Don't Blink

[maryel42]

"And Ophelia was a tempest cyclone, a goddamned hurricane... your common sense, your best defense, lay wasted and in vain... for Ophelia knows your every woe and every pain you'd ever had. She'd sympathize and dry your eyes and help you to forget. Ophelia's mind went wandering. You'd wonder where she'd gone. Through secret doors, down corridors, she wandered there alone. All alone..."


The girl wondered what it would take to become Alice and fall through the mirror. She looked at her reflection, it was a stranger to her. She could watch her eyes change color and she wondered where they went when she slipped sideways and ran away.

She got good at shifting. Reality was always subject to change. She listened with her nerves outside of her body for the change. Sound of a car door close, footstep, just a simple drawn breath from time to time. And just like that, moods change. Emotions change. And whatever she was, whereever she was, maybe what she was doing was wrong. Maybe it was going to make everything worse, make somebody notice her. So she practiced being invisible. She wanted to vanish away and be seen, not heard, not noticed, she practiced being a blank slate. Not knowing, not hearing, not seeing, but always seeing and listening. She learned to mirror back the girl they wanted to see. Sometimes that was good, sometimes silly, sometimes helpful, sometimes sad, sometimes sick, sometimes... a miniature copy of themselves.

And every so often she forgot to mirror, and she was seen. Some of the time that was okay. Some of the time it frustrated her parents and they'd scold. Tell her that she's just like this relative, or that one, lazy and selfish and unthinking. And as she grew older she started hearing that she was like this relative or that one who hurt her mom. That she did it too, as a child, but that was alright and her mom forgave her because she was just a kid copying the person who had power, and no matter how the girl hurt her mother, the mother would still love and forgive her. Every time she heard it, she accepted it a little deeper. Whenever she said something that didn't agree with whatever reality had shifted into that moment, she was wrong, and her mom often threw it back that no matter what the mom said, the daughter would argue with and say it was wrong. that the mom couldn't even say the sky was blue, but that the daughter would contradict her.

So the girl learned not to contradict. To shift with the reality. When and as it happened, to accept and move on in her head, and never to question. Every time she was wrong, she felt it burn a little deeper and one day she didn't even hurt anymore to feel it. It was just how it was. She was a wrongness.

Sometimes her father would ask her to explain something. Didn't matter what. Something deeper than a simple, obvious answer. Like, what she thought about a book. Or a trip they had taken. Pin her with a deceptively calm set of eyes. And she'd give him the real answers. The ones she actually thought. Or felt. Or believed. And ever so gently, ever so evenly, he'd pick it apart and show her that she was wrong. That she couldn't possibly think what she thought, and that wasn't it better to think of it another way? And to escape that tone of voice she eagerly agreed. Agreeing was easier, and she bent further and further and got to stay invisible, and she learned that when her stomach started to twist she could sometimes slip sideways in her skin.

One day she slipped all the way sideways, and a perfect chameleon came out. Another girl wore her skin, and that girl was perfect. She gave the right answers all the time, she could watch and listen and bend as fast as she needed to. She smiled at the right things and read the right things and she could take the twist in her stomach.

And the days go by
Like a strand in the wind
In the web that is my own
I begin again
Said to my friend, baby
Nothin' else mattered

Once she learned to slip one way, it was easy to do it again. Far better to craft one girl to go to school and one girl to placate father and one to take care of mother and then she could spend her days reading and writing stories in her head. There was another one, too, that she didn't talk about. One dream that she had over and over again that she couldn't talk about, couldn't admit to having, and it scared her a lot. There was a girl that lived in that memory. She waited.

The girl who wrapped up all those others, looked at herself in the mirror and wondered who she was and who looked back at her. She wished she knew how to slip through and be Alice. She wished her parents would die, like parents did in children's stories, and she would be whisked away to live with her guardian, her godfather, the kindly bachelor uncle who would read with her and love her and take care of her. Every year her godfather came to join in with the family at thanksgiving, he would talk about science fiction and fantasy with her, and she jealously compared how many minutes of attention she got from him compared to her older cousin. She loved her uncle-godfather very much. Her other uncle, she didn't want to know. He smelled funny. He talked strange, disjointed sometimes and he'd say the same things over and over again and she wanted to run away every time he noticed her.

