Not So Sunny

I'm in a bad place this (these) week (weeks). Everything I write is so melancholy and bitter. Everything I feel is so melancholy and bitter.

I am trying to focus on the good stuff: my loving husband, my beautiful baby, the fact that my little family is safe and warm and healthy. But in and around and behind those things creeps the fact that I am tired of living here. The arrangement has lost its lustre. I have never done well when I have had to live with my mother, and three continuous months of it have pushed the limits of my endurance. I am irritable and snappish these days. I grit my teeth and tap my feet. I snarl and grunt. Everything my mother does or says annoys me, it's like someone is running a cheese grater over my soul. I have to remind myself daily of all the reasons we left California. I use them like mantras. It was dirty, I chant to myself as I clench my teeth and try not to explode while my mother says for the 1,000th time that Piper is fussing because she wants her grandma. It was crowded, it was concrete ugliness and expensive trash and we hated it as I trip over a box of our clothes that's sitting in the middle of the bedroom floor because there's nowhere else to put it. Max hated his job, he was so miserable I tell myself as the box of clothes trips me a second time and I crash into a dresser, sending a cascade of our junk to the floor. I missed the rain. A stack of CD's falls behind the dresser with a clatter. We wanted our daughter to know her family.

It's not working so well these days. I am homesick for our old apartment, a place that was all ours. I am tired of sharing my baby. I am tired of nothing ever staying where I put it down, of all our posessions constantly being scooped into piles and dumped into baskets and shoved into boxes and nothing is ever where I need it to be and nothing is ever where I left it. I am homesick for the dry heat and even more so for our apartment's air conditioning, which we could turn on and set to nipple-hardening temperatures whenever we felt like it. I miss the places we used to go, even though by the time we moved I was so sick of seeing all those ugly malls and chain stores I wanted to scream. I miss the familiarity of it all, the rhythm of days that were ours for the taking.

I miss having a life of our own, seperate and far away from all this. I miss being able to try new things (like joining the Unitarian church or watching Justin Timberlake videos) without someone screeching "WHAT?!" because they don't know or understand the version of me that longs for a sense of community and would like to bring sexy back. We moved back here to be closer to our family, all of whom were so ready to love and love and love and love our little baby, but these days I wake up thinking why the fuck am I here? I want to be a continent away from these people again. I am starting to resent my husband for bringing us here, and to resent myself for not speaking out against this plan when I had the chance. I resent myself for not having fantastic job that would have allowed us to stay there. I resent California for being expensive and dirty and unsustainable; I resent Michigan for being humid and crowded with family and devoid of economic promise. I am growing morose and moody this week, I am twisting inward like a shriveled, dry tree trunk.