Barf. Child.

It's about 80% hangover making me feel nauseated, but there's a good chunk of wtf doing it to me as well.

I've been thinking about having children.

Who am I fucking kidding. I'm 35. I'm not going to have a child. I'm 35 and have a life about as together as the average 27 year old.

It's just not going to happen.

I started watching one of those Wigs shows on YouTube, where actresses of some note get the opportunity to delve into a "character," a "wig," if you will, and the shows are all about some serious issue women deal with. All well and good. The first I watched, Blue, with Julia Stiles, threw me last year as it was about a mom who has to prostitute herself in addition to having a day job, in order to make ends meet with her young son. A lot of the same issues I've dealt with, in my work, and in my life, were raised in that show.

The shows consist of clips that are about 7-12 minutes long. Little show blurbs to watch on your coffee breaks at work, and the like, I'd guess, was the pitch idea on that one.

Susanna, the one I've started, stars Anna Paquin and Maggie Grace. It's honestly not that compelling and it's more upsetting than anything in a way that makes my gorge rise a bit.

Anna's character is a new mother suffering an obsessive compulsive post-partum depression meltdown. Maggie's character is her stable, mature younger sister with a "real" job.

I've always wondered if I'd be a good mother. I've sought assurances in friends on that front. I used to have a terrible temper. Physically violent sometimes. It's still in me, it's just that I've learned ways to diffuse it within myself in seconds instead of letting it out. It's amazing what just stopping for a second and looking at the situation while in the situation can do. And understanding consequences is a lot of that. "If I throw my phone across the room at my boyfriend, it will hit him hard enough to hurt him, might break my phone depending on whether it hits him, might ricochet and hit something else breaking my phone AND the other thing, and then the fight will escalate, boyfriend might leave me, then I'll be out a phone and a boyfriend and have to replace thing that got broken."

But with a small, vulnerable thing that can't defend itself that's been crying for hours? I don't know how my brain would work with that. I am terrific with other people's children because you can always give them back to their parents when things get stressful. You can go to your quiet home and blare Ryan Adams and sing at the top of your lungs and not have a baby to wake up. You can always get away from the small, vulnerable thing.

And there's the dependence. Sometimes, with four cats, as much as I love them, I think, "Dear god, you are making my life so much harder." You can't just pack up and leave any place with four cats. It's hard to find apartments that will take you. People call you "Crazy Cat Lady" and they think they're hilarious. I can't even go on vacation or a trip for a few days without lining up someone to check in on the cats, change litter, replenish food and water. And that dependence is very, very minor compared to a baby. A baby that becomes a toddler that becomes a child that becomes an adolescent that becomes a teenager.

If I told Joey any of this, he would think I am only thinking this because he is freaked out and doesn't want kids right now and might never want them. While it's true I am thinking this out loud because of the conversation we've been having, it's always been there. Always.

And I know all of these fears are normal. But I'm 35. I really just want to be in a happy, stable relationship. I don't think about the future with Joey. I just love him.

I just wish he could do the same with me, be willing to consider compromises down the line, and acknowledge in a meaningful way that I have moved my whole life to make this work, and that I am willing to get rid of my cats down the line, or even sooner, to have an environment he can be with me in.

Okay. Writing this out makes me feel less like barfing.

On marriage and kids

The talk about marriage and kids came early. Before any I love you was uttered. And, though he was drunk and doesn't remember it, he was the first to say I love you, too. Or, at least, that he was "in love" with me.

I was sober, lying in bed, he texted that he was sad, and was going to get progressively more drunk. I called him, and we talked for what ended up being three hours, but felt like mere minutes. We told stories, I talked about things like how I find dimes in conspicuous places, when it seems like I'm on a particular path toward something, and I attribute them to my deceased grandfather, Dale. He asked if I'd found a dime the day I met him.

I had. In the middle of the bathroom rug at his sister's place, where I'd been staying. I remember picking it up, as I always do, and relishing its thin metallic feel, smiling softly to myself, wondering what the day had in store.

