Stuck
The worse I'm feeling the more difficult it is for me to post.
I write stuff, read it back, realise it is drivel and either delete it or leave it in draft.Sometimes this is stuff that's dated before I'm ready to post it, sometimes it it stuff that makes me feel worse rather than better. Other times I write stuff that even I find nauseatingly self-pitying; or I've written it in such a state that when I read it back it actually makes no sense (or would make sense only to the sort of person who makes a living out of people who see angels or horned devils in splodges of ink).
This has been a bad week so far, coming off a bad week last week; and after all the fuss that is something that has really very little to do with a minor computer failure.I have felt incredibly weighed down by the burden of what I still have to do, I have felt frightened, tired, broke, alone, angry, hurt, sickened...
The worst of it is that I had been feeling so good for so long, since the beginning of the New Year really, that this shift has caught me off balance. I must have ditched too much of the ballast I'd been carting around with me, the defences against what he's capable of doing to me. Perhaps I've been wrong in writing so much of the 'what he's capable' in the past tense.
So now this week I've been suffering flashbacks to moments of humiliation. These moments were like bolts of lightening, in that they would pierce the shroud of darkness within which I hid the truly awful state of my life. They were moments when, or immediately after which the pretence wouldn't hold up. They happened a long time ago, and the past is as they say another country. Except it is another country I've visited regularly this week.
During the years we've been married I've come to know some really good, decent people who've reached out and who must be bewildered that I've kept my distance or ultimately cut myself adrift from them.You're young-ish, you've received an invitation to dinner or this or that. You accept. And then your precious husband either fails to turn up at all without any word of an apology or he does turn up drunk or simply sober and unpleasant.
Relationships founder, you build new ones, you learn not to put your husband forward, but that doesn't work properly because you are married, so slowly the circles you naturally build up around you are corroded and family are alienated until you're alone and you're vulnerable, thousands and thousands of miles from home.
I've had a small victory today and I suppose that is why I've been able to put this together in a state fit for publishing.One of the peculiar benefits of being dirt poor as I am these days is that dealing with my tax affairs is a simple process. I've sod all income, practially nothing to declare. Some forms from the Revenue dropped through the door today, I gathered together the one document required to complete them, jotted down the figures in the appropriate boxes, 'phoned them to advise a change in my status, gave the sweet Scottish chap on the other end the figures I'd already jotted down and that was it. Job done. No need to send of the forms. Hmmn. This just doesn't feel right. Dealing with the Revenue isn't supposed to be easy.
Now I have the local tax to pay and the water company and we're ok.
Except that there's that damned list: passports, visas, driving licence, lawyers, sale of house, disposal of crap inside house.'Passport' for me means: (1) requesting form (cost de minimus), travelling to London to have photographs taken (cost not so insignificant), getting supporting documents together (time consuming), locating someone qualified and able to sign completed form (time consuming, probably with fee attached), submitting form (registered post so cost and time consuming), resubmitting form because the Canadians bless them are so damned picky then (2) repeating process in respect of Australian passport.
Canadian one has British residency visa in it, Australian one takes me home. And I can't face finding out from the home office if there's any way around this.
Then there's my daughter's passport or passports. Just getting her the Aussie passport she's entitled to is going to require a colossal document search and until I contact the High Commission I don't even know what documents they'll require. Bloody hell.
And I'm almost positive I've forgotten some crucial step in the whole process, that will take forever and cost me a fortune.
This morning B said something to me as I was preparing her school lunch: I can't recall her precise words but the gist of it was that her father had moaned about having to clean the kitchen before making the dinner last night.
I spent the rest of the day seething about this, preparing a little speech along the lines of "I just want to warn you that next time I catch you ever brief against me to my daughter on the basis of my housekeeping I will sling you, and the 90% of the crap in this house that is your crap that I never wanted in here, that has no earthly use, that you've dragged in here and then largely ignored, out onto the street."
I spent hours this week scrubbing the bathroom, vacuuming, dusting, washing down the wooden floors, the kichen surfaces, shifting his crap about to do this. And I get ticked off via a third party and the child I've vowed never to put in the space between us. So I can't deliver a message back via the same route, and I'm left composing my speech and rehearsing it.
But the state I was in today that little speech wasn't delivered, of course.However I now feel a little better. It has taken me all day to write this, working in fits and starts. I'm still not happy with my mood, but it is better and I feel stronger.
Now I'm going to have a beer and listen to some music and then I'll go to bed. Tomorrow is a new day.
PS. I basically typed the above over an earlier draft I'd begun some time in the previous couple of days, but this para I decided to retain... He's a pathological liar who's never done a decent days work in his entire adult life (or that proportion of it of which I have direct knowledge) and he's an habitual and natural thief (by which I mean he doesn't even understand that it is theft). He's slovenly, manipulative, deceitful. I made a terrible mistake marrying him - a one night stand could have produced the only good and decent thing to come of it.
