A selection culled from emails sent in July of 2008.

So I’m pretty much just trying not to totally lose my mind, basically. I sobbed a bunch of it out in the shower yesterday, and then was really, really mean to Shane for a while after that, and felt better.

June was great in a lot of ways and something of a bitch in others, and for the first time in years I’ve found myself kind of glad to see July. (Though in retrospect, it might not be June’s fault. I think it’s more of an overreaching arc of suck that encompasses the entire year, save for a few bright shining moments here and there that are the exceptions that I’m sure somehow prove the rule, at least in the twisted brains of certain elementary school teachers…) Even stranger, I’m practically craving a nice heat wave (you are forbidden to remind me of this when it finally hits and I whine about it) that just won’t come. Sure, it teases me with 70s and 80s, blipping into 90 and then back down again just as quickly. Most years we can’t manage to hold out until July 4th to set up the pool, and this year we might be setting it up in the rain tomorrow. I keep thinking, though, of how it felt when I was quitting smoking (it will be a year clean this month!) and I would have a craving that felt like ants biting and crawling in my veins and I would step out into the simmering heat of the backyard, and then the rays of sun would sink in past my skin, well into my knotted and suffering muscles, soothing. Now instead of the cigarettes, it’s that feeling I’m craving – of being burned clean.

I just have to decide if I’m going to read Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex or if I’ll read the third book of the Twilight Series. It’s what all of the cool kids are reading these days, and I liked the premise and the cover art well enough to give it a shot. I like it because it’s totally the book that I wanted desperately to read when I was 15. I hate it because it’s totally the book that I wanted desperately to read when I was 15, and I’m so not 15 anymore. There’s this VERY self-loathing vampire named Edward Cullen who is the main love interest and the one that has all girls’ hearts aflutter right now. You know from the beginning that he is Bella’s Romeo, the one you’re supposed to root for. But my (nearly? when does it start officially, anyway?) middle-aged heart is charmed instead by Bella’s best friend Jacob, who (at least until he starts turning into a werewolf every time he gets mad) is infinitely healthier and cheerier than scary win-you-with-my-sick-stalker-love Edward. (Hello Bella – meet your self respect. Please.) And it’s SO the choice that the unhip Mom would make. The one who just doesn’t understand. The one who would be all, “Really Bella? Edward? But he’s so – grim. What about Jacob? He’s such a nice boy!” “But Mom, Jacob is a young werewolf barely in control of himself – he could shred me to pieces!” “Yes but he’s so cheerful!”

THIS is why I’ve always hated my birthday! How’s THAT for a revelation? It only took me 36 years (well, okay – we’ll assume I didn’t hate it until I was about 8, so 28 years) to figure it out. I knew it had nothing to do with aging (okay, this year, for the first time ever, it might have had a smidge to do with aging) and while the hole-in-the-balloon-lousy-party theory was a good one back when it was cool to blame everything on your mother, it can’t really keep explaining things. I knew it had something to do with the attention, because ground zero has always been the Happy Birthday song around the lit candles – makes me want to crawl out of my skin and die, still – and I can’t completely ignore the day, but I can’t make a huge deal out of it either. (Need SOME attention, can’t take TOO MUCH attention.) I thought maybe it had to do with expectations and anticipation, and maybe it does a little.

But all I really know is that this year, which was a sucky terrible birthday but for reasons that were really unconnected to my birthday issues – it was when the kids started swarming me first thing and Shane was hovering and they were all being terribly sweet and loving and undemanding and I began feeling myself just FILL with this familiar birthday anxiety – and I realized that I didn’t know how to gracefully accept the love that they were trying to give me in that moment. It made me anxious because I hadn’t done anything to earn the attention, didn’t feel worthy of it, and didn’t know what I was supposed to do in return for it.

And hello, driving force in my life!

But can you imagine how amazing life would be, to be able to just accept love when it comes? Not have to do anything for it or with it, just embrace it? It’s so simple my brain just exploded.

In other news, I have a teenager. I’m not optimistic. Granted, we have been indulging him senseless, he’s had sleepovers nearly every night for the last several weeks, and July makes my boy Crab fray around the edges just like his Mom. But ooh, the negativity that has been radiating from that child lately. Please just let it be a diet deficiency and not a new world order. Please.

And speaking of July, I think the worst might finally be over. (Knock on wood – for the love of God, KNOCK-ON-WOOD.) Although the really bad part for me is that I’ve got several of the unschooling crowd hinting get-togethers and I have used up every single scrap of an already limited supply of social graces to the point that I would rather slit my wrist than answer a freaking phone. Sweet Jesus I just need some cave time, but right now the few seconds here or there that I can cobble together of it I’m generally spending pacing a ravine in the floor of my cave, filled with anxiety of everything I envision waiting to pounce on me outside the cave… And I want to be a part of the gang, I want to learn how to hang with a community, even if I stay on the fringes. I think I’m capable of that, I’m just not sure now is the moment. But I also feel like a clock is ticking, and I’m still on the outside, pressing my nose against the window, dreaming of warmth and hot cocoa and shared intimacy and inside jokes, and of course you know the predictable twist to THAT old story – it will turn out that the only one keeping me out here in the cold is, well, me. (And by then I’ll be dead in the snow from hypothermia and they’ll play sad music as it fades to black.)

Cause I don’t know how to be loved. See what I did there?

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