At some point in that conversation, the phrase, "I wouldn't be in love with you unless..."was spoken. It took my breath for a minute, and I almost said I love you to him, as I'd wanted to over and over in every conversation we'd been having the prior two and a half weeks. But, I knew he was drunk, and I knew it wasn't time. I knew, in the morning, he probably wouldn't remember he'd said that.

In that same conversation, a propos of nothing, he stated, "We need to get started on having kids early. I don't want to be an old dad." I laughed, and it scared me a little. Even though I'm comfortable with moving "fast," I am also accustomed to people feeling fast for me and it scaring them, so they project that fear onto me and tell me over and over that I'm moving too fast, yet ignore the fact that they're putting out exactly the same language and feeling that I am. It's unfair, and as of yet, I can't figure out a way to handle it. He asked me, at one point, if I didn't think that he and I were "eerily similar." It came via text, and honestly, I balked at the notion. I thought about the things I'd noticed already, that he could grow angry quickly, that he was horribly stubborn... and then realized I could say the same of myself. After, I started to tally up the ways in which we were similar, and it was true. He was me, with a penis. I started to tell people that when they asked me what he was like.

Chris, seemed so cutely sure of himself and his feelings (and it was only in that one conversation that he was drunk), even though he admitted it also scared him. He'd say things like, "If you can guess how many cavities I have, I'll marry you." The answer was 0. I guessed wrong. I wasn't saying anything like that. I'd talk about marriage, about kids, in the abstract, that I wanted to have them, that I wouldn't discount having them with him, but he was interviewing me. He was probing me for information, for things that compiled his list of what he wants in a wife, in the mother of his kids.

We were sitting at a restaurant, about to go for a walk along the Mississippi when he was here before Thanksgiving. He smiled at me, in the sunset light streaming through the windows and asked if I'd want family dinner every night. I told him of course, that that was the way I'd grown up and that's what I'd want for my family once I had one. He nodded. "Good. That's really important to me."

And there were the other times, like the moment when we were talking about pregnancy and how I wouldn't abort if I got pregnant because I'm 34 and it seems silly to me that I wouldn't keep it, even though my life isn't ready for a kid. I know I'd be able to figure things out pretty fast. But, I said, if I did find out that there was a major birth defect, or some terrible illness, I wouldn't hesitate to abort. He grinned, and high fived me. It was one of the many things that could have been a touchy subject, but was not. We were just on the same page.

He told me, too, when he was here, on a night where we went out dancing and I found that he was the first person I was involved with that I could actually dance with and I was elated, and he was elated, and he was adorably listing, in my ear, over the loud new wave and 80s hits, all the reasons he loves me, and he said something about marriage, and I laughed at him and asked him how long he needed to "know" about me, and without missing a beat, he said, "Six months."

I don't know where that kind of talk got lost. I don't where it was, or what happened that made him just give up on us. Because, as far as I can tell, as far as I remember, we never stopped being compatible. Even when we were fighting, we worked things out efficiently, and were able to look at one another with sincere love, affection, and respect. Something dark and significant happened in his head that took his heart from me, bit by bit, and he just let it happen. And I am just at a loss to understand it.

I've been in relationships where I thought about marriage and kids. I've talked about those relationships here. But none of those people thought the same of me. None of those people talked about our potential kids by name (I'd like to name a boy Ivan Jack), made jokes with me about having "witch twins" after passing street names Cremona and Bersota in Seattle, and none of them, certainly, drew a fucking picture of a girl he had a dream about that he decided was our daughter.

Housewife, Sans House or Husband

As my brownies-from-a-mix were baking (sub olive oil for vegetable oil, add peppermint bark chips) just an hour ago, a thought occured to me:

Perhaps I am not meant to have a career per se. Perhaps all this beating my head against the wall, all this existential ennui is just silliness, like women in the middle of the last century getting Home Ec degrees at Brown to pass time until they got a husband. Maybe I'm just biding my time until marriage.

Of course, this is complete rubbish. Well, except for the minutiae which are not. Facts:

I am an incredible cook.
I keep a clean home.
I am organised, and detail oriented.
I am terrific with children.

In short, I could quite excel at being a housewife.

