Filthy wet night...

I think I figured out why I was so upset with my kid.

On his birthday, when we were taking his little one to her soccer game, he began to attack me in front of her for what sort of parent he felt that I'd been when he was a kid.

She is only 7, but incredibly sophisticated for her age, and she tried to stop him.

He laughed her off.

I got thinking about it and realized that he and I could have a conversation about this, but the time and place was wrong. He was attacking her in a subtle way for loving her grandma, and he was blindsiding me by attacking when he knew I could not respond.

And I got thinking about Thursday night tickle fights and making their beds, and ironing their clothes, and fighting with their dad because he withheld things from them because he didn't feel they were worthy. Not because we couldn't afford it, or they hadn't been good. But because they hadn't been his idea of award winning children. Their dad, my first husband (who I thankfully cut off contact with) used money like a club on us. When I refused to let him batter me and them any more, he met someone else, and then moved out (in that order).

To me, my kids where wonderful. They were amazing and unprecedented. There were simply no others that could touch them.

That's the other problem... after years of comforting them, protecting them from their dad, loving on them, caring about them, fighting until I was emotionally exhausted for them, they've both turned on me because of my imperfect skills.

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I haven't been sleeping well. I get to bed between 2 am and 4 am and can't wake up in the mornings. If I manage to get myself awake, I'm incapable of doing anything more than going back to sleep for a while. I know it's depression, but I absolutely loathe this manifestation of it. "Sleeping late" is frightening to me. It infers that I'm lazy and unmotivated, and have no self discipline. It's deeply embarrassing.

I absolutely have to wake up tomorrow because I slept in today and didn't get my car registration and plates, and will have to take Dean to work, and get myself to my cleaning job. The woman I clean for bought me a car. I, somehow, without breaking the rules I live by, have to get the car and claim it as mine.

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This is the first car I've owned in many, many years. The first in my name, and it's the first time I've taken this responsibility as seriously as I am. It's got to run, and if I have problems with it, I have to be sure I have prudent reserve set aside for repairs. When it's had enough, I have to be the one to buy the next one. There will be no more living off the good grace of others in my life.

My goal, the thing I've been thinking seriously about, is something I heard in a group I belong to.

"Self supporting through our own efforts".

I was raised to feel that only a man could take care of me, that women were incapable. I internalized this for years. I am just starting to break away.

I want my autonomy. I want to be self supporting through my own efforts. I want to be responsible for my own car, insurance, home (to the limit I can be). I want to live or die by my own hand, and stop waiting for the knight in shining armour to come. He's already here. He's inside me.

Full moon rising...

So, I'm pretty sure all the residents where full of crazy pills tonight.

Three serious panic attacks that manifest themselves as... "It's my shower night! NO? It's NOT my shower night? Well, I want one anyway! Who SAYS I can't have one? No, I CAN'T take it tomorrow. My daughter is coming! NO, I don't CARE that she'll be gone before it's shower time! I want a shower! I NEVER GET A SHOWER!" (she gets them... the "shower" is just a symbol to her. It's where her focus turns when she is frightened and confused. Nothing soothes her, either. Not even a shower.)

That one was a little funny, because she's mostly angry, and her anxiety is treatable.

For Dora, not so funny. She's concerned that her little girls are lost. What's worse is that she is going through a med change, and has no PRN anxiety meds ordered.

With Dora, I lead her down to the nurses station where we call both her daughters, who are patient and kind with their mom. They are only little girls in Dora's mind. She's forgotten that they grew up. Or perhaps she dreamed that they were little again, and lost, and needed her. She was easy to manage and tuck in after talking to her girls. The only thing damaged was for the nurse and I who's hearts broke for Dora. How awful it must be to have a delusion feel so real.

Moments later a woman who'd been perfectly fine suddenly paniced and felt she had to go home. NOW! Her name is Beth and I've always loved her. She'd always lived on a farm, loves me and Cass because we both farm, and she's always trusted us.

Tonight the look of betrayal on her face tore me into pieces. When I said, oh, so gently, "Beth... I'd take you home myself, but honey, the home you're looking for is not there any more."

Leah, the nurse and I managed to get an ativan into Beth eventually. And then I sat and gave her a foot rub, praying that the pill would work. Leah turned away in tears. Neither of us knew for certain what to do. We helped Beth call her daughter, but both of us were grim because we knew the damage these calls do to the family. Hearing your mother in desperate tears is not something any of us like to be party to.

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Tonight the sumac, hickories and maple had turned electric colors. And when I came home, the wind had picked up and they'd begun to fall.

Suicide note...

It's been a long time since I felt, really, like killing myself.

Truth to tell, I thought I'd outgrown my self destructive impulses.

But when faced with days like today, all that goes out the window and the call of it returns. "It would be so much easier than this half-assed survival that I call a life."

It didn't take much to set me off today. My kids anger and contempt, my spouses absence, my inability to reach out, loosing the dog because I'm too worthless to have the responsibility to take care of an animal.

First the kid..

It's hard to write about the kid because I'm never sure where reality begins and ends with him and me.

