Update #79

Icy poles on the back step

Our move went incredibly smoothly, and our new place is gorgeous. There’s a white picket fence out the front, which means we’ll now live happily ever after! (Right?) Alan’s in his element, repeatedly sweeping up the berries dropped by our prolific lilli pilli, and mowing the lawn at the slightest sign of grass growth. The kids running on the floorboards in the morning makes it sound like our house is being shot at and I’m still not used to the blue of the walls, but with a couple of carefully-positioned rugs and a lick of paint, I’d happily stay here forever. Also, I’d been wondering how annoying it would be to have to drive back to Kogarah library to pick up any holds that arrived for me, but I found out that my new local library is connected to my old library; I could simply change the pick-up location to Oatley and continue to search the same catalogue. This discovery was one of the highlights of my year so far. 

This morning was Mo’s second tear-free school drop-off in a row. If he gets through tomorrow as well, he’ll have set a new record. The other day he casually pointed out that the clouds looked like an archipelago, and the stunned response from Alan and me obviously helped him decide that going to school was a better use of his time than hanging out with ignorant doofuses like his parents. He still cried in the mornings after that conversation, but it was clear that his view of school had shifted from “torture chamber” to “the place where I learn stuff that seems to impress Mum and Dad.”

Hazel, on the other hand, has started crying at preschool drop-offs. I’m sure this is because she’s genuinely upset about it, and not because my children have a daily quota of drop-off-sadness that between them needs to be filled, but so far this year my experience suggests the latter. I wonder if they spend so much time together that their bodies just sense when it’s their morning to break down at drop-off time, like women whose menstrual cycles align after a while. The plus side of Hazel being the unhappy child is that preschool teachers are more inclined to offer cuddles, so I see her being comforted and therefore don’t feel like I’m leaving her on her own in the same way I did with Mo. (And yes, it takes a particularly icky kind of narcissism to make my child’s separation anxiety all about me; I realised this after writing last month’s Separation post. I agree: Ugh.)

As pour moi, my increased dose of medication hasn’t seemed to make much of a difference to my mood, and so I’m still in Depression Land, getting irritated over the fact that I have to eat (So. Much. Effort) and relate to people (whyyyyyyyyyyyy) and spending a lot of time wondering how it would be possible to disappear without hurting my children at all by doing so. So far I’ve crossed off suicide and running away, which leaves my list frustratingly empty, so here I remain. I’m currently learning about perception, which is doing my head in (I refuse to believe that colours don’t exist); I so desperately want to be able to put it in the “Things I will never understand no matter how hard I try” box and move on to something easier (like another episode of Nashville), but I need to understand it enough to sit a 20-question exam on the topic by the end of this week, so I’m discovering wavelengths and depth perception and marvelling at how my brain can be both SO AMAZING (I can see! I can recognise! I can react quickly to what’s going on around me!) and SO MEAN (maybe I’m not a complete failure, brain. Maybe you’re a fucking liar).

I remember seeing an episode of Rage late one night, many, MANY, years ago, and a Beatle – I think it was George Harrison – was reflecting on the past, and he said something like, “The time just goes so quickly.” He snapped his fingers: “Like that.” I’d heard other adults say similar things, but the holy Beatle-ness of the speaker made me pay attention for once. I’ve been thinking about that quote a bit lately; Friday’s always here before I’m ready for it, and then Monday again, and then my unit will be over and the break will be over and the next one will be flying by and then there’ll be another break, then my final class, and then I’ll graduate. Before I know it, 2016 will be done. *snap*