(written in 2004. We would divorce three years and a baby later)
My live-in boyfriend had cheated on me. It was a public embarrassment -- everyone knew. During the struggle that culminated in infidelity, he hit me for the first time and said horrible things to me. He came and went as he pleased. He was cold. Hostile. Brutal. Defiant. I was pleading, resentful, enraged and exposed. My response to this emotional sinkhole? Let's get married. And we did.
My marriage was to be a baptism. A sacred ceremony to save me from my sinking shame.
For me and my husband marriage became proof to the world that we were indeed lovable and able to love. Normal. Acceptable. The actual ceremony took place -- after just two days of planning -- on Halloween.
Appropriate.
Our tentative partnership was born from mutual need. Aren't most? But our individual needs were more desperate and choking than most. Union didn't ease the terror, but twisted it. We didn't fill each other up. We went about bashing the vessels.
Not too long after the wedding, we were back where we began. You cannot (I hope) imagine the verbal bludgeons that one person can use on another. Fat. Disgusting. Loser. My mother is critically ill and he hopes she dies. My brother is in jail and he hopes he gets raped. My sister committed suicide and he's glad. Physical violence ranges from kicks and punches to litter boxes dumped on my head and his ass wiped on my face. I am not joking.
This is my husband. He's supposed to protect me. I am full of screams that don't come. Sorrow and loss and rage and recrimination. I allow it. I'm still here.
The shame from which this unholy union was born is the shame that keeps me here.
Here's the kicker. No one suspects it. I'm a rising star in my industry. Strong-willed and outspoken. I'm an independent feminist. I kept my name. He is amiable and considerate. The picture of the liberal 30-something man. We appear united to all, while our home is a burning bunker.
To be fair, there have been splashes of sweetness. He is childlike sometimes, and I want to protect him. His vulnerability and need seem accessible then. I feel like I glimpse his humanity. I feel like I can reach him. But they're only splashes.
Now I crave kindness. I long for loyalty. I dream of a steadfast man who will love me completely. Someone I can love without fear. That's still what marriage means to me. But marriage won't wash you clean, and it won't save you. If you're looking for salvation, look somewhere else.
...but then, you already knew that. She died on November 23, 2003.
I am preparing to move by trying to get rid of things. It's slow going, particularly since I've been nursing a wounded heart. However, I just found something I thought was lost forever. It is a notebook containing my thoughts on my mother's death, written on 12/05/03. I would like to share them with you. Thank you for your indulgence.
This is the notebook I bought for my mother the second week she was in the hospital. That was in October. She told me several months before that she had always dreamed of being a writer. I never knew. I urged her to buy a notebook and a pen. She never did. I bought her a book on writing. She said she loved the title; something about freeing the writer within. I imagine she held it in her hands while she sat in her worn, brown recliner as the light from her hand-picked and long-coveted circus glass lamp bounced distractingly off the book's laminated cover. I imagine she looked at it absently with bemused warmth in her heart toward me, then let it drop as her thoughts skittered elsewhere and her hand eased back onto her wine glass or clutched at the remote control.
She never read it, that's certain.
She was already gone from herself, and gone from me, too, by then. When she was rushed to the hospital soon after, though, I perceived a grand opportunity to stake out a piece of my mother for my own. I bought this notebook. I located the discarded guide on writing. I wrote an earnest letter professing my desire for her to write while recovering. I offered to read the book to her.
She wasn't interested in hearing it.
I told her I needed her to fight. I told her I needed her. She cupped my face kindly, looked at me affectionately, and told me a truth.
I do not live my life for you.
The gaze, though, was more than affectionate. It was certain and self-assured. I can't remember ever seeing that particular blend of characteristics on her face before. It was profound. I do not live my life for you.
Later in her hospital stay, she acquiesced a bit, as many do under the often infuriating focus of my will. She said she would fight for me. She said she would take a piece of my liver for her birthday. She would spend 30 years being my friend. She said she was eating well. I bought stacks of vegetarian cookbooks to comfort her grizzled liver for when she went home. She thought it would be soon. She was fine.
One day, though, she was not fine. She was "hanging in there." The next morning her heart stopped and was restarted.
She was now living, but not quite alive.
I was told to hurry home from Houston, but I would likely not make it in time.
I blindly navigated the worst floods, tornadoes, and thick sheets of rain Houston had seen that year to make it to the airport. To beat the clock. I did.
I arrived to wide-open, mossy-colored and yellow-rimmed eyes and two strong hands grasping mine. The breathing machine precluded speech, so I imposed my own interpretations of the vivid expression on her face.
I'm so happy you're here
I love you.
I'm fighting.
I'm fine.
...but here's the thing. The wide eyes and clinging hands could just as easily have been saying, "You're here. Please help me! I'm hurting. I'm afraid. Make this stop."
How can I know?
Next is a haze of days and tubes and machines and sleeping in the visitors' lounge and praying and needing...something. Needing my mommy.
My mom was fading. I would read to her. At first she seemed comforted by this. Then it didn't seem to matter. I became an expert in reading her machines, and I read to myself, aloud. If she knew anything, maybe she knew we were there and we loved her
Before her once-revived heart rested, she no longer belonged with us. With the breathing machine forcing her to stay, she was a beautiful, delicate-finned fish on land, straining for home. That merciless machine would not let her go until we said so.
First the final sucking sound, then terrible silence, then peace. For her. Not me.
We emerged into a stunning lemon yellow day. Where was Houston's meteorological tumult? That would have been appropriate. We had let her go.
We didn't have a choice.
She didn't live her life for us.
When I was married, I would write words on things. All kinds of things. Everywhere. Like other people doodle. Faith. Fidelity. Kindness. Grace. Friendship. Words like that. Words that meant love to me. Things I craved. Rare things. Rare for me, anyway.
My husband liked to date. He liked to hit. He dated when we were dating. He hit when we were dating. Marriage and a baby did not discourage all of that. Can you guess which one hurt me? Sure you can. The dating.
Betrayal.
Betrayal, to me, is breaching faith. Lying. Cheating.
Hitting it what people do. I can take a punch. Lying. Cheating. I'm a little girl who doesn't belong, who is not welcome. Who is alone, scorned, unwanted, betrayed.
Violence, in the upside down world of the abused, is a connection. All that rage is focused on you. An explosion that's about you. You matter enough to hit.
Fucked up, right? I know.
Lying. Cheating. They sever connection. They are abandonment. They emptiness. They are disintegration. They always happen. I will never be safe from them.
Betrayal.