I write stuff, read it back, realise it is drivel and either delete it or leave it in draft.Sometimes this is stuff that's dated before I'm ready to post it, sometimes it it stuff that makes me feel worse rather than better. Other times I write stuff that even I find nauseatingly self-pitying; or I've written it in such a state that when I read it back it actually makes no sense (or would make sense only to the sort of person who makes a living out of people who see angels or horned devils in splodges of ink).
This has been a bad week so far, coming off a bad week last week; and after all the fuss that is something that has really very little to do with a minor computer failure.I have felt incredibly weighed down by the burden of what I still have to do, I have felt frightened, tired, broke, alone, angry, hurt, sickened...
The worst of it is that I had been feeling so good for so long, since the beginning of the New Year really, that this shift has caught me off balance. I must have ditched too much of the ballast I'd been carting around with me, the defences against what he's capable of doing to me. Perhaps I've been wrong in writing so much of the 'what he's capable' in the past tense.
So now this week I've been suffering flashbacks to moments of humiliation. These moments were like bolts of lightening, in that they would pierce the shroud of darkness within which I hid the truly awful state of my life. They were moments when, or immediately after which the pretence wouldn't hold up. They happened a long time ago, and the past is as they say another country. Except it is another country I've visited regularly this week.
During the years we've been married I've come to know some really good, decent people who've reached out and who must be bewildered that I've kept my distance or ultimately cut myself adrift from them.You're young-ish, you've received an invitation to dinner or this or that. You accept. And then your precious husband either fails to turn up at all without any word of an apology or he does turn up drunk or simply sober and unpleasant.
Relationships founder, you build new ones, you learn not to put your husband forward, but that doesn't work properly because you are married, so slowly the circles you naturally build up around you are corroded and family are alienated until you're alone and you're vulnerable, thousands and thousands of miles from home.
I've had a small victory today and I suppose that is why I've been able to put this together in a state fit for publishing.One of the peculiar benefits of being dirt poor as I am these days is that dealing with my tax affairs is a simple process. I've sod all income, practially nothing to declare. Some forms from the Revenue dropped through the door today, I gathered together the one document required to complete them, jotted down the figures in the appropriate boxes, 'phoned them to advise a change in my status, gave the sweet Scottish chap on the other end the figures I'd already jotted down and that was it. Job done. No need to send of the forms. Hmmn. This just doesn't feel right. Dealing with the Revenue isn't supposed to be easy.
Now I have the local tax to pay and the water company and we're ok.
Except that there's that damned list: passports, visas, driving licence, lawyers, sale of house, disposal of crap inside house.'Passport' for me means: (1) requesting form (cost de minimus), travelling to London to have photographs taken (cost not so insignificant), getting supporting documents together (time consuming), locating someone qualified and able to sign completed form (time consuming, probably with fee attached), submitting form (registered post so cost and time consuming), resubmitting form because the Canadians bless them are so damned picky then (2) repeating process in respect of Australian passport.
Canadian one has British residency visa in it, Australian one takes me home. And I can't face finding out from the home office if there's any way around this.
Then there's my daughter's passport or passports. Just getting her the Aussie passport she's entitled to is going to require a colossal document search and until I contact the High Commission I don't even know what documents they'll require. Bloody hell.
And I'm almost positive I've forgotten some crucial step in the whole process, that will take forever and cost me a fortune.
This morning B said something to me as I was preparing her school lunch: I can't recall her precise words but the gist of it was that her father had moaned about having to clean the kitchen before making the dinner last night.
I spent the rest of the day seething about this, preparing a little speech along the lines of "I just want to warn you that next time I catch you ever brief against me to my daughter on the basis of my housekeeping I will sling you, and the 90% of the crap in this house that is your crap that I never wanted in here, that has no earthly use, that you've dragged in here and then largely ignored, out onto the street."
I spent hours this week scrubbing the bathroom, vacuuming, dusting, washing down the wooden floors, the kichen surfaces, shifting his crap about to do this. And I get ticked off via a third party and the child I've vowed never to put in the space between us. So I can't deliver a message back via the same route, and I'm left composing my speech and rehearsing it.
But the state I was in today that little speech wasn't delivered, of course.However I now feel a little better. It has taken me all day to write this, working in fits and starts. I'm still not happy with my mood, but it is better and I feel stronger.
Now I'm going to have a beer and listen to some music and then I'll go to bed. Tomorrow is a new day.
PS. I basically typed the above over an earlier draft I'd begun some time in the previous couple of days, but this para I decided to retain... He's a pathological liar who's never done a decent days work in his entire adult life (or that proportion of it of which I have direct knowledge) and he's an habitual and natural thief (by which I mean he doesn't even understand that it is theft). He's slovenly, manipulative, deceitful. I made a terrible mistake marrying him - a one night stand could have produced the only good and decent thing to come of it.
posted by Enyo @ 8:11 am
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