More and more her memory splintered. More and more, she was determined to keep that knowledge to herself. She didn't want to be wrong again. She didn't want anyone to know. Some of that was because she had been very sick. A lot of confusing things during those years. Faces didn't match names. She could remember faces, remember that she knew the person who belonged to the face, but she couldn't remember their names or how they were connected, only that she knew the face. On paper, though, she could trace the names and how they connected and she knew the words to say to make sense of it.

She thought that nobody knew how confused and scared she was sometimes and how hard she tried to keep her secret. But somebody did figure it out. One of her mom's cousins figured it out. Every time they met up at a party or event or anything, he would carefully sprinkle the reminders into the greetings. Name and connection. He never made her feel a wrongness. And one day when she was very nearly all grown up they met and she knew who he was before he had to remind her. She said "I remember you" and he shared a quiet smile of happiness with her.

The clouds never expect it
When it rains
But the sea changes colours
But the sea
Does not change
So with the slow graceful flow
Of age
I went forth with an age old
Desire to please
On the edge of seventeen

One night after school she walked into her father's office and she couldn't keep up with the shifting, there was no right answer. There was a brief moment when she wanted to fall through the floor. There was nobody there to help her be invisible. Her entire self felt turned inside out, and she went limp as she stopped believing that anyone would ever come to let her go away.

He said, what will people think if you kill yourself? How will that reflect on me? I'm an appointed official, I am important. it will ruin me. It will kill your mother. Hasn't she been through enough? How could you do this to us? You're just being dramatic. You just want attention. Stop talking about being different, about feeling sad, about any of this nonsense. it's not true. you've got nothing to be sad about. how dare you upset these outside people who call your mother and me and they think you need counseling, but you won't do anything there. You won't get anything out of it, and it's just too much work and a waste of money.

every word he said drove her flatter into the sense of wrongness. tears came then. she cried herself out on the bottom of her world, and she let the words go like swords ripping her spirit out. His hand on her neck, squeezing, and his voice getting that quiet little twinge of something not-quite-him, and she knew that if she looked up she'd see the break in his eyes so she closed her eyes tighter.

and if you ever tell anybody again that you feel different, that you're sad, that you hurt like this, i'll kill you myself.

and his hand kept closing and she would have gone even limper if she could. Frozen. Dead. And after a few minutes she dried her eyes and somebody else got up and walked out of that place. Somebody with a storm under her skin. She left a child curled up around her knees, screaming, screaming and bleeding on the floor of that room with the blue carpet and the cool white walls, the black marker on the white board still covered with her nonsense drawings.

years later, her mother asked him to move out and leave. the girl woke up every morning for weeks, a smile on her face, and she didn't know why. in the following months she started knowing why. one day the rubber band of her sanity pulled tight and started to snap back. one day she was in a hospital with locked doors and she knew that he couldn't get in to finish what he started, and she wrote a letter telling him that until he went back to therapy and started taking his meds again she didn't want to see him or have anything to do with him.

the ground didn't swallow her up.

she saw a few things she would never forget. she learned a few things she would never forget. she broke up with her boyfriend and he tried to kill himself... and she didn't see him again. The conflict he represented was something her mind shied away from. It was her first kiss... she panicked over. Fumblings in dark corners at school made her start slipping sideways in her skin. Once, together in his bedroom he started going into more intense heavy petting, and she froze completely. Later, scrubbing her skin raw, trying not to think about how scared she was. How ashamed she was of feeling so scared. Of a memory of another time, in the bathroom of the tiny house she had grown up in, the same house she could not escape, in the same bathtub

and her brain broke

she saw that memory and she owned that memory and there was this tiny blond baby girl in her heart that was curious and trusting and happy and full of sunshine, all until one morning she heard the shower running and went in to see what was there. here, honey, put it in your mouth, it's alright, it's okay. but she can't breathe. and she's scared and she can't move and then it's some endless time later and she's older again with her skin half raw and shadows in her eyes.