My new therapist is a cool customer. I nattered on about the twisting impact infidelity has on a spirit for awhile. The psychic hemorrhaging it causes. The emotional gangrene. She listened, then tentatively suggested that hitting is a betrayal, too.
It did not resonate. I looked at her like a Labrador struck by the sound of a a dog whistle. I cocked my head. It was a new concept. I don't feel it. My brain says of course it is the truth. My heart doesn't hear it.
Hitting is hitting. Infidelity is betrayal.
I have to work on this. I have to let my hearing brain have a chat with my hardened heart. Hitting is betrayal, too.
Hitting is betrayal. Hitting is betrayal. Hitting is betrayal, too.
Please don't hit me anymore.
I look at this picture and see a powerful wall of killing weather, which it is, kind of, if only symbolically. It is a a picture of my arm after an attack perpetrated by a man who loved me; a man I loved. How does a girl grow into a woman who loves and loves and loves a man who hurts and hurts and hurts her.
Habit.
I am going to transcribe a series of text messages I received from my baby brother this week. He and his wife (referred to as A) moved to my tiny, isolated hometown with no other aim than to help my ill and aging father. My father is a mean old bastard. He was a mean young bastard. I am grieving for the brother to whom I am in many ways a mother. I should not have let him go. Here is our conversation. Enjoy.
Bro: Just letting you know, Dad left the house after asking A and me to look for his wallet. He went to the (store) and bought a 750 ml bottle of LTD whiskey. He drank 3/4 of a bottle through the night, threatened to kill me and A various times, went outside and peed in the yard a couple of times and peed his pants. We stayed away from him and A found him naked sleeping on a bare mattress. We can't stop him and when I told him about how he was he said we could kiss his balls. I am really upset, Boo, Dad was never like this. Grandma, Grandpa and mom would be very upset if they saw him like this. He told me last night that if mom had ever spoken to him the way A talks to him, (mom) would be "bleeding in a corner crying."
Me: He's always been like this, just not to you. It's worse because he's been alone for years. But it's just him, magnified by age and loneliness. Call (cousin) and tell her what's going on. Or (cousin). (Cousin) can help. Be honest with her.
Bro: I've have already been in contact with (cousin) through (cousin). They say remove all of the guns while he is sleeping and I'm doing it tonight. He talks to himself when he's drunk and he refuses to bathe.
Me: He has knives, too.
Bro: All I found was the big knife.
Me: Please be safe. Lock your door at night. Why do you think I slept with a knife under my pillow in high school? He threatened to kill me and/or himself many times.
Bro: I didn't think it would affect me like it has.
Me: He's probably schizophrenic and so was gram. He deserves our pity, but not much else. Don't engage him.
Bro: I won't. I stay away from him and I have not have one drink with him. I try to discourage him. He's so mean to me. I'm remembering so much of his cruelty.
Me: That's actually good, baby. It doesn't feel good, but it is good.
So that's my dad.
The fact the he is probably a schizophrenic gives me pause. He needs help. Mental illness is sucking quicksand, and it's not his fault. However, he refuses help and has brutalized everyone who has tried to love him for decades.
I spent every waking moment from the time I was aware there was a person on Earth who wasn't my mother trying to win this man's love. I spent untold sleepless nights trying to understand him so I could forgive him for his most recent cruelty. Why? So I could love him again. So I could get back on the full-time job of trying to get his attention; struggling to get him to love me like a father should.
I learned to accept the unacceptable, tolerate the intolerable, and see beauty in people who abuse.
That's how girl grows into a woman who loves and loves and loves men who hurt and hurt and hurt her.
Thanks, dad.
I don't love you anymore.
There is something about being hit by a man who hits hard, as hard as he can, like you are a man. It is a singular experience. Jarring. Like being in a prizefight but you've wandered into the wrong weight class. You exit your body and see yourself. You're Rocky Balboa. Head snapping. Spit and blood blend and soar in a slow motion frame. There is something in it that makes you want to stand with a jutting chin a dare them to hit you again. Defiant.
That's all you've got?
Being hit like a car wreck is unlike being hit by a man whose intention is to humiliate. I've now experienced both. The terrorist isn't in it to cut or bruise, but to demoralize and confuse. It is a skittish existance, living with this kind of violence, never knowing when the lights will go off and the knives will come out. This man may slam your head on the hardwood, but he won't often hit you in the face. Not hard, anyway. Not like you're a man.
Still, whether you're facing a closed fist or fighting against someone's fist full of your own hair, your chances of dying are the same, I think. They almost never mean to kill, these men, but you're always pretty sure death is coming. It's not something you fight. It just is. But this hitting hard. This hitting to hurt. I don't know how to understand it. Who hits to break skin and bone? To injure your love? She whose every part you have touched with a reverence like awe. This I don't get. Don't men hit to control? To regain equilibrium? To keep you lost? Ashamed and uncertain? But this hitting to damage, what is it? To leave eggplant stains spreading here and there, bruises that can be measured in multiple inches? Who hits to split a lip into neatly severed segments, so perfect you could easily stitch them yourself if only he had a needle and thread? Blood on the sheets. Blood on the wall. Who hits to leave indigo easter eggs on high, proud cheeckbones? Matching dyed eggs on matching fair shins. Who does that? What drives them? I have to understand.
I don't know this man whose unforgiving foot turned my whole hip heliotrope, one warm night in another year, but I have loved him. He split my lip. He split my heart.
He said it was my fault. I know that's not true. He said he's not sorry. That may, actually, be true. I hit him once. Open hand. Twice. Three times I did it. I am not sorry. He choked me to kill, he said. I scratched his face. I am not sorry.
How could I have loved him? What is that feeling in my heart still? It is the place where my father lived, and the beautiful brother I once adored. One hits to humiliate. One hits to hurt. I moved them from that warm home behind my breastbone and moved these undeserving others in.
Yet still I don't understand. Why would anyone want to make another bleed? A lover bleed? A friend?
But I can tell you something true. Being hit...hit hard. It doesn't hurt. There are no tears. They can't hurt me. Not one of them. I can't feel them. They can't find me. No matter how hard they look. I'm free.
It's 4:08 pm and I've done nothing today. I'm not even dressed. I have so much to do that when I start to think about it my brain shuts down.
Anxiety.
I don't function well when my daughter isn't here. Sometimes I don't function well when she is here, and I don't know how to manage this anxiety.
I imagine, while stuck here, sweating through this lingering anxiety attack, that if I had a partner -- a husband or a boyfriend who actually wanted to spend time with me -- there would be no days with me emotionally and physically stuck. My home would be full of noise and joy and we would all do our parts and so much living and loving would get done. I would never be anxious and I would never be overwhelmed.
