this woman’s work

Seems like I’m living in a snowglobe minus the snow. I’m discombobulated and every time I think I’ve got my footing again — shake shake shake — I’m knocked off balance.

Good news: Let go of a timesuck client that people have been telling me to let go of for months.

(shake shake shake)

Bad news: Client still hasn’t paid me for last month of work.

(shake shake shake)

Good news: I think working around Brett’s schedule is more than do-able because the kids are older, I’m better organized and teleivion is a magical baby sitter.

(shake shake shake)

Bad news: Brett isn’t loving the job.

It’s kinda like that only it’s everything. Every. Little. Thing. So that’s how my mood is, too.

Good news!

(shake shake shake)

Bad news!

(shake shake shake)

Ad infinitum.

I am neither happy nor sad about this or that or the other thing but I am interested — sorta like a bystander in denial that the shake-ups are actually happening to me. I find this to be a sanity-saver since I’m pretending not to nice the way I’m being buffeted by whichever rotten kid is messing with my personal snowglobe.

(shake shake shake)

I reread Edith’s Diary last week. It always makes me think of blogs. In case you haven’t read it, it’s a novel about a woman’s who life is truly wretched but the worse it gets, the happier her diary reads. Her son is an alcoholic, lazy misanthrope but in her diary he’s married and has lovely children. She is living two lives and as the false one becomes more real, the more stuck she is in the wretchedness. It’s a frustrating book; you want to shake her loose of her fantasies so she’ll face up to how bad it all is and do something.

I remember watching this friendship implode from the sidelines once. There were two bloggers who were best friends in a larger circle of bloggers (I knew them from an online forum where I was a lurker so it may be that some of you know them but I doubt it). I don’t know what happened but there was a huge falling out. I got a heads up from someone else on that forum (my connection there who inspired my lurkdom) and I — like everyone else — watched the whole thing fall apart. It was big. It was bad. It was ugly. There were secrets shared, confidences exposed for the world to mock, some ugly language thrown around.

It was one of those trainwrecks that ripples across blogs because people take sides. I pieced it together backwards, hunting down archived entries and skipping around links to figure out how it started.

Anyway. The most interesting part to me is that one of the people just went nuts. She used to write like a regular person — you know, life’s ups and downs — and then suddenly everything was peachy keen and the sun shone all the time and every morning they all woke up and danced around the maypole together.

Now my connection had some inside scoop on this person’s real life and of course it wasn’t like that (because whose real life is?) but the picture got brighter and brighter. She was losing weight! And running marathons! And her children were cleaner and smarter and better behaved than anyone’s!

Of course she was writing it for her ex-friend (whose own blog stayed noncommittal and everyday) to let her know that her life was awesome and she didn’t even care that they weren’t friends anymore. Take that!

I think I would have been a blog denial writer myself if I’d been blogging in my teens. I’d likely have created an alter ego and made a virtual life that was nicer and more manageable than my real one. Actually (thinking more on it) I betcha I would have blogged as one of the characters in the stories I was always scrawling. You know, to make ‘em more real.

Because that’s what Edith was doing and what this other blogger was doing — making a better life real by writing it down.

I guess I do a certain amount of this, too. I write an argument with Brett only make it funny and by the end of the entry I’m not as angry with him anymore. (That’s a tip for you — you can now read the subtext of any entries about that adorable Brett and his quirky way of doing things. You now know that I start those entries with gritted teeth, glaring at the monitor.) See, that’s a way of rewriting a narrative to bring yourself to a happier conclusion but it’s not lies. Because truthfully my conflicts with Brett are minor and sometimes I need reminding about that.

With Edith’ blogging counterpart, her denial was so damaging. She couldn’t make it so just by writing it. A sham doesn’t become more solid just because she’s shouting that it’s true. Instead she just pushed people away because a) they figured she didn’t need them anyway since life was so dandy; b) and they knew she was lying and it was kinda creepy.

But the thing is with blogging is that eventually that blogger got her some new readers who didn’t have backstory so they took her at her word and so it was like her imaginary life was true, at least for them and she could take comfort in their comments that affirmed it.

This is why I’m glad there was no interwebz when I was a disgruntled teenager. I think the nature of having so much control over a virtual life would have messed me up for a little while longer than I was messed up all on my own. Truly.

I kept trying to write about something that will not be written about. Rats. (I wanted to write about someone else and couldn’t find a way to do it and still protect that person’s privacy. Double rats.)

We’re all confused over here at my house. We’re all walking into walls. Figuratively for the grown-ups, literally for the kids. For example, Noah was the only one to remember that he has religious school today. And an ice cream social! You can imagine the horror if he hadn’t remembered in time to get there.

Yup, things are crazy over here. Going on-site this week will either make things much better (at least for me) or twice as nutty. I’m certainly curious to see how it goes. (There’s no wifi there so blogging will be sporadic.)

I’m getting itchy writing fingers and my white board is filling up with ideas. I always have service ideas although (as longtime readers know) I have no great love of service magazines. I was staring at two of these ideas thinking about how much I didn’t want to query them because I would have to go look at the magazines to craft the queries and how much I don’t want to have to look through the magazines when it occurred to me I could write ‘em as essays. And then I was horrified because at least two of them are more than I want to share. (I know! Me! Reaching a limit on sharing in public!) Then I free wrote a third idea because Brett found it the most intriguing. I hit a wall but later that day while doing laundry I realized that I hit that wall because I started off lying to myself at the start of the piece. I mean, I look at what I wrote and say, “Oh Dawn! You protest too much!” My naked denial lay there all accusing me. Damn denial.

I’m thinking about denial a whole lot these days and having these denial-colored glasses on mean I’m seeing it everywhere. Nothing good ever comes of it. Then I listened to The Ghost of Bobby Dunbar, which seemed right in line with the Barbara Tann story. Those are big, hairy cases of denial but I’m thinking about small-scale denial, too, particularly in the unbloggable situation where I’m watching someone stomp all over their relationships in the effort to keep face.

I feel unreasonably angry about that, which is why I was trying to blog it. There is nothing to do with my anger but stomach it until it fades away because it’s not me that’s hurting (I’m collateral damage). I mean, I’m hurt but it’s like holding a grudge aginast the sun because you got a sunburn when you’re the one who didn’t have the sense to go get under some shade. That’s what the sun does so you take it in small doses. Likewise people in denial can’t help but lie by omission even when you want them to be honest.

There. I think the only people who will know what I’m talking about will be the two people I bitched to about it. Mission accomplished.