My grades are posted, and I can hear the plastic bag I placed over a broken door window ten fucking years ago flapping in the breeze. That is to say, it is December, my house is filthy, and I probably won’t replace the glass this year either.
This semester turned out to be a totally predictable cluster fuck of closed daycare and me stomping around the house in knockoff Ugg’s and fifteen-year-old sweatpants making jerk off motions with one hand while staring into my phone with the other. I communicated solely by Logan Roy quotes, and while I know he is not supposed to be a role model and in fact every character in that show is irredeemable, I appreciated having the language in which to communicate that I was, in fact, not here for anyone’s shit.
Everything is out of control, of course. My partner and I fought about the price of our daughter’s prescription and my contributions included such gems as “it doesn’t even matter if she gets her Flovent, I guess, since she won’t even be able to vote and she’s going to have to paddle a canoe to school where she will have to wear a bulletproof vest and not read any real books.” I’m terrified about all of these things that are entirely outside of my control while, at the same time, trying to keep us and my career alive.
In the midst of all of this, though, we’re all looking at each other and shrugging and not knowing anything, together. My parenting friends and I are all half panicked half exhausted but fully re-evaluating what is actually important. I keep asking myself some version of, “If I die tomorrow, is it going to matter that we are eating takeout for a third night in a row?” The World is marching on, but the expectations that were set up for us are no longer attainable, and I think we’re articulating what we already, always knew – that they weren’t meant to be in the first place. Fuck ’em.
from midnight oil 