Chimera
“It could be much worse,” I told my mother as we completed mile four of our Berkeley march, the meandering from resale shop to park rock to bakery to salon product pick-up to iced tea to waiting for the boy outside his classroom. “We’re both lucky in so many ways.”
I am loved and have enough money and a lovely place to live. I am healthy. The boy is healthy. My brain still works, although it is leakier than it was before, and when I am not healthy (the brain fog, the never-ending crying jags, the unexpected blood) I have health insurance to cradle me and doctors and a phalanx of mental health professionals waiting to reassure.
It could go away at any moment, all of it, a heavy fact that lurks in the back of my mind, along with the discontent, the ugliness. It could go away. I don’t deserve it. I have been a passive player in my life, a provider of care and user of someone else’s money, piggybacking on the labors of my husband. If I went with the usual flow of words here, I’d call myself a parasite, but that isn’t quite right. There is an exchange, some of which is implicit, some of which is my self-sacrifice to the gods of luck, the gods that know I don’t deserve a damn thing.
I clean. I cook. I do the laundry and the dishes and organize much of the boy’s life. I have taken the things that I love – cooking high on the list, emoting and caring on a deeper level, deep thought and appreciation of art and the world in the mix, too – and boxed them up, the small and large parts of me. No one asked me to do this, but I don’t know how to live my current life, how to join it to those parts of myself that feel … deviant? No. Subversive? How could that be?
It’s suppression, plain and simple, and I’ve written about it for years, usually indirectly, often with anger. But it’s nobody’s fault (but mine). I’m chipping away at the boxes and trying to give the feelings room. Still, in that conversation about the things to be grateful for, the many things, I realized how little enthusiasm I have for my life. That pisses me off, because I remember caring a lot about the world and life and emotions, and I’m tired of not-feeling, of not wanting to go to the edge of the emotional sea, to the churning and tossing and the moments of beautiful calm, the uncertainty about the weather, the immersion in warmth and sunlight.
I’m tired of the suppression and I’m grateful for the good things and I still haven’t figured out how to join selves, to take the pre-parenthood me and the mother me and join them to make a new creature. Or maybe I’m doing it, but it feels so slow and there are so many other pieces of baggage along the way, the heavy legacy of the past, that it’s sometimes hard to see my way forward. 
From the prompt "I am so grateful for..."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Note on the title: I spent more time debating the title than I did writing the post. Ultimately, I think it fits. You can find out more about chimeras here and here and draw your own conclusions.
Confidential to people looking for my yicky post. I deleted it.
Image by Stuck in Customs.