Two years ... Versus Two Months

Emailing with Mr. X earlier, I was thinking about the past two months of my life, in comparison with the past two years.

"Great news usually bouys us up, but I’ve found EVERYTHING is just fundamentally changed since the news.  I continually realize I can’t get over it, and I’m so gleefully thankful it’s ridiculous.  And it DOESN’T let up, it doesn’t stop.  Whatever I’ve had to complain about since May, I can’t really feel any of it for long (see also – the email about root canals and dead laptops …).  I’m not exactly prancing around like Pollyanna (I save my Dorky Grocery Store Dancing for you …), but I just can’t get really down, it would be ungrateful.  And, as focused as I have been for so long on gratitude and thanksgiving … jeesh, if ever in my life I have had reason for HYMNS of both, now is that time, and calling a close to this feeling would just be no damned *fun*."


***


Contrast this with the one complaint I do have, which is a fairly serious problem being able to breathe.

When I get sick or have back problems or this comes up, I tend to greet a new iteration of weakness/what have you with skepticism.  My mom raised me under a system by which malingering was not happening, and so “staying home from school” was a pretty serious event, accompanied by the direst of undeniable symptoms.  And so, I measure myself by this standard every time my body tempts me to contemplate not going to work.  I tend to tell myself no level of malfunction is “really” enough - and so I often deny difficulties on some level, at the onset.

The thing is, I also tend to deny them afterward as well.  I've had a lot of bouts of back pain in my life, particularly during the past two years, but I always look at back pain "from the outside" as being a far stupider "excuse" to miss work or complain than it seem like from the inside.  Likewise the bronchitis I had last year, when I was BLESSING the 105-degree humidity killing everyone else, because it didn't hurt to breathe - or the cold I had not long ago - or the arthritis in my neck, or the migraines, or whatever.  While it's happening, I can have no doubt there is genuine trouble - but the moment it's over, I look back with a scoff.  I judge myself by mom's standards (as, indeed, mom still does, herself), and find my problems insufficient unto the drama or outages and so on.

My boss at the last job once started off a conversation with me, "You know I am a Catholic, went to Catholic school, have the maternal guilt, and all that" and went into a discussion of how he was touring colleges with one of his children, and that though he was taking work calls he had judged himself to be on Time Off, and so I was to mark the day down thus - because, Maternal Guilt.  It's got power like that, and he and I laughed about that.

You do not have to be Catholic (nor Jewish) to know this Maternal Guilt.  Forty-six years old, it's still this strong for me, and my boss (past fifty, and his mother may not even have still been living at that).

The good news is, this has developed in me a standard that feeds a work ethic I didn't really internalize until I was at least thirty (that seemed ... mature, at the time ...), but which I've nurtured like nobody's business.

I'm gratified to be a responsible grown up - and that's just so weird.