housewife's brain

and by "the tunnel of fudge", i mean feeling
like you're alone and helpless in a dark scary
place, immobilized with fear and mediocrity.



when the novelty of not working weekdays wears off, the distance between what you've always really wanted to do and what you're doing now becomes pronounced. cavernous, really. it's basically you, alone with some disorganized ideas about what you want to do, and the fear of not doing those things, and the fear of doing those things but having them be patently unsatisfying, all the while the mer-man of mediocrity just hissing and shaking his webby fist at you, getting kelp and pond scum all over your living room sofa, eating all the snack food that you bought for the dinner parties that you never actually have.

a surpisingly instinctual defense to this predicament is to try and sleep it off. you quickly realize that this will only vault you to a whole other level of constant sleepiness. i'm talking about sleeping at a competitive level. the kind of sleeping that bestows international sleep symbol status, and puts one in strong contention for "sleepiest man alive 2006".

so you fight the good fight, staying awake, listening to NPR, drinking tea, trying to eke out one little measly new blog entry, thinking that at least this will be something you did today. then a piece comes on NPR about a former housewife who, after reading the at-the-time recently published book "the feminine mystique", decided to take all the creative energy that she was putting into her kids halloween costumes and birthday cakes and channel it into writing novels after her kids moved out of the house.

you try to find encouragement in her story, hope that you too will someday be able to imagine your way into the fullness of your own potential. but mostly, you begin to think that everything that you've been doing up to this point is about as important and meaningful as decorating a birthday cake or organizing a closet. you keep thinking about that pathetic commerical from the early 80s where the woman is frosting a cake with a paper knife as if this is some kind of accomplishment on par with conducting a national symphony.

i wish someone would hurry up and write "the ted mystique" already. or i wish at least my kids would go ahead and move out.