In which I review all the big stuff. Did I mention I think I’m having a mid-life crisis?

Basically, in reviewing my life, I suddenly noticed a few trends. A couple of things popped into my head with disturbing clarity while I was talking with my friend Deb in New York, and a few more have become clear in the few weeks since then.

One thing I’ve noticed is that I feel much more fabulous than I should when I’m on vacation. Vacation should be fun, of course, but when it’s so much better that you don’t even miss your real life, you have to suspect that something’s up.

Another thing I’ve noticed is that I have no panic symptoms when I’m on vacation by myself.

Another thing I’ve noticed is that when I’m away, anything and everything feels possible. When I think about moving, getting a job, finding a place to live, getting a gig, even dealing with the farm property, it all seems like nothing more than a little work. But when I’m here, oh my God, it all feels like a fucking vortex, an albatross, an impossibly heavy ball and chain. We’ll never get the remodel done, we’ll never get through all the shit we need to do to get out of here, we’re stuck here for the next eight years.

We’re stuck. That’s the motto of my whole realization: we’re stuck. I feel like I’m suffocating.

You’ve heard me say before that Brett and I have nothing in common. It used to be funny, but now – not so much. He seems to be comfortable with things just the way they are, and this terrifies me. How can I relate to a human being who claims to be happy doing nothing but working a day job and lying on the couch in front of the boob tube in a crapped out old house? He doesn’t even have any hobbies – unless you count buying projects, storing them in buildings, and then never touching them again.

I’m also completely fed up with being told I’m lazy. During a recent discussion, when I mentioned to Brett that he hadn’t gotten anything done on the house in over a year, he replied that maybe he’d get more done if I supported him more. That statement made me so angry on so many levels that I could only respond by laughing out loud and changing the subject before I said something I could never take back. I do nothing but support the man, to the point of having given up most of my own life in order to be home to make dinner.

I could go on and on about how I run our entire household and how I have to nag him sometimes for months to do simple things like fix the showerhead – but I’m not going to. Those rants are already written elsewhere on this blog. Let’s just say that I at least do the bare minimum, and he does much, much less than that. And it’s always been this way, the whole time we’ve been together.

Anyway, it turns out that I’ve recently discovered that I’m desperately unhappy, and that there is very little I like about my life as it is. It shocks me to discover this, because I think of myself as being pretty self-aware. But I think I’ve stayed in denial for so long because I suppose I felt like I’d fucked up, somehow. I’d said I wanted to get married and buy the farm and live in the country. But now I’ve tried country living and it turns out I was wrong, but I felt like I’d made my bed and had to continue to lie in it. I guess I felt like I couldn’t change my mind, because the cost was too high. I’d really wanted to buy the property back then. It was so exciting, and we both had so many plans, and how could I possibly change my mind when it’s so wonderful? We’re so lucky, the place is so cool! What’s not to like!

Well, now that I’ve tried it, I can state unequivocally that I don’t like country living. I don’t like driving 26 miles to buy eggs, or the fact that there’s dust on everything, or living with the mice and the bugs and the flooding and the driving in ice and snow, or that no one ever drops by unannounced for a visit.

Listen, it’s so bad I literally have fantasies about living in an efficiency apartment in a city somewhere. I mean, I don’t even fantasize about having sex with hot movie stars, I think about mundane shit like having an apartment so small I can clean it in half an hour! I daydream about taking the bus to work so I can catch up on my reading and knitting. The idea of being able to walk a few blocks to buy groceries turns me on. Honestly, I’d sell the house, appliances included, and all twenty-six-point-five-acres at a loss right now just to get the fuck away from it… if it were my choice to make.

Another thing I’ve noticed is that I’m not the only one who’s depressed. When I got back from vacation, I’d convinced myself that Brett had to be as unhappy as I’ve become, because no happy person would spend as much time on his ass in front of the telly as he does. I gave him a whole speech about how he’s a Libra too, and that he needs a social life so much he’s actually designed the entire remodel around entertaining. I explained that we needed to set a schedule and get things done so that we can get out of here and move somewhere with opportunities for me – for us – to be happy, engaged, fulfilled people.

He made it sound like it was all really difficult, that we’d have to get a mortgage to get some equity out so he could stay home and work on the house full-time, it couldn’t happen just like that, we’d have to talk to Sean over at the bank…

Then he asked me if moving to Colorado would actually fix our problems.

And I’ve been wondering about that ever since. My whole plan was to get us out of here, to move to a place where I could get a good job and a cool gig and become a cool person too. But he had to go and be him about it, saying that there’s no way in hell he’d ever live in the city, that we’d still be commuting to town no matter where we lived. He likes living in isolation, he likes long-ass commutes, and the fact that everything’s twenty miles away bothers him not at all because he does none of the shopping or errand-running anyway, and plus he likes driving.

And then I started thinking about what I want to be and do, what I always have been and done the rest of my adult life, and it occured to me that what I want to do is work just enough to pay bills and do music the rest of the time. Which means I wouldn’t be home cooking dinner or cleaning or decorating or gardening or canning or sewing or any of that crap. Which means that maybe I’m just not traditional wife material… which is something I actually didn’t know about myself until very recently.

Do you see where this is going? The life I’m living now is one that is so wrong for me that I’m totally nuts, but he says he likes it (even though I’m not entirely sure I believe him) and the only thing he’d change would be to have me happy. The life I want (and used to live) has virtually nothing at all to do with any of what we’re doing now. And I just noticed that I’ve been saying for years that we have nothing in common, and that I’ve even told him a few times that I’m certain there’s some other woman out there who would kill for the slot I’m currently occupying, someone who’d love to stay home and garden and preserve peaches and work on the porch and do laundry.

Naturally, we’ve been getting along really, sweetly, amazingly well since I got back from vacation and told him I hate my fucking life. We’ve been talking and cuddling and even meeting for lunch, and he’s been doing cute things like cleaning up after dinner and taking out the garbage and making a point of chatting with me after work every evening.

But I can feel the entropy; this phase won’t last – it never has. As far as I can tell, he didn’t do a single thing last weekend while I was in Kansas, and he’s already fallen asleep on the couch twice. And I’m already starting to get anxious again at the thought of another goddamed entropy-filled winter out in the country, in the dark, driving on ice, hauling wood in to burn in the stove, wearing four layers of clothes just to stay warm enough not to shiver.

The crazy thing is, I didn’t even know that I was this unhappy until very recently. I’m such a glass-is-half-full, count-my-blessings, isn’t-this-cool sort of person. I still haven’t sorted through much of this, I just know that shit’s got to change somehow before the rest of my fucking hair falls out.