i obsess.

WAHM v. SAHM smack-down: or, further evidence of my schizophrenia.

I had enough ideas for blog posts this weekend to keep me knee-deep in 'em for months.  (Especially at the rate I've been going, lately - it would have probably taken care of my quota through early fall.)

But -- time.  Time!  Where was that going to come from?  From my clear-out-the-dog-hair-sea allotment?  From the window of laundry-and-more-laundry?  From the oh, cripes, I don't want to list the minutiae, it's bad enough that I have to spend most of my "free" time doing it to begin with.

Mostly, I get really angry when I come up with something mind-boggling that I yearn to scribble down and just can't get the minutes to do so, because I'm too busy doing all of the mindless shit required of me, and never feeling adequately caught up, when I know these ideas, these beyond-myself thoughts are what make me feel alive, bigger than the laundry/dishes/grocer/bed-making, beyond the drivel of what I do at work, at what I do probably 7/8ths of the time.  

And I know I had more time when I was at home during the day, even though I didn't realize it then.  Because I work now, I get to see what my Fridays at home with Jack vs. my Monday-Thursday spent rushing about are like, via comparison.  And I get really resentful of people who try to unfairly occupy my precious minutes who aren't directly related to me or married to me.  I get ANGRY.  And then I want to delete these people from my phone directory and never speak to them again.  ESPECIALly when they don't work.  I'm thinking specifically of an old/kinda refreshed (thanks a BUTTload, fb) relationship with someone, a person who doesn't have a job aside from caring for her one kid, who recently tried to make me feel guilty for not leaping to respond to her request for my attention on some random fucking item, I just can't begin to elucidate my reasons for how irritated I get when this sort of thing goes down.  Even when Jack was newborn, I was working.  I worked all the time.  I was terrified of our not being able to survive financially and I labored after labor at money-making (the embroidery machine was my gauntlet, my master, its software my bullying Minotaur).  I rarely had a week free of some work requirement, especially once I began selling things for fadiddle (at which I mammoth-failed, *sob*, moving on, deep breath GO!), and it affected my focus on my child, affected my ability to be present with him, and lots of other things besides, BUT.  Even given that, I still had more time than I do now. 

Between getting the morning parade on the road, and the morning commute, and slamming as much work into the slice of time I have to get it all done (which is never, ever enough, and I'm rarely caught up) before I need to leave to pick Jack up by 3 p.m. (later than he or I like, as it's after the bulk of his friends have gone home and late enough that I don't feel like we have much time for anything), get home with him, possibly (probably) stop at the store for essentials, fight traffic, feed the dog, get Jack a snack, unload the dishwasher, fold some clothes, pick up junk on the surfaces, sort the mail, deal with bills/other daytime-specific phone calls to annoying call-centers, make other necessary appointments, get the dinner ready if I'm making it (Caleb and I try to trade off, when I'm in not-too-crippled-by-ADD mode, which can last for weeks and sometimes longer, hooray!), then wrap up dinner, get Jack into his bath, post-bath, etc., do dishes, clean kitchen, fold some more laundry, pick over Jack's current clothing and assess what needs to be got rid of (too stained/ripped/small) and replaced, or some other benign-yet-important task, and then possibly do a little more work or else fade into a pile of gray lumps on the sofa for an hour before I drag my sorry ass to bed, I'm lucky, LUCKy if I can find a few spare minutes to email/blog/tweet/chat with friends.  When I get the chance to leave the house and meet someone for a drink, which I do on a regular basis but ONLY because I have a really supportive partner who allows me that free time as often as I want it, and I generally want it at least twice a month, I almost always have to push myself to go because I'm dithering just before I leave, always.  It's that last ten or so minutes before I walk to the car.  I get so grossed out at the thought of leaving.  Leaving my family, leaving my husband to deal with the dinner/dishes/bedtime routine, leaving my kid for those last minutes before bed, and he's not getting any younger, this I know, leaving with those pants sitting strangely on my post-holiday-pudge bottom, with this new set of wrinkles under my eyes, around my mouth, with this permanent exhaustion in my chest and belly and wreathed around my shoulders and down through my arms and wrists and curled in my tired fingers.  But I go.  I go, I see, I hug, I cherish.  It's good to go.  To come home to the family I love.  To appreciate, to be new and fresh. 

But I don't like the strain on my time, and if people try to make me spend more of it than I like through the assy means of threatening me with guilt, by expressing to me that I somehow owe them something, they have just written their ticket to fuck-off-ville.  My family is the only entity to whom I owe ANYthing.  They claim me, and that's where I license the guilt-factory, if there were one. 

I'm not warning any one of you, my friends, who might read this and be timid with me henceforth through some confused sense that I was speaking to you.  I'm not.  I'm being very specifically upset with someone who really never did relate to me, but especially does not now.  I have always worked from home since Jack existed, but now I work *away* from home.  I was never really a true SAHM.  'S okay.  I don't mind.  I think it was beneficial for me, in a twisted, can't-go-back so-what-the-hell-anyway kinda beneficial.  But hell's bells.  If you haven't got any kind of job aside from wiping peanut butter from around mouths and wiping poop from tiny bottoms, I SERIOUSly don't expect you to compare your life to mine, and I'll dismiss you from my friendship ranks without so much as a quick backward glance if you threaten my ability to care for my family by taking precious time and energy from me with cunning use of guilt and machetes. 

But especially the machetes.

*This is not a -- oh, hell.  I don't care how you perceive it.  I work away from home.  I've also worked-at-home with a paying gig *while* being a SAHM.  I am a mom.  I have a right to think all of this stuff.  If you don't likee, fine.  Express yourself in comment-form.  Anonymous assholes, prepare to be disemvoweled.  Everyone else, have at it.  I guess I just don't feel like explaining myself any further.  I don't owe it to anyone. 

Though it does feel good to get it all said.  It's been bothering me for so long.  I feel guilt for not being a regular blogger anymore.  See?  Cunning use of guilt.  Way to go, BLOGS.  You're worse than Jesus for guilt-weight.

**Written while on coffee/lunch break at work, ftr, hence the rambling and general tangential incoherence, WIN

***This is really just a massively over-worded exhortation to remind people, me included, to not assume we know just what anyone else is handling, what's on their schedules/lists/plates, and certainly to not think that they owe us.  They don't.  Besides, real friends understand the rule of mellow with regards to communications in adulthood-land; we communicate our desire to hang, to chat, to be involved, and then we sit back and wait until the person we're communicating with reciprocates.  And we don't pressure, because -- why the fuck should we?  We're friends.  It's chill.  Trust exists for such times as these (that can last many months, I've discovered in recent years).  Our friendship will continue to exist for as long as we can stand it, so long as we give each other room to manage our families and whatnot.  Pressure is bullshit. 

I was not, and am not, judging harshly those whose only job is running a household/caring for kids.  That shit is exhausting.  Just -- understand that my life is different from yours, is all.  And the good ones?  You do.  You didn't even need to read this.  /blather

hurted.

If you've been doing nothing but reading my posts from the inception of this blog, which would mean you've probably, by now, hung yourself often enough due to the rather long-ish breaks taken between entries to have become a porn star for how well-hung you are, oh, that was weak, anyway, ANYWAY, you might recall that I had a brother, and he is gone.  Well, not gone, just far.  Beachy.  Beachy in a lives-in-a-homeless-institution full-time.  In Florida.  But as I've poorly joked before, if you've gotta go homeless, why not go beach?

Why do you read this?

You need to really pause and reflect for a moment.  Seriously.  It's almost more sad that you read this than that I write it.  For I am truly a low, despicable creature in the game of the writerlies.

So it occurs to me, as I work and toil and sweat back here in the creating area, the area where I create things, I won't extrapolate for your unknowingness even though it may vex you, because I haven't time.  I am supposed to be churning and burning, bitches.  To the point, ho!  (Ye thundercats of glory and, gee, where are *those* plastic fast-food accessories for the movie that is yet to be?  Unless it already was.  I would not know if it came prior to my child's birth.  I'm unsavvy in the realm of kid-meal plunder from before a certain time.  Yeah.  I.e., uncool.  What.)

Point!  Ho!

*ahem*

(Pause for effect; or, more earnestly, pause to pretend, well, not pretend, but actually DO work.)

