was younger, on the wrong medications, misdiagnosed, the high was so measurably useful. There was no absence of ability, it was go-go-go and the going was always the thing that I needed to be heading toward. Now, the map leads me into brambles and I get frequent scratches and cuts, for which there is no salve.
Besides simply seeing their marks and trusting they won’t scar too badly. They’re merely surface wounds.
Those bushes catch me at the most inopportune times: the night that I need to sleep, before the packed day ahead; the work hours that need to have every minute sucked out of their marrow; the few times when I would like to just be able to lie down next to him, when he lies down, and not have 12 thoughts and awkwardnesses spew from my mouth.
This shrubbery robs me.
But, the vegetation has been ever so scaleable lately, and because of this, or perhaps in spite of it, I’ve been standing on top of a green mound, half enjoying that pure moment before the inevitable. I was almost convinced that the inevitable might not come.
Maybe this combination of pills and success and happiness was what it might take. Maybe a remission of a sort was being had.
Yet…
That’s not my story. It never is. And the signs have all been there.
The medication has been working for the most part, but I’ve not been particularly well, just not particularly unwell. There was the point in time, in early winter, when I all but stopped eating. Initially because the addition of speed to a hypomanic bipolar’s menu causes appetite suppression and amnesia, but also because once the pants got a little baggier, I got a little fuller-feeling.
I’ve been working myself to the neural bone this month. I don’t doubt that if you lift a flap of skin, you can see the dendrites, exhausted and charred, yet still sending their rapid-fire messages over gulfs. I have to cut back, I know this, but I’ve gotten to a place where I don’t want to except for in the most ridiculous areas that I can’t resign from. If I don’t do the laundry and the dishes, there is no one else to pick up the slack, and if I can get everything done on my lists of things to be done, then there isn’t a lot of affection and loving and physical contact taking place.
I love my job. I don’t want to step away from it so much that I’m nearly counting down the weeks until Zoë’s brand-new lessons end, so that I can hire someone to watch her. So I can get away from being underneath the guilt and frustration and trapped feeling I feel, wanting to work, but knowing that I’m home, with her, for a reason. Right now, I can’t do that – exit from her days – because she’s just simply too booked up.
It takes no toll on her – preschool five mornings a week, swimming two afternoons and gymnastics one – but it’s sucking me dry. The have-tos have been added to and those are so much heavier than the job that I love doing. They’re bringing back the resentment I felt when I was little more than pillow and milk-maid.
But that’s the claustrophobia speaking, not the mother.
Because here’s the thing: as far as I know, I do my job well. Being a stay-at-home mother? I don’t. I never expected to be good at it. I never wanted to be one. I planned to return to work, three months postpartum.
And now, here I’m sitting with an ache in my heart and a churning in my guts and I can see the freedom – just eight short weeks away – and I can almost smell the change in air pressure because I’m almost at the top. This time, I might not have to get down. This time, I might get to sit there, watching that seagull swoop and I could be where I’m supposed to be.
But. That’s not my story. It never is. And the signs have all been there.
The next few days are going to be challenging. I’ll have to make decisions and harder decisions and wait and see.
I fucking hate waiting and seeing.
I also hate feeling like a victim, as if something’s happened to me, and there’s little nothing I can do or could have done to change an outcome. I detest that nearly every time everything seems to be going well, the fucking bottom falls out. And I can’t handle when the bottom falls out and some one gets pulled down with me.
I loathe this fucking rollercoaster.
