I'm Not Tired. I'm Responsibility-Weary.

We refer to them as periods of transition.  They come in different varieties, but two of the main groups are dramatic and undefined. A dramatic transition is one with obvious consequences and expectations. New job.  Birth of a child. Moved to a new city. On Tuesday, your life was one way, and on Wednesday, it is different.  The undefined transition has no beginning and end date.  The expectations are vague, and you aren’t sure about anything as you progress through it.  Growing older.  A marriage.

I feel as if I’ve been in an undefined transition for a year or two.  I like to refer to it as a transition to myself because there is a notion of an end date.  This will be over, and I will have made some new decisions and feel better about moving on.  My kids are older.  They aren’t even kids anymore.  They are all legal adults.  They have jobs and school they have to find ways to pay for stuff.  They have to figure out food, shelter, clothing, transportation and avoid all the dumb pitfalls of life that I did. 

But, I have been in the parent zone since the months leading up to the birth of my first son.  That’s 1993.  I was 21.  How much did you know about life at 21?  I’ll give you a hint: Jack shit.  I have been in dad and husband mode since before anyone would allow me to rent a car. I had a mortgage when I was 24.

It was an incredibly stressful and spectacular 25 years.  I was lucky that my wife and I got along, and I figured out a way to deal with my anxiety and depression.  But all that is over and now I get to think about what I want out of life.  I have benefited from therapy and an overabundance of self-reflection.  I know myself a lot better.   How I handle my day-to-day is the issue.  I work.  I write.  I spend time with my wife.  I try harder to maintain healthy habits.  Okay.  But that is also what I was doing with the kids around.  What will be different?  What can I enjoy now that I couldn’t before?

The first thing I discovered was long periods of stillness and silence.  I used to hate ‘the quiet’.  I always needed music or the TV on.  Now I can sit on my couch with a cup of coffee and nothing else.  I just try to think about nothing at all and let the creeping thoughts of chores pass by like leaves on the wind.  It is a special treat.

The other major revelation about this transition is that I know that I am responsibility-weary.  (I don’t know of another term for it, so I will go with the clunky hyphenate I thought of in the moment.) I was never tired of my children.  I was never tired of my marriage or my family or friends.  I was never tired of maintaining a home.  All the emotions are rock-solid.  I just don’t want any more responsibility than I’ve already taken on. 

It came to me when we were prepping for a recent weekend where we were going to finally paint our dining room.  I kept feeling the dread as Saturday drew closer.  It wasn’t laziness and I didn’t have any plans I was missing out on.  I just didn’t want one more chore.

My plate is full.  Quite full.  I have taken on more than I should have in life and made myself responsible for way too much. Not only food, shelter, love and general support for a family of five, but the entertainment, conversation, sense of humor, memory-keeping, Halloweens, Christmases, birthdays, heart-to-heart’s, crisis management, education monitoring, answer hotline, and about fifty other things I can’t think of. Anxiety and fear made me worry about a lot of extra crap that wasn’t up to me. Now, I’m beat. I’m pooped.

Most of these responsibilities have concluded.  I don’t have to do them anymore.  But that doesn’t mean I now have room to reload with other responsibilities.  I don’t want any new ones.  In fact, I want them whittled down to as few as humanly possible.  I am exhausted.  I am attempting to find more energy through diet and exercise, and I’m seeing some early signs that it’s working.  Great.  I still don’t want any more responsibilities.

I have the common liberal guilt of not doing enough for others.  It’s real to me.  I think I should volunteer for something.  Right now, my body and brain are telling me ‘No’.  Maybe this makes me less of a functioning adult, or less of a citizen, or I’m showing weakness.  I don’t care.  It is what it is.  I am simply tired from 25 years of responsibilities and I want to go into Responsibility Semi-Retirement. Just me, Amy, and a dog or two.  If I can afford to have someone mow my lawn, I’m hiring them.  When we move out of this house, my boys will do it or I’m hiring people.