That is, were it not for a persistent gnawing at my gut for change, for personal control, and the fact that I know ennui, existential or no, would not fully abate, then I could quite excel at being a housewife.

What I could be, though, is a woman who works from home in the sort of job that would not need to be relied upon wholly for stability, or to do something in which I was relatively autonomous. Carpentry, I think, could fulfill this need, both as personal fulfillment, as well as providing finances to the home.

I think a lot about marriage. I just got out of a serious relationship, or at least a relationship which seemed more serious than any I'd been in previously, and most definitely one I'd wanted to turn toward marriage, and thus am currently in no position to be handing over that level of commitment to anyone. And yet, when I am out and about, I'm looking at people no longer as potential playmates, but as partners. Given my lifestyle, there is a dearth of options.

A friend joked last week, "You're going to have to spend a lot more time at Target Field."

In Which I Dream An Idyll, In Which I Dream The Primordial Battle

My dreams have been absent from waking memory for more than a month, a fact which is highly unusual. I can recall only one other time in my life where this occured. It was eight years ago exactly, and that was because the man I was dating at the time, commonly known as The Devil, was stealing them. He was also causing me to bleed each time we had sex, regardless of the force or tenderness we engaged in the act with. Upon being told that I felt he was stealing my dreams and that I was bleeding each time we had sex, my dreams returned and the bleeding stopped. There are other reasons he was known to us as The Devil, and those reasons, while important, hold little bearing here. Just understand, that it is not easily my dreams should slip away from me in the daylight hours.

Knowing this, though, sheds little light on why it should have been occuring the past month. My stressors have all but disappeared. Money, love, life are finding a pleasant equilibrium. My lover, Andy, is not stealing my dreams, we in fact rarely sleep in the same place together. No, this time it is a mystery.

What there has been to recall is little. There's the brief snippet of Michael J. Fox shambling toward me with heavily cataracted eyes, an image unsettling enough to have me wake with the certainty that I'd dreamt his death into being, and there's the dream last week I recall swipes of, a Grey Gardens-like duo of women who were my "aunts", and pails of ranch dressing being flung at a large crowd of people who wished them harm, one member of this masse being my friend Hilary Davis, whom I recognised from behind by her red hair, just seconds after the dressing hit her. There's also the brochure which featured a Korean restaurant called Babi, which served pizza with a Sriracha cream sauce and artfully cut, cold, raw vegetables placed aesthetically over the surface of the Sriracha slathered crust. But none of these dream snippets add up to a whole, nor have they provided me any insight to deeper brain goo.

In other words, these dreams are not like my dreams. They are inferiour imitations of what I know to be my dreams and praise the lord, it would appear that the real dreaming is back as of two nights ago.

I dreamed of a huge old pale yellow house, which sat on a hill that slipped gently into a cliff which overlooked a large lake. It was surrounded by thick woods of elm and oak, with a private drive not easily seen from the main road. The house was run down, as if it had not been tended to in a decade or more, but its build was solid, and its foundation crafted from natural stone. I had found out that this house was an heirloom, passed down for generations, but kept secret; the previous owner had cared little for it and spent no time there. Thus, my time had come to make it my own, lest the house fall further into disrepair. I stood on a higher hill which overlooked this house and took photos with my cell phone. I'd been unprepared for this gift and the elation had made me weepy, heady with possibility. I sent these photos to Andy with the understanding that he was to keep it secret. He was welcome to live with me here, of course, but it had to be tended to before that was possible.

What is curious, then, is the course the dream took after this. Being as religiously romantic as I am, I find myself wont to believe that this house is real, and that it is a place I have been, in a life long past. I've had dreams like what this dream turned into before, where people I've never knowingly met have names and rich lives of their own, and understanding of the dream landscape, technically foreign territory, is as known to me as my own life.

