it moves, along the back, like a cipher (the candle wax remnants)

last swim, that circled nub is me

cold AF but there is nothing else like it

"He used to be ironic and jolly, always with a sly humor and a broad goofiness. But his fear of losing her has made him serious....[she] has no idea he has lost his humor because of her." ~ The Antelope Woman.

Reading, always reading, shrunk down like when I was a kid hiding in closets with a hamster and flashlight. In The Wife, what took his easy-humor away ("he doesn't remember he's funny", that's a thing that happens) is cancer, stage 4 chances, and she stays away, worried at a distance but cursed, she believes, to always lose when the stakes are highest. For the best she stays alone forever, she decides. He survives and talks her out of it. 

Here, in this version, her child doesn't commit suicide (accidentally, she didn't really mean it, but). And he doesn't get cancer. But there is a cost, as always. In this version she has no idea that she is illness - her worry, her grief, her stay-backness, it's withering them all. 

Does Erdrich bring that around? Or is the child kept alive a permanent price paid, repaid forever, by this mother? Does my favorite paragraph (survival ideology) survive, in any form?

[does he ever say anything as weirdly funny as let's "get under the covers with sushi" again?]

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22). The unfamiliar situation sends you searching for guidance. When none appears, you study how the place works and choose one small job you can do well. Your competence has a way of settling your nerves. You attract an admirer. 

I don't need more "admirers" 

Prior experience × present danger. If the caregiver already knows what addiction, psychiatric crisis, suicide risk, hospitals, etc. look like, current events aren't experienced in isolation. Present cues can activate old threat-learning. Sometimes experience makes somebody wonderfully competent; sometimes the same experience makes the alarm system exquisitely sensitive. Both can be true simultaneously.

"Here’s the real reason: Getting her children back feels like all the luck in her life is now used up. She doesn’t want to take any more risks. But I could have told her that from a dog’s point of view life is nothing but risks." ~The Antelope Woman 

I wake up already spinning inside what feels like saran wrap, tangling tighter. I keep moving - if you're standing in shit, don't sit down is one of my rules of thumb - but spinning is moving too. I can see already that for his sake and my own bandwidth, my successfully turning down the volume of immediate crisis has a cost - it will fade, has faded already, from the emergency response system in others' nervous systems (their BEMOANING wasn't helpful) - which is quieter but it leaves me alone with this now. I live with an adult (currently) disabled child who needs everything, right down to med reminders and side-effect management (like seraquil brain = halfday zombie, can barely track a thought til noon). He can't drive atm cz of that - can anyone else compute the simple resulting facts, such as no he can't just "pick up the cat today" because you decide not to be functional today(?) I don't get that choice, to just not-be-able. And nobody else has to compute jackshit.

And I am terrified-grateful he's breathing. So even tho I see all that 👆, there's nothing else I can do (feel) about it. 

The bar set at breathin - he's breathing, I'm breathing, you're breathing - it's gotta get raised 🤏 somehow. We can't stay here, can we?

how to not - zach somebody

status: migration/commuting, gotta go close the cottage for the year, cross that "gotta" off my list ft. shrink my world even more. "manageable" is merely breathin for me.

at the duplex - last one my mom could paint - I will walk past it, stuff that down, get the meters read, gas turned off, all the things gotta get done, and never see it again

Bug (lil lifecoach) prescription - we've been trying for a week - so far nobody has gotten much beyond the potato part