4/24/2011

Shut the Front Door

I am pretty much the laziest and most easily distracted person alive. Despite my failures in communication with blog friends and two completely defunct-through-neglect blogs not to mention this one, I'm starting another venture - Shut the Front Door.

Lately I have wanted to say more here than I can without fear of being outed or compromising my anonymity. It all sounds very dramatic when it couldn't be more pedestrian, as I really just wanted to talk more about job frustrations but don't feel comfortable doing so here. I'm friends on Facebook with people I work with, so that's out, and Twitter...well, what can you really say in 140 characters anyway?

It came to me recently that it would be nice to have a members-only online forum to take any similar concerns private so they were not readable to all of the internet. Yes, there are password-protected posts, but I'll be honest - not only can I not be bothered to do that on my own posts and notify readers of the password, but I never remember others' passwords either. Again with the lazy.

It will be a private forum, and all memberships will need to be approved by me. I want to make sure it is a space in which everyone feels comfortable to share freely without the accompanying paranoia that I get when I talk about certain things on my blog. It's obviously not a replacement blog, because lord knows I would never tend to that either if so, but on the odd occasion you feel the need to talk about work, marital issues, sexual concerns, or if you're worried that your cat is trying to kill you, come hither. There are comment functions, so you would be able to get feedback on what you are saying just as you would on your blog.

It will not be a place for talking about any bloggers in a negative way, so behave yourselves. I also do not intend for any detailed personal information to be posted there, so it's not as if anyone will be providing their addresses, names of places of employment, or even real names of spouses/kids/etc (unless you are comfortable with that). I suppose you could be anonymous based on the name you set up in the account, but I will need to know who you are in the initial stage (as in blog name or connection to this collection of bloggers)for membership purposes. That information would obviously not go beyond my inbox if required of course.

I've started this here. I have no idea whether this site is any good at forum hosting, so we shall see how it goes. If you go to the search box in the upper left of the homepage and type in "Shut the front door" the forum will come up with the option to join. This may work, or it may be a complete fucking disaster. We shall see!

UPDATE:
It appears as if forum.com is shit. Not only can some of you not access it, but I as the administrator cannot even log in. Hmph. It is a beta version after all, but really. I guess I will spend some of my evening post-ice cream dinner with P looking at other options.

4/05/2011

Still here

It's so hard to come up with pithy subject titles which allude to the subject to be discussed without being obscenely cliche or cheesy. "Drowning", "HATE HATE HATE", "Grey", "Please feel free to tell me to shut the fuck up with all the bellyaching" (and so on) were all considered and promptly binned.

Well, I'm still in the United States, so let's start there. It's strange - there is so, so much I want to say in order for me to try to work out the shit if even just in my own head, but with the amount of things to say it all just becomes tiresome. Half the time I start venting to The Dude and just give up through sheer exhaustion, both mental and physical, and feel the need to retire for a 20 year nap.

I started out in the let's-get-it-all-out mode not a mere 15 minutes ago (yes, it has taken me that long to get this far...shameful), and my head is now a jumble of half-constructed thoughts and random filler that I'll never be able to bring together in this post. I struggle a lot lately with a foggy head and the general inability to express myself coherently, which isn't exactly conducive to my working life either.

I want to talk about why I miss England, and how I possibly don't miss it as much as I think I do. I want to talk about how I'm pretty sure a lot of Americans (except the ones reading this blog) completely lack a sense of humour and are fake, back-stabbing assholes. I want to talk about how, contrary to what your fair selves indicated previously, I really am fucking up my kid's life with startling aplomb. I think I may have said pretty much that exact same thing last time, but I'm running on fumes here.

There is good news amongst all of the talk of dark days and gloomy thoughts - I have now reached the end of my 6 month probationary period at work, so I am eligible for prescription cover. Thus, I will be hot-footing it to my doctor's someday soon to beg for sweet, medicinal relief. The bad parts of life keep elbowing into the sunny slivers which occasionally peek through, and it's not fair to The Dude and P.

Fingers crossed that my next post is not a muddled, confused mess. I don't expect to be jumping out of bed in the morning desperate to go to work, but I want to be able to function like a real human again. I want to write on here, comment on other blogs again - all the stuff I used to do before in The Motherland. You know, before I was crazy that other time. God willing and the Creek don't rise.

3/01/2011

Stuck

There is an impulse in me to head to my blog when I am down and feel there is nowhere else to go - the histrionic blogging equivalent of drunk dialing. I come here because I want someone to tell me that everything will work out for the best, to offer some brilliant advice which hadn't previously occurred to me. That is my modus operandi in situations like these; I seem to think the only way out will be via direction given by someone else. Rather than addressing the problem(s) myself, I always want to rely on other people to change my way of thinking. As if a snippet of wisdom doled out by you, or by my Mom, life will align and all will be well. Intellectually I know that I am basically fucked, and this is what it is, that no three line comment left here will stop me wondering if life will ever be truly, unreservedly good.

My brain is not currently in a position to devise a well-crafted post, so I will just get it all out there, hit "publish post", and regret it as soon as I do.

