Sad

I woke up crying this morning.

I have a new way of crying…it doesn’t involve sobbing, or diaphragmatic contractions, or really any physical sensations at all.  My throat doesn’t even get tight.  I’ll just become aware that my sight is blurred.  It gets hard to see, and then I feel water spilling down my cheeks from my eyes.  They just fill up with water and then overflow.

Where is this coming from?  There’s a lot of undifferentiated Weltschmerz going on, I know.  Or maybe not so undifferentiated.  The New York Times estimated that between 7,000 and 17,000 people will die each year because of Republican governors who have repudiated federal dollars to extend Medicaid to their constituents, just to vent their political spleen. 

That kind of thing used to make me mad.  But now I don’t have the energy that anger takes.  It just makes me sad.

           

The recent reports provided to the U.N. on global warming – I’m sorry, climate change – which was accompanied by the conclusion that we really have just about ten years in which to make the huge changes in carbon emissions necessary to avoid catastrophic events such as the “collapse of ice sheets, a rapid rise in sea levels, and difficulty growing enough food,” -- which said that 95% of the world’s scientists are convinced that not only is global warming real, but it’s much worse than the worst case scenarios for this spot in the apocalyptic timeline had envisioned in the last report – has me feeling a little bit blue.

That’s an understatement.  A little blue?  I feel like I’m Spock.  Remember the Star Trek movie, “The Search for Spock,” where his aging was tied to the aging and death of the Genesis planet?  I’m almost 58, and I keep hearing doomsday predictions of what kind of case this ol’ planet will be in, in the year 2050 – about the time I’ll be 94.  Not the age you want to be about the time the Earth starts to resemble the set of Waterworld.

So there’s that, and the propensity of the Supreme Court to redefine corporations as individual human beings, at least in terms of freedom of speech and religion, and don’t even get me started on the NRA and how many more freedoms we have to bear arms in the wake of the slaughter of five-year-olds at Sandy Hook.  What happened to the evolutionary adaptation of taking care of your tribe?

No.  What’s really got me lately is that for the first time in thirty years, this was the first Easter that I didn’t sneak into a kid’s room with an Easter basket.  Last year, I snuck into my nineteen-year-old son’s room at six a.m.  Why in the world would any teenage boy be awake then?  I have the weight of dozens of scientific studies that say that teenagers’ bio-clocks are set on a time zone from another planet completely.  Well, my son must not have kept up with science because he sat up in bed, pointed at me and said, “I KNEW you were the Easter Bunny!”  Finally.  He was elated at having evidence, PROOF, at last.  I guess after that he could move out.  Mom is the Easter Bunny.

But this Easter, we got up, Ed went downstairs to work because he’s trying to meet a deadline, I went outside to do battle with the dandelions and then we went to brunch with my mother and father-in-law. We didn’t even dye eggs. Happy Easter.

If I were to be completely honest, I would have to say that I think the real reason I’m sad is that my job of parenting is done.  My job of mothering a daughter is over – she’s thirty, so this isn’t big news.  That job has been replaced with a relationship, and it’s a happy one, so good.  My job of mothering a son is over.  He’s twenty, so again, it was time for him to join the Navy or the Peace Corps or go to college.  It doesn’t matter which one he chose. What matters is that for the last year, instead of cuddling a little warm body in a blue footie sleeper or following around a chortling two-year-old or mentoring a clueless middle school boy with out-of-control-hair or driving around a popular high school music star, I got nothin’.  When I want someone around who gets my sense of humor and dishes it back effortlessly, I got nothin’, and when I want to hug my kid, feeling a little bit of soft fat over hard muscle and a big heart, I got nothin’.

And during this seismic shift, my best friend decided that for some reason she doesn't want to talk to me anymore…so now I don’t have her to gripe to.

So I’m sad.  And the big question now is, what to do about it?

Hey, this is me.  So what I did was write a 340-page novel.  And get involved in local independent media and learn to write commentary and edit audio files.  But at the end of the day – and eventually you have to acknowledge that the day is over and it’s time to do something other than work or sleep – what I’ve got is sadness.

So I’m feeling sad right now.  And that’s just a fact.