And my house would be neat and we'd have real meals!
I play this fantasy out in my head and it loops and before long the sitting and the sweating are accompanied by the crying.
Sometimes, it gets so bad that I want to ask my ex-husband to please come live with us for awhile. He hit me, cheated on me, verbally tortured me, and I want him here. Sometimes. I want the shape of another person here.
Because I don't want to be all alone all the time. I want PEOPLE. My own people. God I want a family.
My friend Barbara says some people just get fucked. Some people just don't get to have families.
OK...self pity ahead....
I want a family. Why don't *I* get a family? I would be a good partner and mom. I know I would. And I'd be happy. I would never take a minute for granted.
I know I am blessed. I adore my daughter. My life is touched daily by people who define what it is to be a good friend. I adore my friends. I do.
Why can't I stop with the feeling sorry for myself and just live the life that I DO have? It doesn't suck. Not that much, anyway...
I'm sort of having a problem with blogging because it seems so very narcissistic. I mean, to do it every day, and stuff. Seriously, who has stuff that's interesting to talk about every day? And, frankly, believe it or not, there is plenty of stuff I still don't feel like talking about.
ALSO I'm kind of stuck on this idea that every thing I write has to be literary, in some way. That makes blogging not fun, because who can write a heartbreaking work of staggering genius (which is up next on my reading list) every day?
I surely can't. I can't even get fully dressed every day. It's a crap shoot.
...but this is a mental health blog, and I think I might get more out of it if I actually, you know, blogged.
Right now my life lacks shape. It always has, really. This is the nature of an environment "managed" by two alcoholics. I never witnessed any structure, and I haven't the vaguest notion how to create or impose it. So my life feels something like a wind tunnel.
This is bad, on almost every level, but it's particularly bad because I am passing this chaos along to my daughter, which I do not want to do. I want to create a home for her, and -- even after a year and a half here -- our apartment feels like I've rented storage for our stuff but we also sleep here.
How in the world am I going to do this? I feel panicky when I even start to think about it.
But our lives need shape. Routines. Plans. Schemes.
OK.
Starting tomorrow.
Podcast. Thesis. Haircut. NO WRITING OR TEXTING that man. Yes THAT man. No more. He is unhelpful. He could be helpful, but he is not...so that's that. If he isn't gonna stand up and be my friend then he is not my friend.
Structure. Goals. Faking it till making it.
Perhaps a daily to-do list will help?
And please don't be surprised if the navel gazing becomes watching-paint-dry-boring. I can't be literate and regularly take out the garbage at the same time! I don't have it in me. ;)
Louise Erdrich must know me. I have never been able to explain why I love her books, exactly. Now, reading The Painted Drum, I think I must have read all of her other books so I could read this one, now. It's a healing book, but it's a hurting book, too. I'm writing here now because I've had to stop reading for a few minutes. I've had a bit of an anxiety attack, I guess. Melodramatic? Maybe. But this book is singing over deep, old wounds. It's also holding a mirror before me under flourescent lights, and I've needed to give myself an unflinching look for some time, now.
I've stopped to put some powerful passage or other from this book on this page for several days, but haven't yet done it. I am transcribing the following passage. It will probably only resonate with me, but after trying and failing to explain the disconnect I feel from my father, and maybe everyone in the world but my Little Fire, Louise explained it to me...
Shawnee stared briefly at her mother, then looked away. It seemed to Shawnee that she had been on a long trip, that she had gone somewhere far away and her mother was left behind. Her mother was back in a place where nothing had happened to Shawnee, but in truth everything had happened. She had been to the edge of life. Apitchi and Alice had gone there too. Shawnee had dragged her brother and sister back. She hadn't allowed them to die. Or herself, either. Now that she was back on this earth, she was lonely. She wanted someone to say to her, Shawnee, you saved them. Not look at her with eyes that said, You burnt the house down.
Italics are Erdrich's.
I just needed to post this. Maybe I'll be able to make sense of it later. Not now. There is just so much there.
I will not be broken forever.
-------------------------
I've been reading about The Painted Drum.
This strikes at the heart of what I'm feeling, these days...
WOODROOF: What Erdrich has given us is a picture of Faye's profound solitude and struggle to connect with another person.
Ms. ERDRICH: (Reading) `Perhaps it was easier to live with the longing for Kurt, the uncertainties even to indulge the unnecessary and maybe insulting secretive precautions. To deal with him in the everyday world of sorrow and surprise takes the mythology out of the relationship, but it is more than that. I feel his suffering when he's near as a physical weight, crushing one heartbeat and the next, squeezing my breath. The madness of sorrow emanates from him. It enters and unfurls in me. It revives my own pain, unsolvable, alive.'
But her character learns, in the end...
Ms. ERDRICH: (Reading) `Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that. And living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on Earth. You are here to risk your heart.'
Yeah...
I don't know quite what to say here, but I feel as though I should say something.
That's my family, probably sometime around 1977. That's my father, in the dark glasses. I am the oldest child in the picture. The smiling girl behind her father.
My father. Contributor of 50% of my DNA and more than 50% of my emotional baggage. I don't understand him at all, and my feelings toward him are completely inaccessible to me. But I know I don't want him to die. He has been so ill for so long, and he may die. There's nothing I can do about that.
My father is an alcoholic. He will tell you he is not. He will also tell you my mom, who died of alcoholism, didn't really drink that much until the last couple of years of her life.
He is an artist at historical revision.
He is an alcoholic, a serious alcoholic, and has been for as long as I have known him.
He smokes. A lot. He has forever, I think.
Because of these things, his heart is failing. His lungs are failing. He's bleeding internally, they don't know from where, and has required a couple of pints of blood a day for the last several days. He can't go on like this forever, but I don't want him to die.
The only thing that I know for sure about my feelings for him is that. I don't want him to die. I wish he would live, but even if he doesn't die, he probably won't do that. I don't think he knows how. Its not that he doesn't want to, he's just incapable of making the choices and performing the actions that equal living a life. He's always just survived. This is how he taught all of his children to navigate their lives, and we just survive.
I don't want to live that way anymore.
When I think of my father now, I get an image of barely restrained panic. His panic. He's always been afraid, I think. Of course, that's not how I saw him as a child. He was a towering figure. I adored him and I was terrified of him. But even these images aren't fully formed, because my childhood and much of my adulthood has been characterized by barely restrained panic.