He claims a tortured childhood filled with emotional and physical abuse, I tend to remember something less horrible than that.

I remember when he was born, lying in the hospital thinking of nothing but him for days. But they'd taken him away from me, and put me in the "surgical ward" Back then if you were giving up a child for adoption they just wouldn't let you see it for fear you'd bond with it and then keep it.

I remember refusing food until a kind nurse who knew me came in just as I was being given a tray, and cut up my food for me and gently pushed the tray toward me. I wish, knowing what I know now, that I'd never picked up that fork.

Back then, if you were a pregnant teen of a catholic family you were kept inside, with no contact with the outside world for nine months. After that, I suppose, if you kept the baby, you and your child would be kept in until it was supposed that the neighbors forgot where it came from, however long that happened to take.

After he was born I came home, alone, with empty arms and an empty belly, and my heart ripped out lying in a trash can somewhere.

For the first week I tried to recover from a rough birth, and deal with the visits of friends. I can still remember the sharp pain that sort of went through every part of me and up to my temples. I remember the unintentionally cruel words. No one knows what to say when you give your baby away.

Worst was the attitude of the family, who didn't have a lot of good thoughts for me. In my family, this was not considered a noble and selfless act.

But I remember, really well, my mom saying just one thing. "If you don't go get him and bring him home, I'll do it".

Well... I honestly don't know why I did it. Maybe at that point I just couldn't handle the pressure of her hating me any more. Maybe it was the torn out heart, and his heart beating separate from mine. But eventually I did go get him and bring him home.

Then I was 17 with a mother who (not surprisingly) still hated me. She was mad and didn't want me to "get away with it". She wanted me to "sleep in the bed I made". Live a life of disgrace with an infant that was also a disgrace.

But how can a 17 year old look down at the infant she'd brought into this world, knowing that it would forever be labeled, along with her, as damaged, "bad", unworthy. Looking at a baby you love, knowing you'd brought this precious thing into the world to be despised by everyone.



Back then there were support groups for young single mothers. I was in one. I was the youngest. I remember the horror of being there with the young-twenties and older teens, and, lacking a better idea, spreading a blanket on the floor for my baby to doze on.

Through a freak event, and desperate move, I ended up living with a much older man for a while. The pressure put on me by my mom was unrelenting. I had to leave, and even though this situation was horrible, at least I was in a new environment, and treated as a new toy by this man. He was ugly and fat and filthy. But he seemed totally enthralled by me. He got tired of me after a year or so.

Then I re-met an old boyfriend, got pregnant by him at 19 and finally thought I'd found an escape.

I remember my journals through those years. They were horrible, filled with words of self hatred and pain. I destroyed those journals years later, after my husband looked at one, trying to see if he could catch me being unfaithful (he couldn't). I poured bleach on them in the bathtub, smashed them as my nose burned from the fumes, and then poured the mess into trash bags as pulp. My blistered hands were all that were left of those years of horror, pain and misery.

Except for two things. My boys.

Yes I remember screaming at them, swatting them, grabbing their arms hard enough to leave finger-print bruises and tossing them in their room. No, not hard enough to injure them. Just their hearts and souls where damaged, because today, neither of them are talking to me.

But I also remember rocking for hours and hours and hours with one or both in my lap. Laughing at their little boy antics. Cheering their little successes. Teaching them to sew, or multiply or plant potatoes. Helping them give their stuffed animals clever names. I remember the good times, too. I remember telling them both a million, trillion times how much I loved them and how wonderful they were.

But neither of them do. I know this sounds suspect, but they both remember things that never-absolutely-never and could not have happened.

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So, where to go from here with it? I've told them I am sorry. I've acknowledged their feelings, and never once have I said one word of anything other than complete and total humble repentance. Even when they said things that didn't happen.

And yet still, they rage at me, and I at myself.

The oldest lives at home with his clinical depression (that he flat refuses to treat). At odd, vulnerable moments he attacks me for the type of parent I was.

I'm looking for forgiveness, but I'm not sure who needs to forgive me. Am I waiting until their rage subsides, so that I can explain to them that I wasn't entirely criminal and monstrous? That my way of parenting didn't come out of a vacuum, but from never, once, in my entire life having been loved or supported myself? That I did better than their grandparents did, by a good, long bit? And maybe, maybe, someday at least having them acknowledge that I was horrible, but I was good, too?

Or is it myself that has to forgive me? I can't. No matter how I think of it, I can't let go of the feeling that I carried my unworthy existence on down to them, and made them undesirables, too.

The few adults in my life when I was young that showed support for me where men that were attracted to pretty young girls.

My mother detested my inability to agree with her on her strange, skewed perception of the world. She played dirty and hurt me any way she could because she absolutely hated me, what I thought, and how I perceived myself

My father only wanted me close so that he could press against me. The times he managed to get me alone and touch me, I blamed myself for being an idiot. I'd been warned and let my guard slip. Stupid, stupid, stupid...

Ahhhh... excuses, excuses. I want the boys to let go of the excuse of bad parenting and get on with their lives, but I don't do the same for myself.

Thread and fabric..

So, today is my kid's twenty-ninth birthday and apparently, as always, he hates my guts.