But I am back, and it is only to say that I think I'm afraid to have a second kid, because what if it makes my first kid hate me and us and everything and become mentally ill (but in a way that's completely un-hip and un-trendy and doesn't land him in art school and then showing in a gallery or whatever the fuck those kinds of mentally ill people end up doing) and end up homeless, in a very non-homie (yo) way?

In a way that hurts more than ever because it's already happened once?

Then again, what are the odds?

And yet --

My dad, his eyes.  Those hollowed-out eyes.

I can't commit onlineicide, it seems, because every time I'm ready to plunge into those soft, easy-on-the-brain waters of not-writing-blog-posts-in-my-head-every-waking-and-non-waking-minute bliss, I run into this:  the urge.

The bloody, inescapable urge.

Forgive me, I must beg, because while my desire to prevent you from having to seethe in my madness, or see the madness at all, my physical thundercat takes my arms and shakes the words out like flying bits of dirty fur.

I'll try harder, next time.

Promise.

class A asshole.

I'm a dick.  I assumed the worst about someone.  Namely, my brother-in-law.  Turns out, he was defending another person when he got cold-cocked by the (small college) town fuckwad and cracked his skull and almost died.  And I assumed he was antagonizing someone.

I'm an asshole.

I'm so glad he's alive.  So goddam glad.

Oh, and speaking of class, this morning, in an attempt to rush through a right-hand-turn with a signal attached to it, the guy in front of me refused to pull up LITERALLY six inches so I could narrowly angle through between his car and the one parked near me on the curb.  I honked, and he turned and yelled at me.  I demonstrated, with clever use of finger-gestures, the distance I required to sneak through and turn right.  He yelled some more and turned back to face the intersection.  I honked again.  He turned and yelled again, more violently this time, and I showed him, again, quite patiently, I thought, how far I needed him to inch forward in order to move along my required route.  He yelled some more.  I shrugged in acquiesence and squeaked through the minute allowance of space.  By this time, he'd rolled down his window (I assume in order to give me some more information about just why he couldn't possibly pull his car forward a few inches), and I spoke back, with more finger gesturing.  Just the one finger, though. 

I did this in front of my little boy.  Who said, mommy, but THE LIGHT! IS! RED!, and who apparently didn't notice my nonverbal communique to the other driver regarding where he could go, because I'm certain he'd have said it in a perfect loop for the rest of the (albeit brief) drive to his school.  Mommy!, WHY DID YOU POINT WITH YOUR FINGER AT HIM LIKE THAT?  MOMMY, IT'S NOT NICE TO POINT WITH YOUR FINGER AT PEOPLE, MOMMY.  Etc.

See?  All class.

Sigh.

the "health" exception.

I had an abortion when I was about seven weeks along.

I was working as a temp at the time.  Twenty-six years old.  No health insurance.  I made about $1200 a month.  Couldn't afford to live on my own because I couldn't cover rent, car insurance *and* living expenses simultaneously.  I had just moved out of my best friend's one-bedroom apartment, where I had been paying slightly less rent than she, with her in the bedroom and me in the eating area of the kitchen (I'd rigged up a wall of cardboard-and-fabric between the breakfast bar and the kitchen for "privacy").  Was in-between, uh, well, just generally in-between (and, yes, I'm referencing The Cure here, along with my horrific life in my terrible twenties).  Staying at my parents while I hunted for a reasonable place to rent that would be close enough into town that I could give up my car and just bike to work.  Had discovered a teeny 1-bed next to Laurelhurst, somewhere near 32nd and Stark - but adjacent to the park, so sort of between Stark and Burnside.  Just where the crummier houses leave off and the mansion-y places begin.

I was still sort of suicidal from being wrecked by my experiences in Alaska the summer prior; being molested by one of my roommates there really fucked up my head and I spent that winter after I returned being an utter mess.  I won't describe it.  I've done so before and I don't feel like going down that path just at this moment.  It was horrid.  I wanted to die but I didn't exactly want to have to be directly implicated in the process, so I just did all kinds of self-destructive things instead.

The abortion was out-of-pocket.  My boyfriend paid for it, as well as for the additional general anesthesia expense (more than doubling the cost, making the total around $500, as I recall).  He had allowed me to make the decision (I'm sure it hurt him very much to leave that up to me, particularly because of the one I did make) as to whether I would terminate the pregnancy, but he insisted that I have general anesthesia as opposed to local.  He knew I couldn't face such a thing if I were only locally anesthetized.

(I still live with the guilt of having had the privilege, the luxury, of general anesthesia for the procedure; because of all the other women who experience it with only local anesthetics, their thoughts of what is happening to them intact afterward.  It is - it is unfair, it is cruel, and I will never forgive that small part of me that was too weak to face what I was doing to myself, to my would-be baby, too weak to watch.  To be present.  I am still ashamed at my own cowardice in the face of it.  When others *must* face it because they cannot afford to do otherwise.)

I never allowed, to myself, to him, to anyone, that I was hurt.  That it hurt me to do such a thing.  I only cried when I tried to get assistance from the state of Oregon in order to cover the cost of the procedure and they turned me down, because, as they explained, I made approximately twenty-seven dollars too much for them to give me even their most basic level of coverage.  The person I spoke with said that I would have to have a child in order to receive benefits.  I explained, but you see, I plan to remove any need for Oregon to have to cover me on their plan on a long-term basis through this procedure that I need and cannot afford, if you could only help cover it.  I'm SAVing you! - the state! - MONEY!, I said, plaintive.  The woman simply shook her head, her mouth a line.  No.  No, she told me, adamant, you can't receive coverage *until* you have the child.  I said, hah aahhaahha hahah.  That's so funny.  I am trying to terminate the thing that would require you to pay for my insurance.  I just need a little help to do so.  And she said, Yes.  I understand.  You still can't get coverage until you *have* the child.

(The irony, of course, is that those who would insist on a woman having her baby regardless of the circumstances, is that she must then scrap and scrape and save and work three jobs in order to support the child, because there is simply NO WAY those same insistent folks will fork over the social services, i.e., their taxes, to assist such a woman in caring for the baby after it is born.  No! to the welfare! queens!, they scream.  Get a job, loser!, they scream.  Have your baby, even if you were raped!, they shriek, and in the same breath, they blaspheme you for leaning on the system to raise that child.  The one they said you had to have because otherwise God would smite you.  You shouldn't have had sex, they simper, if you protest.  You slut, they imply, the corners of their mouths tucked in just-so.  That the man who fucked you and didn't have any requirements post-fuck?  Ah, well.  Such is a man's luck.  Oh, shame on those men, they cluck, their feathers bunched tight around their big asses.  But where is the man?  And where is the evidence?  And does that man get to go on and have a profitable, head-held-high kinda life?  While his child's mother toils and strains and struggles, the system with its allure of come-hither-and-have-your-child, the system giving you another good fucking-over, once you've had it, where you must place your child in daycare and work during the day and maybe another part-time or full-time job at night to pay for the daycare and the health care and the fucking mandatory car seat that costs a minimum of $150 for a decent one, never mind the pricey kind that consumerreports.org insists on if you're a good, mindful parent and want your child to actually be *safe*, the $300-and-up variety, and there are the co-pays and the medicines, the over-the-counter cough syrups and inhalants that you try to give your sick, miserable child in vain in order to help them sleep so you can sleep so you can work so you can pay for the care and the medicines and the formula because you couldn't breastfeed because you had to go back to work when the baby was six weeks old and you couldn't afford a breast pump and then you find out that the formula and the bottles and cough syrup are possibly, no, DEFinitely toxic for your baby, your sweet, sweet baby they insisted you have because God would curse you and where in the world are those people now?, you wonder in the spare moments when you have the energy and presence of mind to wonder and not fall into the pit of despondency over your life, your whirlwind maddening life of work and toil and never seeing the child you gave birth to because they told you you must, backed you into a corner and threatened you with everlasting hell if you didn't listen, and now the aspersions and looks and glances you get on a daily basis when you're with your child, the whispers and the looks and the withering eyes that burn you, because, while it's no longer socially acceptable to comment to a single mother that she's a slutty sinner, the eyes still have it.  Oh, they have it.  And the man is off somewhere in Ibiza with his new girlfriend, the one he met in college while you were with your baby working sixty hours a week and barely surviving.

And the irony of the system giving you the fucking-over after you've already been fucked over is not lost on you.

But I know you're already aware of that.  I just had to say it.  It feels good to say it.)

