Rat King
I got really sick for a while and now I've got some stress to unsuccessfully relieve.
It’s been a couple of weeks since I last wrote. The kids brought home a couple of colds that took me down pretty hard. I was exhausted. I had a miserable cough and headaches, some weird neck pain, congestion. I came down with a toothache that I was convinced was going to end with a root canal. I booked an appointment to have it looked at, but the dentist said it was likely caused by the aforementioned congestion. It’s a week later and my tooth doesn’t hurt anymore. What a relief.
I’m currently nursing a headache and shoulder pain while my kids are sick at home and watching some ADHD af YouTuber talk about his wealth of Lego knowledge, and Lego. He likes to include the price tag of all the Lego he buys to make content with to like make my kids envious or something. I try to talk to my kids about this kind of shit because it festers, man. That compulsion. That need for stuff just programmed right in. My 10-year-old understands it’s a part of culture. My 5-year-old just wants the Lego and is saving up his money to buy more because he thinks he doesn’t have enough.
Honestly, I do my best to get the kids not to watch too much brain rot but it’s hard to avoid it. I don’t forbid them from watching it, though I put a limit on how much they can. Usually when my headache starts, I tell them to watch Mark Rober again, but even he’s got an expensive subscription box my daughter wants. There isn’t really an escape. So much of kids YouTube is like product hype and constant fucking stimulation. It’s a bunch of fucking jump cuts and sound effects, a visual vomit of products, sponsored content, money, look at all this money I spent, I bet your parents don’t have this kind of money, but look at all this shit I spent my money on, watch me open it, watch me bitch about how annoying the packaging is for five fucking minutes, it’s not even interesting but it’s five fucking minutes of your life I’m wasting so you can watch more of my content, I can make more money when you’re lost watching my content, I can buy more fucking stuff because of my content, I get to make a living making content that makes you want and need and imagine filling that hole in your soul, you fucking consumer ass bitch.
When I get annoyed, I end up telling them that they’ve watched enough YouTube and that they should go and play with the Lego that they DO have. Surprisingly, they always listen.
That means I’m doing this whole modern parenting thing right, I think.
Not to toot my own horn. I’m just doing my best. Most millennial moms are bloody exhausted and I understand that screen time is an easy way to get dinner made and an email or two sent. I really do care about my kids understanding what they’re watching, though. When I was still on TikTok, the algorithm kept feeding me horror stories about how terrible the kids are in school. How hard they are to teach. How little they can focus. How poor their literary comprehension is.
I believe it, but I can’t watch a ton of that kind of shit without feeling hopeless. So I do my damn best to spend some time with my kids, which is hard sometimes.
I attempted to teach them chess like a month ago. I enjoyed it, quite honestly, but having to compartmentalize the feelings both children were having in the process of learning, and to explain those feelings to each other, and then to get them to understand and rationalize each other’s feelings of frustration took a fucking lot out of me. I prevented them from fighting. I got them to empathize with each other.
It was a productive fucking day and I still haven’t quite recovered from it.
Now that I write that, I realize that my damn shoulders are still knotted. Like tense as fuck. I’ve had a knot in my lower back for years, but I feel the stress pain mostly in my shoulders now. My chiropractor fixed it a bit, but I haven’t been doing the stretches. My shoulders feel better but there are always kinks leftover. It makes me think of when I’m struggling to untie a big knot out of a flimsy chain necklace, and I gotta go in there with safety pins to carefully untangle said not. Makes me realize what acupuncture must do. Just a little pin right in my lower back, jiggling a little, loosening it. There’d be some temporary relief, probably. Be nice to book an appointment, but I know that over time, each little string would tighten again. There are far too many little rats running around inside my brain.
I’ll never be free of this pain, I guess.
I guess I can accept it.
I’ll probably have to juggle Tylenol and Advil for the rest of my life, which is okay. Sometimes I wonder what mothers had to deal with when The Plague was a thing. Or Polio. Or like, the second world war. Or any war. Like, it kind of seems like kids are getting so mentally ill that it’s impossible to comprehend.
My daughter’s starting to get fascinated by the news. Like I’ll be listening to it and she’s always in the room for me, like…interested. It just makes me think of Columbine again. I was 12 when it happened. I watched all the coverage. I read whatever articles I could. It freaked me out at the time. It’s that one news story that probably triggered all my fears and stuff. It’s in my novel. I unpacked a lot of my weird fears about dying and the end of the world and the current political state in my novel.
I’m still unpacking that shit here.
It’s a lot to unpack, I realize.
It’s like four days after I started writing this post and I realize that I forgot to take my extra strength Tylenol.
In writing news:
I recently sold a reprint story that paid really nicely, so I’m gonna spend the money on new fabric to reupholster my dining room chairs.
Gonna be working on the third draft of Mommy Complex soon.
Go and buy my book, please. It’s upmarket gothic suspense short fiction. You’ll like it if you liked this post. And please leave a review and tell me you left one. Comments give me the best serotonin. They might even untangle some of the rats in my shoulders.
