Caterwauling

Nite nite

Originally uploaded by dcwriterdawn

This photo got upward of 200 hits in the first hour it was up on Flickr, so why not share it with the four and a half readers of Caterwauling.com? 🙂

That’s my buddy George, snoozing away. He’s had a “ruff” couple of days, with a vet appointment yesterday and an emergency vet run today. But he’s doing OK and probably lying in that same spot at this very moment.

It was a DaDa’s night in Delray. Lady L and I have now gone probably every week for the past two months. I’m still not the mayor of it on Foursquare (although I keep trying)! But I *am* the mayor of my church, which means I am the holiest woman in Palm Beach County and must be worshiped accordingly.

Every week, we celebrate making it through however many days it took to get to our midweek escape. Some weeks, we had to convene an emergency DaDa session on a Monday. Sometimes, we even made it to a Friday or a Saturday. Mostly, though, it’s a Tuesday through Thursday event, with Wednesday most often winning the “this week sucks — we need DaDa’s NOW” award.

It’s been a long week already. I’ve been opening and closing the office for days, and despite the added hours, I’m no less behind than usual. That drives me apeshit. I’m awash in a sea of editorial (and I swear the Muck Monster’s in there somewhere) plus numbers and goals and org charts and “B” players and OMG, who the hell put me in charge?

I got some … ah … news today. It’s not bad. It’s rather good. It’s not my news, per se, so I’m not sharing it. But it will affect me in a huge way. Not right away. But it will. I just hope all the progress I’ve managed since January doesn’t just evaporate.

Anyway.

I discovered some old anger over the past few days. I have a friend with a not-so-nice boss, and it opened up a lot of old wounds for me. I remember being treated the same way. And it sucks to see people I love going through that same pain.

I also found myself picking at a scar I hadn’t thought about since my college years. It’s related to that woman who lives in my house. I forgave her for everything as it happened, of course. But I can’t forget how angry I was that she let everyone walk all over her like a doormat. I mean, they wiped their feet AND their asses on her. And she LET them.

It kills me that she let everyone in the world have their way with her. And all she did was die a little bit inside each time. So I inherited a warm corpse, essentially, both physically and emotionally.

And it pisses me off to high heaven that she let everyone else use and discard her, but that I can’t get her out of the house for 15 lousy minutes. Why did she oblige people she dated, yet she can’t do anything that would — if not endear her to me — at least not piss me off?

It’s like there’s nothing left of the person I used to know. But that, with the latest memory I’d thought I’d squelched, I wasn’t all that fond of her decisions, anyway. I remember being GLAD to live far away. That her dumb decisions weren’t my problem.

I also remember fearing the day that I WOULD inherit those problems.

I remember the friend who proposed to me, just so I could take his name and detach from this wacky family. I’m glad I didn’t marry him, but I loved him for the offer.

I wonder, had I been married before inheriting my mother, would she have fought to be on her own — would she have been too proud to move in with me, and would she have been independent so as not to ruin my life?

The single children get screwed with ailing parents (even when they’re at the ripe old age of 53. Ahem). Not that I have siblings, and nor does she, but my friends’ parents don’t bother their married children. Oh, no — it’s the single ones who have to either house the parents, or make the children come back home to live with them.

Life is full of “what ifs” — I know better than to pinpoint what I would have done differently with the gift of hindsight. I just want to think about what I will do with my master suite when I hire the Chilean miners’ rescue team to extract her from it.

I wonder if I’m not simply being forced to pay for the sins of the fathers … and the mothers … and the whole fam damily. Thanks, assholes!

But tonight I got hope that all bad situations have an endpoint. Not my living situation — I’m still a half-mile below the surface there. But if others can have their pain alleviated after a quarter of the time, that means mine has to be next. Right?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 13th, 2010 at 9:03 PM and is filed under Existential Meanderings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.