I left.  Head high.  Stumbling a little on the way out to my boyfriend's car, and letting that be the reason I cried.  But then, crying, because I knew, if I couldn't acquire state assistance, on my oh-so-robust wage, that there were women already with babies and kids who HAD to live on less than I was doing in order to receive state-provided benefits.  SHITTY ones.

and I cried for myself because I had to go through the procedure because I was too unstable to have a baby.  Drunk.  Drugs.  Series of relationships too miserable to recount.  Latest boyfriend totally, bizarrely different, but -- based on my experience leading up to him, I knew better than to rely on the notion that it would survive my - me.  however, I wrapped up that crying portion of the crying menu quick.  didn't need to linger.  this was too important.

I could not do that to another human, not knowingly.  Not with the little handful of sanity I clutched, desperate, like a miser with a small collection of dirty pearls gathered from dustbins around a large city with dark pockets.

I had a dream about it, just before the procedure.  A morning or two prior.

I don't want to relate the dream.  But I remember it.  I still don't know what it meant, if anything.  But that it has remained with me, that dream, makes me feel its significance, all of these years hence. 

I woke up after the surgery and I was sick.  So sick.  I threw up.  A lot.  My old friend happened to be a nurse's aid, worked with the doctor who performed my surgery, only at a different clinic.  I'd requested that she be present during the thing to - watch over me.  She held me while I barfed in the clinic's toilet.

Weeks later, I still bled freely.  New, orange-red blood (because my uterus had been swept clean, so the lining had to replenish itself, which takes time).

I will never forget.

I will never forget what it meant to decide with lightning speed that I would not produce a child that I could not give up if I were to carry it to term because I don't trust people.  That I could not be a mother to. 

I occasionally -- maybe once every few years -- do the math.  Think about him, especially now, in relation to my son.  How old he'd be (of course I have no idea whether it was a boy or a girl but I have somehow, in more recent times, chosen his gender as boy.  Not sure why). 

My health exception was life-and-death.  My own life.  The child's life.  My prescience regarding this subject was crystal clear, the cleanest pane of glass you ever laid eyes on.  I could not mother that child, I could not give it up to some stranger to mother.  I would have done terrible things that the child -- oh, I don't dare think of what I would have done.  I cannot.  They are unspeakable.  Unthinkable.

I was not in the third trimester.  But my health was at stake.  Sanity.  My life.

Now - I have a child.  One who will be (relatively) unscathed by my current bordering-on-insanity, because of, thanks to, my supportive, wonderful parenting partner, and our family.  (I hope.)  This, after I've aged and settled down and done some soul-searching and taken some anti-depressants and other shit, besides.  Grown up a little (as much as someone stricken with the permanent childishness of adhd can).

Is that not to be made exception for?

I would not have this now, my son would not exist, this life we have now, it would not exist, if I had not been able to decide to release that first child from me.

Is that not a health exception worth excepting?  Accepting?  Is that something someone, anyone, could have possibly decided for me, given all the details I have deliberately not shared here - the ones that would convince the most ardently anti-me beyond a shadow of a doubt that I was choosing correctly - that is, if thou hast spent any longer than a sliver of time inside this skin, this spirit?  That thou canst do if not in possession of this uterus, this heart, this head?  And to think, for but a moment, that thou wouldst attempt to do so for any NUMBER of women.  I am mortified by it.

Am I a blip on the lefty-liberal agenda?

flavors!

There's two kindsa crazy, yo*; there's the "I can kinda dig this shiz" brand, and the "Wooooaaah.  Slow it down, there, Nelly," variety.

I think we both know which kind I am right now.

And I think we both know why you aren't sitting in my lap, petting my hair, and feeding me chocolate-flavored-whiskey as a result.

p.s. With all of the appointments I suddenly have scheduled to see both my therapist and my psychiatrist, you'd think I was a) popular and b) rich.  Turns out, I'm *not* Cindy McCain; rather, my husband called and reported that I was, uh, unwell.  Somehow, this alarmed them enough to see me now, rather than in the middle of November.  Cancellations all over the place!  Blowing up like my teenaged-neighbor's celly, yo!

It's so funny.  It's so funny that, once my husband informed them that I might seriously wish to kill myself, they're ALL. ABOUT. ME.

Why not before, though?  When I made all those calls to get appointments?  And even went to some of them (the ones I remembered)?  Why not then?  Why didn't they see it then?

I guess I do an adequate job of covering up the crazy?

(Well, not if you read me on twitter this evening.  But -- never mind that.  Sigh.  I blame the box o' wine.

Okay, and maybe also the crazy.)

*I will allow that, in fact, there may be more than two varieties of crazy.  But, for the above argument, it worked nicely.  Let's just leave it there for now, shall we?  Thank you.  YOU are divine.  And lovely.  And deserving of chocolate-flavored-whiskey.  I'll be sure to feed you some just as soon as I get back in the saddle.

money woes don't pack so well into an old kit bag.

Am so stressed out about money.  We're waiting on a refinance that, if it doesn't go through, will ruin us financially.  And we didn't do stupid things with equity and all that.  We just picked a *really* shit moment to buy a house that needed work - and not the kind that was willing to wait for a few years (look for my next book!, about what to avoid when purchasing an older home, and how many cabinets and inch-sized niches to peer into using a micro-lens in order to best determine whether said old house is worth the duckets!).

Will be returning to a full-time position with the mountain resort, in their sales office, at first of September.  Jack begins preschool the same week, and I'll just be coming home from the convention the Friday prior.  He'll be in daycare all day, three days a week, as a pre-schooler, with the bigger kids, in a classroom of twenty children and two teachers.  He'll also be attending grandmacare for the other two days (and thank jeeeesus they can do that for us, although I have my reservations about it all, which are drowned by our need for me to be working full time, so, reservations be damned).

Today he cried so hard when I left him off at school, harder than he has since he began there last fall.  It was horrid. 

I am witless as to how to manage this.

And hopeful that the medication I'm waiting for a prescription on from the psych will ameliorate the scattered, dull memory issues, and general lack-of-focus/disorganization.  Because if I'm ever gonna need to be able to organize myself and my family, this is that time. 

nuts and bolts.

And screws.

Dear Mom,

I woke up yesterday morning and it was all clear, the bell's clarity was resounding all through me, it was this crazy-rapid series of images that gently lifted me from sleep and brought me to rest on a cradle of understanding. 

I believed in your magical voodoo, I was taught to believe it, so of course I did, that the *safe* people were the ones who professed to believe the same voodoo as you do (okay, sorry, but that's just kind of really funny and I couldn't not), but then -- when I went outside of that fold, as I had to do, because that is where reality exists, I discovered I was ill-equipped to defend myself. 

I was raped and molested on multiple occasions, beginning at age three, by a boy, the son of the woman hosting your bible-study group.  Did you know that?  Me neither.  Not until I was older and the soggy, blurred edges of the memory sort of took hold and I understood what that watering can (or maybe it was a small oil-can?, like, one for his mom's sewing machine?, something like that, anyway, it had a protrusion from whence the container's contents would pour out, and, uh, yes) was doing in the mix.

I was trusting.  Because I was told that *certain* people, *certain* men, would be safe.  Were safe.  Perfectly so.  And maybe you didn't say that in so many words, and maybe you even tried, brokenly, to explain something else entirely, but your actions spoke so much more loudly than the broken verbal communique.  Your behaviors, the prayer over me, nightly, where you asked, "Oh, lord, dear jesus, put a hedge about our sweet, precious baby girl, lord, god,"  and I could see the hedge; its thick screen, its spicy scent, its surround of me, and I was safe.

But I was not safe.

Was I?

I'm fairly certain that the answer is no.  Unless, to be safe means to never understand, sort of like those women and their children in the Texas Mormon sect, the ones that the Texas courts have determined must be returned to their families, which seems pretty cracked out to me, but then, I would've wanted the same if I were a kid in that situation.

Safe.

Hmmm.

The business, given to me by too many to count, is this:  I did not possess the tools to face the meanness and cruelty of the world, and your ongoing blindness in this is painful.

And I am pain'd.

And I forgive you.

I think.

to the unsuspecting eye.

