tryping
The baby’s asleep in the carrier. The middle kid is watching TV. The big kid is out at a class with my wife. I got music on to keep the baby asleep. She didn’t nap today so needs to sleep or the evening will be all tears all the time, mostly mine, but if she naps too long it’s gonna mean a late bedtime and then more tears tomorrow, again mine, which let’s be honest are the only ones I care about. I got a timer set for when I gotta start getting set up to make dinner. Spaghetti and whatnot, it’s what I can do right now.
I saw some headline about changes in student loan repayment plans, am feeling real worried about that. I can’t meet my monthly payments right now, just been deferring that problem until some later time when I have older kids and more brain to think with. It’s like hearing a knocking in the car and just turning up the radio. How I live. Well, get through the day anyway. “Can you call this living, really?” (I am never sufficiently rewarded for my allusions, by the way.)
I’m typing this - typoed it as ‘tryping this’ which is appropriate to where my head is at when writing; if I published a book maybe I’d put a little WOW! sunburst shape on the cover reading “prose you can loathe!” - for the sake of the typing. I’ve not done writing for a minute now. I can’t remember why I want to write, or if I ever knew, or if it’s accurate to say I want to write. It matters to me to do, I feel good having done it, having been brave about the fear, not flinching the face of my own sense of inadequacy. Inadequacy compounded with interest, that’s a common pattern I’ve seen in the lives of people I’ve known, people drawing back from their own flaws in ways that deepen those flaws, letting flabby muscles mean never exercising, letting fear mean never facing up to fear. I don’t, frankly, have any faith in my own ability to learn or improve - I know in my head that this is mistaken, but at a gut level this sense that I am fixed in concrete, will always be who I am now, goes back a very long time - but in a way that lack of faith, and its partners, the fear and the feeling of inadequacy, have come to be motivating because I feel proud of myself for doing it anyway. It’s a bit like this band I like a lot called Thank or like early Nirvana, there’s this self-loathing to it that’s cranked up to eleven and put right up out front, like weaponized, like ‘I will be SO VULNERABLE AT YOU!’ in a way that ends up seeming shameless, proud. I don’t mean to say there’s any virtue in that content, I don’t have an opinion either way (though I do as a fan relate to it and find it in keeping with my tastes, but that’s just mere taste), but I do think there’s a virtue to doing the work against one’s own inclination to do the work.
The baby whimpers in her sleep, grunts, wiggles. I kiss her forehead. She’s talking a little nowadays, and running. A little more kid every day and a little less baby. She’s losing that new baby smell, or maybe my sense of smell is dimming. Both. She’s going to be our last kid, the one who doesn’t get to have a younger sibling. She still has that fluffy baby hair, soft and perfect. I hum to her a little. She settle back down into a deeper sleep and sighs. So do I. Timer goes off. I start making dinner, set aside my thinking, save my tryping.