release

I'm going to use a very dumb analogy to describe what I think is about to happen.

A while back Tai downloaded Sims 2. We got rid of it a couple weeks later but that's beside the point. The point is that while I was playing it, there got to be certain times in the game where things slipped out of my control and next thing I knew I had a house with like 4 people walking around peeing their pants, starving to death, talking to an imaginary bunny, washing themselves in the sink and so on. Every time I tried to tell one of them to go take a shower, he'd go in, the shower was broken, he'd look through the 4th wall at me and complain, the other guy would come in to use the toilet, the toilet was broken. The dad got fired from his job because he hadn't bathed or slept, the kid would come in on the bus from school and pass out in the driveway, it just went on and on.

At some point, through whatever wizardry, I figured out how to turn the corner on that game. First the repairman came in and fixed the shower and the toilet. They were all still starving and hallucinating but at least the hygiene and bathroom meters started getting under control. I managed to get a family member to cook a damn meal without stopping in the middle to run and climb in bed. Little by little the general sense of everyone getting diverted away from A to focus on B, then diverted away from B to focus on C, then from C to D, then back to A (without anything ever getting resolved) started to dissipate and I was able to play the damn game.

My feeling is that many layers of tension are on the verge of being released and that Tai and I are soon going to have a dramatic increase in our ability to do what we actually want to be doing at any given point in time vs what we've been able to do for the last little while. This may be very much the opposite of what people say having a child is like -- that it increases the number of fires you have to put out at all points day and night -- and I'm not doubting that at all, I'm just saying that in the next couple of months I think we are going to be able to make a ton of stressful situations disappear and take a lot of weight off our backs.

As I write this I'm conscious of a very tight feeling in my chest which has probably been there for several days and for good reason, and it's not going to be gone tonight or by the time I wake up in the morning, but I'm really looking forward to feeling it decompress bit by bit as more and more of what I consider to be distractions are cleared away and replaced with continuity and, dare I say, accomplishment.