pixietastic | Road blocks

If I hide in the corner of the internet selling $1000.00 baby carriers oogling things I not only don't need, and can't afford but would never purchase even if I could justify it and had the money, then maybe it wont be the end of the world. Instead of studying for my credentialing exam on Tuesday or doing the housework, or trying to come up with an explanation for how someone who's reasonably intelligent and highly coordinated with a great ability to multitask could somehow manage to flunk a driving exam 5 times (this is just your regular old drivers test nothing exciting the same one you all took at age 16). And yet still pass the parallel parking EVERY SINGLE TIME with minimal effort. Due to my lack of drivers license it will likely be an extra 2-3 weeks of downtime before I can start earning money again.

Maybe if I just hide from all of these things staring at baby carriers for my toddler who's too big to really be warn anyway... maybe none of these things will matter.

And I wont have to have a panic attack every time I come across the #whyistayed hashtag, because it's too soon and I'm not ready even though it's been what now? 7 years since I've lived it? I should be over it. I should be able to talk about it. I should be righteous in my anger and validation and righty-right-rightness in my leaving.

Everything feels heavy and I'm lost again downtown in a sea of buses hiding behind a book on success; hint number one; successful people don't take the bus, because they have cars, and drivers licenses

Successful people don't wake up from nightmares of their former husband smashing through their living room windows and trying to take their babies and when in your dream you phone the police for help, they show up, and they tell you well "he's their father" and "he's entitled to see them" and "he can't be that bad, he seems calm right now, and if he were really so bad, so violent, why didn't you get a restraining order?" and you say nothing to the dream police-men, but you know it's coming when they leave, you're sure in that moment that like all the bad news articles you've ever read, he's going to murder you and your children as soon as they leave but before your new husband gets home from work.

And you wake from it, shivering and awful, knowing it wasn't real, the doors are locked, it's 3am and everyone's asleep.

You play it over in your mind until sleep reclaims you sometime around 5. Doze for an hour or two and get up, go to your drivers test and fail for the 5th time. All the while thinking about the first time you ever drove and how icy the road was in his bald-tired 1972 Ford LTD. You think about him yelling at you, the way he stripped you of any worth always breaking it down to what an embarrassment you were, the wife of a professional driver who couldn't or wouldn't learn to drive. And it became a part of your identity to take the bus, you clung to it, made excuses to have learners permit for 11 years...

And now here you sit, and you need this thing for work, and it's serendipitous, you can't avoid the issue of domestic abuse that week. And despite all those lessons over the summer, the last year of real effort made, of trying to GET OVER IT...

And here I sit, with another strip of freshly bought bus tickets, because I can't re-test for another 2 weeks.

I need a license for the new job.

I need it.

But I don't WANT it, and I'm #notready to take this all apart and get over the road block that has me reading my book on the bus.