By the time anybody reads this, I could be a new father for the third (and FINAL) time. My wife is 37 weeks pregnant with a baby we know very little about other than we think it’s healthy. We really like the surprise of seeing what the make and model is once it enters the world. That part is exciting. And yes, we have a boy and girl name picked out and ready for whatever it is.
So that part is exciting, right? Just that first glimpse of genitalia to see what is going to hang out with us for the rest of our lives is pretty exciting. Well, for me it is. For my wife, I’m sure she’ll just be ready to finally have that little tummy beast out of her. For the first few minutes, she probably won’t even care. But the suspense of not knowing is still pretty cool.
The problem with this little surprise is that, for me, it’ll be the last one for a while. My wife knows this about me and I’m not ashamed of it, but I am NOT looking forward to the baby stage of this thing’s life. It’s not for me. Once these other two kids of mine hit about a year old and I could play and roughhouse and communicate with them, I should have been walking around with a coffee mug that said, “World’s Funnest and Gnarliest Dad.”
That mug, however, will not apply to me in the next twelve months. I will not deserve it. I will do my damnedest to be the best father I can be, but I do not like the baby stage. The monotony drives me slowly insane. I suspect this time will be worse.
I’m sober this time.
I’ve struggled the past few weeks. Like struggled to the point that I haven’t had the motivation to write. Struggled to the point that my wife has been worried about me. I don’t struggle with a desire to drink anymore. That’s actually long gone. I seldom even think about it anymore. I celebrated eighteen months sober back on November 28, and I think the only times I really think about alcohol is when I either write about it or go to AA. I do not sit at home at night, even when everybody is asleep, and crave a drink. Ever. Tobacco? Sometimes. Rarely, but more often than alcohol.
But I do struggle with depression and discontent and lack of motivation and – when it pertains to this baby – dread. Those things can settle on my mind like a cow with four broken legs. The damn thing is NOT moving no matter how much I want it to. And it weighs a freaking ton.
I’ve been thinking a lot during this low period about the monotony of life. That’s not all that has troubled me, but it’s the theme. Those questions like, “Is this all life is?” and “What is my damn purpose?” and “Why can’t I have a simple brain that just falls into happiness and contentment at the flip of switch?” are all a part of it, but all of them settle neatly inside the “monotony of life” theme.
The reasons I’ve struggled lately have been pretty obvious. Life is about to get harder, and I have no addictions to treat the monotony. Which, if you think about it, is Hypocrisy 101. What is an addiction but one of the most monotonous activities known to man? You secure your alcohol and/or tobacco daily (or whatever the vice,) you hide it daily, you partake in reclusion daily, you hate yourself daily, you walk on eggshells daily. There is nothing more monotonous than addiction. And yet it’s such a safe place when you’re in the throes of it. But it is still monotonous as hell.
I mean, at least this baby will smile pretty soon. That’ll be new and exciting for several minutes. Then it’ll make noises and crawl and walk and hug. The only thing exciting about addiction is that maybe Bud Light will find another kind of fruit to squeeze in each can.
I can joke about it all day, but the truth is that the monotony of life is a struggle for me, and it’s about to get worse. The sleepless nights, the tiredness, the diapers, the zero free time, the inability to escape it, the grumpiness of my entire family, the constant cleaning. Those things will happen every single day with no real end in sight.
And yes, I know. Poor, poor, pitiful me. Everybody has to do it. Everybody deals with it, so put on your big boy panties and grow the f**k up, right?
To that, I say this. Just because I know it’s whiny, and I know that everybody else knows it’s whiny, and my mind tells me to go in search of the big boy panties, and every fiber of my being tells me I’m too damn good a daddy to dread this so badly, those things don’t mean the depression isn’t real. And when a person with clinical depression falls into that place, telling him or her to snap out of it and suck it up does not help and is in most cases not possible. It is truly a mental malady with which a LOT of people struggle.
And there is NO immediate cure. In fact, we have no idea what a cure would look like even if it walked up and said, “Hey, I’m Cure.”
Another inhibiting factor in dealing with the monotony of life is that people like me (and I really don’t yet know how to define that person) are destined to slowly (and sometimes swiftly) go insane with monotony. It’s exactly like the saying about insanity – you know, doing the same thing over and over expecting different results – only we know the results are going to be the same and yet we still question every aspect of it as if a genie will pop out of a poopy diaper and tell us the secret to life.
In other words, there is still hope in our insanity, and it would be so much easier if there wasn’t.
So how do we go about attempting to find a cure for this monotony of life? How do we grow to accept it and embrace it and live out every cliche about happiness and contentment and never ask questions like, “So this is it?” Even better, how do I spice this shit up so that monotony becomes a mythical creature from my past?