and now she knows why it hurts, but shakes her head and insists that she wasn't there. it wasn't her. she didn't see it, it wasn't her, not her fault and she didn't mean to do it

all mixed up with that limpness, that defeat, that moment of giving up. The moment when she stopped denying she felt empty and started accepting that she was nothing at all. She really was the wrongness. Nothing she would or could ever do would be enough to erase what she had done, and she just had to pretend that everything was alright

keep slipping sideways. keep mirroring back what strangers want to see. hide behind your eyes, wrap everything you do feel behind layers and layers of misdirection and half-told truths and sometimes outright lies.

one day somewhere in the middle of that she realized that everything that left her mouth was a lie. even when she didn't intend it to be. but because she wasn't allowed to say anything or ask anyone to help her, she had to fix it herself. so she did, carefully, although it meant that for a few months she didn't allow herself to talk at all.

practiced becoming even more invisible, like that would help. of all the incredibly painful things that happened beyond those two, these were the worst of all, because they taught her that she was nothing. invisible, wrongness, existing only to serve somebody else's will. her thoughts were wrong, her memories were not her own, and after the limpness of the hand on her neck she started sleeping with a knife in her hand. to kill herself before he could find her.

and no, it's not okay to be mad about it. i'm not allowed to get angry about it. even now. part of getting angry is becoming visible, and visible isn't safe, and if somebody sees me than i'm real. then it's real. then it really happened and it really was terrible and if i can just pretend that i got over it then nobody will blame me for not trying hard enough to get over it. i can't get over it, even though it probably wasn't that bad and i'm just making more of it than it was.

 

[maryel42]

Come to realize that the past two weeks... I thought I knew where they were going. For the most part, I did.

What I did not expect was that it's also been a continuation of testing the trust-issue waters.

I trust my therapist. That, I knew. That, I have been proving in little ways for several weeks. A few months. Testing the waters, letting more and more freakouts slowly break through. And he passed those tests.

I didn't know if I expected that or not. I think that I did.

But he did pass those tests. So now after a small breathing space I've jumped into another phase. I've been testing myself.

I trust him to take care of my Silent. I've been testing myself to see if I can trust myself to trust him to take care of her.

Yesterday was the tipping point. I woke up this morning after the kitten dreams and I get it. Hear that, backbrain? I get it. It's time to stop lying to myself.

I've been saying that I dealt with it. I've been hiding it. Every time it came up in the early years I got the first words out and then flipped the deck of cards. And there was plenty of other traumas to deal with, plenty of stuff to process my way through, and not one bit of it actually handled Silent. My way of dealing with her was to put her back to sleep. Hug her, tell her it was okay, and put her back to sleep.

Not time yet, I'd tell her. And I'd tell myself that as my thoughts squirmed away. As we stopped being different fragments of me, she got folded into the mix, and still slept. There, but not quite, giving up the knowledge and keeping the awareness. whatever that is.

Here's the point I find that fear. Here's the point I sit with it and let it happen and heal. Whatever happens, happens, and I will come out the other side of it.

The kitten dream that brought it home... searching out that tiny, helpless scared kitten. And all those others, a little older but not the one that needed me to rescue it. Not even rescue it, but find it and comfort it.

I don't know about anger, the anger my therapist says is there. I know about fear. I know about the paralyzing fear, and the little in my heart that just wants to know why, and I know that question doesn't really have an answer. There will never be an answer. And all the words that you'd tell an adult won't work, they've never worked, because that little is still little. She doesn't understand. Which is why I keep searching out child therapists and shrinks.

Someday I knew this would come. Someday I knew she'd wake up. Someday I'd need to find an answer for her.

 

[maryel42]

When I was eighteen, I got shipped off to college and I was SO not ready to go. In just the seven months preceding this I had been hospitalized for my most lethal suicide attempt, had been in two outpatient programs, and been inpatient for psych 10 times. Within a few days at that college I ran into biblical counseling.

