Random
I hate my new house. It’s big, it’s beautiful, in a good neighborhood, and I hate it. I’ve come to recall the old neighborhood with a comfort. The big trees, the city park only a block away. The imperfect broken sidewalks. It was comfortable. Walking the streets, the sunset, and of course the familiar trees. I don’t go out into the neighborhood here. The trees are pathetic and the sidewalks are not welcoming. But it’s a safe neighborhood. In the old neighborhood, we would drive home and have to maneuver around police barriers. It didn’t happen often, probably three times each summer, but it happened enough that I was concerned for my children. What ifs play in my mind of them growing up and joining a gang, doubtful since they are Asian and the gangs in our neighborhood are either Black or Mexican, but there are other scenarios. One summer a kid, a bystander to a shooting, was shot by accident, taken to the hospital and died. I talked to someone at the local restaurant about it. A kid. I walk the streets with my kids all the time, and it’s hard not to imagine us caught in a crossfire. You don’t think these things every day, but I have voiced these thoughts to my husband more than I should. I suppose moving could partially be my fault.
I miss my neighbors. The staying at the neighbor’s house ‘cause the husband is out late, and I’m scared out of my wits ‘cause I watched a horror movie on TV. The comfort that the neighbors are watching out for me and I of them, even the crazy one in his fifties that never worked a day in his life and didn’t know the Vietnam War happened. He had chased away a bunch of teenagers that was messing with our windows. Here with the sun glaring on the perfect sidewalk, I am safe. And alone.
I’m alone at work. My co-workers are mere voices on the phone to me, and when I see them on those rare occasions, I am fake. The social worker that’s supposed to have all the answers that’s supposed to have it all together. It’s about everyone else’s problems, so I can’t show it when I’m tired when I’m sad, because they will ask me about it and it will cease being about them. I come home and search frantically for a citcom, to laugh at lives that are full of joy and problems that are solved in thirty minutes. I wait anxiously for the husband to come home so that I can listen to his jokes and work life because the problems he comes across are kinda lame in the grand scheme of things, and I’m tired of my fruitless search for solutions to problems that are impossible to solve. And yes, it’s okay to say you don’t have the answers. Or to breakdown and burry my face in his chest and hear him say, “What happened?” But that doesn’t always happen and it’s become less frequent when the common scenario is the husband angry, upset, frustrated at me. Money. Apparently, I don’t value it, but I will argue that I do until it’s time for bed and our time together is wasted like the money. Things he ask me to do I don’t. He asks too much from me, and my response is noncommittal and this gets him even more angry. But if I say no, he’ll point out all the time I have that I waste and how poor I am at time management. And how he is not. How he doesn’t allow his emotions to get in the way of getting things done. So, I am alone at home also.
And have I become so pathetically isolated that I’m reaching out into the Internet? Why yes I have. God, I need a friend or a therapist or something.
End ramble.
(Note: will probably delete this once I feel better, so enjoy it while you can.)