I only recognize this now, of course, after having been on this journey of discovery for several years. I entered therapy three years ago, I left my husband three years ago, three years ago I began to feel. The first thing that shot through my saline sub-conscious like the gushing oil geyser at the bottom of the Gulf was panic. Abject. Consuming. Of course, it had been there all along, waiting to erupt. That's when I started seeing a psychiatrist who wrote peaceful words on life saving squares of paper that meant medicine to keep me from shattering into shards of glittering anxiety that could never be pieced back together.
So I learned to panic and not shatter, and I learned that a lifetime of not panicking had cost me dearly. It has, in a sense, cost me my life, because to restrain the panic I dissociated, and lost access to many memories.
Yes, my memory of my life is murky. The memories I can easily retrieve, I'm not sure I want. They are pieces of the puzzle of my personality. A few have sharp edges and are vividly colored. Some are strangely cut and painted with muted impressions. Most are just missing.
I don't feel like writing about the memories I do have tonight.
I just want to say that my dad was not a good father. He was a physical and emotional terrorist. He sat us down solemnly, sometimes, when we were younger than the children in that picture. He said he was sorry, but we were bad children, and he was going to have to send us to the house of correction. He said he was sorry, but we were bad children, and soon he would have to put us up for adoption. He was sorry. It was not his fault. We were bad children.
But he's my Dad, and, in some very damaged part of my heart, he's even my daddy.
He can be charming and funny; a sweet, disarming child. He can be brutal and cruel in his gasping panic.
He is a boy. He has no impulse control. He says what he thinks, and it's usually mean. He throws things. He breaks things. He makes people bleed. He leaves handprints and large bruises.
He's surely mentally ill. Certainly depressed. Maybe bipolar.
I am afraid of him, but I don't want him to die.
I am afraid of him. I hate saying that.
I feel as though I should be there as he declines. More than that, I feel as though I should want to be there. I don't. But I don't want him to die.
We talk on the phone nearly every night. Sometimes I hear, singing from his phone to mine, a yearning for connection. He wants me to tell him things, what I feel and think. He wants me to ask for advice. I have never and would never think of asking him for advice about anything. He wants my heart to be open to him, and it just isn't. He wants to be a father to me. I don't know how to explain to him that he just isn't, not in the way he wants to be. He never will be. That connection is severed and the cord has been carted away.
When I'm physically near him, as I was when he had a health crisis a few months back, he terrorizes me again. He charms, lulls, then attacks. He's merciless. I can't think. I can't remember. I'm the seven year old in the picture. I can't breathe. How can he still do that to me?
But I'm terrified he will die.
I started this post to try to explain this to you, these feelings I have about not wanting my father to die, but I can't. I don't understand. I'm all alone in the world but for my daughter. I feel physically connected to nothing and no one but her. I don't have any "people" to claim as my own, not really. No place I could go and stay if things really go wrong and someone will play with my daughter and make me something to eat and let me put my head in their lap and cry until I'm done. No place to rest. What does it matter if he dies or not? He's no safe place to me.
But please God don't let him die.
I like this word. The space between things. This is where I've been living. I've called it purgatory, but I like this word better. It's not dogmatic. It doesn't suggest punishment or purification. It just is. A space. Between things.
I scribbled this word on a note, folded it as tiny as I could, dropped it in a bottle and set it in the current that still runs between my lately lost love and me. A mea culpa. I fought for a thousand days against this zwischenraum with both fists and both feet. I raged to escape this space. He stayed at a distance safely away from my flailing and made himself a meal. I think he speaks German. He knows where we are.
I look at this space, now, anew. It is peaceful, this zwischenraum. I can float here. I won't drown. Not like Hamlet's Ophelia. I can watch the clouds meet and merge and transform and move along.
Maybe. I'm ferocious. Impatient. It is impatience that makes zwischenraum a purgatory. It's a Chinese finger trap, this space between.
Things swirl here, beyond my reach. They won't be captured. They won't be bent. They won't be told and tamed. I am a teller and a tamer. Failed. Maybe I've been here forever.
I guess I should make myself a meal.
I have never loved a man who was not difficult, and I have only once loved a man who loved me. I have never loved a man who could be very nice to me for very long.
I know a lot of that is on them. Some of it is on me.
The transition from my ex's wife to Mercury's significant other was seamless. He was not the reason I left my husband. The reasons are detailed in earlier posts, but there is some shame in the idea that, while my daughter's health and well-being was a huge motivating factor in my decision to end my marriage, it never really occured to me to consider my own.
Then I had this friend. This brilliant, fun and funny man. Sweet, sensitive and strong. He took an interest in me. He thought I was also brilliant, fun and funny, sweet, sensitive and strong. He loved to talk to me and write to me and he did it all the time.
I would say his emergence as a factor in my life was like water to a woman who has been lost in the desert for 40 years, but I was so dehydrated and disoriented I didn't recognize the drink. I was just happy to have someone to talk to.
I had a friend.
This friend, it turned out, loved me. One day he wrote...
As if how I feel about you isn't obvious by now, I just want to state these things so that you know them and I don't regret never saying them to you in a serious way.
You're the one I think about all the time.
I miss you when you're not around.
You're the bumblebee I'm looking for in the Blind Melon video.
You're the most loving mother I've seen.
I just want you to be happy, and I don't know that I've ever really seen you that way.
To say I was stunned would be the understatement of eternity. It wasn't obvious to me. Not in any way. I was a woman in the desert who didn't recognize water, for goodness sakes. That such a wonderful man would see anything in me but a way to pass empty hours in conversation was just beyond my comprehension.
I began to think maybe
I was worth something, after all.
Over time, with the love and support of this man and a circle of sisters-of-my-heart, I managed to get my daughter and I out of the potentially deadly physical and emotional no man's land in which we lived. My friend and I were now a couple. That fast. I am neither proud nor ashamed of this fact. It just is, and here we are today...
And I think it's over.
I don't even recognize him anymore. He surely doesn't see in me the bumble bee he once wanted to steal away and marry, as he told a mutual friend before I had any idea. If he does, he doesn't say it. I'm pretty sure he doesn't see it.
How did this happen?
There is no denying these years haven't been easy ones. He carries with him some very heavy burdens and faces great challenges that are his and only his to share. I won't talk about them here. But he is not an easy man. He is ridiculously easy, yet impossible, to love. For me, anyway.
As I told him yesterday, loving him is a very lonely thing.
But this is the thing. It wasn't always lonely. Once it was as fullfilling as carrying a baby inside of your body. It was nurturing. It was joyful. It was just bursting with possibilities. I believed in him. He believed in me. I had forgotten that.
I was going through old emails tonight and remembered when we were truly friends, partners, lovers, confidantes...
Where did that go?
...and I read my side of the conversations and wonder where did
I go?