A few days after that experience, I tried to kill myself again, was shipped off into yet another psych ward, and I decided that I was ready to go with "nonfunctional" as a way of life. I hurt too much. In the most stripped down way possible, I hurt too much to bear anything else ever again.

After frying my shortterm memory and getting weaned off the chemical restraints, because I literally could not go through more than an hour without doing selfinjury, whether awake or asleep, I landed in one more outpatient program. I stared at the floor a lot at first. Then I worked on just getting stable. Figuring out if it was worth coming back from that point. I was eighteen.

I forget how young that really is. When you're young, doesn't it seem that you'll always be old? There's such a rush to get grown up and not enough transitioning allowed in really disfunctional families.

Eighteen.

I came back from that, that's the point. I did. I spent a lot of time after that getting functional. Then I trotted off to a different university, much better prepared, and ran into a much better class of counseling service. I remember my intake session with one of the supervisors at the clinic. They did all the intakes and then assigned you to a student counselor, and had a lot of supervision there. I remember that she ran through one complete pad of paper and had to start a second. We ran two hours straight. At the end of the first, she told me quite matter of factly that she was going to keep me.

That gave me a warm feeling. I mean, sure I was trouble with a capital T. I was broken, damaged, I didn't know if I was ever going to stop really hating myself. But here was someone who thought I was worth helping. Here was somebody who was listening, who gave a damn, who wasn't scared by what I was walking in with.

I worked with her for two years. I trusted her. I did all these trust testing things with her, too, and that was the only other time in my life I got that deep into my damage. Almost all of those two years were spent on coping skills. Behavior skills. Learning to recognize my behaviors, manage them, analyze them, restructure thought patterns... I guess she did the most of anybody ever to really prepare me for life. The functionality I have today I can go back and lay at her feet. I would have trusted her with my right-now-current-hell of an issue, but we never got to it.

First I had to learn to stop bleeding out, emotionally, every time I breathed. Those years were basic first aid and trauma assessment. I'll never forget the second highest compliment she ever paid me; it was that I was one walking mess of crisis but that I was a stable walking mess of crisis. She could park me with her grad students on one of my bad days and feel safe that they would get experience dealing with it without being harmed by it. I was a known? I could always be reached, through my haze, and I could work, and I wasn't violent, and though she always was very hands-on with that supervision, I was worth. I had worth. My mess had a greater purpose in that context.

And now all these damn emails I'm sending my therapist. I told him to think of it all as background. It's a view into my head, what is really going on, day by day. He mentioned a month ago that it seemed like very little work actually got done in session; all of it came out on email over the week and we were really just touching base face to face in the office.

I think that it's all about to hit the fan. In session. Last week I sat down and he spent most of the hour convincing me that it was safe to let stuff out in there. That I was safe. That it was okay to do it. I don't remember much of anything else we talked about. Just trust issues and safety and more trust issues. Then was a whole new outpouring of emotional crap. Then my body started shaking and going into these full body things. Waves of fear, again, over and over again, of grief and fear and many other things.

Then dreams about kittens. I think the first set of dreams got impatient because I wasn't "getting it". So it stripped down to an even more blatent form. I'm driving down the road in the pitch black driving rain and wind. Looking for a kitten. Then I'm running because driving is too fast. Then I'm walking. Then I'm crawling through tunnels underground stuffed with debris and mud and crawling things and it's horrible down there but I have to find this tiny kitten who's brandnew and needs me because she's scared and alone. I am so tired and I want to get out of the dirt. I see other kittens coming towards me and I'm tempted to rescue them instead, but they're big enough and old enough and they can find their way out on their own, and they are not the kitten I'm looking for. One of them looked like her, the closer I got, but they weren't her. I finally found that tiny kitten and I picked her up and she crawled into my clothes to get warm and hear my heart and be safe.

I guess that's as simple and in my face as it's going to get that I need to stop running from this thing. Original Trauma.

Is there such a thing as Original Trauma? Is it as mythical as Original Sin? Is it as damaging? And where do I find absolution from it?

