I am so scared right now. My baby will be here in a matter of weeks, and I’ve got to find a way to make enough money to support all of us. I really don’t want to shell out for daycare, but I’m not sure if I’ll be able to find a space where I can work at home without lots of outside noise. It’s annoying, but it’s a fact of life. I’ve also got to somehow pull the money for a headset out of my butt, but I may have help with that.
And no, I don’t mean help with pulling money out of my butt. I’m looking at grants to keep the store running, but I’ve never applied for a grant before, so I don’t know how I’m going to pull it off. It’s not enough for me to be a female businessowner–I have to be able to prove to people that I’m smart enough and competent enough to use this money to make the store into something remarkable.
Anyway, I cry every time I think about putting my little one into daycare, and then I cry when I think about us not having enough money to survive, much less keep the gaming store open. While I have no objection to moving to Missouri so that my family could at least give us a home while we get back on our feet, I do object to the idea of failing anyone.
Hell, maybe the stress will kill me, and then it won’t be my problem anymore.
Speaking of stress, I’m trying very hard to get into the doctor, and a lot of people are bitching at me because I haven’t been there since November. Well, excuse the fuck out of me for not having insurance and not being able to afford it until I got on Medicaid. Also, excuse the fuck out of me for working at a place where I cannot USE a phone from 7:50am-3pm. For some reason, the people to whom I need to speak to even get a fucking appointment aren’t available after 3pm. In that time, I only get ONE fifteen minute break (more like ten minutes), and I have to take that time to eat and use the bathroom. I also CANNOT miss work for any reason for another few weeks, or else I will be fired. That’s why they call it probation. Unless and until the doctor puts me on bedrest, I CANNOT afford to lose this job. At least if I have to part ways with the job for health reasons, people will look at it more kindly than they would if I committed some sort of workplace violation that got me fired. Yes, the one and only time I was fired, it was completely unjustified and unfair, but there wasn’t a whole fucking lot I could do about it. My family needs to eat, and until my blogs, freelance writing, store, freelance editing/proofreading and artwork take off, I have very little choice but to bust my ass each day, even if it kills me.
More than anything, I think that the stress is affecting me. Every symptom I’m having seems a thousand times worse when I am stressed. I have trouble eating on days when I have to work (more often than not, I start having dry heaves, if not outright puking). After work, I can eat just fine, when I am not too tired to eat.
Besides the job, I have people who insist that my partner is abusive, which isn’t really true. Sure, sometimes he flies off the handle and says things that he doesn’t mean, but I do the same damned thing when I am under stress. When I get angry enough, I can be quite cruel. I just happen to have a longer fuse than most people, and I usually cry when I’m angry or frustrated.
Why do I cry instead of raging? It’s quite simple: as long as I care about you, what you have to say, and what you think, the things that you say to make me angry will make me cry, because I refuse to direct my anger at you. When I do finally get to a point where I don’t cry, and instead I vent my anger, beware: it means that I’ve stopped giving a damn about what you think. In extremely rare cases, it may even mean that I’ve stopped giving a damn about YOU. I’ve been to that point before, but it rarely lasts…I’m just not cut out to not care about people.
Anyway, if anything should happen with the job, I’ll see about getting assistance for food and whatnot while I attempt to find a better job and try to get work I can do at home while raising the baby.
Meanwhile, some of my designs are on CafePress at www.cafepress.com/lichslair. The interface is frustrating, but if it helps me sell products online, I’ll do whatever it takes.
And so, time to work on other stuff. I’m too depressed to keep on thinking about this.