I was so much more interesting then! I like the way I talked. I like the way I thought. In my mind, I like the way I moved and sounded and was. I like me, then. You know what's different?
He liked me then. I don't think he likes me anymore.
There is no doubt that the last year of my life has been the most difficult year ever. Terrible things happened in other years, but I wasn't "there", remember? So I've been reliving all of those things -- but "here" this time -- transitioning to a new city and into a challenging graduate program and fulltime single motherhood and finally trying to integrate these shattered parts of myself into a coherent identity and trying to be the mom my truly amazing child deserves...and sprinkle in a car accident that could have killed us...well...
I'm always poor and I'm always scared and I'm always trying so hard.
I don't think I've been all that sexy or smart or interesting.
I think I've been a wreck of epic proportions.
I know I've been demanding and demeaning and difficult and needy and awful, really.
NOW...I'm not going to do what I do and let him off the hook. He's been distant and silent and secretive and cruel and angry and aggressive.
There was a period of time last year during which I believe we tried to destroy each other, and nearly succeeded, actually. I can't tell you why. I don't
know why.
But these things are not who we are. These things are certainly not who we used to be together. We made each other better. We gave each other hope.
We made each other happy.
This, however,
is what we have been to each other for far too long. People who love each other but are scared to death of each other because we push and hurt each other.
I think we can't save it. I'm not sure either one of us wants to try. I don't trust him. He's given me every reason not to, which doesn't work well with my basic disposition toward mistrust.
But God dammit I love him.
How do I stop loving him?
Maybe I'll just ask him how he stopped loving me, and try that.
Depression
Generalized Anxiety Disorder
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder
All of those labels apparently apply to me. And I'm glad someone gave them to me. I really am. I needed them. When I left my ex I was such a mess of undefined but overwhelming emotions, these labels gave me some way to organize everything I was doing and feeling and experiencing. They allowed me to put one foot in front of the other, which -- some days -- was a monumental task.
My therapist held my hand during this period. When I left Houston, and left her, she was proud that I was no longer recounting my more harrowing experiences like I was reading the week's grocery list. She gave me some of these labels, and hooked me up with specialists of all kinds who gave me others, and gave me medicine.
That medicine saved me life, and my daughter's life, I have no doubt. I extend that to my daughter, because if I couldn't function, I couldn't care for her. At the time I likened it to me getting my oxygen mask on before putting hers on. I needed to be able to breathe.
So I've been breathing.
But since it became clear that my health insurance would soon lapse and I wouldn't be able to afford more, so I began tapering my mood stabilizers so I wouldn't fall off a cliff (btdt, not doing it again), I began thinking that I didn't want them anymore, anyway.
Since I have been off of them, I've experienced some not-so-fun things...but I've also touched base with the me I used to know many years ago. She had many weaknesses I'd like to work on, but she was also amazing in so many ways.
One characteristic of this pre-label me that I appreciate is she was not easily intimidated. She may have suffered a lot of abuse at home...but in the world nothing scared her. She was funny, irreverent, edgy...she had a kind of masculine confidence that only survivors have.
She was a survivor.
This label-wearing-mood-stabilizer-taking person had little in common with the me I've always known.
I know these labels are mine. They're accurate. I don't hate them. I know those medicines saved my life, but I am READY to be me again.
Because understand, I did feel some power in my abusive environments.
"You can't hurt me."
I can't tell you how many times that thought saved me. You can do anything you want to me, but you can't hurt me. I'm not even here.
Now I think I can say "You won't hurt me."
Maybe I can find a way to integrate the survivor identity with "aware" identity, because one thing is for 100% sure...
I'm. So. Sick. Of being a victim. I rebel against that label. I won't wear it. I'll own everything else, but I will not wear that label.
It's not me.
So. I've been doing my reading on intimate aggression, and rather than being paralyzed by anxiety, I am so excited! My professor asks us to email him a couple of questions ahead of class. Here are some of my thoughts (remember, since it's an email, not an essay, the terminology is not always academic lol).
this text rocks.
The inset on resilience reminded me of something. One thing that was very important for me in my relationships w both my father and my ex was that I protect them. Since abusers, once identified, were essentially outcast, i didn't want anyone to think that of them. I used to say to myself "they are not throw-away people!" But it seemed to me that once a person was identified as an abuser, that was, to the world, the only thing they were. That wasn't ok with me, 'cause I knew it wasn't true! Why ruin their lives because they were awful sometimes? It made no sense to me, even if they were hurting me a lot.
Do you think this ostracism of abusers was a backlash to a culture that for centuries has accepted and even encouraged intimate abuse?
Do you think it's time for the pendulum to come back to the middle and recognize that abusers, like victims, are people engaged in a transactional process involving mutually contingent interaction and that they are not just rotten to the core if they hit? That they are people as in need of intervention as the victims, in large part because the behavior may be mutually contingent? This helps victims, too, in that they're less likely to feel society will judge them as "weak" or "stupid."
Wouldn't it be helpful for us as professionals to try to remove the stigma from both parties so early intervention is possible?
After all, this idea put forth in the Age of Oprah that a victim need not feel shame while the abuser should shows little understanding of the dynamics within an aggressive intimate relationship. If there is shame to be felt, everyone is gonna feel it. That's just true. I don't need a single study to support that hypothesis, 'cause I know it's true.
...and the family becomes a closed system with "tight controls on information transmission."
Who does that help, really? And isn't that what we're really supposed to want? To help families be healthy? That's what I want, anyway.
Plus, the idea that "if he hits you once, he will hit you again, so leave then and never come back" is so rarely gonna be effective, based on social exchange and investment models. And maybe it even shouldn't, since, through the lens of family systems theory, these families are often characterized by periods of adaptation and stability, and conflict theory notes they are characterized by both conflict and harmony. So, while the bathwater is pretty nasty and toxic, why is it always necessary to throw the baby out with it?
The resilience inset suggests primary intervention efforts are best aimed at promoting competence and promoting positive outcomes while not ignoring risk-focused strategies. I really like the sound of that!
I also liked the idea that damaged families are seen not only as damaged. Because that's usually the end of the story and we folks from damaged families end up feeling pretty crappy and stuck. I like being though of as being challenged and able to address challenges adaptively.
Remember how panicked I was last week? Who would have thought I'd approach this particular class with excitement and hope? Great reading! :)
Those are just some cursory thoughts I had during reading. My thoughts are already evolving, as I read more, and I can't imagine what ideas I might have by the end of class.
The chapter in our text on intimate aggression ends with what the authors are willing to say they assume about the phenomenon. I found it so interesting I will transcribe it...