 

[maryel42]

It's that time again. Time to wrap it up and go to bed. Where I'll lay a bit, then shake a bit, then fail to stay asleep.

I don't wanna. My plan tonight is to take my meds and listen to music and read a book or all my many, many forums to kill the time until I go to sleep. Or I'll google random emotional stuff and hope to trigger a few tears to bleed off the panic and depression. And not sleep. And not think about why I'm not sleeping. And when I am? Jerking awake suddenly.

I babble about it and then I am able to. So this is really, ultimately, my best plan at sleeping well tonight.

 

[maryel42]

Ah. That didn't work. Slept one measly hour and I have been up now for two hours.

To pass the time I'm starting to prepare for therapy tomorrow. I think the first thing to come up will be the events of Monday. To briefly sum, I had a benefit review with social services and disqualified for all aid because I'm still legally married and therefore his responsibility. And he said I'm nothing, a useless leech.

After the interview, actually as it was wrapping up, I went into a dissociative state. I won't call it a fugue because I try to minimize all my more severe symptoms in an effort to seem less broken. But I wasn't feeling real. I was completely unconnected to my body, it was running on autopilot, and the edges of my vision was whiteout fuzz.

Instead of driving to the library I found myself driving to the therapists office where I slipped into the waiting room, put my head down in my hands, and let the world fade out.

I tend to paralyze in these situations. I panic and have anxiety attacks to the point I think i will stroke out, and not be able to move, though I can hear everything around me.

I know I was there through two appt hours. I heard my therapist calling in patients and I'm sure he saw me but everyone let me be (which is what I wanted, so that was cool). Slowly the world started coming back and I was able to ground again. I got my feet going, thanked the receptionist for the opportunity to gather myself, and left.

So I know he will want to address it.

Then all the other crap I've been writing about. I'm trying to frame the words that may come up so that I don't freeze.

Part of the minimizing is making my shrink think I'm doing much better than I am. I told him about the thing with the husband, which came into a huge half suicidal thing a few hours later in therapy. Shrink suggested marriage counseling.

It's my fault for not having the right words to explain. I have a similar issue with the pain clinic.

I'm tired and my body won't shut off. Pain, unresolved body memories, or anticipating therapy? Or something else? Or simply just can't sleep? I don't know. I'm tired.

 

[maryel42]

Another night of four hours sleep. in three chunks, all with great big horrid hours between them. I'm starting to zombify. I have an hour or so before I have to get to therapy. Try to close my eyes again and sleep. Hope.

I'm starting to lose my hope again. It feels as though this has gone on forever. Too many nights on too little sleep, even for me. I'm not cutting but I'm still not hungry at all and it's an effort to make myself eat and keep back the reflex that says "ACK! I'm eating! Stomach can't handle food!" and lose it all. A friend once called it unconscious bulimia. I don't do it on purpose, I'm usually crying when it comes up because I want to keep it back so hard.

If I had more rest I would be laughing hysterically at this. You know how I was saying yesterday that I seemed to be regressing to teenager-hood? I'm officially regressed to the symptoms I had as a teenager when I had my very first nervous breakdown.

I must be making progress to feel this bad right now.

 

[maryel42]

So close to telling him the whole thing. I got all the way up to the last couple of words and then I lost my words. Throat closed up, couldn't say them, just shook my head.

I'd like to think that he could read between the lines. I know that he's had enough years experience that he won't read between the lines. Never make assumptions. Isn't that some rule in the handbook?

Not that I've ever gone by the handbook. Ever.

Sometimes I am proud of it. Sometimes not so much.

We had a bit of comic relief in the beginning. Before it got too real and too painful. He showed me a funny clip. I laughed.

I think it's the first time he's ever heard me giggle. Just a simple, real, no black humor at all giggle. And afterwards I went home and found one of my favorite clips and sent it back. He wrote back that he enjoyed watching it.

I slept last night. First time that I really slept and got real rest in what... two weeks or so? And this morning I lost a lot of the overly-tense pains. I'm back to my baseline pain levels. Which, okay, aren't that great to deal with, but... they're mine. Familiar. It's almost a relief to only hurt this much today.

