The myth of Sisyphus, now more than ever

Today I finally got some initial paperwork for my home refinance. It means nothing - I still don’t have an actual loan in the works, and with the need to have an appraiser come over here, who knows how long this is going to take. I won’t believe anything until (if) I have an actual $200,000 deposit in my bank.

But.

After looking over the proposed terms, payments, etc, I suddenly found myself profoundly cranky and depressed. I feel like I’ve failed, even though none of this is my fault. I did everything right - bought a house, young, in an up-and-coming neighborhood, kept up with the payments and taxes, and when I finally started to make some money put everything I had into paying the house down as fast as possible. My house would have been paid off by 2024. Just four years from now. I would only be 52. I could use the house to pay for these boys to go to any college they want, maybe put down payments on their own houses. I was going to do so much better than my mother, who was a lifetime renter and left us nothing. And now this.

My payments will increase by 150%, and my house won’t be paid off until I’m nearly in my 80s. It’s so fucking depressing I can’t even stand it. And yet this is the thing that will allow us to survive. It’s the only thing that’s going to save us, as all government help has turned out to be lies and cheats. 

I should be grateful I have this equity to rely on. I have it so much better than most. I’m not alone and isolated. I have a partner who has been very helpful and comforting. We have a safe, comfortable place to live, and online schooling, while it sucks, is going. None of us are sick or dying. Our industries will return...someday. Someday I’ll be able to make big payments to try to get this loan back under control. But that day is years away, and in two years I’ll be fifty. I shouldn’t be starting a thirty year loan at my age. It’s madness. And yet, here we are.

I’m hoping once my loan closes - end of May? - I can apply for unemployment. The BF applied yesterday. Anything would help at this point. But I don’t count on those funds still being there a month from now. 

Today I finally broke down and gave Bobby a haircut. Honestly, it worked pretty well. I’ve watched his hair be cut by professionals so many times that I had a sense of the basic techniques - fanning the hair between your fingers and trimming in sections rather than just willy nilly chopping chunks off. Theo’s next. Thankfully my hair can just grow and grow - I have no grays to cover, no nails or lashes or brows or waxing to keep up. Being low maintenance is a blessing right now. There was something about Bobby’s wild, messy, verging on white boy dread lock hair that was starting to highly offend me, the way my kids with food smeared on their faces and hands or toys strewn all over our house offends me - it’s a symbol of my failure as a mother; it’s things being out of control. I’ve already ceded the living room to them - it’s such a mess of forts and legos and game controllers and iPads that I just can’t be buggered to clean it anymore when the very next day it’s just going to be the same; in the evenings the BF and I retreat to our bedroom to watch TV with the cat. I keep the kitchen tidy but it’s a huge amount of work. Constant loading and unloading of the dishwasher, spot cleaning the floor and counters and cabinet fronts, managing our dreadfully overstuffed refrigerator and freezer to make sure nothing is being forgotten and rotting, sweeping the hell hole known as under the table with its repulsive mélange of dropped food, dirt, and cat hair. It is endless. Talk about rolling a stone up a hill just to see it roll all the way back down again.

I was obsessed with the myth of Sisyphus when I was a kid. One thing I never quite got was how he came to accept, even love, the futile task of rolling the stone. Did he just pull up his big girl pants and accept his fate with grim resignation, or did he, much like me and everyone else in this endless quarantine, accept it as a side effect of slowly going mad? Smith comes to love Big Brother at the end of 1984, which I attempted to re-read recently. Is this our fate, so numbed by horror and trauma that we finally just succumb and gleefully drool from toothless mouths because we just don’t know what else to do anymore but laugh at the absurdity of it all? 

No wonder I’m not sleeping well. Jesus.