We assume that control is at the heart of intimate aggression. We assume that intimate aggression is simultaneously situated as a learned behavior; as a pattern of interaction; as a phenomenon that perpetrators and recipients react to, understand, and act on within prevailing discourses of gender, intimacy, sexuality, and violence; and as an occurrence that is deeply rooted in hierarchy, patriarchy, racism, heteronormativity, and inequity. We assume that intimate aggression is filled with contradictions and tensions: it occurs in the context of a loving relationship, it is shocking and hurtful behavior, and it may be preceded and followed by everyday acts of care/hostility/concern/control. We construct perpetrator/victim and/or mutually aggressive partners as active agents who are embedded in a context of romance and joy, control and dominance, patriarchy and equality. In addition, we assume that a both/and perspective can advance our understanding of the paradoxes and the processes of intimacy and aggression.
Sourcebook of Family Theory and Research
by Alan C. Acock (Editor), Vern L. Bengtson (Editor), David M. Klein (Editor), Katherine R. Allen (Editor), Peggye Dilworth-Anderson (Editor)
Maybe I've found my field?
I'm soooooo not about blaming the victim. I am also, though, not about demonizing the perpetrator. I'm not about name-calling, at all.
I just want it to stop. Everywhere. I just want it to not happen anymore. How can we make it not happen anymore?
9 charged with bullying Mass. teen who killed self
By STEPHANIE REITZ, APMon Mar 29, 3:38 PM EDT
Insults and threats followed 15-year-old Phoebe Prince almost from her first day at South Hadley High School, targeting the Irish immigrant in the halls, library and in vicious cell phone text messages. Phoebe, ostracized for having a brief relationship with a popular boy, reached her breaking point and hanged herself after one particularly hellish day in January — a day that, according to officials, included being hounded with slurs and pelted with a beverage container as she walked home from school.
The complete article is linked in the headline.
I have nothing to say about this right now...
I actually typed out these words last night...
"How does a girl learn to be the kind of girl a man wants to hold hands with at Walmart?"
I typed them into an email, I entered my mercurial boyfriend's email address, and then I........
Clicked send.
Yes. Yes I did.
My daughter and I had been wandering Walmart, as we often do when I am simply out of ideas. It's relaxing, in a way, and I needed relaxing last night. But everywhere I looked were these couples, in the parking lot and in the aisles, holding hands. I watched one couple, fingers laced, just so simply connected. They let go for a moment as she readjusted her jacket, then their fingers found each other again, easily.
They seemed so secure with each other. So together. So safe. There was no fear or shame...or showing off, either. Just belonging.
I have never experienced such public ease with another human being in my life.
"What's wrong with me?" I complained to the universe, bitterly, "Why doesn't anyone want to hold my hand?"
I remember two times in more than two years that my mercurial bf has touched me like that on purpose. Once we were walking into a bar, and he put his hand on the small of my back to guide me gently through the maze of people. Once we were going into a restaurant, and he casually threw his arm around me as we fell into step.
Both times I thought my heart would burst with joy.
Maybe that's why he doesn't often do it? I have a feeling a joyful me is quite a lot of joy to behold. Maybe too much by half.
Carson McCullers wrote in 1940 that The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. I'm not sure my heart hunts, so much. It waits. It hopes. It doesn't expect much. It doesn't ask for much. My heart is more like a Venus Flytrap.
When I was little, not much bigger than my daughter is now, we had these neighbors. They were nice enough people. Catskill folk. My dad used to go deer hunting with the son-in-law. They had a daughter, much older than I, but who rode the bus with me. I attached myself to her until she one day told me to go away. I get it. I was little and annoying and probably waaaay more clingy than your average next door neighbor.
Anyway, the daughter-with-a-husband babysat us sometimes, and the parents were in our lives, somehow, though I don't remember if they babysat or what they did, really.
I just remember that I liked to be at their house. I didn't like to be at home. One day I decided I wanted to eat dinner there. It was winter. Snow. Coat hat scarf mittens. I knocked on their door and asked to be invited for dinner. The mom said no. She closed the door.
I sat on their stairs and cried. I wailed, I think. I wanted to be in there in the warm with that family. I watched them move around in the artificial golden glow of family time on a winter night in Upstate New York and sobbed. I don't remember if she came to the door again, but I'm pretty sure I knocked several more times. I remember crying loudly until I was crying softly. I sat on their stairs with an icy face drenched in tears and snot. It was getting dark. The path home was through the trees. When the sobs subsided and the hiccups ceased, I went home. That's what I remember.
When I started thinking about this post, last night, it was going in a whole 'nother direction. I have been so lonely this weekend. Disconnected and lost. But my friend Tam had us over to color eggs. Just that little bit of normal life for my girl and me helped. It changed the course of my thinking from focused on the alone part. The fishing line in my brain began to angle for connections, instead. After all, I'm blessed in so many ways.
So, while I want to give that little lonely girl on the outside looking in a hug, dry her face, check that she's warm, tell her she's gonna be ok -- honest -- pat her bum and send her home, 'cause there really is no place else to go (I'd send her to the home I have now, if I could, but all I can really do is take good care of the daughter she will someday have, who is now safely asleep in the next room)...I can't let myself get lost in what she doesn't have but really wants and what I don't have and really want.
What I do have is pretty amazing. My eyes are on the wrong prize. My girl, my school, my sparkling circle of friends (sisters, really), even my mercurial bf whose gotten 8.7 billion odd emails from me over the years, and has almost never made me feel like the true nutcase that I am because of them.
Seriously, what am I whining about? I'm blessed.
Another use for this tool acquired by the little girl who was me, called empathy!
This is gonna be some full-on rambling, so beware...
My good friend Tam has invited me to Easter services at her church. It will be hours long. A vigil. I want to go. Sure I do...
But I'm getting this feeling in my tummy about going that is like the feeling I've been having over my Family Interactions class.
Fear.
I'm a church shopper. I want to find a place where I can explore my thoughts feelings about goodness and mercy. I want my daughter to have a sense there is something greater than herself. So I shop. I go for awhile and love it, but then a switch flips and the thought of going to this place again for even one more moment makes me feel as though I'm in the river and someone has tied lead blocks to my feet and I'm going down, down, down...sucking in ragged breaths of nothing but dirty water and seaweed until I've reached the rocky bottom, and all is black. We don't go back.
What is that about?
A friend was talking to me about his own journey with Christianity, and we disagree on many thing (I'll probably have lots to say about that at some point lol), but so much of what he said is so gorgeous, I want to give in to it.
