Sometimes you can even taste something bad coming your way.
I have to write this down because it’s too fucking late to download it onto people in my inner circle. It’s past 9pm — I mean, be reasonable. I want my bed and my ruminating thoughts. What if my inner circle ask too many questions… and I get bored halfway through? Or I reach capacity and just want to shut down? Like a power down or reaching your daily limit of questions to ChatGPT. Actually, it would be great if I had a visible indicator for each interaction to show how close I was to a shut down.
Anyway, I get home from ferrying one of our offspring from an after-school club. It’s a Monday night. And we all know a late-night club on a Monday, mixed with a 6.30am work meeting, is shit. So fucking shit. The week has only just started and I’m already on my knees.
I walk in — he’s made turkey legs for dinner.
What the actual fuck? Why are we eating turkey? We don’t even eat turkey at Christmas. Already I can feel my earlier two-hour yoga class leak out of my body. I’m overstretched and starving. Fuck it. Now I can’t even be bothered to eat, so now I’m hangry.
The yoga leak just got worse — and when I say worse, I mean like when you’re in a public toilet with diarrhoea. You give yourself the gentlest of pushes to open, trying to control the outage (and the noise). But instead, you unleash the entire contents of your bowel and your organs are just hanging on for dear life, trying not to drop with gravity.
That’s where I was at.
Then he says, “You know it’s my Dad’s anniversary.” Anniversary of him passing.
I say yeah, of course, it’s in my mental reel of Things to Think About.
Then he drops the bomb: “So we have to go to Mum’s on Saturday.”
WE? Does he mean we we — as in me too?
Now, I’ve made my peace with the fact that his family is not my cup of tea. And by “his family” I mean the MIL/SIL double act. But what I find hardest is this: I am not allowed to talk about it. Not with them. And not even with him. He knows — he’s witnessed — the questionable shit they’ve done.
So the small stuff snowballs into an avalanche. Better for my peace not to even share the same space as them. I’m a pressure cooker. Push me just that little bit too far and I will blow. And where she blows? No one knows. Not even me.
Honestly, if this was a yearly tradition, I wouldn’t mind. At least then I could mentally plan for it. Have a lie down the whole weekend before in preparation.
Last year there was nothing.
So why this year?
They don’t actually want to see me — the last time I spoke to them was on my birthday months ago. It doesn’t feel like a family get-together. It feels like being summoned. Like control. Like it’s time for me to be paraded.
The zen from my yoga class has completely dissipated. Jesus, my tits hurt and I’m hungry. I take a brea
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