March Is The Cruelest Month

Nothing specific hurts my feelings and that hurts my feelings.

Reader, forgive my absence. For the last week I’ve been agonizing over an absurdly short post about when I asked my husband if he thought we’d ever get divorced and he told me “No one ever thinks they’re going to get divorced….” It seemed like such a ripe anecdote to explore hurt feelings. But after days of typing out shallow platitudes tantamount to “la la la la la la live for today” and “this too shall pass” only far less eloquent because I am neither The Grass Roots nor… God? Solomon? A medieval Persian Sufi poet? I decided I just couldn’t post the mediocre slop. Who cares if it’s bad? Said my husband, not knowing the subject matter and his imminent evisceration. It’s all about the churn! But reader, you deserve better. I deserve better. We ALL deserve better. And quickly, I’ve been asking myself why I couldn’t mine more out of my husband basically telling me “I’m not making any marital promises” when marriage itself is supposed to be the promise. Why could I not expound on the fact that my husband confessed to his sacred vow meaning NOTHING!? The answer, I think, is that it didn’t actually hurt my feelings. Maybe it should have, but it didn’t. The heart is a mysterious anthropomorphized muscle.

It’s not that my feelings haven’t been hurting. But the cause is unspecific. Or rather, it’s many small causes that stick together and build speed like a katamari ball until my own feelings mow me down. Is this what men and women and non-binary people of science call depression? Is it what poets call ennui? Self indulgence? The inveterate indignity of being? (Unbearable lightness my ass.) I don’t know! The only thing I know is that I know nothing! But while I believe there are no real answers to any of the questions I’d actually like answered, I seek. The day I cease to seek, dial my emergency contact. So let’s autopsy this katamari ball, shall we?

My kids are fair to mediocre listeners. My relatives have been pointing it out with delicate disdain since my children were barely old enough to defy me. But recently, the mediocre listening has gotten even mediocre-er, and that hurts my feelings. I never wanted to be the kind of angry, sour mom — you usually see her at the airport — yelling at her kids for being exactly what they are: kids. I know kids are baby animals. I watch youtube videos of polar bear cubs wrestling and see the resemblance. But I feel myself becoming angry airport mom, because (I suspect) we might all be angry airport mom? Polar bear cubs are adorable, but it is really fucking annoying to try to let them “help” cook dinner. It’s nearly impossible to convince them to pick up their Magnatiles. And trust me, it’s not the paws, it’s the attitude! Being the cripplingly repressed person that I am, my yell-response is not exactly on a hair trigger. But nothing else seems to work! (Note: yelling also doesn’t work.) I try to reason with them, as in “you should give your little brother a turn with that balloon because he’s two years younger than you and only weighs three pounds less and pretty soon he’s going to be able to trample you like a Mecca stampede.” I try to mindfuck them with positive reenforcement and appeals to their American exceptionalism, as in, “It makes me soooo happy that you love green beans. Did you know most kids refuse to eat green beans? That’s why you’re strong and they’re weak little pussies!” I threaten abandonment, by storming out of the room or, if we’re outside, simply running away. Nothing works! Or rather, nothing works 100% of the time. So you have to be vigilant, flexible, creative, which is exhausting. Which is why you sometimes reach for the blunt instrument of the yell and then take personally the fact that your naughty little animals made you do it.

Also, death is a part of life, which I’ve understood for quite some time as a vague abstraction. But suddenly death is a part of my life, and it hurts my feelings. Some of the death feels too insignificant to mention, like my two cats over the past year. Some of the death feels too significant, like my sister in November. But to me, it’s all part of the same ominous weather system that seems to be unloading on me and only me. Then I think about Gaza, and Ukraine, and Sudan, and I feel ridiculous. Then I feel ridiculous for not feeling entitled to grieve my sister because war and because violence and because inhumanity. So I share my grief casually over lunch or drinks and it hits the table with such a heavy thud. It’s so embarrassingly inert, like I just dropped a high schooler’s backpack between me and my companion and now we’re trying to make conversation around it. Like “oh, I’m so sorry to hear about your backpack.” Or “yeah, backpacks, I’ve been there.” Even writing about it here feels like I’m pouring cement. Then I get an alert that the salad Substack I follow just dropped a new installment about herbs, and it makes me wish I could give you good herb content instead.

Also, my ass hurts my feelings. Why must it be so lumpy? So oddly shaped? And then I feel sad for my ass, because what did it ever do but let me sit on it? The ass is the real Giving Tree.

Also, nothing ever happens. Did time start watching True Detective and actually decide to be a flat circle? The other day, I was trying to remember how long ago my kid’s spring break had been only to realize it hasn’t happened yet. My days and weeks feel like a condo development where building after building looks exactly the same. (SEE: pre-wedding lodgings on this season of Love Is Blind). So then I try to deviate from my routine, but then the act of deviating becomes part of the routine. Is this the week that I’m trying to drink less alcohol or eat less meat? Am I pitching a book or writing a screenplay? Should I send a handwritten letter to a friend, or get vaginal rejuvenation surgery? It all bleeds together. I must have rejuvenated my vagina at least four times this calendar year.

But if you’re still here, if I haven’t put you to sleep or made you vomit with my own self pity, maybe you feel a little bit similar? Maybe the particulars are different, but the dull indignation feels the same? If so, it’s worth reminding ourselves that it’s the beginning of March, which, even in sunny California, is the worst time to be alive. T.S. Eliot wrote “April is the cruelest month, breeding/Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing/Memory and desire, stirring/Dull roots with spring rain.” What a crock of shit. I’m sorry, T.S., but some of us like flowers! Some of us prefer them to being “covered in forgetful snow”! If rebirth is cruelty, unleash it. In my driveway, a wall of white jasmine is finally bursting open. The warm muskiness of its smell is way too horny for winter.