Adult

I sometimes feel like I spend the vast majority of my free time grocery shopping.  I don't necessarily enjoy this activity but I do it because not feeding your children is usually frowned upon.  It is one of those incessant, unrewarding activities that no one tells you about when you are a child.  I mean, seriously, if they did tell you about all the shit you have to deal with as an adult, no one would grow up.  And then who would change the diapers and watch really crappy reality TV and manufacture alcohol?  It's really better that we are kept in the dark.

I sometimes, though, feel as though I skidded around the corner of adolescence into the hallway of adulthood, with lipstick on my teeth, staggering in my heels with my skirt tucked up into my panties.  All of the stuff that goes along with being a grown up is sometimes overwhelming.  Paying bills, providing necessities and hopefully desires for your family, feeding, cooking cleaning laundryoilchangestaxesmortgagesplanningforretirement....it all sometimes melds into a big ball of overwhelming-ness and stress and anxiety and I wanna curl up in the fetal position-ness.

If I ever invent time travel, I am going to invest heavily in the benzodiazapine business.  I get their appeal, really I do.

I also get why grown ups seemed so stressed when I was a kid.  I get why that kind of information is hidden from children.  If I, with my alleged adult capabilities and sensibilities, find all of the responsibility to be paralyzing, I could only imagine what a child would think.

I don't know that it will ever get better.  Mostly because I am pretty crazy and tend to beat myself up and I never feel that I am good enough or doing enough.  Does any adult not have their issues, though?  Maybe childhood isn't all it's cracked up to be.  Maybe the real good time is adulthood, where you have access to self soothing and vacations and rational thought.

Or maybe the real fun is when you are elderly and can say whatever the fuck you want and blame it on dementia and drink as much alcohol and eat as much chocolate as you can because "we don't know how much longer we will have her with us."    In fact, that sounds so super good to me that I can't wait until I'm like 80.

I'm totally going for the benzos then.  Just because I can.

Random V

Me: (wincing as I write out the check for daycare)  I think we need to just find a hobo off the streets to live with us and to watch the little girls.

Charles:  Riiiiight.....

Me:  It would be educational, right?

And philanthropic. 


Working with the mentally ill has given me numerous really really good stories.  Most of which I can never ever tell.  It helps to have really good coworkers to be able to share some of these gems.  It also leads to a kind of gallows humor that is exclusive to therapists and people working in the mental health field.  For instance, it is not unusual for this conversation to happen in my office:

Me:  Do you hear voices?

Client:  (hesitates).....Yes.

Me:  Are they telling you to not talk to me?

Client nods.

Me:  Have you ever tried to tell them to shut up?  What is their response?

Normal people don't think that way.  Normal people would freak the fuck out if a voice was in their head telling them what to do, or if someone told them that they were hearing voices.

Additionally, normal people don't sit around at lunch and in between talking about our weekends and whatever news is hot debate what kind of psychosis you would be likely to have.  Delusions of grandeur?  Paranoia? Hallucinations of Jesus coming back?   My luck would be that I would feel water all over my skin because that would be its own special kind of hell for me.  I would not be a happy psychotic, I fear.


I have recently decided to do some rearranging in my house.  Cause I don't have anything more to do, like working 7 days a week or actively giving my children mommy issues to discuss with their future therapists.  I am stuck on what color to paint the living room, though.  I just recently bought new curtains and new slipcovers and now I am really regretting jumping the gun on that decision because I feel like I am committed to a certain scheme now.  My ODD (oppositional defiant disorder, for you non mental health professionals out there) is kicking in and I am really bitter that I have backed myself into a corner here.  I, of course, am blaming everyone else but myself for this decision.  I might even throw a temper tantrum or two about it.  Hell, if those kids are gonna need therapy, by God I am going to make the sessions interesting!