8PM Thurs 11 Nov 82
Nancy asked me to keep Shane home tomorrow – she had a hard day with him today – his genital rash really not clearing up. Desitin seems to cope the best. 1 hr of cleaning and I only scraped off the top layer of dirt! Open house at Marycliff College – the type of place that used to suit my fancy – does it still? Very baroque – a robber baron house with green marble fireplaces. The last chatelaine killed herself by crawling painfully into a “slimming” rubber suit – positional asphyxia! Then they filmed a scene from The Amityville Horror there – starring Richard Burton no less – now the Sisters of Mercy are frantically exorcising the place and I get to be a part of it. I was somewhat intimidated by all the 17 year olds with their mothers. Library had no listing for Monica Dickens! And she was a Catholic! Beautiful handmade signs everywhere: “Life is Fragile” & lovely quiet study & prayer rooms. Fr 12 Nov 82 Poor Shane cutting teeth on top of his rash – bad day. Very nervewracking. Silhouette rejected Dishonored Virgin- they don’t care for the abusive husband. Too bad – he’s the funnest part of the book. Still have high hopes for the English – they might think I’m snazzy. Back to my amorphous, powerless, resourceless life! 8 AM – Sat 13 Nov 82 Another sad, restless day. Sore eye from a chipped contact lens – felt bad about not seeing Granma since her stroke so dressed up to go and this is what I get for it. Now I need a new lens and no money to get it with. S fussy and cranky – me & T feeling “separate” – can’t get close. He didn’t get home till 10 – woke me up with lovemaking. Mmmmmmm… Worried about trust issues however. How can you “trust” the other’s reflexes when they are automatically paranoid/hostile/disturbing? I trust his SECOND THOUGHT. Not his automatic self. He has been dreaming lately that I balk or frustrate his efforts – I dream he lets me down! We soldier on while the baby screams. Rocked S to sleep. FINALLY. Speaking of dreams, Lois is very resentful of others “meddling” in her life but her strongest desire is to control the lives of others! Some kind of Freudian thing, presumably. DEFINITELY time to move on, but nowhere to get to. I’m beginning to realize that “constant forward motion” is actually my most impressive talent. I thought it was rough when I had to be strong for the dogs!!! Finishing Koch’s Rose, Where’d you get that Red? Lovely book. Poor S screaming – better give him some Tylenol. 5:30 PM – Sun 14 Nov 82 Feel fragile, like I’m recovering from some long illness. Sitting in front of the TV wtching Two for the Road, a perfectly awful movie I liked way back when I was trying to learn about Life. Finney plays a pig and Audrey plays a “nothing” – pretty depressing. Spent yesterday walking S around the Beaver College campus feeling like a heroine in a sad novel. Seems I do everything late & in the wrong order. Why? Only when looked at through the prism of a disordered society – which I want to find more about. I keep trying to turn into another person but it hasn’t happened for 33 yrs. The problem of my “earning power.” How to fit into the world. I should get some “marketable skill” like audiologist or reading specialist but those aren’t the things I want to study! I want all the most useless subjects like poetry & mysticism. Reading Agatha Christie my usual recipe for shock and thinking abut parental ideologies. They didn’twant to talk about the way the world REALLY WAS but how they wanted me TO THINK IT WAS. In the meantime, evil moves behind the scenes. Sex, rage, adultery, hypocrisy, redemption – my 11 yr old brain goggled at the Strange Old World. It’s what I want to write about and I can’t see how it’s going to make me popular. 11:30 AM Mon 15 Nov 82 Another record in awfulness days. Growing theory of mine that women’s depression sets in when their powerlessness is brought home to them. Men fight for their families, women have to BE their families. Genevieve says not – she and Brett are out in the world both swinging while their children are raised by the least expensive born again Christian they could find. (She’s agnostic, he’s ex-Jewish.) Hmm. My dilemma is I’d rather be poor. Unless somebody wants to buy Dishonored Virgin or Tarnished Vows for at least $5000 which is what it cost to write them! And in the future it would cost more BECAUSE I DON’T WANT TO DO IT AGAIN! SO ACTUALLY THEY GUESSED RIGHT – I’M NOT GOING TO BE THEIR LAYER EVEN OF BRASS EGGS. Sitting here worrying about housework because Women’s Work Is Never Done. It starts unraveling immediately. But I’d rather start my new novel scary as that is…Why be afraid of unlocking the soul? Feel like a singer who has been operating in falsetto. Good name for a novel, by the way… Maybe being poor is like being thin, or young. You just feel more intensely what’s around you. Letting my Psych Today sub lapse. Just doesn’t make sense to me anymore. Interestingly, exactly the same emotional/psychological/financial waves are breaking over T’s head. Should feel like a double whammy but in fact it makes things easier. 5PM– wrote 5 p sick with fright. Just forced myself to do it. They’re not any good of course so is that worthwhile? Feels like a skier walking down the hill. Pictures back – S adorable, T handsome, I look like a bloated corpse. The Return of Starr Faithfull. Obviously my idea of hiding till rebirth is a good one. Unwilling to leave the house because I have conceived a phobia of being Yelled At. Accused.
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Alysse Aallyn
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