Anger Management

Things have not improved with Buster. Shortly after my last post, I called him in response to one of his emails that grated on me especially hard. I ended up screaming at him as I drove down the road on my way to pick up M after work. He knows how to push my buttons, and he’d pushed them all that day. He insisted that his moving to BFE Southern Colorado was “better,” but couldn’t, of course, give me any concrete examples of how it would be better. He thinks he’s going to be able to visit “about 3 times a year,” forgetting, I suppose, that he can’t drive in the snow and that his not-even-front-wheel-drive POS compact truck couldn’t even handle suburban Denver roads in the wintertime. But the tipping point was when he said that he could try to get joint custody. It was only a threat, and was meant to unhinge me, and it worked. Unleash the Kraken.

(Let me just say that IF by some miraculous intervention, he were to get his shit together, move into non-condemned housing near by, manage to mimic adult behavior to an acceptable degree, and be consistent for some reasonable length of time, I would actually welcome his participation. It would take a shift in the space-time continuum, or something on that level, to make me believe he was trustworthy or capable of caring for my precious daughter, but I’d certainly rather have him do that than what he’s BEEN doing for the past seven years. Just in case you were ready to get all huffy about Joint Custody as a concept.)

But the collected, mature-er part of me that is able to step back and observe my more... primitive...self yelling at the idiot on my cellphone as I drive down Santa Fe (Oprah would NOT approve), realized then that it might be a good time to explore more productive ways to burn off the rage and frustration.

So... I signed up for the fitness training classes at work that start next week. Two days a week at noon I will be working in a class, outdoors, with a trainer. There’s also a day of yoga that I am going to try to add. It goes for twelve weeks. I think it will kick my butt, since it’s been a while since this former distance runner has done any consistent workout, but I’m looking forward to it. As motherhood has collided with aging and an increasingly sedentary lifestyle, I find that by the end of the workday I’m just tired, grumpy, and feeling more and more like a soft, squishy lethargic slug.

I think it will be just the thing. That, and imagining, in detail, Buster getting stuck somewhere in the wilds of Southern Colorado on a lonely stretch of road, far from a cellphone signal or another human being, in a ditch that he drove into because he can’t drive in the snow. (Apparently only I vividly remember the road trip we took from Denver to Auburn, CA, Christmas of 2003, when I was six months pregnant and he couldn’t/wouldn’t drive most of it because he had no skillz.) It entertains me to picture it.