I have not one damn clue. But I figured it was a good enough idea to just spell it all out and figure out what exactly are the things that fall under the category of monotonous in my life. Maybe it’ll convince me it just ain’t that damn bad. Doubtful, but it’s worth a shot.
The Monotony of Work
I put this one first because it’s actually the least monotonous. I’m a high school math teacher, so there are near daily surprises. The high school set is getting lazier (yet somehow crazier,) they’re getting less respectful towards everything, and they leave high school far less prepared for college or career than generations past (and yes, I’m stereotyping all of this, but when it’s true, you’re allowed to type on stereos.) They are the generation of participation trophies and educational leaders that do their damnedest to succumb to pressure and just “push” kids on to the next grade, mastery be damned.
But even still, there are literally no two days alike.
So in that regard, the monotony is not in the daily planning and teaching, since there is a curriculum that must be completed, and it is not in the humdrum nature of “clock in, work, clock out,” since teenagers are insane and there is that little perk of not working during fall break, Christmas break, Spring break, and summer, and the monotony mostly shows up year-to-year, not day-to-day, which is preferable.
That said, however, all of those things I said about students and leadership in the previous paragraph gets REALLY tedious. There is daily monotony in the inability to alter the course of this generation, daily monotony of speaking to children so poorly raised that they do not understand the necessity of education (or of listening and respecting their teachers,) and monotony in watching our educational leaders not stand up to it. And because of those three things, the monotony of losing credibility and authority in the classroom is getting REALLY frustrating. It’s getting old.
Which is why I often remind myself about those damn summers. They’re nice.
The Monotony of Cooking
I am the cook in my house. My wife is a perfectly capable cook, I just don’t like eating leaves and guac and tabouli salad and crap like that. I cook some kind of vegetable for every meal, but I cook a meat and a carb every time, too. As it should be, dammit.
But I spend at least two hours in the kitchen every single day. We go out to eat more than we should, but when I cook, I have to go ahead and pencil in two to three hours of the same exact shit day after day. Cook, eat, clean. Cook, eat, clean. Every damn day. Mix in the counters that just seem to grow stuff like mail, cups, medicine, flowers, computers, various bags, used Q-Tips, snot rags, dirty underwear, and entire wardrobes (okay, so the last few are a slight exaggeration, but not much,) and these counters become the constant, daily bane of my existence.
I despise dirty counters and I despise the daily monotony of cooking. Yet I love to cook and I love my kitchen. I make no damn sense whatsoever.
The Monotony of Marriage
My wife and I have been married four years now, and I tend to enjoy every single aspect of my marriage, so if you think I am going to say anything remotely negative about her or my marriage, you must be out of your damn mind.
The Monotony of Fatherhood
There is very little monotony when it pertains to my thirteen year old daughter. I’ve moved past the fact that she eats terribly and is starting to act, well, like a teenager. What’s monotonous is the lack of listening. It drives me insane. I do not know how many times two people can repeat “When it’s your turn to clean the kitchen, the dining room table and all counters are included in that.” We’ve said it a minimum of seventeen thousand times. How has it not been obeyed yet? I just do not get it. What in the hell goes through her mind when she finishes washing dishes?
“Hmmm, what was it they told me to do again? Vacuum? No, that’s not it. There’s no ceiling fan in here, so I can’t dust it. Wait, I remember!! They told me to eat dessert and check Instagram. In my room. Where no food is allowed. I never heard them say it wasn’t allowed the four thousand times they said it, so it’ll be fine. Kitchen’s done!!”
The monotony of a two year old is worse. When I get home from work, I must “play animals.” I cannot have a break, I cannot go pee, I cannot get a glass of tea, I cannot kiss my wife, I cannot start dinner. I must play animals. And if I do any of the other things first, the request to play with animals will be repeated ad nauseam, unless we somehow end up in another room, whereas the request can change to “play puzzles” or “play stickers” or “play bed.” This is daily, and it does not simply happen when I get home from work. It can happen on a Saturday morning, even before I lift him out of his damn crib.
And what is “play animals?” There are about a hundred little plastic farm animals and dinosaurs, and they must all come out of their bin, and then they must be lined up or they must gather around and eat plastic vegetables or they must come in and out of the plastic barns. And if any of his ideas for how we must play with the animals are not followed, he pitches a fit, at which point I intentionally piss him off further rather than giving in to him because I’m not raising a pansy ass bitch. (And I’m not about to apologize for saying that since nobody knows whether I’m joking or not.)