His little one was here and she had a soccer game this morning, and it was obvious that he was in a bad mood from the start.

He had to remind me what a horrible parent I was when he was a kid.

Whether or not I was is kind of immaterial at this point. I wasn't the worst, and I soooooo, sooo, soooo was not the best. Again, it doesn't matter so much any more. I'm a good parent now, and as a grandparent, I say with no false modesty whatsoever that I kick ass.

Now, what to do about all these little fits and spells he has where he wants to rip my guts out for things I did in my teens.

I'm thinking that (since he's been living with me for years, and his brother resents the living hell out of it anyway) that it's time this little one moved out. He's obviously being damaged further by having to live here. He's got money to move out if he chooses to. He stays here for no other reason than he can.

Sometimes creating the post and then adding the title seems to be the way to go.

Last night at work Gordon asked where I had been. Bewildered I said "Well, Gordon, you ordered me out of your room last night! I figured I'd pestered you enough for a day and sent Kathy in to get you ready for bed!"

He snatched my hand to his lips and kissed it. I gave him a quick hug and muttered "You old coot.."

It was a pretty horrible night where I got there late (could NOT wake up in the morning to take Dean to work so I could have the car and get there on time) and I felt over worked. Seriously didn't get some of my work done and just didn't care.

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Still haven't sent the lawsuit response. I'm terrified. I'm going to ask Dean to take it to the lawyer and vet it out before it's sent.

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I wish someone would read my posts... someone with whom they resonate and who would respond. I feel kind of empty and alone here.

Indignantion

There are a lot of things causing me to feel pretty worried today, but I think inside I’m building a tiny spark of “calm”.

I did post to my favorite message board about credit issues. I asked if calling creditors and informing them of an intent to declare bankruptcy would stop legal action.

Of course the answer was no. If that were true, no one would even bother with bankruptcy, right? Call and tell you’re creditors, and whoops! No more problems with them?

Anyway, I then sent an e-mail to my sister-with-the-bossy-attitude that I wasn’t mad but felt she was underestimating my problems.

I’ve thought about this over night and came up with a list of things that I don’t think my sister was adding into the equation before she came to her conclusion.

...I am not a phone person. It can take me a week and sometimes narcotics to get myself into a state of mind where I can make a simple phone call, and it’s incredibly stressful for me. I don’t do these things easily or well.

...The debt is not mine. I, personally, and not declaring bankruptcy, and it would be stupid of me to do so at this point, as I have a very modest amount of debt (a couple vet bills, a credit card that I defaulted on, and a couple doctor bills in my name). DH is going to have to be the one to take action and there is no way on earth I, PERSONALLY am going to advise him to tell creditors something that may or may not be true.

...What I WILL advise DH to do is deal honestly with the creditors, and work within the system to settle the debts. Scrupulous honestly.

....One of the things that really pushed my buttons is that she stated that we’re going to LOOSE EVERYTHING if I didn’t take her advice instantly.

Now… Listen here, missy. I’m already stressed enough without vile edicts and declarations that I’m “GOING TO LOOSE EVERYTHING”. Particularly since that statement isn’t true. Saying horrible things trying to get me to take an action that is NOT in my best interest is NOT a good way to help me at this point.
The legal action is already in the works. It’s far to late to call the two creditors that are already fighting over us and start making false statements. We’re going to have to see them in court very shortly and I don’t want former lies hanging over our heads. DH and I need to keep this situation as clean as possible.

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All that said, it’s a pretty morning, and I work tonight, tomorrow and Monday I think. There should also be a paycheck waiting at work for me.

I need to send out the ISP bill today, and drop a check off at the mortgage company.

DH and I also need to set up a good grocery list.

That and mail out the response to the lawsuit to the appropriate parties.

And make a clean, clear copy of our spending record for court.

Ok. Those thoughts pretty much just terrified me.

Seven kinds of "suck"..

Ok... with the infinant variations of "suck" my week can be, I've come across a total different breed.

Delightful older sister keeps contacting me (through IM and phone) and giving me her take on things, and telling me certain things need to be done instantly.

Unfortunately, she's not listening to the real problem (i.e. the debt problem is not in my name, and she's barking up the wrong tree), and I don't give a shit about taking politcal action on the wrongs coorporate America is heaping on the poor populace.

What I care about right now is finding a car to get me back and forth to work for a reasonable amount of time. What I care about is getting my husband out of the worst of the problems and teaching him the skills to prevent problems in the future.

What I care about is whether or not I'll have a job long enough to collect a miserable paycheck.

The fluffy bunny was just because it was there and made me feel good for a moment.

What I need to do is start keeping a record, on a spreadsheet of our spending. I need to keep careful track and develope a plan for each month that meets our needs. What I need to BEGIN thinking about is an approach for this lawsuit we're enduring, and what to expect and do in court.

What I don't need is extrainious things like calling creditors that are currently suing me and (lying) telling them I'm declaring bankruptcy in hopes that they'll stop their madness.

DANG, now that I think of it, that's a question I'll post on one of my message boards... I'll be back (maybe tonight, maybe not).