Coffee Chat: Restless Hibernation

Come in dears, and have a cup of coffee or tea with me and let us chat for a little.

I'm struggling.  I try to write but can't.  I try to get to the tasks I've assigned myself but find them boring and uninteresting.  It is the same with cooking, reading, studying.  I've lost all inspiration.  I want only to hibernate, and yet at the same time I am very restless.   I rest and relax and do a small task or three and then I feel worn down tired.   I long to be doing something, but the pull of doing nothing is equally as strong...Can anyone else identify?



I got my Christmas things put away and more or less put into the right bins.  I'll have to go back and work on that task a bit more, but that's the way it's gone since the week after Christmas.  I sort of get things done, and sort of don't.  I try to read but put the books down frequently.  I try to watch television programs but get distracted by something else.  I long to point to the fact that we are watching a great many YouTube and Prime programs which seem shorter than average TV programs and say I've fallen into a sort of spell of being unable to concentrate for longer periods  but the truth is had we cable TV I'd get only short spurts of routinely interrupted TV viewings, something I've known my whole life long.  I say "Oh you've read too many short stories of late that's why it's so hard to concentrate on a book..." but that too is untrue.

And yet, John seems to have unwittingly hit upon the real problem just yesterday.   I had a text from Bess that she was coming by for a few minutes.  I told John that we'd be having company in a couple of minutes time.   He fussed gently when I mentioned it and said "Must my vacation be continually interrupted?" in a joking manner, but it really struck me harder than a joke should have.   I sat quietly for a moment and said "John...You are NOT on vacation.  This is our LIFE and we can't have the attitude that it's a perpetual vacation now that you're retiring!"

Now mind you I am not blaming John.  If  anything, I've assumed his  attitude and that's my problem.  I have noted that if I'm busy, he generally gets busy himself.

Mind you our routine of getting busy is quite different.  I have often said I prefer to gentle my way into a morning, but after a cup of coffee, I'm generally good to go and I spend most all the morning hours working as hard as I can in order to free my afternoon.  John on the other hand, is generally up a bit earlier than I but is seldom ready to tackle a day before 10 or 10:30am.   It's just the way he's always done things since I've known him.  I recognized this fact on Monday when I was working at getting all the Christmas stuff out of the back door and he was still being leisurely.  "Why it's the same pattern he follows on those days when he's planned to leave home..." I mused but I did not cease my work.  Truth is I was following my pattern of work behavior.  It was just a blessing that I recognized his pattern in that moment.   And why a blessing?  Because I could have gotten very testy towards him because I was working so very hard and he wasn't!

I might add here that he did get busy at about the usual hour and he worked hard enough to warrant a quiet afternoon when it was done.  He cleared a whole tangled patch of vines near a side yard by hand and it wasn't an easy task.  But the next day, when I focused solely on very light housework...well there was that 'vacation' mode of thinking on my part as well as his...

 I expected when he was no longer working full time ( he is currently working part time in order to use up some accumulated leave time but still doing a 24 hour shift) that he'd require a few weeks to really rest.   These 24 hour shifts are brutal, filled to the brim with non-stop activity and if downtime is available it's often broken by calls.  The stress of dealing with trauma after trauma and sometimes drama after drama, is physically and emotionally draining.  It truly takes days for him to recover from the lack of sleep as well as the burden of stress he's under for those 24 hours.  One of his former co-worker's spouse reported that when that man came in from work, he went to his bedroom shut the door and stayed there for 24 hours not even coming out to eat meals.  John doesn't do that but he does often doze in his chair and looks weary beyond words in the hours after his shift.  When he does go to bed at night he's often sound asleep before he's started prayers and sleeps a solid 10 hours...after napping most of the day.  And the next day is almost as bad.

So I do understand that the job takes a deep toll.  Having a little more time off between shifts is helpful but because he knows there is another shift coming up, he tends to just think of the time between as being 'on vacation'.  That he began this current cycle of work about Thanksgiving is what has really drilled home the  holiday/vacation feeling for him I believe.  Here's hoping when he's working but a single 12 hour shift each week he begins to feel less like he's on vacation and more like he's working part time!

