Waiting for Me

It's me again. The same stains on the carpet. The same fake smiles. The same magazines with missing covers and pages stuck together.

How long can I go on wishing every moment of every day that things were different?

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Something dawned on me the other day when I was sitting in my therapist's waiting room. Like every other time it was a room full of women, some my age, some older.

There sure are a lot of unhappy women in this town!

That's right, and there's a reason for it.

Most of these women are unhappy because they have miserable lives. Being a wife, today, around here - it might as well be the Flintstones, except it isn't funny. Get married at 17, bang out a bunch of Rugrats, and clean up your husband's (and his buddies') mess for the next 30 years.

See if THAT makes you happy.

I know, I know.

This is "the heartland". We have "family values."

I was born and raised here. Don't tell me I don't appreciate family values. Real ones, not excuses for laziness and immaturity. Degrading your wife is not a family value. Never has been. Never will be. It is not a Christian value. It is not the kind of value that makes anything work anywhere for that matter.

The doctor and the experts on TV sit there and say that our unhappiness is due to an illness.

Why isn't our unhappiness due to what's really going on in our lives?

Why can't THEY admit that? Why can't WE admit that?

...You think I would have gotten up and walked out when I saw that...

It seems to me that so much is at stake. Our potential - it's spiraling down the drain. You can see it, feel it, slipping away a little bit more every day.

That ought to make anyone profoundly unhappy.

These are the years that won't come back. We're wasting them on immature, porn addicted guys who want their mommies to clean up after them.

I married a boy in man's clothing who plays video games all day long but won't hold a job.

My sister married one who smokes pot non-stop! What was she thinking?

Probably the same thing I was - not thinking at all really. Just focused on the moment - what we were getting out of, getting away from, not getting into, getting stuck with.

When the doctor and the TV insist that we are ill instead of pointing out that we are being robbed of something valuable, the doctor and the TV are part of the problem, call it a mindset or whatever, that degrades us, that diminishes us. That makes us feel powerless. That makes it harder than ever for us to grow. That robs us of dignity and integrity for decades, for a lifetime even.

You think I would have gotten up and walked out when I saw that.

I didn't.

I needed my Xanax and my Ambien.

That's another way they trick you - get you hooked on pills you can't get off of.

Maybe somehow I can.

Maybe next time I will.