Give in...isn't that a telling choice of words? I think it is. For me, anyway.
This empathy, I think, may also be a shield, for me. If I'm taking on another person's emotional experience, I am protected from my own. Empathy is a wall between me and my roiling emotional self.
I have an idea that nothing is more frightening to me than feeling my own feelings.
When I listened to a recording shared with me by my friend of his church choir, the unfettered joy and freedom I could hear in their voices nearly gave me an anxiety attack. Tears started to leak from my eyes, for reasons I don't understand.
In fact, whenever I have tears about something that has to do directly with me, it never feels like I'm actually crying. It just feels like water is coming out of my eyes. I cry over movies or songs or the pain of those I love.
When it's about me, water comes out of my eyes.
I know this is probably not the optimum way to experience life, you know, through others, but when I start feeling things about my own life and my own experience I am 100% sure I am going to either die or go completely off the rails out of my mind. In that order.
So I find some way to shut down.
What does a person do about that?
My Little Fire and I went to the movies tonight to see the delightful How to Train Your Dragon. If you know me, you will not be surprised to discover the crying started, oh, about five minutes in, and simply gained in intensity during poignant moments throughout the film until I was choking back sobs.
Yes, choking back actual sobs. At a kids' movie. About dragons. Which are not real.
As a child, my mom wouldn't let me watch The Incredible Hulk because I became inconsolable when the closing music began and Bill Bixby was again forced to walk away from whatever tenuous connections he had made in Whereversville, U.S.A...alone.
Most people possess a degree of empathy. It is an emotional capacity the develops in early childhood. It is described by many as the ability to understand the emotional states of other people, and perhaps the ability to feel what they are feeling. You might think of it as the ability to cognitively put yourself in someone else's shoes, see how they feel, and start walking down the road for awhile with your thumb out, like David Banner when he wasn't busy smashing things up as The Hulk.
It appears my ability to empathize has gotten a heavy dose of Banner's gamma radiation, because it is alarmingly easy for me to slide into another person's shoes and not just assess their emotional landscape, but to integrate those emotions into my own emotional landscape.
This is not good.
I take that back. It can be good. My ability to empathize has given me a unique strength as a reporter, because I am almost always interested in the multiple facets (both sides?) of a story. Even if we're dealing with a straight crime story, where - to most folks - there's good and bad and right and wrong and hang 'em high is the only answer, I always want to know what's underneath. In the most evil actions, I want to understand how the evil person got that way. I want to walk in their shoes.
In my life, however, I struggle with this...empathy. I get angry with myself. I call myself names, like "idiot" and "sucker" and it is true that I have been victimized by my own ability to feel another person's pain. I am all emotion with no capacity for calculation. I became enmeshed with my father and my ex, and held on tightly to these relationships long after it was clear that each, in its time, was killing me. I could see these men as the little boys they once were, and I wanted to protect them. I thought if someone could just be kind to them...
Blah.
I was barraging myself with these sorts of insults one day when a friend stopped me and pointed out that this ability to empathize must have, at some point, been a very useful tool.
So I began thinking about some of the things I know about child development and infant attachment. I began to wonder what use empathy might have been to me, as a small girl, in a dangerous place. It seems a rather useless tool, when you're trying to stay alive.
Hmmmm....
The Wiki on the Hulk series from the 70s says this...
Doctor David Banner is a physician/scientist who is traumatized by the tragic car accident that killed his beloved wife Laura. Haunted by his inability to save her, Banner studies incidents of people who, while in danger, somehow managed to summon superhuman strength in order to save their loved ones.
My dad once related to me a tale I found chilling yet luridly fascinating. I don't remember this incident, but because of where he said we lived at the time (we moved a lot when I was small), I must have been about five or six. That would have made my brother - ten months my junior - about four or five.
Dad told me my brother and I had misbehaved in some way, so he took us out on the back deck, tied us up, and left us there. He said after some time, he heard a pounding on the door. It was as forceful a pounding as can come from a tiny fist. When he opened the door, he saw his oldest child, a quivering whisper of outrage, who immediately demanded he go untie her brother
right now.
He said to me, with great and - to me - perverse pride, "That's when I knew you were strong."
Um...
ok, dad. That may or may not be when I knew you were crazier than a
shithouse rat, but I digress...
I hadn't been "strong" for me, if that, in fact, could even be called strength. I was "strong" for my brother. In fact, I can't think of a time when I was ever really "strong" for me.
When in danger (following the line of thinking from The Hulk Wiki lol), it is from this well of empathy that I summon the strength to save my loved ones, and in saving my loved ones, I save myself. Interesting.
I was able to love my parents, even when they did awful things, because I could recognize and even feel their pain. Every little girl needs to be able to love her parents. Empathy was the tool I used to be able to do that. And I still love them, um, most of the time, even though one is dead and one mostly drives me crazy.
It was when my empathy for my daughter became more powerful than my empathy for my husband that I was able to emotionally disengage from him, which eventually allowed me to leave him.
It is my empathy for my baby that allowed me to care for her in a healthy way when I had no models for positive parenting.
I guess it has been a pretty useful tool, now that I think about it. Maybe I haven't learned to control it yet. David Banner still hasn't learned to control his anger.
But, guess what? My Little Fire and I and learned tonight that you can make friends even with a Night Fury, put a saddle on it, and together you can soar.
My life worked out in such a way today that I didn’t make it to class until it was ending. I made it just in time to turn in my midterm – a take home – talk to my very kind professor for a few moments, and leave.
So the universe conspired against me today to see to it I didn’t make it to class.
Damn universe.
Except I’m not sure it was the universe. I think I did it on purpose. I didn’t have this thought until I was driving to class, so late, and now I’m certain it’s true.
A lot of people have a hard time believing people can intentionally do things without being aware of their intention, but I think people do it all the time. Think about the things for which you’ve been late or the things you’ve missed…did you want to be there? As I type this, I realize I’m not offering up a new and brilliant insight into human behavior. It strikes me that this is often called passive-aggressive behavior.
But today I was being neither passive nor aggressive. I think I was trying to save my sanity.
I love this class. It’s called Family Interactions, and we are learning about the concept of family, the working parts of a family, how the players interact, what family means in different cultures. We’ve discussed dating and cohabitation and marriage and divorce, accompanied by a forest full of trees worth of studies dissecting every aspect of human relationships and the family.
It’s fascinating. It’s engaging. The class is full of smart and passionate people who argue and debate and sort and tease. It's guided by a man who knows his stuff and loves to teach it. He loves to lead us into a discussion and watch us figure out for ourselves what we think it all means. It is the intellectual equivalent of breakfast, lunch, dinner and a healthy snack, if you’re me and just enthralled by this stuff.