I am sure if I just keep pushing myself a bit each day I'll soon shake this mood.  I have a long list of things I must  do, an equally long list of things I'd like to do, and then there are always the extra things that pop up which must be done, too.

I think another problem for me is that age old one of doing some housework on my soul.  Having found the YouTube videos about narcissism, recognizing my own patterns of behavior and understanding my own feelings, I feel a bit adrift.  It's as though, having looked in a warped mirror all my life, I'm suddenly confronted with a new one.  I see that I am not as I'd always thought I was...but I don't quite recognize who I am yet either.   I'm a bit startled to keep turning and seeing this different image of myself.   Does that make sense?

And how is it I see myself at this point in time?  Normal.  Like others.  Not  isolated or alone as I've felt in the past.  This is a good thing but did you realize that even a good change can throw you off balance?  Well it does.   And at the same time I see the deep cracks in my façade.  Now that I know what ails me (or rather doesn't ail me, but what happened to me), I find I struggle because I don't know how to act.  I'm aware that someone is sick, but it isn't me.  Part of me longs to be deeply hurtful and cruel and another part of me recognizes that the illness isn't  the fault of the one who causes me to suffer.   There is someone broken and it isn't me.  I can't however, in my old roll of peacemaker fix this problem.  I can't tolerate the behavior without holding my boundary lines with unceasing watch and battle.  I know that I must adjust to my knowledge and learn to not react to the barbs.   I feel uncertain and lost.  I feel validated and relieved.  It is a true mix of emotions.   So I am adjusting and it's taking a bit out of me.  And I'm taking my time learning more, too because I know myself well. I can be an information overload junky and that's no good as I learned when I was first diagnosed with diabetes.

Then there's the whole lot of unknowns before me.  I recalled today how several years ago a dear girl offered us a cabin in the North Georgia mountains for a week's stay...Katie had started her school year and was determined to have perfect attendance.  She flat refused to come with us to the mountains and so it was to be just John and I.  We couldn't accept the full week offered but we did agree to stay three or four days.  It was the first real length of time alone we'd had in nearly 15 years of being together.  I was scared silly.  I kept wondering, "What if he finds he doesn't like me?"  We knew each other well in the context of our jobs, as parents.  But we'd never been really ALONE for more than a few hours at a time.  We have sort of the same feeling coming into retirement.  Only it's John who is continually questioning if I will really like him when there's a good deal of one on one time.

And for my part, I've been selfish about my alone time over the past few years, very protective of it, as I found it restorative to have that bit of time to myself to work or play or recover, to privately collect my deeper thoughts.  Can I return willingly and gracefully to a world in which I am seldom alone?  I don't know.  John is not a demanding person, but he does like more than the average share of my attention.  I can get frustrated easily if I'm being continually interrupted while trying to do a task or write a post.  I can be more than a little testy if I'm feeling introverted and there's someone wanting me to be otherwise.   So there's that aspect of things as well.

On the other hand, I sometimes have this overly idealistic vision of what retirement might mean.  Travel.  Entertaining.  More family time.  Picnics in the park.  All that sort of thing.  But there are many unknowns at present.  What exactly will our income be?  Can we afford to travel?  We've never been big on entertaining anyone other than ourselves...That isn't likely to really happen now is it?  As for family, I think we have a nice balance of it.  I don't really want our lives to be consumed by family.  I want the gentle ebb and flow that we have now.  Picnics?  Doable on any budget.  So perhaps.  But there's the reality of it all to be seen and adjusted to.  So I dream and then I draw the curtains back across the dreams and think, "Best wait and see a bit later down the road."

Due to a snafu we've yet to know what income we will have in retirement.  That perhaps will be cleared up in the next week or so but in the meantime...Do we start to trim deeply?  Do we go on as we mean to go?  Will John need to work more than he plans to work (2 shifts a month) or will he need to work at all?   How shall we shop for groceries?  We've discussed doing it monthly and continuing with our bi-weekly spending.  We've talked about how we might pay our bills.  We've talked about savings...There's no end of theories to put forth when you don't have hard facts to deal with.

So here I am neither this or that, not here nor there...but I'm hanging on because eventually I'll be out of this limbo of being between seasons.