9:40 a.m. - 2012-04-30
content
I'm happy again and I don't know why. There are absolutely no clouds in the sky and I went out to the front steps and smoked a cigarette and drank coffee (a ritual I do every morning and love) and felt content. Where did that come from?
When I came in Marley pushed me down in a kitchen chair and crawled into my lap like she always does, all elbows and knees and getting much too big for my lap, and I felt happy. And content. Again.
My feelings about my kids are the barometer by which I measure my happiness; it bothers me more than anything else when I feel like I'd rather be anywhere else, and I know they are beautiful and amazing but I don't feel it. Sometimes I don't feel anything for anyone, like when I was a kid, and I wonder if that means I'm a psychopath and I hate myself.
And then other times that feeling is just gone and I am happy and playful with my kids and I feel like I'm on vacation staying home with them. I like that much better. That's the way I feel right now (even though they're climbing all over me as I write, again.)
I think Peter has more of a part in this than I would like to admit. I also don't want to admit that probably the thing I find most appealing about Peter is that he likes me. Very narcissistic, but maybe not unusually so? I always feel that people who like me don't really know me, and the two people who have known me best -- my husband and my best friend -- eventually decided they didn't like me, and seemed to dislike me more the harder I try to be likeable... so I do feel unlikeable and unlovable most of the time.
Peter at least knows how crazy and dark I can be and still likes me. He still wants me as a friend. One could argue that he doesn't know me that well because our friendship has always been letters, phone and e-mail, a virtual friendship I guess, but on the other hand we are still drawn to write to each other thirteen years after we met very randomly and forgettably at a public meeting in a small town in New Hampshire. I used to see and work with Matt every day, before and after we were a couple, and sometimes I wonder if the fact that I was no longer indispensible to him as a work partner (because I was the best he'd ever had, he'll still admit that) then I stopped being indispensible to him as a person as well. Valueless and below average, if you take away who I was/am at work...
I have never worked with Peter and we've never talked that much about work. Or accomplishments. I don't really picture him as a lawyer, although I know he's a good one (and very quotable). I don't know if he thinks of me as a reporter, but I don't think so. (He said he mostly thinks of me in a miniskirt, which is OK with me.)
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