Sunday, May 12, 2013

What makes you think that your problems are Permanent?

I've decided that Mother's Day sucks.

I am now adding it to other 'sucky' holidays, like Valentine's Day.  When you grow up without ever going to a dance or going out on a date, Valentine's Day isn't much fun.

Halloween, now that's a holiday I can get into.  As if gobs of candy weren't reason enough, you can play dress-up and decorate and have an extremely dark sense of humor and still be socially acceptable.

But Mother's Day....

When my mother was in the hospital, I kept thinking it would be nice to have still had my old church to go to.  There was a pastor's wife, and a dozen older women, who I kind of missed more than I usually do.  It's dawned on me today--I don't have a grandmother living--my mother's mother passed away just weeks before she did, and my other grandmother passed when I was twelve.  I don't even have a mother-in-law--she died eight years ago.  In fact, I don't have any women in my life at all except for my sister and my children, who are almost women.

I try not to waste time feeling sorry for myself.  I've spent most of the day just pretending Mother's Day doesn't really exist.

I think denial isn't always such a bad thing.

Here's something I saw on facebook that I liked today:


Kind of my new philosophy of life--focusing on....what?  I don't know.  But I only have a few decades left on this planet.  Whether I go to Heaven  (where there will presumably be gobs of candy every day), or get reincarnated (maybe I can avoid being a gnat in my next life if I manage not to wallow in self-pity more often than I can help), or something else entirely--I'm starting to think that this isn't all there is, and that it's not (quite) the end of the world if I can't get a job, or make my marriage work, or find a church where I'm acceptable.  Hopefully I already have people (and pets) waiting for me, wherever I'm going.

It doesn't seem to bother most people that they are going to lose everything.  Every person they care about, every pet, every possession, every place--they're either going to lose them, or be lost themselves, to death, sooner or later.  If they're lucky, they might get an entire century on Planet Earth before the end.

Denial.

For a majority of the last forty-seven years I've been in a place similar to the place I'm in now--alone, almost housebound, unemployed (or failing in school, or both).  I am now working on accepting that this is the way my life is going to be.  Hopefully I'll be able to stay in this house--being able to go out in nature comforts me.  But there's no point in worrying about that.  More useful denial.  I've given up on getting government assistance--maybe I'll try again some other day when the desperation gets a little worse and we need the money a little more than usual.  But right now applying again seems downright silly.  And besides, I am REALLY tired of trying to prove that I'm trying, instead of being a malingerer.

I'm making the best out of my situation.  I've been exercising more--I'd lost fifteen pounds (yay!), and then stopped.  No more pounds would budge.  And then I read in a book about the Amish ("Amish Peace" by Suzanne Woods Fisher--more on that in another blog post, perhaps) that they eat mashed potatoes and doughnuts, but aren't usually overweight, because....well, this is probably the reason why we have so much obesity in the United States these days....they work hard physically.  Not watching TV several hours a day or sitting behind a desk, but planting and plowing and canning and taking care of animals and walking everywhere.

Maybe people are meant to eat all the fat and sugar they can get their hands on.

So when everybody leaves the house, I get on the Wii.  I mean, I still had a salad with dinner, and refrained from having seconds, or opening that bag of chips in the cupboard.  But I might really need to be more active.  Pedaling on the exercise bike while I talk to my sister is apparently not enough.  We have several physical fitness games that I never play because somebody's always watching TV or playing the Wii, and when everybody leaves I go relax in a corner somewhere.  I've given that up for now.  I've also started exercising a little more when I can--lifting a few weights while I read the book about the Amish, doing a few leg lifts while I'm online, whatever I can think of.

I keep going through the clutter in the house, and just keep busy doing chores and homeschooling and playing that piano.  It's not easy sometimes, because I think nobody will ever hear my music.  But the music is good for me--it's good for my mood, and it's a bit of exercise for my hands and arms.  It even seems to do my back a bit of good.  Every day I click to donate. 

I spend some time on facebook--talking to other autistic people.  Autism support groups on facebook are wonderful for acquiring lots of friends--I think you could fairly reliably diagnose autism based on how many (non-autistic) friends a person has on facebook.  I have seventeen--four children, a husband, a sister, four relatives, a fan fiction author, and six people from illness support groups--I occasionally talk to sick people, too.  It disturbs me--people who I know for a fact are severely troubled and/or just not very nice get on facebook and within a month have dozens of friends.  I think that maybe having dozens of facebook-only friends might be best for me--when one dumps me, I can just go on with my life.  The way normal people do when one of their dozens of friends dumps them.  Having only one friend and then getting dumped is not healthy or fun.  And autistic facebook friends laugh when you tell them that May 8 of 2013 is a Fibonacci number.

I think facebook-only friends are also better for me because they won't ever expect me to be able to drive out somewhere to meet them.  I think sometimes I might be alienating people by making them think I don't want to see them, when the truth is that I simply have no way to get to their house, or the park, or a restaurant.  Even though the last couple of times I've tried to explain.  It's also nice not to be failing to recognize people and missing their facial expressions and struggling to hear what it is that they're saying.  But it doesn't quite kill the loneliness.

Being out in nature kind of does.  Being stuck in a room all day would definitely make things worse.  Especially if there weren't a piano in the room.





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