While it may not be obvious, I dig through my repetoire of pain and anguished memory in order to save my child(ren?) from having to endure the things I have done.  To comprehend the madness, understand its angles and contours, see it for what it is, expose it in an uncomfortable series of essays and exposes and unhappily rendered portraits that render it weak and rattling in its feeble grasp on my soul.  I do this for my son, for Jack, and I do it for any other children I may (or may not, ...) have the pleasure of knowing, vis-a-vis, I do it for those whose children must eventually battle dissimilarly similar creatures of dark, haunting personal treason, and I do it, even, for some of the other parents (and non-parents) who find themselves in battles akin to my own.

And, so.  Though this weblog, more often than not, has the quasi-tangible feel, the sense, of a worn, pock-marked personal journal, rather than that of a mommyblog;

don't be fooled.  This is a MOMMYBLOG, coming and going.

You see, through it all, I hope.  I hope for the things to come. 

And, thus, I wage on in my ever-tiresome, yet never-ending battle.

(Beats hell out of describing all my intrepid, albeit minutiae-enriched, introspection as naval-gazing, huh.)

wow.

The stupid, it hurts my head.  I didn't read it all, because it made my brain feel sloshy.  Which is bad.  Because my brain is already decently sloshy on its own.

This, people, is where I come from.  My people, my forebears, my own, otherwise loving parents taught me this variety of slop.

'Tis a mighty scourge, knowledge.  It will burn thee.  Smite the Satanic knowledge!  Smite the wicked temptress of information and enlightenment!  (Er, please don't mistake The Secret as part of that whole "information" business I'm referring to.  Mr. Moron said it, not me.  But, still.)  Horror!  The New Age has infiltrated - wait for it - medicine!

Yes.  It's called SCIENCE.

yeouch.

p.s. picked the link up gratis over at Karoli's joint.  I'm sorta not sure if I'm grateful.  it's too much of a flashback.  Gwen.  You with me on this?  *shudders*

what it's like when you have a disability but can't get assistance because you forget to call because of the disability:

I'm on hold but it's already afterhours for the mental health triage for Kaiser and I have a feeling I should've tried to call maybe slightly earlier than I did, which was, hilariously, right at five o' clock.  You know.  Quittin' time.  So, basically, I nailed la hora solid.

What I want to know is this:  after I get the help I need, and b'lieve you me, I need it, N.E.E.D., should I write a book about my ADHD experiences?  Now don't you all (hee!  I said "you all," like there are more than three of you reading) kiss my ass and say, sure, honey, you should do it!, sure's shootin', don't just blow a bunch of hot air at me; tell me if you think there might be someone who would benefit from my semi-horrific collection of disarranged, colossally messy life puzzle pieces, none of which fit together in any coherent fashion.

Or, conversely, tell me if you think that, oh, poor dear, she really *is* a big, sodden, ridiculous mess (and please take note of my having deliberately NOT described myself as a fierce, hot tranny mess, b/c I am simply not that interesting anymore, people), and she just needs to find somewhere quiet where she can whisper to herself and rock out in her kewl granny chair.

Book?  Or whispery chair scenario?

It all starts here, people.  IT. ALL. STARTS. HERE.  (It also all falls out of my ear, or ass, depending on your pov, or maybe quite possibly where you're standing, in which case, I apologize and -- you're right.  Absolutely no more beans/beer at the same time.  Scout's honor.)

Dweedle deedle dee!

it feels like the end. or, i'm hungover.

I'm sure it isn't, but it does.  Feel that way.  I mean, the hangover is only part of the equation.  There's also this awful broken feeling inside, beneath my gnawing belly, this sense that I'm beyond repair, and it (the feeling) was present prior to the hangover.  Which I came by honestly, in the form of delicious rose` (how the fuck does one make the little accent mark sit astride the "e" without having to perform keyboarded acrobatics of which I am decidedly unaware; anyone?) at Clyde Common, with uber-fabulous people to drink alongside, and properly offend by my drunkenness, and general boorishness.

It's the ADHD, it's the aging process, it's the failure to thrive.  I'm blowing it on every level.  I am watching my life swirl around the base of the drain and I'm thinking, how can I fucking stop this, or at least make it swirl beautifully before the giant sucking sound happens and all the life has swirled down into the black depths?

I am incapable of retaining things like learned social behaviors that everyone else is able to retain.  I'm stuck in this fucking toddler loop, and I can explain that shit to people I'm around until my mouth bleeds from the pressure of speech propelled through the tired maw (and delivered from the depths of a tired ma), but it doesn't matter, because in the end, I still come off like an asshole and people get tired of my excuses.

I'm tired of my excuses, too.  I want to change it, but the only way I can currently think to change it is to just hide, hunker down, slink along the lowest points, pretend I don't exist.  Sure, I have to exist on some level for Jack's sake, but I don't have to exist for my own sake.  If I'm only needed for familial support, I can do that without having to exist socially in my own right.

Granted, my husband doesn't love the energy I'm expelling into the atmosphere of our home when these are the turgid, clay-cloud thoughts that churn within the generator of my body, that I release this stuff and it deposits a thick layer of gray soot along the surface of the piano and the couch and the table and our bed and the chairs and the artwork and knick-knacks and the dog and the child and nothing and no one remains free of its drifting coat of heavy and clinging webs.

I am not able to do what others do.  I can't finish writing the papers or reading the books or completing the thoughts.  I can't flesh out the details and I can't complete the projects and I can't remember the important and the not-so-important.  I can't always remember to feed my child on time or keep him on his even sort-of-regular schedule and I can't recall to whom I told what and I can't keep track of my vocabulary so it slips in and out and there are plenty of occasions where I feel as though I've gone further backwards in my time on earth than forward, in fact, I am beginning to be convinced that the only things that have been allowed to grow are my ability to convey the pretense that I am an adult, like a great toddler-mimic, and my body has aged appropriately in order to push the pretense's believability up toward quasi-truth, but at bottom, in my gut, under my gnawing belly, I know that it's all just this gigantic farce.  I am a toddler who cannot remember how many months ago something happened, and thinks it was yesterday, cannot get beyond the oppositional behavior, cannot manage to pull off the necessities required of an adult life.

And I am beginning to be convinced that there is nothing that can alter this sequence. 

Which is why I was right to not want to have a child, ever.  It's why I always knew I shouldn't procreate.  I'm not capable enough to manage things.  I can, for awhile, but not for the length of time necessary.  (disclaimer:  I'm not suggesting my son is not amazing and wonderful; I'm suggesting that I am not capable of taking care of him well enough to merit his worth.)

I'm failing, and I'm failing hard and fast. 

And I don't believe there's anything I can do or think or inhale or swallow or drink or eat or work on or write or talk about or downward-dog or run toward or away from or above or around to fix it or heal it or aid it or even ameliorate it.

Everyone is having seconds, they're filling their bellies with second babies and more life and bigger chances for fear and failure and success and their courage in the face of such odds appalls me because I don't have that option.  I shouldn't have optioned the first belly full.  I am failing him, and he knows, he knows the way I knew with my parents.

Fuck.

(I'm leaving comments closed because to see the sad, round zero staring back at me two days from tomorrow will just make it worse.)

cooking is my new bag, baby.

I've suddenly learned that cooking is not only not all that terrifying, but it's also totally healing my relationship with my husband in ways that I never before thought possible.  I can't believe it. 

Wait.  Let me stop myself before I turn into a verbal avalanche, which is inevitable, but let's see if I can pause it; we're also getting better sleep.  I dug out all my favorite books a few weeks ago, because Caleb brought them into the house finally, since we'd finished the basement and then the kitchen, and the holidays and the dizzying ride of illnesses had kind of abated for the moment (which is back, but that's another rant altogether).  The books were still cramped and pissy, all smashed together uncomfortably in their boxes, but I remedied that for a lot of them, trekking upstairs into my room while cradling them lovingly in my arms, stacked too high so that I dropped several on the way - just like old times!  And after sorting them out and spreading them through the upstairs, randomly, so wonderful, that random spread of books, so comforting and cozy and sumptuous, I noticed the Ferber book, and I grabbed it along with my complete short stories by Fitzgerald, and toted it to the living room with some tea and cookies and snuggled down into the sofa cushions.  And after re-familiarizing myself with its contents, I grabbed my husband and forced him into the chair across from me, and explained how we'd be revisiting the Ferber process.  To my amazement, he agreed; we've both reached our maximum quotient on sleep deprivation, it seems.  When I consider the rounds we've gone on that whole business, it blows my mind.  But that's all past.  Now is what matters!  Now is in our clutches!  So we set off to reinstate sleep in our home, and it was accomplished within a night.  All we did was ignore the tiny bits of weeping, just plain ignore it, and sleep was had.  It got us into a better sleep place, which sort of stimulated me to get better organized in general (I see that now, looking back), and I started having stuff done enough in the evenings that I just sort of *wanted* to get to bed earlier than usual, and then I was in a better mood, and then the organization process lent itself to my having the headspace to work out meals in advance, and get the requisite ingredients, and begin making dinner during the week. 