I arrived at the house in the early afternoon hours as people bustled about tending to tables and wreaths and streamers. Signs of festivity, of celebration. I wore a cotton dress, in the style common to women in the mid 1950's. This was not the house of the first portion of the dream, but that same house, decades earlier. In pristine condition. Full of people, of life, of love. These woods were somewhere south of the Mason-Dixon, and the inhabitants were lifelong, old money Southerners. Happy, genteel folks. And I was one of them. But, in pondering this in the waking, it was not a me that I know, but yet a me no less familiar than the me that is now. My hair dusted my shoulders, a dark blonde which shone with shades of red. I wore a small white veil upon my head. My dress was perfectly tailored to my shape. I kept looking down, to my stomach, touching it gently. I was pregnant, and it was my wedding day.

I dashed upstairs, to the servants' quarters, where I spoke with my dear friend, our black head servant, Albert. He was the only one who knew that I was pregnant, but it was not something we spoke of, or indicated. In the dream, I just knew it to be true. He sat at a small table in a nook just off a children's playroom, eating a simple sandwich. His eyes shone with happiness and pride that I was back home, and that the reason for my return was my wedding. I knew that there was much to prepare for, and bid him adieu.

This is where the dream ends. I find it curious that despite Andy being prominently on my mind in the first portion of the dream, he is absent from the second portion, and that I've no impression of who my groom and father of my child was to be at all, other than the understanding that he was the right choice.

Last night's dream is less worthy of detail, so I shall summarise:

Connor, an ex quite possibly least likely to ever interest me again, wound up interesting me again, and things were vaguely rekindled. I moved to Madrid, and he followed me there. It was shortly after this that I became suspicious when I noted him frequently talking to large groups of people. I realised he was proselytising them to be in his army for Satan, and when he couldn't convince them on the simple merit of his words, he would resort to casting a glamour upon them. This fact raised my hackles and caused latent messianic powers within me to come to the fore and thus an epic battle of good versus evil began.

The end.

I'm sure I won. Connor's a putz.

Therapy, it turns out, is therapeutic.

This morning I was feeling solidly fucked up. 30 Rock viewing did not help me, as even the slightest similarity to my current situation is liable to give me false hope which is subsequently dashed by the vagaries and whims of television writing, which then causes some kind of fissure in any semblance of rational thought I have put together for myself, made of tenuous, fragile bonds.

It doesn't help, either, that practically everything is somehow related to Andy. He'd become so completely, comfortably enmeshed in my life so quickly, and then just as quickly, completely ripped from it. It's been almost a month now. A whole, sad, month.

And so, I walked to therapy today, which I've been excited about for the past few days, which, having been in and out of therapy for the last 20 years, I am fully aware of how beneficial a session can be, but I cried as I walked, somehow still able to be sad despite the Lady GaGa thumping in my ears.

And I cried in my session, with a perfect stranger. Three times. I saw my previous therapist, Monica, for about four months and didn't cry once. The eyes welled up, but no actual loss of saline was made. Monica pointed out numerous times that I seemed to be detached from the tales and problems in my life, that I could talk about very emotional situations and express no emotion about them at all. Which was curious, since I was genuinely feeling emotion, and I wasn't the least bit uncomfortable with her; I was, somehow, detached, though. But not today! No, the waterworks flowed with ease. I went from feeling borderline hysterical, considering rushing over to Andy's today so I could see him, to feeling quite calm and centered, considering.

I like this new girl. She seems to be of similar demeanor to Monica, but Katie is a touch younger, prettier, and she's got a sense of humour. Monica wasn't a wet blanket, but she was also not the sort of gal that I'd ever go out and have a glass of wine with. Which was what I liked about her. She was completely non-judgemental, honest, even blunt with me. Katie's a bit more laid back. She dropped an F-bomb at one point, which I respected. And she laughed at my jokes.

I told her how I'd never cried with Monica, and how Monica had pointed out my detachment. I feel it's Andy that's changed this. I became better with Andy. The best version of myself. I need to get back to that, without Andy. And I think I can. Deciding against Drunk, Slutty Sarah, against casual smooches, against heavy drinking at all, that's a huge step. As is the realisation that I need to begin putting myself in the position to be ready for marriage and a child. I'm two, three years away from that, and that's if I pull it together as of yesterday and make dramatic life changes. Maybe Andy doesn't fit into this plan in the greater sense, but he's certainly been the catalyst for it.

Why do my hands smell like meat?