I don't like being back here. Every single day I wonder why we have made this move when we were comfortable in the UK in so many ways - we had job security, we owned our own property, P was enrolled in a great school in which she was flourishing. Ok, we didn't actually *like* our jobs, which was the initial impetus to come back to the US. Oh, we had grown out of our flat too and were looking to sell, acknowledging that even in moving to a bigger place we still wouldn't have the space we wanted for P. The US seemed the obvious choice to improve those areas, but guess what? The joke is on us. We can't sell our property in the UK, we spend more in rent per month than we would on a mortgage for a very nice house, The Dude can't find a job, I HATE my new job, and P goes to a sub-standard daycare/school which manages to drain even more money that we don't have. Bills keep coming in, as they are wont to do, and I'm in constant amazement that we pay so much for not having much of anything quantifiable.

My job might give me a stroke, and on a calmer day I might evaluate how I can't yet decide whether the US workplace is shit overall, or if it's just my place of employment. I was lucky back in the UK - I loved the people I worked with, so I guess it's my turn to be in a work environment that is largely unbearable. Under ordinary circumstances, I genuinely love the field I'm in, but I now dread going to work every day. I sometimes sneak into the bathroom and cry, thinking about how I just want to be home with my baby. Those who know me know that this is *not* Pru-like behaviour, so there is obviously a glitch or 50 in the system somewhere.

We tell ourselves that we need just that "one thing" - a job for him, an offer on our flat in the UK, and then it would all start to be ok. We say that to one another when we are both doom and gloom, but I don't believe it, and I very much doubt The Dude does either.

There are P-related (future) school issues that are also being thrown at us, and I'm just so sick of thinking about it that I'll just skip over it here. When I'm back to being sane, if only for a moment, I have parent-of-a-near-5-year-old crap to bring up on the blog but I can't be arsed right now. Suffice it to say, it's so, so hard to not feel as if I have completely screwed her over in all of this. We moved over here to give her more, and she's living a pale imitation of her former life right now. It tears me apart thinking that I have consciously done this to her.

I try to recall that revisionist personal history is powerful. It makes you think that you were much happier before, that had you stayed in that life, everything would have been fine - peace in the status quo. Truth is, I know I wasn't happy before. I needed change, and I got it. Now I don't want it. I'm always discontent, there, here, everywhere. It doesn't matter. I don't know what I need to do in order to be happy, or if I can be. The DRAMA, I know.

So there it is. I know, it's just one of a hundred times I write these posts. I'll get over it, until the next time when I do it all over again. Don't feel obligated to indulge me by dispensing sage advice, just please, no one say that it could be worse. Things could always be worse - that doesn't make it better.

1/04/2011

Why hello there

My initial concern was that I wouldn't remember how to get to my blog, and even if I did - would I know how to log in and where to go once I was? I managed this after a couple of tries, then realized the larger problem would be whether I remember how to write. I'm concerned that until I get back into the swing of things (assuming I can manage to blog more than once every 6 months), I'll write in the self-conscious style that plagued my early posts. Reading my old posts you'd be forgiven for thinking you'd stumbled onto a 13 year old's diary, not the blog of someone in their late 20s talking about infertility. Late 20s...oh, those were the days.

So yes, I'm "back", though I never really left. I shifted my whole life and family back to the fair shores of the US and got lazy. Creating a new life for three is hard, let me tell you. I could pretend that I have no time, but I do. My kid (nearly 4 1/2 - SHIT) goes to bed at 7.30pm, I go to bed around 11pm every night. That is 3 1/2 hours of nothingness. Said nothingness is largely spent watching TV or DVDs with The Dude, catching up on what we have missed all these years away. Let me tell you - you people have got this reality TV thing down. Yes, it is "you people", because though I have lived in the US for three months and uh, I am American, I'm having some outsider issues which I hope will lessen soon.

My job is frustrating; it seems the notion of "training" is not important to the new place, yet haranguing me for not doing something I did not even know existed is acceptable. I am very independent and thorough, so this is not my chosen method in which to work. Professionally, I wouldn't want to do anything else, but I'm not sure if this is the institution for me. I am trying to be open-minded about it because I know it can take awhile to adjust, particularly when you come from a familiar, comfortable environment. I've been increasingly homesick for a country I am not even from, and on most days I debate whether I've done the right thing.

So here we are, dropped in an unfamiliar place, slowly getting our bearings. The Dude vacillates between thinking that the life we'll have here will be great once we sell our place in the UK and he finds a job, and OH MY GOD WHAT HAVE WE DONE? He has started doing some part-time coaching which has alleviated some of the overall pervasive misery, but neither one of us can help thinking about the two fairly good-paying jobs and property that we owned (god, I hate renting) and left behind.

P is just peachy regardless. She's happy here, she's happy there, she'd be happy in Eritrea. She is a jolly little bean, if not a jolly little dictating bean. See, I suppose not everything changes. We question our decision on her behalf as well, because even though she's well-adjusted, things could always be better. I wonder if anyone ever feels confident that their child(ren)have the very best life that they can provide. I didn't feel as if I was doing that in England, which was part of the reason for the move. Yet, I certainly don't feel as if I'm doing that here either. I don't know if that ideal space exists.

So yes, I am here. Disjointed, confused, stumbling blindly through life both real and cyber. My goal for this week is to read blogs, so watch yourselves. That is, if I can remember how to sign in and comment on them. Oh yeah, or if I'm not distracted by all of the quality reality television - damn you Real Housewives of Beverly Hills and Millionaire Matchmaker!