Which leads me to this post.  The marriage-salvage, the succor that is my making dinner Monday through Friday. 

I've dreaded this becoming a truth since I was a kid.  My mom made dinner every night of our lives, and at one point she tried to induce me to start making it, and from my current vantage point I cannot blame her one wit, but at the time, I remember thinking, ew.  I hate *eating* dinner; why would I want to make it?  I like dessert, so I'll make that.  I started baking all the time, in fact, and would make a batch of cookies or a cake from scratch at least once a week.  She managed to coerce me into housekeeping and ironing, too, which I am grateful for; but I simply wouldn't budge on the dinner-making.  The reason?  My big resistance to dinner?  At the time, I couldn't have given you an answer, not much more than a shrug and an I-dunno.  Now?  I know it's because my mom, bless her honest, awesome, hard-working heart and soul and every other bit of her, is really not much of a cook.  That's being nice.  She tried.  She came home exhausted from her tiring role as executive assistant to the president of the division of the company where she was employed, every single day, and cooked dinner.  I remember how, after clean-up was complete, she'd collapse into bed, and nothing I could do to keep her out of it worked.  She was plumb wiped.

In my twenties, I insisted I'd never become domestically skilled.  (Even though I would've killed in any housekeeping challenge that didn't involve cheffery.  I can clean like you would not believe.  I love it.  It thrills me.  I wish there a clean-cathalon.  I need that ribbon, just for validation.)  So I'm not sure why I was trying to bother convincing anyone about my lack of domesticity.  I guess it was the link between my mother's lack of desire to live beyond her work and her dinner-making.  It didn't seem like much of a life.  Not one I'd want, anyway.

Caleb's been making dinner, along with all the other meals, since we've been together.  His whole family cooks like crazy.  All the kids, on both sides, are mind-bogglingly skilled.  They can all do that whole throw-it-together thing, the dash-of-this, pinch-of-that, cooked-to-perfection bit, without breaking much of a sweat.  It's beautiful.  I'm a foodie, in the eating sense, and it is AWEsome to eat the food that any of them make.  His little brother is a sushi chef; has been one for about eight years, and throws the most incredible fusion meals together on a whim.  It's frigging fantastic.

It's been an issue, all these years, my staunch refusal to share in the cooking duties.  I do everything else housekeeping-related - in the beginning, he shared laundry duties with me, but I eventually took over, and he's fine with that.  I am, too.  I'm so damn particular about folding and put-away and whatnot, although not as much lately, because of time constraints, which bums me out, but mehhh.  I'm learning to live with it.  But I've cleaned the toilets since we first began living together, and at my stubborn insistence, with his willingness, it's been my purview ever since.  I. Clean. House.  He Fixes Dinner.  The End.

Then we had our son, and that just shook everything up like, you know, just as you would expect, only in ways that you wouldn't expect if you didn't know what to expect and didn't read the what-to-expect book because you'd heard it was a crock.  And then read that crap-ass Sears bullshit and it made you insane for months, until you somehow managed to shake it all loose, and then you were *still* lost because of the sleep deprivation and the stubbornness about refusing to cook, although you were actually cooking a good portion of the time for that kid in your life, because you had to, but who counts heating up frozen peas and mashing them in that little food mill as cooking?  Not me.  But then, one day, you're making lasagna, without your husband's help, even though it's this ridiculously simple recipe from your kitchen GENIUS step-mother-in-law (seriously, she's the best cook I've ever encountered in the flesh), this sinfully delicious recipe that makes people ask for third helpings of, but also easy in a way that makes someone who lacks all the cooking skills in the world, like yourself, astonished that you made it.

And then you don't cook for a long time, because that lasagna, plus some lentil soup (also sinfully good, but in a way that makes you have some very painful interludes of gastronomic distress, plus it gives your breastfed baby similarly horrid bouts of bad gas that make him convulse with pain and make you break up with that recipe altogether, albeit totally sadly, and with sidelong glances, because it was *such* a good recipe, dammit, esp. with a side of fresh sourdough, oh my GOD it was good) was all you knew how to make, and the lasagna -- well, you can only eat lasagna so many times in a row, we're talking months on end, before you kind of want to never eat lasagna again, ever, ever, ever.

Ever.

So.  We started to get some sleep.  And I started getting organized.  And to meal-plan.  Simple stuff.  You know.  Spaghetti (a dish I've hated from time immemorial, because of the weekly church-spaghetti-dinners on Sunday evenings, with all that slimy pasta and that oily, runny sauce, sweet and cloying and yet somehow still flavorless, and the slippery-with-margarine french bread, mysteriously dry and simultaneously squishy, and the grey-green iceberg salad chunks, with the reddish, spoiling center pieces, and that white-pink chunk of tomato, hard as rock, off to the side, and the green cans of parmesan spread in bunches around the auditorium tables in the dank basement of the church quarters).  But this time, I made my step-MIL's recipe, with all that good red wine, and garlic, and wine, and liberal amounts of salt and pepper that just FLY in the face of church spaghetti makers everywhere, the flavor in it is quasi-obscene.  It's GOOD.  Amazing.  Good and spaghetti *can* live together in the same sentence.  My mind slid sideways out of my ear when I found it out, that it can happen, that *I* can make it happen.

Hamburgers.  Breakfast for dinner.  Taco night. 

I roasted a chicken and made garlic mashed potatoes, with the potato skins on for added texture and nutrients (the potato skin's so good for you, which just sounds exactly like something a mother would say, doesn't it) on Friday night last week.  Lots of butter and cream and salt in the potatoes, too, and fresh-ground pepper, and all I used on the chicken was butter, salt, pepper and some dried rosemary, and it actually turned out juicy and flavorful.  I made gravy, too, and blanched some fresh spinach.

My marriage has never been better.

I know.  It's kind of silly.  Part of the reason I've stopped being afraid of the kitchen is because my mom stood nearby and coached me while I cut up a whole raw chicken a few weeks ago.  There's something about doing that - it really makes you feel like you can do anything in the kitchen.  (It's also not a little gross.  Yeah.  I said it.  I've handled raw chicken before, in its various forms, and I even helped my mom cut a whole chicken up when I was a pre-teen, but I'd never done it myself.  With my own two hands to rely on.  It's a -- thing.  And given my lack of desire to cook partially because my mom was not so good at it - that's funny, isn't it?  But I think we all can see that it's a little deeper than that.  And we can also see that my cutting up a chicken actually managed to heal my relationship with my mom, which is a nice touch of irony, isn't it.)

Let's end it there, for now.

i was right about stink-eye.

Disclaimer: this post will not be polished.  Just spitty.  Er, shitty.

We didn't get a lot of sleep last night; J woke up several times and it was a rough one.  We all woke up late.  Etc.  I'm already worked from this week of pink-eye and the medicine that we were applying four times daily.  It stung, according to J, and we were really fighting him to get it into his eye -- it was a salve (kind of like vaseline) and I was supposed to, with perfectly clean hands (what a laugh - esp. when having to repeatedly aim for the eyes only to end up wiping it in his hair and then having to rewash, multiple times), deposit a thin strip of it inside the lower pouch of each eyelid, but when I was trying to do it solo it was ridiculous.  Impossible.  I managed it on Tuesday, but Wednesday I enlisted my dad's help, and yesterday I'd already thrown in the towel because I scheduled an appointment to see his pediatrician in the afternoon and, though she said to keep using it (it *is* an antibiotic, eurythromicin, and so the obvious attempt was being made to use the whole round, blah blah), I tried once, totally unsuccessfully, to get him to allow me to apply it, and then I was just like, you know what?  Fuck this.  It wasn't even working, anyway, because his eyes were just as red and swollen and goopy as the first day I observed that something was amiss, so I really didn't give a flying fuck if I got a lecture for not applying it, because it was such a total pointless endeavor.  So the appointment, it blew, because when the doc was checking his ears she noticed that the right drum was slightly red, but couldn't get a very good look with the chunk of wax that was in the way.  She tried to remove it with that little white plastic spoon thingy, which is part of our routine, because he's inherited my predisposition for wax build-up, something I'm not thrilled about, but whatareyagonnado *shrug*, only it wouldn't budge, and he was starting to get really uncomfortable, and his sobs were starting to crescendo, but I had to help her, I had to know whether he had an infection in his ear (he started complaining about ear pain a few nights before the appointment so I suspected that it might be a problem prior to her raising the issue during the check-up).  I held him, dutifully, but it was so hard to listen to him sob and say "Mommy" over and over again, and cling to me, with "Nooo!" mixed in, and that clinging, it was hurting my heart so much, but I thought it was right to find out if he had an infection.  I mean, shit.  I don't know.  I just melt into the hands of the doc when I'm there, she's a good person, we've been seeing her since J was just a few months old, I trust her.  I do.  I know that's probably rather naive but I -- she really does care about him, I know.  I'm a good enough mom to be able to determine that.  I think.

