I think I’ve forgotten how to sleep. Again. I think that maybe this past year has been to big. There has been so much change and I’ve just tried to go on about my life like nothing is different. But everything is different.
I’m in a new place. For the first time in 20 years I’m living apart from my children’s father. It’s strange, because we’ve not been romantically involved in a decade…but we are living together, or next door to each other for the last 20 years.
Now we live in different towns.
So that’s different. It feels like a natural progression. But it’s still…different.
I don’t see both my children every day. We swap them back and forth so effortlessly that it feels the same…but sometimes I don’t see my eldest for a week at a time, or my youngest for five days or so.
The rhythm of my life has changed.
I live closer to the ocean. 25 minutes away from the edge of the world. The people in this province are different. There is a genuine friendliness, an openness that is beguiling. But it is different. It’s strange to think of the culture shock that happens from province to province. People think of Canada as one thing…but it isn’t. It’s full of dialects, and pockets of differences that come from place, history and whether or not there is access to basic needs.
We were doing our taxes this weekend and when we lived in Ontario we were in a much lower tax bracket. Nothing has changed, expect for our province and now we are paying higher taxes because of my partner’s income…but everything is expensive here. Groceries, gas…the housing prices have skyrocketed and so we have less money and not more, but we both have to pay the government extra, a significant amount extra. That’s scary. To think of how precarious our financial state is.
This year the monies I’ve been receiving since my divorce, they go away. But I don’t actually feel any more capable of working full time than I did after my stroke. I’ve cobbled together this schedule of having to be wondrous places so I can be paid, and valued, and feel useful and like I have a purpose, but my body, brain and emotional state are telling me that I’ve got my limit.
Last night I couldn’t sleep because my anxiety was through the roof.
So I sent a message to my friend, and let her know where I was at, and that I likely couldn’t work Mondays anymore. Which is heartbreaking because I loved the place I got to spend my Mondays, I loved the people there. Everything about it was beautiful. But it was too much for me. And that was a hard thing to acknowledge.
This week I start my job at a bookstore, and I’m hoping that I can do it. It’s a two minute drive from my house. It’s a job that I’ve done off and on since 2007. I know the system. I know books. I know the kind of people who love and buy books at small independent stores. That is my comfort zone. I’m hoping I will be able to manage working there two days a week.
But I’m also back to parenting full time, one kid or two, because school didn’t work, and we have finally decided not to try again. And that is big.
I remember thinking when my eldest was little that I would only breastfeed until he was 6 months old. That was the recommendation at the time. But when I introduced dairy he got full body hives and couldn’t breathe. And so I breastfed for two years. And because I did that for him, I felt like I had to do it for his younger brother.
I spent more than five years of my life either pregnant or breastfeeding. I wasn’t expecting that. But I did it.
I’m used to change. I’ve moved every five years. Change is a constant in my life.
A week or so ago I managed gk catch up with a former student, I’d taught him when he was in grade 7 and 8. Almost 16 years later we found ourselves sitting next to a duck pond in a completely different province talking about life.
He was a really thoughtful kid when he was young, and he has grown into a very thoughtful man. He was remarking on the fact (and I asked if I could talk about our conversation and he told me to go ahead) that he thought at some point he’d hit the point in adulthood where you just knew what you were doing, that he’d be an adult like the adults he’d imagined as a kid. But instead he just stepped across the veil to find that adults are still trying to figure things out, that growing up doesn’t stop, that it continues to be messy and that for most people being an adult just means more responsibility piled on top of the mess.
But that somehow, we get through it, one day at a time.
I agreed, that life is messy. It’s a big beautiful mess of things, responsibilities, taxes, but it’s also full of chances to learn and to understand ourselves and each other.
My life has never been a perfect set of instructions to follow. I have lived it like the main character of a novel whose writer has a good sense of humour, and I’ve seen the foreshadowing, the living metaphors, and the plot line isn’t always clear, because so much of it is as of yet unwritten. But like a character I’ve chosen to take every opportunity for self-discovery, for adventure, for community care. But in this chapter I think I’ve decided to try to be a little gentler with myself. And with others. We are all of us just trying to get through the things being thrown at us. This chapter I’m trying to live a little slower, a little quieter…and I’m not sure how that’s going. I have a habit of hitting the ground running. Life is so short and I want to do ALL THE THINGS. But I’m just one person, and there are billions of main characters out there, and I don’t have to live every life.
I’ll be forever grateful that I got to spend part of 2024 tucked away in a magical post office/grocery store/tea shop/mercantile/cafe and I’m grateful to know that it is still there in the world full of beautiful people, stories and heart, and that I can still visit it, and be friends with the people who own it and work there. That this is not an ending as much as it is a page turning to another chapter.
Tomorrow I’ll be writing on the whimsical ABCDerium prompt, but tonight I needed to sort things so I can sleep. I hope I can remember how to sleep.
Heart,
Wake
(A gentle slug-friend who I brought in from the fold, and returned outside once the weather warmed)
Thank you as always for sharing where you are. I really relate to wanting to live all the lives. I tell myself I can write more lives than I can live and that might be enough. I've started looking through spaces on Pinterest and thinking up a person and their story just a little at a time, dip my toes in many lives!
It's good and sometimes sad to know our limits, I'm glad you could accept a need to not work Mondays, and very glad you can still visit. It does seem like so much change, and it makes sense to feel all the things. Wishing you rest 💜
I feel like I could've written this post--with different personal details, of course--but oh man, have I been there. Last week, I had trouble sleeping 4 days out 7. I've weathered a lot of change in my life, too, and I've hit the ground running a lot, too, but just because you did it, and it feels "normal" that doesn't mean it doesn't take a toll on your nervous system.
Maybe I don't know you that well, but I'm confident when I say that I believe you're resilient. I'm not saying that to encourage you to keep your foot on the gas at all times, but the opposite. I'm saying I think it's ok to take your foot off the gas when your body demands it. You don't have to solve every problem yesterday. You'll be ok. You'll figure things out.
I'm probably not saying anything you don't already know. I think you'll feel a lot better after you've gotten some sleep. I just want to say that I get it, and I think it's going to be ok.