End of Year Assessment
J wonders how other peoples’ lives seem so much easier than ours.
They’re not, I tell her. Everyone thinks they have it worst.
I don’t know that anyone has it as bad as I do, she says. I have demented parents who need a lot of care. I have a service job at the library that pays shit and only gives me three weeks off a year. I can’t have babies. I have a commute that sucks and my brother barely cares about me and my sister in law won’t speak to me. I look around at my friends and their parents are still OK, they aren’t dealing with elder care. They’re going on vacations and dating and fucking around, living life.
You are living life too. And your friends aren’t as happy as you think.
They sure as hell tell me they’re doing awesome.
Yeah but that’s the game, now, isn’t it? To pretend? Everything is amazing and you are crushing it, living your best life, full of travel and pursuing your own interests and hustling and all of that shit.
We don’t do anything.
Sure we do. We have gone on lots of little trips this year, ate out a bunch, did some stuff we’ve never done before. Plus we work on the IVF project so hopefully we can have a kiddo. Which is still a possibility.
It just seems like things are impossible for me and easy for everyone else. My stupid fat friend M got pregnant by accident by her husband for fuck’s sake. She’s like two hundred and twenty pounds!
Remember that scene from The Crown where Margaret and Elizabeth are alone together, talking about life? In turn they outline their problems to one another. Each sister concludes that the other has the better life. One is the head of the monarchy, with responsibilities and authority. The power means she has a better life. The other, Margaret, is free of such duties. If you value freedom, then she has the better life. One has a husband that she has difficulty with — public philandering, fights — the other has experienced true love, though she is not allowed to marry him for political reasons. Everyone has it bad. If you want to pretend you have a terrible life, be my guest.
But you don’t. And it’s hard for me to hear you are this unhappy. I work so hard for you to be happy — for us to be happy. It’s hard for me to be happy when you’re not happy. Is there anything I can do to make you happy?
You make me happy already.
I do?
Happy wife, happy life, she says, finally smiling, repeating a phrase that folks around here use.
Happy wife, I repeat, closing the distance between us and kissing her.
When she left for work she was still smiling. So that’s something.
I came up with a list of things we did during the year that didn’t involve family care or IVF bullshit. For each event I printed photos we took of places and ourselves and friends, out and about. I bought a scrapbook that looks like the one in the Pixar movie Up and pressed the photos into place underneath sticky cellophane sheets.
It turns out we’ve done a lot together.
A week long trip to Sleepy Hollow in New York – A tour of Washington Irving’s house, FDR’s library, the Dark Shadows mansion, the Headless Horseman bridge, an old cemetery, ice cream and treats and meals out.
Day trips out to Newport and the old White Elephant mansions, Newburyport, Rockport, consisting of seafood and people watching and shop browsing, fudge and waffle cones, salty air and bands.
We saw Peter Gabriel. And GWAR with Nekkrogoblikon. And a bunch of movies out at the theater. We went to an old run down cinema in West Newton and caught an indie movie, went to Coolidge Corner for another.
We went to New York. Yes it was for IVF but we also had a really nice meal out and walked around town for while.
In October we did the Hawthorne Hotel ball in Salem, MA — wore costumes, the whole bit, out and about with friends, a million people in a million crazy outfits, the biggest party in the area.
And we have continued our quest to find all the great apple-cider donuts in the area. We’ve visited nearly a dozen farms and sampled what they had to offer. Some had animal petting areas. We fed goats and petted llamas and watched kids chase chickens across cobbled streets.
At home we’ve watched over a hundred movies. Decorated seasonally. Got the last of the furniture we needed. Completed house projects: A bathroom re-tile and refresh, a basement room turned into a home gym, solar panels installed.
After assembling all of the pictures and flipping through pages of our adventures, I wondered if it would be enough for her.
It feels like enough for me.
Here’s what I’m still not doing enough of. Working on hobbies that make me feel more complete and well-rounded as a person. I wrote about this yesterday some. It’s going to be a major priority for me next year.
I finished putting away my video games. No more PS5, no more switch. When I am bored I can pick a book up instead. I read nineteen full books in 2023 — J and I keep a list posted to the wall, right under our kitchen calendar, and we are sort of in competition. She crushed me last year, coming in at 44 herself. If I redirect the hours from video games into reading instead, I should be able to come out on top in 2024.
And I am going to commit to playing guitar again. I put a task on my whiteboard to find an instructor. I’m a fairly good guitarist already but it’s still nice to have lessons — someone to bounce ideas off of, someone to motivate and cheer-lead. Having a scheduled lesson will also … well this is going to sound stupid but it will legitimize the hobby with J. Instead of it just being me noodling around with my guitar, I can say “I am practicing the song for my lesson.” It sounds like something I have to do instead of something I am doing just to kill time or avoid her. J doesn’t like feeling like I am ignoring her in order to pursue leisure.
The hardest thing to make myself do is of course also the thing I want to do the most — I need to write more.
I managed to put together the story outline for Patterns yesterday. Updated with my new ideas, the ideas I’m borrowing from the Witch Handbook I’m reading. I need time to sit down and write a few scenes. It’s difficult to make myself do it. I had time yesterday but instead got sidetracked. My brain searches for other things to do — anything but write! I don’t know why this is. Instead I got low dose THC gummies from a cannabis store and sent them to my mom in the hopes that it will help with her nausea. We talked about it on Christmas and she finally agreed to try this approach — to try marijuana — even though she’s morally opposed to it. I appealed to her practical nature — I said it’s cheap and it’s been used for nausea since the dawn of time and how can this possibly be worse for you than Xanax, which you are taking in large quantities already, for anxiety? It certainly won’t kill you. What if it does the opposite, and helps? My words worked, she agreed to give it a shot.
So putting everything together and sending it off took a couple of hours that I could have used to instead work on personal goals.
This is something I am guilty of: Putting others before me. Other people’s needs always seem to come before my own.
I don’t think this is something I particularly want to change.
I just want other people to need less.
The last thought bucket is IVF.
This was a total fail last year. Five cycles, tens of thousands of dollars, arguments with J, emotional support and physical support and worry. Most of my OD entries have bits and pieces about IVF.
And yet, we’re trying again. J and I just started another cycle for 2024. I’m optimistic and more enthusiastic than I might have otherwise expected to be, given the series of failures we’ve endured.
I hope it’ll be our last.
J’s doctor brother T said, after hearing the news of our last cycle failing, Good now you can put IVF behind you and focus on the family.
What he meant was: I don’t want you to have a child. I want you to caretake our mom and dad 100% so that I don’t have to worry about them or pay for their care. I want you to be the good Greek daughter who lives with them and dotes on them and cleans up Dad’s shit and piss. I want to ignore them entirely and focus on luxury trips to Sweden and Japan and Peru with my family. I want you to live the life of servitude so that I can take off and enjoy the best of what the world has to offer.
I am looking forward to cranking a kid out, becoming parents, and telling T to shove these thoughts and expectations up his fucking ass.