Stick Figure

Last night, I was running, chasing Lolo around the backyard, and hand to God (because, yet again, how could I make this up?), I got seriously poked in the eye with a stick.  Oh, hahahahaha, aren’t you cute universe with your funny little “signs”?  I stopped running and sat down on the grass and cried.  A) because it hurt like a…..I’m not ready to completely share my rainbow of curse words I like to use, we’ll get there B) because it was dinnertime and dinnertime is hard sometimes with four kiddos and C) because I’m tired of feeling a little thin, a bit like a stick figure.

This has nothing to do with the weight of my body or my actual figure, it has to do with the weight of my soul perhaps?  It is the free-falling feeling (and not the good Tom Petty kind) where the wind could whip you away at any second and the fire truck forgot to come with its big, white safety tarp.  Weightlessness with sharp little prickles of  pain and worry and the gnawing, tiredness of my soul being munched on a bit by the people I love, the people I take care of, the lists.  Brush it off, up you go, come on now, keep running.

This morning I was walking, yes, the puppy again, and I met a neighbor.  I had the poofy, Georgia bedhead, pajamas, yep still wearing them, and I met Rick.  After a joyful greeting by Lolo and the standard introductions, he eventually asks “So what do you do?”.

In a millisecond, this is what goes through my mind:  “nothing, I do nothing, nobody notices or cares, I forgot to put on my mascara I bet you think I look old and I’m tired and I take care of 4 kids alone most of the time and I wash everything…sheets, floors, couches, faces, baby hands, dog paws, underwear, toilet seats…..I drive, all of the time, burning through fossil fuels like a person who doesn’t believe in global warming but I do but now you will think I hate the Earth because you always see me in my giant SUV I swear I have dreams and goals and I’m running with my eyes closed do you know what that is? you should get on board I drank two glasses of wine last night for no good reason and I cried three times yesterday and my head hurts and my heart hurts and this place we live in kind of sucks and what’s with the untimed stoplights? and my dog is whining so now you think I have a bad puppy and I’m worried about Syria and Trump vs. Clinton and my husband is working from home this morning but we haven’t had time to really look at each other and will you think I’m weird if I start crying right now, Rick?”

In reality, I froze and then mumbled something. I am pretty sure he saw the panic and asked, “Do you play golf or tennis?”

He definitely thinks I look old.

“No, I don’t, but my husband plays golf!”  I know I saw him breathe a sigh of relief to find some common ground with the crazy, tired woman from California who forgets her mascara and carries her puppy on walks and looks very close-ish to a breakdown of some sort.

“See you later, Rick!  Nice to meet you.”

He ran.  He might have been on a jog anyway, but it looked to me like he might be quickly trying to get home.

Ten thousand years ago, I was cast as a character named Marian in a play called The Edible Woman, a novel by Margaret Atwood beautifully-adapted for the stage by a man I greatly admire, Dave Carley.  I was almost-married, almost-graduated-from-college, and I was working in a Festival of New Works in Ann Arbor, Michigan.  I remember it as one of the fullest and happiest times of my entire life.  The character of Marian was a straight-laced consumer eventually finding she was being consumed by everyone.  Her big moment comes at the end of the play when she finally, truly sees herself and bakes a cake in the shape of herself for the people around her to eat.  She spoke in third person in these long, quirky monologues:

Marian:  Marian’s coping but she knows it won’t last.  There’s too much noise, too much laughter, too much everything.  She’s swaying and smiling and feeling like a two-dimensional thing, a paper woman from a mail-order catalogue.

Geesh, I could nail a Marian monologue right about now.

Let’s keep running, shall we?