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I can’t. I’m too non-functional. I depend a lot on the husband, some on the kids and my family of origin, a too small amount on friends. I wouldn’t last a day in a post-apocalyptic landscape: I can’t walk, grocery shop, drive, wash dishes, clean almost anything (except the the washer and stacked dryer are literally outside my office door), and I run out of steam way too quickly.
I haven’t been able to depend on myself for decades; the best I manage is, with all the resources, to feed myself several times a day and take a shower occasionally.
The writing is pure self-indulgence (and it keeps me happy and from despairing), because I use what little energy is there, selfishly, to do something that makes me happy instead of contributing a mite more to household paperwork, for example.
I never thought this would happen. I thought I would always be able to bull my way through whatever I came up against. I thought hard work – the STEM degree, the dream job at Princeton, even having the kids – would just be ‘part of life,’ tough and to be managed – but doable. And returning to baseline when they were older. I thought I would exercise, and take care of myself, and have a happy retirement…
You deal with what you have to, but I thought I’d have a lot more of me to do it with.
I hope this doesn’t happen to anyone else.
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I love that SO much!
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I think you had it with that first line, Alicia… we must depend on ourselves…
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Jaye Marie and Anita Dawes 
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