July - Once again, On Hold
I have spent most of this
month being what I think of as ‘on hold’. (A state that I have spent too much
of my life in BTW.) When I am on hold I am not really doing anything, I am just
waiting, passing time, fitting my life awkwardly around others’ activities.
I was on hold for whole days
sometimes when the kids were little and one had a birthday party or some such to
go to in the middle of the afternoon and so the rest of us just frittered away
the day without purpose.
I was on hold for a whole
week occasionally after Ardre got sick when the kids would be staying with him
and I was home alone in endless echoing solitude, but couldn’t go away, or even
make plans I wouldn’t be able to break, because I knew that if he got too tired
he’d bring them all back at a moment’s notice, so I was left at loose ends,
frustrated, filling each day without knowing if it was my last alone or not.
I was on hold for a whole
year more than once when I was unemployed but the kids were older, enrolled in
school and sports, and it made sense on several different levels to stay around,
but I couldn’t find enough to do to with all my hours and so ended up feeling
unfulfilled and hence irritated, waiting, always waiting, for their school day
to end, for example, so I could ferry them to hockey, but then just waiting
again, for that to be over.
I lost a whole decade on hold
married to Geoff.
If I were an industrious
person, enterprising and entrepreneurial, or even merely social, all this time
could easily have been used productively rather than having been wasted. I
could have learnt to play the violin, or written academic papers, or started up
a home-based business, or even just spent it all congenially with friends and
family. But I am not. And so the hours, weeks, and years dragged by slowly and painfully
empty.
I remember being very happy
with endless time off when the kids were very little and I was on extended
maternity leave and my days were filled with looking after babies and toddlers,
which I actively enjoyed, and I went to FEN, the community mother and child
drop-in center most days, so much so that I ended up making friends, and I
belonged to a couple of different groups that met weekly, and I was on good
terms with my mother and visited her regularly, and I even had a best friend,
also home with small kids, who called me on a daily basis and arranged
activities for us all to do together. But as my kids got older and my
relationship with my mother disintegrated and my best friend moved out west and
most other mothers returned to work (as opposed to me, who chose to return to
depression instead) my days got longer and less focussed and everything started
to fall apart.
School here finishes at the
end of June. I’d been planning to let my lease run out then, pack up all my
stuff, put it in storage, and leave, go off on the 1st of July. But
my youngest son got a summer job working landscaping just a few miles from here
(near Arnprior, what are the chances of that?) and asked if he could stay with
me. He’s going into his last year of college next fall, this is the last summer
in which any of my children will not be graduated and be, hopefully, working,
living their adult lives, the last legitimate time any of my children might
want to live with me.
So, of course, I said, ‘Yes.’
But now, for the summer, my vacation
is on hold, my life is on hold, I am on hold. I didn’t have to stay here but
the coincidence of him wanting to live here along with the sentimentality of it
being my last son’s last summer as a kid were just too strong to resist. But I
don’t have a plan, a single friend in the area, or enough to do. So days hang
long. I cycle a bit, read a bit, work slowly through my pre-departure list, but
I also spend a lot of time doing nothing. I could have gone away, for at least
part of the summer, but not wanting to miss even an evening of time with my
kids holds me here. He works long days, 12 hours of labour in the hot sun, and
so when he gets home we swim in the gathering dusk, then eat, then sit and chat
for an hour and then it is already time for bed.
I fully intend to get up each
morning to see him off but usually he is long gone by the time I pull myself
out of bed so I crawl back in and go back to sleep for another couple hours or lie
snuggled in the warm cocoon of my covers with a book or even turn on my laptop
and watch TV shows one after another. Often it is noon before I get myself bowl
of cereal, which I take back to eat in bed, and 3 pm before I finally emerge,
shower, and go for my morning coffee and internet check-in at Tim’s. It is with shame that I admit this. Though I
am not unhappy with this dispersion of time, the lassitude of it all seems, if
not sinful, then at least unhealthy. I feel compelled to come up with a thumbnail
story of what I have done each day lest he ask, and when he is off, gone for a
weekend, the release from the need to justify, to anyone, my total inactivity,
is actually that, a release.
I am considering abstaining
from facebook. I know people tend to post when there are positives in their
lives, and not when there aren’t, but the daily barrage of amazing things that
my facebook friends are doing contrasts so greatly with the barrenness of my
own existence that it worries me. I feel as if, if my son weren’t here, I could
die and my desiccated remains wouldn’t be found until my landlady ran out of
post-dated rent cheques.
Don’t get me wrong. There
have been lots of lovely interludes this summer; a few stolen days at a
friend’s cottage including a canoe out on the lake calm and clear enough that
we could see huge fish swimming far below, a meal out in Ottawa with both my ex
and all of my kids gathered together at a new place that was so much fun my
middle son’s fingers were literally wiggling with anticipation as he waited his
turn to order off the tablet, a day spent with old friends from Deep cycling
near here on a studio art tour, another
day off canoeing with my old canoe group exploring the flooded bays and islands
above the dam across the lake from my house… my middle son has visited me
several times, and I’ve made trips back to Deep to go to friends’ retirement
dinners and stopped in to see old friends at the same time, sat and drank
coffee with Rick, and tea with Jane, and white wine with Shelley… I’ve been into Ottawa often to visit my
oldest, and I’ve made it to almost every dragon boat practice here in town, and
the few hours that I have spent each evening with my youngest have been lovely,
and I have, finally, acquired a phone, and have been making up for lost time
calling people, and, sometimes, I get long newsy e-mails that make my day…
...but there have also been
times when I just let the hours flow by in a very aimless fashion.
I am, without doubt, on hold.
But I am not - which is most
worrying of all – at all worried about it.