And then there is the monotony of him NEVER eating anything healthy, the monotony of the devil’s gift to parents: the toddler car seat, the monotony of diapers, the monotony of picking shit up, the monotony of f**king nursery rhymes, the monotony of the same book over and over again until I want to rip the front cover off and send it like a frisbee out the back door with such force that I dislocate my shoulder.
I love those two so damn much, though.
The Monotony of Church
It’s not just the act and process of Sunday morning church. That bores me to tears, but the monotony of church is more than that.
I just don’t get it, okay? I never will. It doesn’t mean my mind will not constantly try to DEMAND that I get it, only to have the rational side put up a winning debate, thus beginning the monotonous process all over again, but I do NOT understand most people’s views of the Christian Religion, Jesus, God, and a book written by humans. And the very aspect of its unchanging yet forceful message / rhetoric gets REALLY monotonous, especially when FAR too many “Christians” are some of the most hypocritical people on the planet.
I physically cringe when I hear somebody say, “I owe it all to God” or “God was with them in that accident” or “Put it in God’s hands.” Those verbal bouquets of religious feel-goodery are perfectly reserved for those times when something or somebody was blessed with positivity, luck, or good fortune. But when a kid dies of a gunshot wound to the head at Sandy Hook Elementary School or a mother buries her young son who was eat up with cancer or an icy patch sends a family of four down an embankment into an icy pond or a tornado levels a retirement village in Boca Raton, do we then say, “They owe it all to God” or “God was with them in that accident” or “God gave him that cancer for a reason?” Was it in God’s hands then?
Then people tell other people to “Pray about it.” Okay, that’s a nifty idea, but I guarantee I can research and give you equal examples of most prayerful scenarios ending in both positive and negative outcomes, no matter if prayer was used or not.
I’ve suffered forty-one years not understanding it. Or, I’ve spent forty-one years understanding it so rationally that I have no ability to conjure the reality of what might be the most elaborate fairy tale ever penned.
Do I believe in God? Yes, I do. I believe that nothing around me makes one bit of sense unless somebody is responsible. I believe it is possible to have a relationship with my creator that is not like others. Do I believe in prayer and “putting it into God’s hands?” I might, if it was anything better than a 50-50 proposition. Will I ever be “religious” to such an extent that I can disciple to a non-believer? No, I can assure you of that. That will never be me. But I can guarantee you this much. I will struggle with this topic the rest of my life. And I already know my feelings on it won’t change. So not only is it monotonous and wearisome in my present, I get to look forward to that weariness never leaving. Goodie.
The Monotony of Politics
This one is starting to irk me FAR too much. And this is becoming like monotony squared. Since 9-11, and exponentially through three presidents, we have become the most monotonous, predictable, hateful, partisan-to-the-death bunch of citizens the country has ever known. And that includes the Civil War.
The basic anatomy of a far-left Democrat when talking about a Republican: “He’s a racist fascist nationalist white supremacist who tries to cram God into our laws and wants every criminal to have a gun and would rather a mother die than the unborn baby, and I will make up incriminating shit about him to make him and his party look worse than it actually is. And none of them are middle-of-the-road right-leaning independents either. They’re all irrational, delusional, hypocritical Bible thumpers.”
The basic anatomy of a far-right Republican when talking about a Democrat: “He’s a baby-murdering socialist satanist treasonist traitor that wants to take all the rich people’s money and give it to lazy people and immigrants because he hates his country, hates God, and I will make up incriminating shit about him to make him and his party look worse than it actually is. And none of them are middle-of-the-road left-leaning independents either. They’re all irrational, delusional, hypocritical atheists.”
Yeah, it’s getting old. Work together, for f**k’s sake. Quit bad-mouthing and blaming every damn president that came before today, grow the f**k up, and do what’s right for the majority of Americans. It’s just not that freaking hard. Come to the table wondering how you can compromise, not how you can ram a brick up the other’s ass. It’s getting REALLY monotonous and predictable.
I discovered yesterday, however, that it isn’t all monotonous. It’s actually the worst kind of anti-monotony we could imagine. I saw a post on Facebook yesterday with almost a thousand comments made by “adults,” and they were all making fun of Michelle Obama for purportedly having a penis. This is now representative of the class we have in this country.
The Monotony of My Damn Brain
My brain can be a dangerous place. It is no more dangerous than when monotony has it screaming from the inside. Monotony causes it to go places in search of relief from that monotony that sometimes the places it goes are not healthy places for the mind of a recovering addict to go.
My mind is also dangerous because of the stubbornness that is often borne from that monotony. I am so stubborn about some things that I would debate a more stubborn man about who is most stubborn and not give in even after he beat me. I’m too stubborn to lose in a battle of stubbornness. And then I wouldn’t admit that I lost. I’d just try to figure out how to beat him.
