Dig is not here. Missing a husband should be normal. We are all familiar with daddy absent overseas for weeks at a time. It means I cannot blame his absence on why today I wake up and crash into a brick wall.
I have three kids to look after, but I can't blame that circumstance either. You may not believe it, but looking after triplets is nothing much these days. That may be partly down to the fact that we get on pretty well and we are fairly used to living together. Shark has gained so much in wisdom, independence and confidence this last year I reckon she could organise this whole family and sail the entire ship if I just taught her my PIN number and left her totally to make the decisions.
I could blame the crash on how the whole damn house seems to break down while Dig is gone, what with the boiler playing up, the tap threatening to explode, the kitchen mouse running riot. But those things are normal too, whether he is here or not.
Or I could say that when I wake up I suddenly know, for certain, it is one of those days we are all going to die, and horribly, and disgracefully, and slowly. Just like the rest of the family. I will die first. Then I will leave my children motherless, vulnerable, abandoned. It will be inconvenient. Everyone will hate me. I won't have finished cooking dinner or paying the milkman and people will be upset about that. You need to know, kids, that my body gave up to its process of internal decay and I did not give my permission for that to happen.
Then again, I could put together a neat package of off-the-shelf neurosis to explain this morning's bleak mood: guilt, anxiety, compulsion, a dash of immature behaviour by bursting into tears because it's daylight. Perhaps I could give a psychologist a job by saying I blame backward going moments in the growing up years. Moments that lifted me out the world, unhooked me from myself and opened the way for an alien today to take over my brain.
Or perhaps it is just a self-indulgent post-holiday blues moment, the sort we all experience on a Monday morning. Because it is Monday. In which case, send me hate mail. Today I'll add it to the file of the stuff I'll send myself.
I could tell myself there are people who do so much more than me, maintain lives under more stress, support themselves under many more problems. But sometimes that knowledge doesn't make me feel better. In fact that makes me feel worse, because now for sure I know how weedy and inadequate a person I truly am.
I know what to do. I need to plan rising out of bed. I need to plan the day. Tomorrow. And then the week. Otherwise, without a plan, I come apart fast.
And then I will blame this.
Here's the view on one side of the front gate.
And on the other:
Both the orange plastic fence and the signage have appeared this morning on either side of the gate. On the left side of the house the pavement is blocked off. And on the right side of the house the pavement is blocked off as well. Looks like imprisonment to me.
It might explain why, just after 8am I woke up not only with that feeling of dread and doom, but with the air curdling bright blue and purple thanks to the stream of acidic blasphemies loudspeakered through the bedroom window.
It's a bloke, of course. I don't think any woman would utter these words unless she was trapped in a snake pit screaming mad. Not only is it a bloke, in a vest, he has a bright yellow jacket on. And he's pulling up the road outside. And why the blue air? He cannot get his big digger to work.
So that's what I blame. Imprisoned by some bloke yelling obscenities at a big digger.
Of course I look on the bright side, because that is what a miserable Grit must do. If she does not, she will sink under the weight of the day.
Thanks to the bloke outside I can now claim someone else taught my daughters to use words so bad, one day when they say them the world will stop turning, the paint peel from the walls and the air turn into sulphur. And the bloke they say it to will turn his face to the wall in shame.
