I Don’t Know What’s Wrong With Me

And I don’t know how to figure it out

“Just heading out to get some tomato sauce.”

“But we’ve got some. Check the back of the cupboards.”

“Nope. Looked already,” I say pulling the collar of my coat down, “I won’t be long.”

I head out to the car, open the door and drop into the driver’s seat with a sigh. I’m sitting awkwardly because of the object in my left back pocket, so I tilt to the right and pull the glass jar free.

I look at the label, Best Italian Tomato Sauce, and throw it onto the seat next to me before driving out of the driveway and turning left. At the end of the road, I turn left again and then a right. Eventually, I pull up in front of a random house on a random street and switch off the engine.

I sigh again.

I just need a moment. A moment where everything is still and I’m not doing anything.

I hate lying to my wife and stealing bottles of tomato sauce so I have an excuse to head out. It’s probably a little selfish too, to duck out in the evening right when things start to get hectic between finishing work, checking on the kids, getting dinner ready, and bedtime.

Sometimes it’s all I can do not to start screaming.

I probably don’t need to lie over something so small. I could be honest. I could just tell my wife that I need to be alone for a while. Though I worry that she’ll think something is wrong, and I really don’t want to scare her. It’s a bad excuse, I know it is. Lying is wrong, there’s no excuse for it. It’s the coward’s way out. But I know my wife, she’ll have questions. Questions will lead into discussions and I don’t have the energy to get into it.

I love my wife. This all makes it sound like I’m trying to get away from her and it’s not that. I just know her well enough to know what she’s like. She’s fiercely intelligent and insanely sharp which often makes me feel like I’m on the witness stand. I have to carefully choose how I answer or else she’ll find a hole in my argument and suddenly I’ve lost a grasp of what I was trying to say. So, sometimes lying is easier. Again, I’m not proud of this.

A white lie is still a lie. If I keep this up she’ll probably think I’m having an affair.

I snort at the idea the moment it comes into my head. If only I had the energy. I don’t think I could conceivably have time to romance another woman in between juggling work and home. I don’t know how people do it, to come up with cover stories, alibis, and enough emotional bandwidth to maintain two different relationships. The level of coordination and organization it would need is beyond me at this point.

I wonder whether I’m depressed. I can’t tell whether I am or not. I’m not unduly stressed out. The pandemic has definitely changed things but overall everything is okay. I’m grateful to be able to do my job from home but now it feels like there’s more work in the day. It’s hard to break away from it and I find myself still thinking about tasks long after I’ve shut my work laptop. There’s this sense of pressure that is new like I’m having to prove that I’m working because no one can actually see me working. It’s weird. No one has made me feel like I’m slacking, but still, I’m definitely trying to compensate for something.

The kids are at home too which also makes things hard. Again, I’m grateful that they’re old enough to know to get their homework done and organize themselves. They sometimes need a little nudge but that’s way better than some of my colleagues who spend half the work meeting trying to push their kids out of the camera view.

Work finishes later now; I tend to clock off around 7 or just past 7. There’s no commute now so it’s straight to dinner. I do miss the commute though, that quiet time in my car as I’m driving home.

Before the pandemic, I would go hit the gym for a quick session but now the gyms are closed I try to go for a run instead. I don’t bother when it’s raining, which is all the bloody time.

After dinner, it’s spending some time with the kids, helping with complicated math homework, which is fast approaching a point where it will be beyond me. Then a little later it’s their bedtime. Then it’s ours.

Then we do it all again the next day.

Life, it seems, is beginning to wear me out. I can’t remember the last time I felt energized and ‘raring to go’. Nowadays, my head feels like it’s in a constant state of fog. On the surface, everything is going well. Work is, well it’s work, but hardly any surprises there. And at home, Sophie seems happy. Cara, my eldest, is doing really well and her grades are fantastic and my youngest, April, is as boisterous as ever. They seem to be taking everything in their stride.

So, everything is good. It’s more than good.

Except there are moments when my chest does this thing and it’s like I’m suffocating. I can’t really describe it. It’s as if I’m stuck in this really stuffy room and I can’t seem to breathe air in properly. I want to take a deep breath in but I can’t.

It’s not like that every day.

I don’t even know anymore; the days just blur into one and I’m going through the motions like being caught in the spin cycle of a washing machine. Sometimes halting temporarily before starting again, round and round and round.

And in moments like that, I just need a timeout. I go into my car and drive off. I have to physically leave because I know someone will inevitably see me sat in the car and come knocking to find out what I’m doing.

Sitting in my car makes me feel like I’m in my own private insulated pod, protected from the world. Outside is the chaos and inside it’s just me. I close my eyes and bask in the silence. No 5-minute meeting notifications, no sorry news updates about how crap the world is, none of it.

Once in a while, I’ll go over to McDonald’s and have a burger with some chips when the craving hits. Not because I’m really hungry but because I find the whole thing nostalgic. It reminds me of simpler times when I used to have a Happy Meal at the back of my dad’s car.

When I’m done, I throw away all the evidence. I then head home back to my family and have dinner with them.