It’s also real, revealing, and for me, it’s getting dangerous.
Today we were to discuss family functioning. Next week it’s intimate abuse and violence. I am in full flight mode. These classes scare the hell out of me.
All of this is exacerbated by the fact that since my health insurance lapsed, I have not filled a single prescription. First my anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medications ran out. I was ok with that. I felt emotionally healthy enough to test these med-free waters. I did really well, for awhile. Then, the Dexamethasone ran out. This helps regulate my adrenal (fight or flight) hormones. Then the Levoxyl. Thyroid meds. Your thyroid function has a very direct impact on your mood and mood stability. Then the Metformin. I’m not sure what that does for me lol, but it regulates my cycles, so it must be important.
Add to this my hospitalized dad, my imprisoned brother, my absent (whether he’s in the room with you or a million miles away) brother, my dead mother and sister, my mercurial boyfriend, my mental-illness-poster-boy-ex-husband, my delightful but labor-intensive four year old, my precarious money situation that makes my life with my daughter a house of cards, and now full-blown insomnia…and you have me, in alternating states of barely restrained panic or untethered from myself in full-on depersonalization, both of which – in me – do a fairly spot-on impression of mania. I’m very afraid the people I speak with will think I’m on crack, actually.
But I’m not on crack. I’m not on anything. That’s the problem.
----------
Part two of today’s post, Ditching Class, begins now. I filled my Dex, Levoxyl and Metformin scrips tonight. I took them. I’m not racing so much. I feel tired and like my blood pressure has dropped. I don’t know if it was actually high lol, but it feels like it has dropped. I have a headache.
So that’s something.
But before I completely lose this stream of thought, I want to explain why I think my class may be terrorizing me.
In January, 2004, this was published on Salon. It was a response to the online magazine’s request for tales regarding “The state of your unions.”
Baptism by fire
My live-in boyfriend had cheated on me. It was a public embarrassment -- everyone knew. During the struggle that culminated in infidelity, he hit me for the first time and said horrible things to me. He came and went as he pleased. He was cold. Hostile. Brutal. Defiant. I was pleading, resentful, enraged and exposed. My response to this emotional sinkhole? Let's get married. And we did.
My marriage was to be a baptism. A sacred ceremony to save me from my sinking shame.
For me and my husband marriage became proof to the world that we were indeed lovable and able to love. Normal. Acceptable. The actual ceremony took place -- after just two days of planning -- on Halloween. Appropriate.
Our tentative partnership was born from mutual need. Aren't most? But our individual needs were more desperate and choking than most. Union didn't ease the terror, but twisted it. We didn't fill each other up. We went about bashing the vessels.
Not too long after the wedding, we were back where we began. You cannot (I hope) imagine the verbal bludgeons that one person can use on another. Fat. Disgusting. Loser. My mother is critically ill and he hopes she dies. My brother is in jail and he hopes he gets raped. My sister committed suicide and he's glad. Physical violence ranges from kicks and punches to litter boxes dumped on my head and his ass wiped on my face. I am not joking.
This is my husband. He's supposed to protect me. I am full of screams that don't come. Sorrow and loss and rage and recrimination. I allow it. I'm still here. The shame from which this unholy union was born is the shame that keeps me here.
Here's the kicker. No one suspects it. I'm a rising star in my industry. Strong-willed and outspoken. I'm an independent feminist. I kept my name. He is amiable and considerate. The picture of the liberal 30-something man. We appear united to all, while our home is a burning bunker.
To be fair, there have been splashes of sweetness. He is childlike sometimes, and I want to protect him. His vulnerability and need seem accessible then. I feel like I glimpse his humanity. I feel like I can reach him. But they're only splashes.
Now I crave kindness. I long for loyalty. I dream of a steadfast man who will love me completely. Someone I can love without fear. That's still what marriage means to me. But marriage won't wash you clean, and it won't save you. If you're looking for salvation, look somewhere else.
-- Anonymous
Of course, I wrote that. It was, as Emily Dickinson wrote from her rural Northeastern town,
my letter to the world, That never wrote to me. I still feel as though I should ask you to judge my ex kindly, because he once was an infant someone hurt, horribly, before he was an often cruel and always confused man.
Until tonight, only four people have read this who knew I was the author. My ex-husband, who had nothing to say. My mercurial boyfriend, who has a deep and abiding hatred for my ex. My friend Linda, who gently and lovingly supported me as I made a series of controversial decisions several years later, and my brother, who took my tentative attempt at connection as an opportunity to critique my writing.
Of course, talking about this kind of violence is not something my brother is capable of, except to joke, “If dad taught us anything, it was how to take a punch.”
Family functioning. Intimate abuse and violence.
My family of origin and my family of “choice” simply did not function. Intimate abuse and violence was the primary language in both.
So I ditched class tonight. I think I did it on purpose. I don’t want to do it next week.
Now I have my meds. Not the ones my mind likes, but the ones my body needs. I hope by writing this, and acknowledging what I think was my intention tonight, I can push through it next week. I think it’s important I’m there to "represent." I think I have a responsibility to "represent," because not only am I gaining the knowledge I hope will end with me proudly walking across a stage to accept a Masters of Science in Educational Psychology: Human Development and Family Studies, thereby achieving the first goal in my life I actually chose for myself, but I think I am teaching some of my classmates, as well. They wonder who these people are, who marry men who hit them, humiliate them and cheat on them. They wonder who these people are, who stay with these men for years, even though they know they may not survive. Many don't.
I can say to them “I am one of these people. What would you like to know?”
I almost remembered something the other day. It's something about yellow.
I was driving to class. I'm almost always driving these days, it seems. I've learned short cuts and work arounds and new routes to keep boredom at bay. Most days I ease into a zone that is all thought skittering to thought with no presence in the here.
But this day, the other day, a color caused me to careen into the present then lurch toward the past, where I raced toward this memory that was racing toward me.
The color was yellow. Butter yellow. Bleached gold on an old pickup. It was ahead of me and off to the right. It was suddenly the only shade of anything on a highway of grey. I was entranced as I raced toward this memory racing toward me. It was this specific hue of yellow that did it...
We almost met. We almost touched. I almost knew. But suddenly, as sudden as only yellow can be, this piece of me reached the end of it's tether and snapped back into its safe for safe keeping.
I haven't remembered this memory, but now I know it's there, waiting for me to retrieve it. I don't think I want it and I think I wish it would go away. Because there's one thing I know for sure...
I hate yellow.
Little Fire