And this monotony and stubbornness go both ways. Each can be borne from the other. Unless you are afflicted, you cannot understand the relentless monotony of innate stubbornness. And stubbornness affects everything that dances, crashes, glides, or tiptoes through your mind. And then that “thing” that wound up there will not leave, monotonously torturing you as it repeats itself over and over until mild insanity kicks in and you have mini breakdowns or short, almost necessary, bouts of anger.
All of the ways that monotony affects me will NOT change. I have to come to terms with that. I will ALWAYS view those things as monotonous. They will ALWAYS affect my ability to maintain a happy, content persona. I accept that begrudgingly knowing I don’t really have a choice. I will quite simply always struggle with monotony. My brain does not work differently than that.
All of this was easy when I was drinking. I could deal with damn near anything because I could drink that night. It would all wash away in beer. I don’t have that anymore. I don’t WANT that anymore. So how do I defeat this brain and the monotony and stubbornness that controls it?
I know part of the answer. I’m just procrastinating. Per usual.
A few days ago, I watched one of the most powerful videos I’ve probably ever seen. It was a guy standing on stage speaking to a group of people about his life. He talked about his upbringing and how music had transformed his life and gave it purpose and how monumental the influences of his parents and wife had been. Sounds ho-hum so far, right?
What made it captivating was that Alvin Law was born without arms. And watching him on that stage – the confidence, the contentment, the complete absence of self-pity – made me feel both inspired and pathetic. Here was a man that couldn’t even pick his damn nose, and he appeared far happier and contented than a relatively healthy forty-one year old man with a good job, beautiful wife, two and a half perfectly healthy kids, a gorgeous house, and an overall sublime existence. (P.S. Click on his name above in this paragraph for the video I saw. I promise it’ll inspire you.)
Can you imagine HIS monotony?
Alvin Law has been a motivational speaker since 1981. And why not, you know? Is there a man more perfect for it? He was born with no arms and has a better attitude about life than 99% of the population. He cannot hold his wife’s hand, but he can play the piano, the drums, and the trombone. He looks like a circus freak, but watch him on stage and he oozes badass cool.
I’ve only just discovered Mr. Law, and I plan to watch as many videos as I can find about him (and read his book) because he makes me want to be a better me, but I wanted to focus in on a just a couple of things that I’ve seen so far in speeches or quotes by him that I really think can help me when monotony has me settled under that legless cow.
His big mantra is that everybody has a label. It is affixed to your forehead, he says, for all to see. But he argues that there is not a darn soul who can stop you from changing your label.
I have a few little labels that speak well of me: Husband, father, teacher, newly self-appointed addiction activist. I have more labels that do not speak well of me, however. And as I got to listening to some stuff Alvin Law said, it occurred to me that we actually have TWO labels. One is the label that others see. One is our own label; the one WE see that is hidden from the outside world. Which one do you think has more bright lights shining on it?
Our own label affects us far more intimately than the label others see. Our lives literally revolve around the way we view ourselves. My label has some hard-to-digest words on it. Addict, loser, failure, recluse, friendless, unworthy. Looking back over the past twenty years, my label has become as monotonous as my life. It hasn’t changed in twenty years. That’s pretty monotonous, don’t you think?
Alvin Law simply says, “Change your label.” I’d like that. That is definitely something I want to do. But how?
I think it’s clear that I do not put much stock into “signs from God,” but everything – and I mean EVERYTHING – the past few weeks has been screaming at me the same message. I look on Facebook and it’s there. I read an article online and it’s there. I see a commercial and it’s there. I’ve read two random blogs this week and it’s been there. I even heard a kid in the hallway at school saying it. And it is almost exactly the same message. Every. Single. Time. For weeks this has happened. Same message every time.
We live once. No regrets from this day forward. Go do something that will inspire you that everybody else thinks is crazy. Who gives a royal damn what they think?
Sounds like a great way to break out of the monotony of life, doesn’t it? Terrifies the shit out of me, but I WILL regret it if I don’t. So do I have an idea of what that might be? Yeah, I do. All it is is an idea right now, but it both excites me and terrifies me beyond words. I don’t know if I’ll ever muster the courage to do it, but I know my future will continue being monotonous if I don’t start taking some chances. I did it once, in the past few months, right? I started writing again.
We live once. No regrets from this day forward. Go do something that will inspire you that everybody else thinks is crazy. Who gives a royal damn what they think?
I’m getting there. Maybe this baby will make me finally punch the grip of monotony square in the freaking face. It’s my only chance to REALLY live outside the unrelenting grasp of addiction, self-loathing, depression, and the insanity-inducing monotony of life.
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