Anyway.  I was holding him and trying to reassure him and then our doctor said she'd rather have the nurse use a syringe and some warm water to help coax out the satanic wax chunk, and not chance scratching the ear drum, which I was all for avoiding, too.  But then between the time that the doctor left and the nurse came back in, he'd gotten cozy on my lap reading the book we'd brought, and didn't want anything to do with the business she was undertaking, especially once she started using the syringe, and I was trying to soothe him but it was fucking impossible.  Squirming and shaking and screaming, he was a wet, hot mess and it was all I could do to hold him in place.  She was unsuccessful, too, so I had to hold him again while she applied some iodine to soften the wax, and we waited and I got him *somewhat* calmed down, and we read again, and then she came back and he saw her coming toward him with the syringe and it was worse than before, and I had to tell my head to SHUT UP, because I was doing the right thing even though my gut said, JUST FUCKING RUN AWAY NOW, just run, grab your baby and run out that damn door.  I wanted to, I was crying because he couldn't see my face, his face was pressed into my neck like he was trying to get back into my womb through there, I cried softly and without anything shaking so he wouldn't know I was upset, and I turned it off, *snap*, when the nurse started opening the door to rinse his ear that second time.  But I cried.  Because my heart was open and bleeding on the floor of that white-and-gray space.  And the wax came out after the iodine had softened it, but also because I was praying openly at that point for it to do so.  Me and my personal jesus were at bat for that wax to leave.  Well, okay, the iodine and warm water may have had some effect as well.

And *then* the doctor came back in to look, and she used the scrapy-spoony thing again, and I was literally spread across his body, pinning his elbows, thinking, with that teeny-tiny piece of brain-space I was allotting myself to look down at the whole thing, detached, I suppose that's the id, right?, saying, um, IS THIS REALLY RIGHT?, and feeling like it wasn't.  But then she still, STILL couldn't determine whether the ear was infected but did happen to notice that after all that skirmish, his ear canal had gotten scratched and was now bleeding. 

Awesome.

So we quit with the antics and I got him dressed and quieted him down and we departed from that tiny, dank space of fucked-up-ness and out to the lobby so she and I could actually hear ourselves because he was no longer screaming insanely, instead, he was happily exploring the toys that probably gave him eighteen new illnesses to carry with us to Cali on Sunday.  But at least he wasn't screaming anymore.  And I got the instructions for the new medicine, eye drops this time, not salve, and it sounded like a dream of ease and luxury to apply it instead of having to somehow keep him pinned down while simultaneously grappling to get each of his eyes squeezed open wide enough to smear that salve into, rather, with the drops, to just drip one in the mere vicinity of each eye, no prying required, oh, dreamy.   Still, four times a day, and this time for 10 days instead of 5, but in the end, better.  Also, after we used it last night, he said it didn't sting, and that's so great.  It's bad enough to have to wrestle your kid into a half-nelson, to then apply painful stuff to his already painful spot, when there's a less painful option.  Phew.

But today, today I was tired.  Today, after I gave him a cupcake and we sat on the bench outside of the cupcake store and he ate it, swinging his small legs freely, waving his cupcake at passersby and saying, "ook!  ook at my cup-cake!  hi!!", with his little chocolate goatee and his little mutters of "yummy, mommy" - when we got home at the end of the trip, lunched, read books, and then I snuggled him down for a nap, and was falling asleep, I was so sleepy, I just couldn't not.  I could not resist the sleep's siren song.  But J, though he begged me not to leave his room, kept coughing in my face, and I was so sleepy and had to go.  I said, "I'm leaving, do not get out of this bed or I'll get upset," and crept into the living room where the sofa said, oh, hello, darling, and reached out for me and pulled me down into its cozy embrace. 

I regret saying those words.

For, upon waking an hour later, disoriented, almost drunk, I spoke briefly with Caleb, then wandered back to J's room, and was met with a scene that made me physically falter.  A stunning visual greeted me:  J, naked, half-smiling, pulling at the skin on his tummy, and his bed, covered haphazardly with poo, and stuffed creatures, also covered and smeared and besmirched with shit, and his bed, the ends, and the rug, and even the floor near the walls, and all his bedding; and there was shit on his feet and legs, and hands, and I began to cry, and he laughed.

And I swore, and spun on my heel and went into the hallway, where I found the very expensive rubber-coated wire whisk made by Le Creuset turned-mangled-plaything lying at my feet, and I threw it at the wall at the other end, I threw it hard.  It bounced off.  Good thing it's rubber-coated.  Made for a very satisfying projectile.

It was an ugly day.

Hug me?

noone is to blame. adhd is, though.

Remember that Howard Jones song?  It totally takes me back to the eighth grade.  Not necessarily in a good way, but also not really horribly. 

My arm aches from painting, which I did, again, for around six hours yesterday.  Caleb came down with the death-by-phlegm cold, and bolted to bed after dinner.  My parents, who make my head spin from the amount of crazy they make me, are beautiful, wonderful people who came over to help knock most of the rest of the painting out.  They were here until almost 11 p.m.  These are people who have had a standing bedtime of approximately 9 p.m. since I was small.  They are lovely, these strange, crazy-makers, and I love them. 

(But if I could actually have the opportunity to say such things without being interrupted around seventy-two times during the thanking process by their need to inform me of their giant, unbounded glut of love for me, of my beauty and worth and general fabulous perfection, of how glad they are that I'm their daughter, how wonderful my son is, how beautiful, how lovely Caleb is, how large their amorous affections blossom in the knowledge of our existence, etc, because when I'm honest with them, quietly so, it makes them rather more uncomfortable than if they were positioned with their tokheses over the back of a porcupine, and I guess my acceptance of their resulting need to block my attempt to gracefully, quietly tell them that I'm grateful for what they've done for me due to that discomfort is part of the whole mess of being grateful.  Lesson:  Being grateful is messy.  Oh.  I get it.  Now if I could just remember it - story of my fah-reaking life.  But then, if one cannot remember one's history, and is therefore doomed to repeat it, that just means -- I'll be writing this post again at some point.

Please don't ever read through my archives.  I won't, either.  Deal?)

like a faucet.

