the summer of form-filling and fantasising

a life update from the cracks

I’ve been scrambling lately. Lurching from one crisis to the next. Trying to staunch the cascade of chaos, the fall out of financial chaos related to the breakdown of my marriage, an ongoing health crisis in the family and my imminent divorce. The end — or the beginning of the end — is in sight. There’s a court date, thank god. I’ve been applying myself to the task of resolving what needs to be sorted in the mean time, getting my battered little ducklings in a row. I know divorce is hell for many people, but the situation in which I now find myself (a sole care single mother responsible for a household, a life, over which I have scant legal authority or financial control) is at times so maddeningly nonsensical the only thing I can do is throw myself at it for days, beavering away at the edges and corners I can get purchase on, trying clear up the mess as I go.

I’m not meant to write about The Situation in detail (lawyers) but even if I could I wouldn't want to, not now. It’s become too tedious at this point. Too maddening. I barely talk about it in detail with anyone anymore, except with the boys, or my Dad, when he asks. The weirdness of my current situation — the chaos I wade through each day from the moment my feet leave the sheets until I fall into bed, yearning for oblivion — has begun to seem, if not fine, at least weirdly normal. But it’s not normal. I try to remember that. It’s an evolving crisis and the shape of it shifts around me, buffeting me constantly when I need to stay on course. I’ve learned to live with the gnawing uncertainty by holding on to the one thing I do know: It cannot go on. It just won’t.

It has not been a straight forward process. Not at all. At times it’s been terrifying. I’ve panicked and choked and I’ve raged at the heavens, which of course helps no one at all. I’ve also had periods of intense distraction, times when I just turn my mind from it, allowing myself to slip out of time… I let the context recede, forgetting everything for a few days, giving myself over to the pleasures of my work, of sunshine, summer, music, food and wine, laughter and joy. The company of my children and close friends. The best thing about other people is that they have other things on their minds. Other stories, other conundrums, agonies and joys which — thank god — have nothing to do with my own. Conversation is a life raft. I have never really understood people who don’t love to talk. Idle, discursive conversation brings me back to my body, myself. Each one is a little holiday. I have learned to allow myself these lulls and sweet escapes. But when I return to the reality of my life, it’s like tumbling back to scorched earth. The landing is hard.

The work ahead is daunting but not insurmountable. I try to remind myself to break it down into manageable chunks, then bits, then crumbs. The resolution involves hours of rifling through files. Sorting papers. Triaging. Bill paying. The endless filling out of forms. Registering accounts in web portals. Uploading PDFs. Verifying my identity at every turn. Making the necessary calls. Sending emails. Copying in the right people. Throwing myself on the mercy of the state, the school, the health service. Finding out what schemes exist to help families like us. Families “at risk” — even as I write that it feels ridiculous, overblown. But at least for now, that’s what we are.

At the same time I’ve been quietly working, or trying to work as much as I can. Pushing the wolves from the door while sending stuff out, in the hope the funds keep trickling in. I’ve been retraining for something new (it’s exciting — more later). I have a manuscript novel that is almost a second draft, which will become a third and forty thousand words of a new book as well. I’ve nudging along a few other things, shepherding, pushing. There’s podcast I’m wildly excited about. A script. There’s this newsletter. I still love my work thank god.

I’m getting the hang — slowly — of being the only grown up on deck for the boys. Setting aside the time required not just manage their lives but to order our days into a more predictable rhythm. Ordering new uniforms, packing lunches for school trips, updating calendars, mathletics, sports tournaments, figuring out the summer ahead, talking to family back home. Its endless, the details, the litany of tedious essential tasks, the laundry, the labelling, the spreadsheeting, I’m not brilliant at it to begin with, but I’m learning to screw up far less. The trick is to keep thinking small. A narrowing of perspective. I used to make longer term plans but it’s been so difficult to think ahead for so long now that September is a blank. On bad days it's like I’m moving toward a cliff’s edge that keeps receding a few inches just in the nick of time.

On the upside it’s mostly useless, isn’t it? Planning the future, I mean. The only real planning I can do at the moment is concrete. Tackling the dreary admin required to surmount the obstacles that stand in the way of us getting to a place where real plans might become possible again. When I do cast forward these days, it’s pure pipe dream fantasy. This is true all the time really, it’s just that in my current situation I can’t pretend otherwise. But I still love to drift away when I can. Pretending is dangerous (it can lull you into imagining things are not what they seem, hardening into delusion, avoidance, sending you perilously off course) but it’s also so comforting, so tempting. It’s my special skill. Who doesn’t occasionally indulge in reveries of rescue and escape? Even on my best days, the days when I exercise by mid-morning, defrost chicken thighs for dinner, cross all the items off all the lists… I cannot fully relinquish the dream habit. It seems built into me somehow, since childhood I have survived in part by just closing my eyes and throwing myself forward into some iridescent future — so many gorgeous futures! — in which what is happening now is not happening at all. In times like this fantasies are necessary, if only because the the revery they inspire stokes excitement and hope. With optimism comes energy. And energy is everything. It’s what makes things possible. Without it we become dull and inert.

I was thinking this morning that even the most outlandish, laughable faraway fantasies are true in the truest sense: The future will unfold. Everything is changing and will continue to change. Nothing is or ever will be fixed. My little family will revert to our natural state, which is one of relative safety, stability and contentment. I will make sure of it. Not just by crossing off lists and filling out forms, but by closing my eyes and imagining it.