 

[maryel42]

Integration


Once upon a time -isn't that how all good stories are supposed to start- there were five of me. Or six, depending on how you count it. Now there is one of me. For almost all of the time, there's no difference. That's how well integration took, and how much I wasn't totally all the way five (six) people I was.

The sixth either doesn't count at all, or is the only one who does count. I'm still not sure. I've been hiding her since 'integration' stopped being a dirty word and started becoming 'the way I start being fixed'.

I'm also not altogether convinced that DID wasn't just the 'popular' diagnosis that year on that ward. Like ADD became. Like Autism/Spectrum. It was probably a lot more accurate that say that I was going through a majorly split personality with a hefty helping of dissociative episodes, on top of the silent seizures. Who knows? And does it really matter at this point?

Anyway.

Around the same time as Integration started being tossed around as the thing that would fix me, I was starting to have massive guilt because I wasn't getting any better. Surely, a year of therapy and two hospitalizations and meds were supposed to be fixing me. I wasn't supposed to still be cutting and starving and waking up screaming and fixated on dying to finally escape the pain and the screaming that never really seemed to stop in my head. Running out of group. Bent over crying in gym, until I couldn't breathe from tears and then escaping into the safety of my own head while somebody else, some other fragment of the mirror came out to talk for me. And I decided to stop giving the real answers to some of the questions.

I learned all the right ones to say. I learned to say that of course it wasn't my fault. I said of course it was him, it was his sickness, it was his problem and none of my doing, and I forgave myself for being so young and tiny. I learned to say that of course my depression was easing off. Of course I didn't think about killing myself every hour of every day.

And I did it so well that the therapists and doctors all believed me. I want to say that of course they believed me. I had enough time in, I was about at the point where it was supposed to work, they didn't want to go over it again and again and again... every time they brought it up I trotted out the answers and flipped the deck and made it better.

And when a huge wave of heavy guilt washed over me in group or in session afterwards I kept trotting out the words and I soothed myself by saying, "of course it's not true. I know the truth. It doesn't matter."

Years pass. Five of me turn into one of me. The mirror gets mended. Under enough prolonged high stress high emotional states, sometimes it starts to craze again, but it's all Me.

Even that last, tiny, teeny tiny bit that I could make not exist by dropping her off the charts and fudging my intakes a bit.

Here's the thing. I know where she came from. None of those other bits, I ever really knew and it never really mattered at what point they splintered off. Just dealing with it mattered. All the years since I got to be just me again. But.

Every so often her head comes up. Every so often I remember all those little details like they happened just an hour ago. A couple of years ago I started remembering how it felt. It went from knowing and seeing the event to full on Knowing and Seeing and Feeling it. There's being scared and there's being afraid on a level that's just off the charts and there's being confused. I'm not watching it happen anymore, I'm actually being that kid in that body now.

I don't know how to talk to her. I don't know how to get through to her. As a grown up I've got all the knowledge of what and when and how and it doesn't matter at all because she doesn't have the words I have. I can type anything. I can write and type my way all around it and I can talk all the way around saying it, and I can't come out and say it at all. Not since I started feeling the emotions, not since I stopped seeing as something that happened to someone else and started seeing it as something that happened to me. That overwhelms me. All the years since, all the professionals and the work I've done on my own and this brings me all the way back down again.

Sure, I can live around it. Still. I can pretend that it's not there, still, and inside my head I can wrap her up in the darkness again and hide her where's she's safe, and I know that eventually she'll fall asleep again for a while. The longer that I'm a mom the less I want to do it. It's not fair to me or her. I want to be able to take her hand and pull her all the way and let her be part of me, all the way, and not hide her away like the shameful little secret that she is.

My head knows. My heart doesn't.

 

[maryel42]

Don't blink.

Blink, and you'll miss it.