I was just spouting off yesterday.  I need to do it occasionally, so the damn doesn't burst, etc., but I feel better today.  Well, okay, anyway.  J is at my parents' house and that helps, but mostly I just want to finish having to slice deep into my gut and reveal the black memories that dwell therein to my therapist in order for him to add it all up, all the pieces that will help him best determine what kind of pills I can pop that will bandage up the wound I had to slice open in order for him to make that determination and OY.  Well, alright, to be fair, because I'd already sliced it open when we moved, but it was a messy, imprecise cut, less cut and more rend, and this latest one was medically administered with a sterile knife, but after I leave a session of pulling out spaghetti intestines and the blood has spilled anew and I have to somehow shove it all quickly back in and run through the gray rain to my gray car on the gray road and keep it sealed for a week, for another session of poring over the grisly, tar-coated innards, well, I'm not entirely capable of keeping things sealed properly.  I was always that kid who picked at the scabs, pick pick pick, and yesterday, I had not allowed the bandage to adhere cleanly to the wide-openness directly beneath its immaculate surface, I had to peek along the edge.  Just to see, you know, whether it was still there or whatever, and then - hey!  Oh!  Right!  I was raped in high school, and also molested in the eighth grade, which, while I don't count it as my first kiss, it technically was, and then there was Alaska, and god.  I shiver over sharing these things, these scary details, because who wants to see the wreckage?  People want to read blogs to laugh, even at the goriest of news items, we want to see them and shiver darkly and then get a good punch line to lighten the load, and I have no punchline.  Instead, I'm angry, I'm pissed, PISSED at those FUCKERS who have made things so much goddamn harder for me, this life that is already not a simple trot through each day, even for those who have been lucky enough to escape molestation on any level (of whom I am convinced there are but few).  So, I'm angry.  And I share because - you wanna know why?  Because there shouldn't be a ban on talking about having been taken advantage of.  I was stripped of my power in those moments, and -- here's a funny (although not punchline-y, sorry) thing:  when I was a stripper, throughout the entire experience, I recall hearing people say things like, Oh, you know, women who are in the adult entertainment industry have all been molested or raped at some point.  And I was always like, huh.  Well, that makes me an anomaly, doesn't it.  Since I'd somehow managed to completely forget that I was molested *and* raped before I finished high school.  You know why?  I'm gonna tell you that, too!  Because I didn't relate to the textbook definition of molestation or rape.  I thought about those precise, defined specifics, and compared my versions to those, and went, oh, nope!  None a' that here!  And when I shared the stories brokenly to my friends, their blank looks and non-responses or the occasional "Oh." brought me up short, made me think I was over-sharing and frightening people and I should probably just stop telling those stories that frightened people and made them not want to hang out with me.  Shame on me for having told anyone, was all I could feel and think. 

Isn't that all terribly funny?  Funny-weird, I mean.  I know it's not funny.  I don't feel like laughing.  Rather, I feel -- like I don't want to have a daughter.  Because I'll be compelled to tell her what I went through, and though in a perfect, best-case scenario, my explanation is clear and clean and her reception is solid and logical, and she learns from my stories and is careful about where she goes and what she does, but -- dude.  The guys who molested me in the eighth grade?  Were in the middle of a party of kids who were not drunk or stoned or high on anything other than their own selfish agendas and thought the whole thing was funny anyway.  So do I ban my future daughter from attending social functions altogether?  Well, no, but I would hope she would know to push someone away and call attention loudly and clearly to the inappropriate behavior, strong enough and confident enough to know that the molester should be humiliated to attempt such a thing in the midst of a fucking party.

But would she be successful, even then?  What if it didn't matter - what if she were molested anyway? 

How could I live with myself, having not prevented such a thing, and having allowed this precious charge of mine to experience something that has fucked me up like a rake in a hurricane?

Ah.  This is all such a THING, this mess.

SEE why we have to talk about it?  The more it's out there, the more stories we share about our losses of power at different but still important moments in our lives, the more "textbook" definitions there will be available for people to learn from, to see as mirrors or useful comparisons, to watch out for as roadsigns, to draw strength from, to recognize their own experiences as having been something more than a private, shame-filled thing to closet and keep buried.

Let's talk about it.  Talk about it here.  Please.  Don't give it any more power, not just over yourself, but over the future would-be molesters.  Let's use our old pain as a weapon for our kids.

If you don't want to identify yourself, you don't have to.  Be anonymous.  Or email me your story and I'll post it sans name.

This is one way to keep our kids safe.  You see, I'm aware that this could happen to my son, too, whether I ever have a daughter.  I don't want it for him, either.

damn this bear trap on my body.

Oh, what to do, what to do.  Should I check myself into a mental health clinic - when there's such an excellent one just around the corner, in this very neighborhood?  The same one they put my brother in when he was still around town, being all homeless and shit?

Should I tell myself to keep sucking it up, the knowledge that I was raped on prom, the same stupid night I got ditched by my date, the night that I already felt like the asshole of a baboon?  That I'd forgotten until I started writing something else horrid about high school a few months ago?  Because nobody likes a whiner, Debbie.  Shush that shit up.

Should I try to keep it all together like I always have?  What about all the mental cracked-up crap?  Push it together and sew a jagged line of fuzzy woolen thread over the top, keep ignoring the child coughing from his crying jab in the other room so I can write these selfish devils down, entrap them, ensnare them as I am ensnared?

Do I say all of this, knowing that my father-in-law reads this blog?  Do I keep writing down the ugly, miserable, hateful, horrid things when they could hurt so many people? 

Do I insist that my husband come home today so that I don't rush into the street and wait for oncoming traffic (well, okay, the stray, occasional minivan doing about 3-5 mph) to do the job I would avoid at all costs because it is so messy to handle - not the handling, really, but the planning?  Seriously, gross, the planning.  So goddamn messy.  Many's the time I've wished for my residence to be the penthouse.

And, furthermore, do I write these things here in this free-for-all space, knowing that even my therapist could pop 'round?  Find out I'm possibly worse off than I'd like for him to perceive, even though I really do want him to perceive the truth - whatever that might be?  Because I really don't know just what that is.

I know that I *don't* want to call my mom and ask her to come over and help, because I'll have to explain the gravity of the situation and then she'll make a huge fuss, which would only exacerbate my feelings, the thing that I absolutely DON'T need, rather, I need her to underwhelm me with her non-response (other than the response of, yes, okay, be right over, babe, and then come in and let me go curl in a ball on my bed while she hangs with the crying kid).

Shit.

******

Keeping comments closed, 'cause I don't want to deal with the guilt of not responding to heartfelt concern that I already know you have 'cause you've shown it to me so many times, but please - not to fear - I won't do anything stupid, at least not deliberately.  Caleb is coming home and I'm alright, really, I am.  Just getting the bad thoughts out here so I can keep myself accountable.  It's what I do.  It works for me.  It always has.  I'm gonna make it (and now we hold hands and envision me tossing my wooly beret in the air).

when knowing isn't half the battle.

I feel like I've been handed a hot potato and asked to keep holding it.

This adhd thing is spinning me right 'round, baby.  Right.  'Round.  (I was totally attracted to the androgynous singer of that song in the eighties, btw, and, logically, to Boy George, Belinda Carlisle when she was more zaftig, and therefore more boyish, and George Michael as well.  Androgyny was so hot.  Actually, now that I think about it, it still is.)

I wish I had an appointment to see the psychotherapist sooner than three weeks' time.  That feels a little too far away. 

Argh.

dispensing with pleasantries.

Caleb had to go to Vegas for a trade show again, and I'm admitting to his being gone simply because I have his brother to keep us safe (not to mention our HUGE! FEROCIOUS! MAN-EATING, uh, man-licking/peeing-on but with TOXIC PEE THAT WILL MELT KNEECAPS! HONEST! JUST ASK OUR FRIEND WHO STOPPED OVER TODAY AND WAS PEED ON AND SUBSEQUENTLY RUSHED TO THE HOSPITAL FOR A LIFE-THREATENING KNEECAP-MELTING MALADY! dog), so, yes, since his brother came up to help us move and do some house-straightening, and ladies? he's single (and I started to go into why that's good but I'm too fucking tired right now).  Anyway.  Caleb's out of town, something I dread more than any other single thing in this world, because it always makes my heart ache, sort of like heartburn but with that added frisson of sadness, so I'm trying to suck it up like I'm s'posed to, but GAH.  I hate it when he's gone.  Just like Joni said, the bed's too big, the frying pan's too wide.  I always get a little case of heartbreak, and my appetite completely disappears, so I ate alcohol for dinner while J had chicken and corn and rice and watermelon, and he watched me drink the rose and smiled with his mouthful of food spilling out of the corners.  It's a nice rose, too, Red Bicyclette rose, quite surprisingly nice, I like it very much.

I was trying to say how I get bored with blogging but, of course, typical as per my routine is wont to persist thanks to lacking any kind of focus and we all know why 'cause I've already nailed the reason but FUCK if I feel like actually discussing it currently (iow, I don't much feel like it), I didn't finish the thought.  I wanted to explain that I get bored because I get so distracted and then I try to write all these things and then my mind drifts and I never can to seem to keep it on course, and I'm forever wishing I had someone else's ability to manage my thoughts coherently, like G or Kristen or Julie or Liz or Ruth, they're all so good at coming up with things and following through.  Why can't I do that?  And, yes, I know the answer.  It's a fucking rhetorical question, okay?  I can do this, this post is unplugged.  The amp has been turned off.  I'm sending this one out to the masses in a whisper, albeit the stage-kind.   I'm throaty and raw and I'm luminous, no, wait, I was luminous in my twenties, now I'm frazzled and fuzzy-haired, but still throaty, and maybe a little raw, well, definitely raw where I rapped my knuckle on the cupboard today, and also where I got the cardboard cut on the finger on the other hand, and yes, my feet are black-soled from being barefoot because I hate wearing shoes now and WHEN DID THAT HAPPEN, EXACTLY?, never thought I'd live to hear myself come out with that one, ugh.

