(Not a) Very Brief Update

Firefly, on the phone the other night, said I sounded much better than that last post would indicate, and I'm going to have to agree: that was a REAL ugly day, or couple of days, and most of the interceding ones have been better.

Well, better for ME, anyway:

--Tim got locked up; as this is his fourth or fifth DUI, and at least the third accident he's caused while drinking and driving, and he was driving on a suspended license as well, we're pretty sure that he'll get out of jail around the time LittleMan goes to preschool.
--Squeaky can't pay the rent because her cash benefits got cut off--our AFDC/Link system is notoriously random like that. Plus, she lost her best friend; Mariana, who had got caught cheating by HER baby-daddy, called Tim (a few days before he got locked up) and left a voice-mail saying that Squeaky was cheating with a friend of hers (which she wasn't--they'd only met once). Tim didn't believe it, but Squeaky told Mariana to piss off; but she'd been spending so much time with Mariana that she needed somebody else to hang with (the one thing Squeaky cannot STAND is to be alone.)
--Well, Squeaky found her "friend"--Kino, the guy she was allegedly cheating with. Apparently, Mariana called HIS baby-mama and told her that he was cheating with Squeaky, and in retaliation, she put him out of their place. That was a day or two after Tim got locked up; Squeaky was alone, Kino was homeless--so guess where Kino's been staying? Squeaky told me last night that it was no longer platonic.
--And the hell of it is, all the changes she'd made while she was with Tim have disappeared. Kino and his cousin Eddie were with Squeaky when she came over the other night; they're cute enough, sure, but basically, they're garden-variety thug boys from Humboldt Park. She's dressing different, talking different, and in all other ways is more like the Squeaky I first met--the one I didn't like.
--The real victim? LittleMan. She brought him over the night she was here with the guys; no matter who was holding him, whether it was me or Kino or Eddie, he would NOT take his eyes off Squeaky. Apparently her dad had been watching him for a couple of days, and she'd just gotten him back, but he was not gonna let his momma out of his sight. He's a sweet little guy, too; Squeaky says he looks just like Tim. I can never see those kind of similarities, but he is awfully cute. I feel so bad for him--and for Tim, as well.

As for me, the real news is: CR is coming to stay here for two weeks. I really, really wish I could put into words the amount of change he's gone through; it wouldn't make any sense, though, to anyone but me. The people who care about me are all suspicious of him, and I can't blame them; how many dozen times did I swear to them he'd changed, and how many times did they then watch while things happened exactly the same way, over and over again? And what would make this time any different? If it was Deb, or Firefly, or Tim, or anyone else (what "anyone else"? lol) and I saw them going back to the same person over and over again, to be treated in the same bad way over and over again, and finally saw them being dumped in the most painful way possible, I know I'd be skeptical too, no matter how long the separation had lasted. But here's the thing: people grow up. People--well, some people, anyway--go through things in life that make them stop to look at themselves and decide: I don't like this person that I see. I don't like the things that person does. CR went through that for a long, long time. He thought about what he wanted out of life, and from what he says, one of those things was to be with me. And I'm in a better place too. No longer am I dependent on anyone's approval or good opinion of me. I can stand it if he leaves me; I can enjoy him if he stays, without losing my self again. And everything he's said to me indicates that he's glad to let me be myself, to encourage me in the things I love, instead of how it used to be. I wish I could explain it; and maybe one of the reasons I find it hard is that in many ways, it makes me think of the best days with JP. I still do miss him, more than I can even bear sometimes; it's hard to press that grief to the side long enough to enjoy being treated well again. In a way it makes me a little impatient with myself: for fifteen years you've waited for someone to love you this way again--as you are, knowing all your quirks and darknesses, but still willing to plan some magnificent visionary future--and now that you've been blessed enough or lucky enough or whatever--now that you've been fortunate enough to have that handed to you unasked, you're still moping over the little ways in which they're different? It makes me think that maybe all these years I haven't been as good at "accepting" as I thought; was there somewhere, unacknowledged, some part of me that didn't want "something like" what I had with JP--that would only accept JP himself? Was all that "understanding" that my life had changed that late-October night, just another example of being able to parrot back the right answer, rather than an answer I believed in?