My life has been a series of transitions, just like yours.  In my case, I have a hard time defining them or being honest to myself how I feel about them.  Being a good dad was all that I cared about.  I still believe that was a good way to go.  Now, I can have some wiggle room to do something else.

Just not sure what that is.

My Anxiety Files - The Songs of Doom

Also on the radio in 1980.  Why couldn't this be in my head!?!?

I don’t really have stories of my own life.  I have a few anecdotes, and most of them are a bummer to share with anyone.  This one is sort of a bummer, but it’s also an interesting look at how the brain works and what it does to protect us. From itself.

1980.  A shitty time in my eight-year-old life.  We moved from Syracuse to Orlando and we almost immediately moved back because of cancer.  My mom’s mom and my dad’s dad were both diagnosed.  It wasn’t good for anyone.  We moved back without a permanent place to stay and my younger brother and I ended up sharing the room of my then high school-age uncle.  That’s the when and the where. What you also need to know is that I probably had anxiety my entire life, before I knew what it was.  One of the side effects is lack of sleep and I also was a light sleeper.  Still am.

For the four to six months of living at my grandmother’s house and sleeping on an extra mattress in my uncle’s room, at age eight, in third grade, I barely slept at all.  Sometimes two hours a night.   There were times I never fell asleep. The reason was that my uncle played music to go to sleep. His stereo would be on all night long, and he used that like some people use a fan or a sound machine for background noise.  My brother slept just fine.  I couldn’t.  I would have small increments of light sleep and I would immediately wake up to Queen, Elton John, or something off the Michael Jackson Off the Wall album. Maybe I got him to shut if off sometimes, I don’t remember. I do remember wandering around a darkened house in the middle of the night, trying not to wake anyone.

So that wasn’t cool.

Now, this is part that makes the anecdote kooky.

This memory isn’t burned into my head like so many other shitty ones.  But the songs that were on the radio ARE.   Specifically, three songs from that time bring me back into the body of that little boy in his pj’s roaming around trying to figure out a way to fall asleep. However, and this is the weird part, if you asked me in the last thirty years what those songs were, I COULD NOT TELL YOU.

Does that make sense?  I could not recall the songs at all, however, when I would hear them in a grocery store PA, an elevator, in a movie’s soundtrack, I immediately knew it was one of the Songs of Doom. My brain blocked them from floating around in my skull.  They were banished from memory recall and mostly remain that way.  I remember plenty of songs from my youth and the memories that are attached to them, even shitty memories.  But those were unique.  I knew they existed, but I could never recall them.

One day, about eight years or so (2010!) I heard a commercial with Blondie’s “The Tide is High” in the background.  Blam!  That was one of them.  I also knew it was the most famous of the three.  It came to me as I woke up one morning and because I had now been writing for so long, it was time to track this shit down.  I wrote down the title and made it my mission to try to find the other two.  The internet was built for that type of bullshit, so I looked for ‘Top Radio Singles of 1980’ hoping to get a clue from the song titles.  I found both of them.  It was the first time I’d ever looked at them as a group or thought about them for more than a fleeting second in 30 years.  They are:

The Tide is High - Blondie

Never Knew Love Like This Before – Stephanie Mills

He’s So Shy – The Pointer Sisters

(This is absolutely the honest truth.  I just had to look these up on Wikipedia because they slipped away again. I could not remember The Pointer Sisters name or song at all.  Thanks again, internet. And brain.)

So, between 1980 and 2018, whenever these songs popped up in my life, I felt like shit.  But I could share the story because I could remember the songs.  And, now that I have perspective, “He’s So Shy” was the worst.  I think I hated it at the time and it was just fucking grating every time it came back to me.  The really crappy thing is that 1980 was a killer time to listen to the radio, but none of the tracks I liked, or continue to enjoy were the Songs of Doom.  I guess that’s how it works.

So, yeah.  The songs, that time we found an unexplainable turd in our house and…that’s about it for me and personal stories.  Unless there are a bunch that are all blocked out, too.