I cannot lie, it has been a REALLY hard year or two...or three. Let me be the first to say that I have a remarkably rich, splendid and blessed life--what I am talking about here, I guess, is what people call depression or a funk or a REEEEAAAAALLLLLY long sad mood. So, I get the selfishness of my bitching--it is not lost on me one little bit.
And I have had much harder years. Harder in the sense that I didn't have enough money to buy diapers or formula or even food for that matter (not like I couldn't go to Carl's Jr, but like I couldn't B U Y A N Y F O O D) and I had to pawn my sewing machine and other items precious to me--something that I am still quite embarrassed to write out loud. Embarrassing hard times.
Or even the year I left my first husband and moved in with my family and literally slept days and worked nights, exactly the opposite of Sister just so we could sleep in the same room in the same bed, just not at the same time because that is all my parents had to offer and believe-you-me it was A LOT to offer because I had brought a two-year-old with a sippy cup into their house about an hour after they had laid brand new beige carpeting. Now, if you have ever lived with a sippy-cup-aged child, you recognize the sprinkle pattern of red-any-kinda-juice stains and you can appreciate the depth and breadth of The Parents hospitality. Thinking of this leads me to remember my son taking the cat's collar off that first weekend and tying it around the neck of a ceramic goose my mom had painted and fired herself and then he asked it to "walk duck". Needless to say, it tipped over breaking the head off prompting him to cry and my colon to tighten. Good hard times.
I have had hard times that required me to be on the run from home to daycare to work and back to daycare then to soccer practice back home to fix dinner, do homework, go to bed and THEN do it all over the next day; I have had hard times when I thought we would never have a stick of furniture or a paid-off car. Hard work times.
Then, there was the excruciatingly hard time I had watching my beloved husband and his family sit hospice care day-in and day-out for seventeen days straight while the father of their little family died at home of stage IV pancreatic cancer. Heartbreaking hard times. And then the very next year I had to sit in-patient hospital comfort care, which is entirely ironic because it is not at all comfortable, for the entire Easter weekend watching my much-adored 93-year-old grandmother die after breaking her hip never letting my son's still unborn children know what a great old broad she was. Sad hard times.
This hard time has been hard in a slow simmer kinda way. I have come to the realization that I have a two-to-ten-year-percolation period for my life's traumas and dramas. And boy, oh boy, I have been hit by some of life's big three in the last couple of years--a trifecta of hard times. Most days I have been treading water. Some days--hell, ALL of the days of two summers ago--I have been going down for the third time. But because of some very pointed advice given to me by my husband, The Caveman, "Baby, I love you with all my heart and all I have to give, but I just cannot do this any more. Not one more day. You need something I cannot give to you. I cannot indulge in your constant dialogue on these subjects, Darya. Seek help. Now. For God's sake; for my sake; for your sake and for the sake of our marriage." So, because in the middle of this incredible cast of misfit, miscreant, misogynistic characters I am the one that cried the loudest and hurt the longest, I had to go get help. I had to see a psychologist. I had to get my head shrunk. Crazy hard times.
I haven't been meeting with Dr. Headshrinker all that long--maybe a couple of months, but already the tide in me is starting to turn. I can feel it. The riptide is starting to stop dragging me under. The current is changing. I am changing. Oftentimes, you just do not know how bad the undertow was sucking you down and under until you finally get to the whitewater and start to crawl and gasp and swallow a ton of saltwater--tears--to finally feel just how hard you had been working. Hard times. I am finally recognizing that these last three-and-a-half years have been hard in yet another different way than what I am used to calling hard.
But really, what does it matter? If it's hard, it is hard. Period. I don't need to rate my life's painful experiences on the shit-o-meter of life. Hard is hard. Hopeless and helpless and desperate and in despair is a tough neighborhood to live in and honestly, I hope to be moving soon. Hopeful hard times.
xoxo Darya
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