When I think about CR, though--the things that attracted me to him in the first place, the things I liked about being with him--and liked enough to stay with him even despite the bad times--and the things I missed when he left, even despite myself--when I think about those things, and when I talk to him (we talk on IM every day, pretty much)...then, I can be happy just with what he and I have, without putting all sorts of psychology on it, all sorts of interpretations.

In other news:
I finally got to meet TinyGirl, Deb's daughter, whose blogname is hereby CutiePie. If I was in ANY way inclined toward motherhood, this kid would have tipped me over the edge....unquestionably the cutest baby I have ever encountered in the history of the world, ever. She's calm and laid-back; she'll occasionally let out a little fuss, then she'll calm herself down with no outside intervention. She fell asleep on me--an actual human baby actually fell asleep on me! This is unheard of. Babies do not like me. Babies scream when I hold them, steadily shrieking til I hand them back to their actual parents; not CutiePie. She let me hold her for a while, kind of blase about the whole thing, and then she started getting that groggy-face, the one where the eyelids go to half-mast, and then pop back up.....and dowwwwwn......and up....Finally she just sacked out completely, and I held her for a few more minutes and then put her in her bassinet, where Deb made her into a baby-rrito and after a moment of fussing, she was out like a light. Did I mention that she's also completely freakin' BEAUTIFUL??? One of my things with babies is, when they're born and for the first maybe 8 weeks of their lives, they generally look....well, not to put too fine a point on things, but they look like they've been extruded from somebody's cooter. Squishy and wrinkly and kinda like a little old man, except in miniature. Well, not CutiePie. Deb said that when she was born, the nurses were coming from other floors to see her little blue-eyed redhead. She's got the prettiest face and the cutest little features, and everything on her is just unusually adorable for a month-old baby. And I'm not saying this because she's Deb's kid, either; she's just an unusually pretty baby, is all.

So after CutiePie sacked out and Deb and I visited for a little bit, I left. I'd gotten an iGo car, and had to get it back, so I left around 8:40. As I walked to the car I said, "Nice fog!" thinking that it was just Deb's low-lying neighborhood that had a thick overhay of mist. Well, it wasn't. The main street I drove down to get to I-57 was foggy; the ramp was foggy; I-57 was foggy; the Dan Ryan was foggy; the offramp was foggy, the main street was REALLY foggy and so was the road through the park, the shortcut I normally take to avoid a series of unnecessary stop signs and stop lights. And the walk home--the four-plus blocks which make me nervous to walk at night on a GOOD night, was foggy to a terrifying degree. I was finally able to calm myself with the self-assurance that even the serial killers would have the good sense to stay home on a night like that, and eventually I made it home.

I'm a lot happier than I've been, honestly. I can't say my motivation is back--although I think what I'm going through now is largely just my normal procrastinating over unpleasant tasks (the laundry mountain, moving everything that will need to be moved so I can run the vacuum, etc.) I am still struggling with my creativity, still trying to overcome inertia and get back to writing and drawing and painting, but CR has promised to make it his goal to nudge me back into the things I enjoy, as part of his apology for not supporting me as I pursued those things in the past. It's another one of the things I can't explain; he says he's angry at himself for not admiring my talents enough when we were together before, and this is his way of making it better.

There's been a lot of stuff going on, really; I've got about four beginnings-of-posts that I started, but just never had the time to finish. It's not that I'm losing interest in blogging, as I've been accused of; like every other thing I like to do, I think, I've stopped doing it because there are so many things I -should- be doing that I'm not--and as you know, it's not allowed to have fun when there's undone work. But because I don't want to do the work EITHER, I do nothing--watch TV, play solitaire, fart around on Facebook--and so nothing of consequence, either fun or important, gets done.

I think, though, that I'll have much much more to write about over the next few days. (Although....as Firefly will attest, I'm generally pretty close-mouthed about the Gory Details; somehow, though, I'm pretty sure I'll have writing material even without salacious talk.)