The world is ending right now because there are dirty dishes in the sink and a bunch of moldering, half-eaten yogurt cups and tubes strewn throughout the house.
I just got home from the Urgent Care Center. It is 8 p.m., and any mom who got up as early as I did this morning knows that 8 p.m. is the middle of the fucking night.
My husband is engaged in a power struggle with our seven year old son, Jack, over universe knows what. My three year old, Emily, is wandering around like a lost lamb because she wants mama milk and cuddles before bed.
But first things first.
Since a huge vat of Purell or rubbing alcohol isn’t available, I hop in the shower. It serves the dual purpose of warming my chilled, aching body, and cleansing off the filth of the walk in treatment place. I had anxiety upon anxiety the entire time I was there as people coughed, hacked, wheezed, and made all sorts of moaning cacophony. In the curtained area next to me, there was a woman chanting, “Germs, germs, germs, germs, germs,” over and over in a haunted whisper. True story. I can’t make this shit up.
The chest X-ray confirmed bronchitis and the doctor wrote me a script for antibiotic and a cough medicine, but then changed his mind when I told him I still breast feed twice a day. He forgot to call the pharmacy and change the prescription, which resulted in an hour-long wait in the parking lot of the pharmacy, where I sat in my car, heat on full blast, shivering and crying.
Wait! Before you stop reading because you hate me for bitching about First World Problems, please know it was pretty much the worst week of my life, followed by an exhausting weekend of poorly behaved children, and ending in body aches that rate waaaaayyyy at the grumpy and sad end of that smiley to grimace chart.
A client killed himself last week, and it left me reeling in confusion, guilt, panic, and fear. While I have forced myself to accept there was nothing I could have done to prevent this tragedy, my heart has not caught up with my head on the matter, and being sick wears down the professional buffer I might have for such matters.
After spending the entire week in the aftermath of suicide, another employee of my program gave me her notice along with a few dozen clients to reassign. Since my other clinician quit my program before the holidays, I have no one to reassign these clients to. When I went, shaking and sobbing, to my supervisor for support, I was basically told to figure it out.
I came home looking for some solace, only to find my husband intended to work all weekend. This is good news, in one way, because we need the money and he is freelance. But it is bad news in terms of having the children, house duties, etc. ,and so on all to myself for the entire weekend.
So, contracting bronchitis was just the frosting on the crap cake I felt had been baked for me this week. I feel like a jerk even writing that, while knowing I have access to better medical care and pharmaceuticals than 87% of the world. (Note: that is not a real statistic. I’m making shit up because like I said, the world is fucking ending and who cares anyway.)
Sometimes I just need to vent. Then I get sick of myself and get on with my life.
Some people have real problems. I know this. People like the family who lost their child in the most confounding, shocking, and traumatizing way last week.
After my shower, I hustle to put on PJ’s. I ignore Jack’s tantrum and go straight to Emily, who is sleepy and sweet. She puts her hand on my heart as she snuggles into my breast, and touches my chin as light as a butterfly.
I’ve been contemplating the Buddhist concept of dukkha lately. Dukkha roughly translates as “suffering,” and it is an important concept in Buddhism. There has been ample dukkha in my life over the past few months. . . the dukkha of motherhood; the dukkha of clinging to things during the process of our move last November; the dukkha of family issues at the holidays; the dukkha of yearning for things to be a certain way at work; the dukkha of physical illness; the dukkha of my anxiety and depression which has been rearing its ugly head over the past few weeks like a powerful and frightening dragon.
The dukkha of wanting to change the unchangeable, and to understand the incomprehensible.
And tonight, the dukkha of dishes left undone at the end of the night when I am sick and tired, and have already done dishes 17 times over the course of the weekend.
Basically, Buddha teaches that life is dukkha— not that everything sucks, but that by its nature, our existence is flawed, impermanent, and difficult. We can struggle against it and fight with it as something bad, or we can accept it for what it is and go from there.
What does that mean?
I don’t know. And at the moment, I don’t really care.
I started writing a post last weekend about trying to sit with the grief and anxiety I felt in the light of my client’s death. It was hard– both to sit with and to write about– because it made me fiercely restless. I didn’t end up posting it.
Kuan Yin sat with the dragons and made friends with them. What would it be like to do that?
I guess I could do the dishes.
Or I could not.
Maybe dukkha and I will cuddle up in bed with some Ceftin and Mucinex and try to get to know each other. And maybe the world will keep ending, and I will lie in bed and hear things screeching and banging and popping outside my window.