November 23, 2000
11/23
Happy Thanksgiving!Well. This will be my final regular entry to the journal. From now on, til we move to a different place, I will be making email entries to my notify list. Feel free to join if you'd like to continue receiving entries. I will post them as archives when I have FTP access again. I will still have email though, so feel free to drop a note.
We went to the regular Thanksgiving thing at Jay's grandparents house. It was the usual stuff that goes on there. One aunt is a gossip monger. Another aunt and uncle are considering divorce... My wasn't that a chilly little couple. Of course, My mother-in-law questioned everything I did with my boy. These are the Christians! Imagine a weekend with the non-Christian side of the family. We left feeling exhausted emotionally and physically, as usual.
This is the reason Jay and I want to leave the area completely. It's time to make our own way, our own traditions, apart from the family. We're too close to them. We (yes, both of us) feel stifled and pressured. It's no way to live. Of course the family (dummm dee dum dum) is fighting us tooth and nail on that little endeavor.
You know how people hold stress and pressure in different parts of the body. Some may get headaches, some may get heartburn... I have the spot between my head and shoulder. Usually, if you give someone a backrub there, and they are realxed, it'll feel all squishy. Me? I'm perpetually rock hard there. I'm always feeling tense or pressured from someone, somewhere. Whether at work, or at home, or by family, or by money, the list goes on. I don't know how to get rid of it. I've tried giving things to God... But it doesn't work. I still worry. I don't know how to control it. As a result, I turn into a control freak, and must do everything myself. Why? 'Cause usually if something goes wrong, I have to take the fall, or fix it. Or both. So, why bother. Just do it myself, and then if it goes wrong, it's right for me to take the fall. I'm the one who screwed up. Of course, in real life, things don't work this way, and people need to help each other. However, I fail to actually do that, and I end up with too much, and too little time to do it in. Everything falls apart. I know this in my brain... But I don't know how to fix it. If you've ever seen 28 days (with Sandra Bullock), as a therapy tool, she has to wear a sign around her neck that says, "Confront me if I don't ask for help". I'm thinking I need to buy stock.
Tomorrow is the major yucky, how are we going to do this, this is our life? packing day. Saturday is the actual move day. Sunday is the clean day. And our in-laws won't take Joseph for any of those days, so we're trying to figure out how to do this together (or we won't accomplish it) and still take care of our son. I don't know what to do. We're just going to have to do this in shifts. Uggg.
I'm so sad about this. I know we're moving on, but still... This was our first home together. This is where we spent our wedding night. This is where we conceived our son. This is where we learned who the other person was. This was where we made our marriage. And we're leaving it. Crummy as it may be, it was ours. We made it a home instead of and apartment. We gave and received a lot of love here. And now we just leave it as we came to it? Big white blank walls? Won't the people who come after us know how much love there is here? Will they love each other well too? I'm tempted to mark the place somehow. We were here. Whenever I would walk through the courtyard to our number 6, I knew what was waiting for me. A loving husband. A few loving cats. A sink full of dishes. Then a child born of love. Now what? Going on borrowed time to a home where I don't know my place. Going to where I'm constantly reminded I am the outsider by marrying into this family. Going somewhere else, with someone else's family again. I constantly feel as if I don't belong anywhere around here, except for being by Jay. He's my family. But no matter how much I don't want it to, the other people matter too. I want to have a large loving family to have holiday meals with, without all these imposing undercurrents around. There were 4 generations at the gathering today. I felt that I was loved by two people. Jay & Joseph. I made this apartment a place that held my precious family. And now I have to box it up. It makes me feel empty, and lonely, and shifting, and terribly sad, and as if a chapter is ending in my life. The problem is, I don't know what the next chapter holds.