I. hate. my. brain. is what I'm trying to illustrate, I'm in the midst of a hate-dance, a hate-jig, a reeling reel of anger and resentment, I'd parry and thrust but I think it's already damaged enough, so all I'm free to do is smolder with fury over this unfair disadvantage.  Yes.  Sure.  It's an interesting place, kinda like Donald Duck's brain when it's revealed to us on his jaunt through Mathmagic Land (a video I still PROUDLY own and have shown to my son on several occasions because it's awesome and one of the best things ever made), but it's not interesting to me.  It's tiresome and useless and troublesome and rebellious and shirkish and I want it to obey me, for christ's sake!  I feel like I'm handling two toddlers; my child, and my brain.  It's awful.  I want it to straighten up and manage like it's supposed to.  I want it to have not lost me a college degree or have spent years upon years resenting my parents for not having instructed me on the proper life-skill tools.  I want it to retroactively give me the opportunity to begin a career, any career, and stick with it, to not have racked up thousands and thousands of dollars of debt in my early twenties, to not have had to file bankruptcy because of the debt, to not have spent years treading water as a stripper because I couldn't handle any other kind of gainful employment (and I'm not criticizing adults who choose that career; I'm only explaining my own inability to play that role and live with myself daily).   I want to have the opportunity to retrieve some of the many, many relationships that dissolved at least partially as a result of my lack of an executive processing piece, a brain boss, and I want to have the chance to not wreak such damage on the relationship with my husband, the many years of damage, the sabotage, the distrust, the defensive behaviors because of the fear that he would eventually see through me, see how I'm shit and not worth two seconds of his time, I want it all.

I'm gonna be working through this for a little bit.  Please excuse the resulting mess.  I don't know how much time I'll be devoting to blogging, aside from the selfish, in-my-own-head kind, while I'm doing this demo.

I still care about all of you very much.  I'm just gonna be selfish for a minute.  It won't last.  I care too much to disappear completely.

Just, um, don't scratch me off your lists, okay please okay?  I'm going through another one of those pushing-away episodes.  I'm sorry.  I hate that I do this.  I wish I could stop doing it.

I just need a little time.

this and that.

Can I be honest?  Sometimes I'm so bored with blogging.  Not the friendships; just the time that it takes to come a'calling.  I get so damn restless.  Ah, yes.  Another reference to my newly-made discovery re: the attention deficit disorder thingy.  Today I am not enamored of the realization.  Today I am pissed.  I destroyed, but what I really mean is MANGLED, a vine that had been creeping gently around the iron rails near the front door of our new home for what was probably a small eternity, thanks to my anger at this thing that has made my life very difficult.  I am resentful.  I want to be an adult.  I want to be in charge of my life, in the driver's seat.  I don't want to have to pay an endless homage to the beast that insists I forget what I was just doing, just saying, just worrying about -- did I put the milk away? -- what was I about to write?

This is why I sometimes don't finish posts, and sometimes come up with grandiose schemes for things that die on the vine - or, like the vine I chopped mercilessly down today, die AS the vine.  I hated that vine.  I hated that it clung to my hair when I went through that doorway, I hated that it had lived a quiet, undisturbed existence, I hated that it belonged to the people who left this house such a fucking house of smelly horrors.  I wanted it gone, because I wanted to SHOW THOSE ASSHOLES.  Because I could.  I wanted to uproot some other living creature unnecessarily from its former place of comfort and safety, because I feel similarly uprooted.  And I wanted to do it to something that couldn't make me feel (very) guilty about doing so.

Guess what - I feel guilty anyway.

the mother of personal epiphanies.

When I was diagnosed with Cyclothymia, years ago, it didn't feel right.  And even though I'm aware that it's possible to be simultaneously afflicted with, say, an anxiety disorder, or depression, or even the bipolarism, along with AD/HD, I don't think that's the case for me.  (Although I'm quite certain I possess a tendency toward obsessive/compulsiveness.  Example, and please understand that it brings me no small sense of horror to air this to anyone other than myself and my partner, although to do so is freeing and also helps communicate the seriousness of my malady:  I often go large spans of time without showering because of my phobia regarding the cleanliness of the locations where such things are done.  Kind of hilariously ironic, non?  I can't get clean because the place where I should be cleaning myself isn't clean enough.  It just makes me laugh and *laugh*.  Really.  Oh, so funny.)  (Cristina, I was freshly showered when we hung out.  I can let the phobia go in hotel rooms, for some random reason I cannot explain.  A place I was staying when we met.  So.  You can heave a sigh of relief that your newborn babe is not going to live its life as a leper thanks to my scaly, unshowered mess of a self.)  (And Blogher-met friends - same story.  Hotel room.  Hotel room showers.  Safe from lildb brand of leprosy.  For nowwwww.  Duh-duh-duh.)

Anyway.  This just couldn't feel more appropriate, this potential diagnosis, something I hope to confirm through means of scientific head-nodding tomorrow (I have an appointment to discuss just that thing with my doc in the afternoon).

Please understand - I've never felt so sure of something before.  Every single item on the list fits me to an absolute T, even the knowledge that I've had this thing hanging around my whole life, from the time that I was small.  Any one of my teachers would probably agree, and if my parents believed in the possiblity of mental imbalance as a real-life tangible instead of the figment of my clearly-silly head that it must be in their minds, they'd assuredly chime in with their agreement.  (Nothing like being supported by one's parents.  It's AWESOME.)

I've just always, ALWAYS wondered why I couldn't make myself behave like my peers, and I sort of just hoped I'd eventually fade into the correct attitude and behavior, like the chameleon I often flatter myself to be, with time and maturity.  And it's never happened.  I'm still a sore thumb, a crazed, over-loud, inappropriately boisterous freakshow that can somehow never manage to keep track of anything and is always late, always interrupting, always hopping from one! exciting! genius! new! sparkly! better-than-ever! idea! to the next, without even recalling what the last thing was, five minutes after it's been hatched.  I miss information all the time because I drop out of the conversation because I'm so absorbed with whether so-and-so thinks I just looked at her boobs even though I was merely looking down to check whether my leg hair was announcing itself to the masses or if it was just me thinking it might be doing so, and then it seemed like I might've been staring at her chest, only I really wasn't, but then I couldn't. stop. thinking about it, the idea that she thought I was doing so, and ?  I'm sorry, could you repeat that last paragraph, please?  Or maybe I was solving a quantam physics equation, but the point is the same.  I miss things, and then I don't want to be rude so I pretend I heard it, and then I just feel like an UBER idiot because I have no idea what's going on, and it FUCKING AFFECTS MY SOCIAL LIFE, OKAY?  I've had the rockiest friendships since I was a kid because everyone thought I was so inattentive and self-absorbed, although, gosh, I can't see why they didn't love those traits, since they're such good friend-making qualities.  Actually, I'm quite good at *making* friends because I'm funny and gregarious, but in the friend-keeping dept., not. so. much.  And this is a result of years of the same cycles, of being attractive enough, both physically and personally, to draw in any number of aspiring compadres; but somewhere along the line, I know they'll find me out, they'll discover my incapacity to be anything but late, self-absorbed, inattentive, uncommitted, interrupting, loud, over-excited, silly, etc., and I sabotage the relationship in order to not allow the usual rejection to occur.  I'm damaged by this thing, this AD/HD thing.  I'm not broken, but I'm damaged.  And frankly, if I'm gonna have been damaged by something, I want to know its name.  I want to know just who, just what I'm doing battle with on a minute-by-minute basis.  I want to wrestle with a creature who isn't hidden in a fog, and when I KICK ITS FUCKING ASS, I want to see it writhe in its frustrated, inevitable throes of clutching, ever-weakening gasps.

Yeah.

And I refuse to be ashamed anymore.