I don't know why Heidi likes to sleep like this; she probably doesn't know why either. It's funny/sad how we do things and don't know why we do these things.
I bought groceries on Monday and came home and started cooking. I was making chili for the big guy and chicken spaghetti sauce. When I make chili, I make a huge pot of it, enough for ten or twelve lunches. I chop up all the veg that I put in it, the onions, the mushrooms, the peppers and the jalapenos from the garden. I used four cans of kidney beans and three cans of diced tomatoes. There was stuff all over the kitchen and I was slowly cleaning up. I was just about ready to sit down and rest when I thought, I'll put the cranberry ginger ale away in the fridge. When I did that, a can dropped and exploded. It went over everything in the kitchen, the cupboards, the counters, the pantry door, the appliances, me and it also hit the TV room floor and the door to the basement.
So like so many people in the world, I blamed someone else. I yelled at my husband, blamed him because it was pop I bought for him. It wasn't his fault but I wanted to yell and blame someone, someone else. And then I started yelling at him about all the things that are bugging me right now, like his lack of help around the house, how he's dealing with his family, how miserable and angry he is, anything that I could think of, I dragged it on in and yelled it at him.
He went for a car ride and I cried and cleaned the kitchen. It took me an hour. An hour for me to think about what's really bothering me. I take care of a lot of people, including my husband and I often feel that it goes unnoticed or forgotten. And it's not just me, my husband and I have supported people financially over the past eleven years. My husband's daughter and her boyfriend lived in our rental so they could pay off their debts and save money for a house and then they left and said, don't talk to us again. Another friend's daughter and her boyfriend moved there because they needed cheaper rent; they lived in our rental and were pigs. When the boyfriend moved out he called me a cunt when I asked him to clean. And then there's Gracie who flooded the place and introduced us to german cockroaches, leaving the place filthy again and requiring extensive repairs. Even the young lady who lives there now is nice enough but she gets a steep discount on the rent. We also have a condo that I rent out to another woman we used to work with and she also gets a good discount.
But there's also us taking care of Jack when he was taken away from Gracie and even before that when we cared for him when she was working or stoned or drunk, and somehow we became the bad guys who are trying to take Jack away from Gracie.
And there's me not taking care of myself because I didn't want my co-workers to be short this summer or have holidays cancelled and now I'm in more pain from limping for the past two months at work. My right leg is sore now too.
So I dumped all of that on him when it was about me.
Anger is a strange thing. I sits waiting for the right moment to spring into action. It doesn't leave on it's own, it waits. When my ex husband and I sold our house and he left me to clean up the mess, I was angry. As I rage cleaned, it's a thing, I started to cry and cry and cry. I realized that underneath all of that rage and anger was a deep sadness. I think that was the beginning of me getting a handle on my anger; I started to feel the grief that I had kept bottled up inside myself for so long and as I did that, my anger started to subside.
I still get angry and I still get angry and misdirect my anger, see above, but it's much better than it was. My dad was an angry man. He thought his anger protected him and maybe at one time it had protected him but it also drove away his children and made it so hard for his own wife to love him. He was abrasive and often blew up; you never knew what would set him off. He didn't really have any friends. He was alone in his fortress of anger, nursing all of his old wounds. He thought he was safe but he was just alone.
And that's what anger does, it just isolates you. None of us can change the past. I can't make my dad a kind, loving parent. I can't make my grandmother a sober, loving parent for my dad, and so on and so on and so on. We come from our ancestors and all of their faults and mistakes. But I can do better now. I can let go of my old grievances and forgive my parents. I can forgive myself too for not being a better parent to my own children. I can continue to strive to be more patient with Jack and model better behavior and give him coping skills I didn't learn until I was an adult. I can keep trying to let go of my old anger, to feel the sadness that goes with it and then to let it go because it's not helping me anymore.
