Enter The Crone

A meandering exploration of my current state of mind...

It doesn’t happen overnight. I have been circling it for some time.

At around age 45, my eyesight took a ‘nosedive’, and I began to experience a significant downhill decline in nearly all aspects of life. Half a decade before that, my social standing had already diminished significantly. Now I feel fully in it. Age 55 and ticking…

My first grandchild is scheduled to be born this week. Induction begins tomorrow/today—in less than 6 hours. When I was born, my mother carried me dangerously past term (by 6 weeks, according to her), and I was so large they had to pull me out with forceps. This might explain my chronic, classic headtilt. I am living proof that a traumatized nervous system can become stuck to some degree in a state of ‘having a hard time’. I am a good person, having a hard time for large segments and in many areas of life.

So many things are different now, but the mysteries of life—birth and death—remain mysteriously and curiously similar over time. At least to my perception, many things do not change. And as the saying goes, the more they change, the more things stay the same.

I am playing a gig tomorrow night, which was scheduled before the induction date. Fingers crossed the ‘double booking’ will not create any internal (or external) conflict for me. I am a somewhat underqualified singer in a Rock and Roll band, which I mostly still like. We play many of my own original songs and I feel lucky to play with some very talented musicians and all-around good humans.

There is a good chance my grandson, Jett, will be born Tuesday or even Wednesday. He is not technically ‘due’ until next week, but his momma is ready to explode and having some hypertension. She is over 30—about to be 33 I think, and my son will be 31 next month.

My son was not a sexually active teen or young man, so I was pleasantly surprised when he informed me he was in a serious relationship (nearly two years ago now), then rather quickly moved in with her and told me they were starting to plan to create a family together. Thrilled, I am.

This is all adding up to a new phase of my own life. I have two unruly canine companions that keep me busy and give me some cuddle time, and otherwise, I’ve felt quite lonely the last long segment of time.

I had a five year affair with a man I knew through other friends for more than 30 years, before the p’andemic, off and on during lockdowns, and briefly afterwards; though by then he had moved on and back to his wife (they were separated two years when we got together and he was ‘planning a divorce) and first daughter (he fathered a second daughter with their former baby sitter whilst lying to me despite our ‘open’ relationship the last couple years).

I know what it looks like from this side of things, but I still ‘had to try’. Smiles and sighs. He was abused in different ways than I, and is a known manipulator. Everyone else knew it more than I, or so it seems from here.

The pain of loving someone who was not honest with himself or others still stunts my ability to trust myself or others. Our relationship ended in layers of devastation for me, and minor inconveniences for him. I work on it, but my only attempt at intimacy since then only accented the effect, and drove home how blind I tend to be to my own ‘neurospicy’ divergence. My finances and health were damaged as well, though to be fair, that was all of my own doing, and might have happened even if we had not shared the time we did. We did share some very good times.

I told him, when we first got together, that I would probably help him repair his marriage and he would end up falling back in love with his wife. I have a history of my ex’s returning to their ex’s after trying to love me.

I suppose I am difficult. “Trying” he and I agreed many times. “Hard to Love”, it seems to me (the title of a novel I have in mind to write). I still lament and miss the feeling I had when we were together and I thought he truly did see me and love me. He read my books and listened to my songs and bought me presents and took me places. He let me into his life for some time. He is intelligent, capable, and the kind of prickly asshole I tend to like. When he started changing, lying more, denying any recollection of important conversations and agreements we had made previously, I knew it was an exersize in futility, but I still showed up whenever he called on me, and did all the tough jobs he began hiring me to do. The last one was working for he and his wife doing difficult demolition work in the music store they own. Manly work, in contrast to the feminine things he gave space for earlier in our ‘intimate partnership’.

Still, I do try. I am trying. To love myself. To repair my own self-betrayals. To re-parent myself. To let go of my former selves and become someone…worthwhile. To be the kind of woman I like, the kind of female I hoped to become. It has always been a work in progress.

The last five years have been a slow roll into the crone phase. Letting go of unhealthy relationships and coping strategies has left me with more theoretical time to work on myself.

The quickening and ever-present, ever-faster passage of time finds me feeling further and further behind. Even as I let go of so many lofty goals, I still, somehow, never seem to have enough time.

AI tells me I should replace “further and further” with “increasingly” which reminds me how I have always given less and more fucks than your ‘average bear’.

I spent about two years doing freelance work helping to ‘train’ AI until the company I worked for ‘dropped me like I was hot’, so I understand fully how full of shit it often is, and why. It was trained on and by and for humans, and humans love dolled-up beautiful lies more than ugly, naked truths. AI dishes out consensus as ‘facts’ and asskissing as ‘advice’.

However we try to evolve, we seem to come back to our own self-inflicted demise. No one gets out alive.

Now it’s later than I meant to be up, so goodnight.

~ZGala, April 20th, 2026

(probably edit or delete this sometime, but then again… ..)