No pulse is no excuse not to dance

I can’t decide if I’m happy or depressed. I just, can’t leave the apartment. I don’t want to go anywhere. I want to curl up on my couch all day, and do absolutely nothing. I’m a fucking sloth. 

I have irrational fears that Luke is a hoarder. And maybe I’m just watching too much Hoarders on Netflix, or maybe it’s because he has like 35 t-shirts. 

Maybe it’s just the winter. Maybe that’s why I don’t want to go anywhere. And I don’t want to get dressed because I’m not going anywhere. Maybe I’m trying to rationalize my depression because I convinced myself that I was okay, when I’m actually not.

The situation with Lennon is my biggest trigger, I think. I love my son. I want to spend more time with him. It’s just that, I can’t afford childcare. And his great aunt and uncle watch him for free. And because they refuse to wake up at 7 AM, Lennon has to spend the night over there during the week. It’s really taxing on me to work all day, then have to spend my evening over there with them, and then finally get to come home and get ready for bed. When I get out of work, I want to go home. It feels like too much to get out of work, pick Lennon up, come home, hang out and then have to bring him back over there a couple hours later. But I don’t want to spend that couple hours over there because I want to come home. I can’t win. Then the weekend rolls around, and Lennon’s so used to being over there that he generally doesn’t want to come home. Plus he’s afraid of my clawfoot tub. And I can’t very well spend all day over there. I have to do the dishes, and the laundry, and pick up the apartment. It’s just too much. So I’ve spent all day in this apartment, doing laundry, cleaning up, and hating myself for not spending as much time with Lennon as I’d like to. I’m constantly plagued with feeling like a bad parent.

Do you know what I want? I want that normal, middle-class routine I used to scoff at in high school. I want to make my kid breakfast, go to work, make dinner, hang out and watch tv together, or go for a walk. Anything, as a family. Then tuck his sweet little self in at night, and cuddle up next to my man. I want a family. I want that normalcy, and I’ll take it with all of it’s chaos, because that’s life. I don’t want someone raising my kid for me, but it’s always seemed to be too much for me to do on my own. After me and Mike split up, I was working, going to school full-time, and taking care of Lennon. He came home every night then. I was like 110 pounds. I’m not made to be 110 pounds. I was scary looking. But everything was so overwhelming that I felt like I didn’t have time to take care of myself anymore. 

In the past year, since my breakdown and the suicide attempt, it’s been a lot harder. I lost my health insurance that covered my mental health services. I don’t get therapy, I’m not on antidepressants, and I didn’t have a chance to develop any healthy ways of dealing with myself. It felt like I was thrown from the train, and left to fend for myself before I was ready. The cycle is vicious. If I don’t see Lennon that day, I feel terrible. Feeling terrible, I get depressed, and then I don’t want to leave my house. It gets worse and worse, until I reach the point where I haven’t seen Lennon in days. When I do see him, he’s so happy to see me, and I feel even worse for being so lousy.

I put a lot of my effort into my relationships with men and minimal effort into my relationship with my son. And I think it has a lot to do with my sense of urgency to find a mate, so I can have a family. I feel weak for believing that I can’t possibly create the sense of home for my son on my own, that I need a partner to make that a reality. I’ve wasted a lot of time on some lousy relationships, spoiling them not because I was moving to fast, but because I pick generally lousy human beings to date. Luke’s different in the sense that he’s not already all fucked up. He’s had a generally normal life, with a normal family. He’s really nice, and he’s not all broken and evil. I put a lot of effort into my relationship with him, and it’s really nice to hear him remark that I make him feel loved - something my exes would have sworn to the opposite of. And it’s incredible because I don’t do anything different. It’s just that Luke isn’t so fucked up that he can’t recognize or appreciate all of the little things that I do for him, and it’s refreshing to have met someone who makes me feel good about myself. 

And when I’m down on myself, calling myself a bad mother and every other name in the book, he doesn’t give me that bullshit response like “Oh but you’re a great mother.” He tells me like it is, like I know how it is, and it leaves me with full trust in the words that he speaks, because he’s never telling me what I want to hear, only truth. Don’t get me wrong, he doesn’t tell me I’m a bad mother, but sympathizes and encourages me. 

Not to mention Lennon instantly adored him. 

I certainly am going to need to work on myself. Harder. I just don’t know where to start. I’m an emotional hoarder - I hold onto all of it, until there’s no room to move anymore. I just have to pick a place to start, and go from there.