a few short staccato words about stress
A positive attitude and pathological optimism will only get you so far, then you crash, like I'm crashed, and you wonder how you're going to manage, make ends meet, get from A to B without losing a limb or an ear or what few marbles still rattle around your skull. That's me today, yesterday, this entire week.
I've been stressed about money, oh money, I wish I had a million zillion dollars, but I know everyone wishes that, wants an easy glide. The Avon isn't cutting it. Yesterday floated by with no calls, not a single sale. I had high hopes. Today has been the same. I know I'll get by another week, but I don't know how the weeks will add, what the summer's sum will be, what I'm going to take into the fall. I'm squinching my eyes tight, wishing so damn hard right now, wishing this will get easier, or that I'll figure out another way to make money or that the lottery numbers I played today on a whim will come through tonight.
My ex doesn't pay much child support. He hardly pays at all. I don't tell my children this, although I've danced around it with my daughter when he got tight with the money before college began last fall. Some months he pays something, some months he doesn't. If I call him on it, he gripes and complains and tells me how horrible I am in financial matters and how I messed up his entire money life and he just forgot and his wife forgot and the mail musta been late and you get the picture. Most days I don't care. He doesn't have any money either, so that's life, a working poor life.
Up until a few months ago I was coasting on savings, money I socked away, money I thought would last much longer than it has. I still have some left, but it isn't much, it might last through fall if I'm careful. So I'm trying hard to get something going with this Avon, trying to get a big customer base and repeat sales and come up with the cash to cover the groceries and movies and clothes and shoes and pet food and gasoline and car insurance and all those lovely essentials you don't think about except when they might be prioritized.
It's all made me grumpy and short and tired and foggy and my eyes glaze over with fear and I can't sleep at night and I'm on the verge of crying and never mind all the other stupid stresses like birth daughter reunions and old relatives in hospice care and school starting in one month and a car that still won't run and the four eyes of two little boys who want to go camping and run around town and are sick of their mom sitting next to piles of Avon brochures with a sad lonely expression.
7:38:02 PM 
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