Motherhood is exhausting. Mothering a preemie, exhausting. NICU, then home, then worried about every last little thing. Is she breathing? Is she too blotchy? Is that a sniffle or just her noisy breathing? Will the birth defect in her eye mean that she can see or not? Therapy for the muscles, for the developmental delays, tracking the reflux and her weight gain. Watching my baby girl look through me as though I wasn't even there.

Seasons come and go. Sensory tantrums, full blown meltdowns. She's not seeming to feel pain anymore. Shots... don't make her cry as long as the other babies at the clinic. I hold my baby while she's screaming and flinging her little body all over the place and the second time she bruised herself I started wrapping my body around hers to cushion the impact.

My baby turned a year old, she was beating me black and purple almost daily. Still looked through me... except

Don't Blink.

She'll turn her head around in the sunlight and catch my eye. Smiles. Laugh of delight, then it's gone again. She'll hear me singing and creep across the floor faster than anything and grab my skirt. I'll sit on the floor reading aloud to the empty air and a few minutes later she's come up and curled into my lap. Never often. Never for long. But those little bits kept me going day after day and they taught me to love her.

Don't blink, or I'll miss it. Don't blink, or I'll miss those moments and I will drown in the pain of it.

She got older, started stripping, started stripping and pooping and smearing her poop over everything. I scrubbed it out of the carpet. The walls. The crib. The couch. I scrubbed it out of her air, where it matted solid in the middle of the night. I had it ground in my fingernails, and the smell was in my skin. Never went away.

Don't blink.

Older still... and I waited for her... and made the most of the small moments when she'd look back at me. When she knew who I was. When she laughed and I laughed and those moments let me keep going. I waited.

I never blinked. And one magical day she came to me, and she wrapped her arms around my waist, and she knew who I was all the time.

 

[maryel42]

In the spirit of Blue Collar Comedy's I Believe, I offer up these statements. I tried for funny but true, but it turned into a big sadness in me by the end, putting some of these moments into words. Short, clear statements, and I hope I managed to put them more as a statement of strength? Than as a statement of woe?


I believe: that a mother who has just brought her newborn home from three and a half months (over one hundred days) in NICU cannot hog her own baby. She is perfectly properly allowed and entitled to hold that child as long as her arms can stand it. She is not required to give equal time to her mother, or greater time, in the spirit of setting a good example of sharing for her toddler.

I believe: a guest does not rearrange someone else's home, without being specifically asked, no matter how irritated that guest is at having moving boxes still unpacked in the garage.

I believe that a car owner should have the right not to park in a garage no matter how much her mother insists that it is better.

I believe that I have the right to refuse baking cakes for anyone I choose without justifying my decision. Double if it's for the guy who showed up uninvited at my door, exposed himself, and insisted on groping me with his tongue before he would leave.

I believe that I have the right to make decisions about my own medical care without defending them to my mother. She is not owed a blow by blow account of my latest pelvic exam, a detailed rundown of my bloodwork, or naming rights over my offspring. She also does not get to decide that I have my tubes tied, because my pregnancies and deliveries were just so horribly traumatizing for her.

I believe I have the right to expect that my mother will never call my boss to discuss how I had mental health issues as a young adult. Or that my father was an incredibly abusive parent. My boss does not need to know this. Anything she does need to know I am more than capable of telling her myself.

I believe I have the right to expect to be respected as a grownup in the entirety of my life. Not just in my marital bed. Although I may still be judged for it, and nothing in that room is off limits for comment or opinion.


I believe that the state of my son's genitalia is nobody's business but his parents and his physician. It's fine. Let it go already!!!

Same goes for my daughter, if it ever comes up...

I believe that although I may have been able to be bribed as a child; working towards a radio, a my little pony castle, a calculator, in the pursuit of potty training, I grew out of that some time ago. To suggest that I can be bought for a price now is, quite frankly, insulting. If I couldn't be bought by a room of my own in order to move back home and follow my mothers master plan for my life, I can't be bought back into my marriage by the promise of a new wedding ring.

I have the right to say that I expect my son to be back in time to be fed and be on his bus. I have the right to expect my wishes to be followed. Not just whenever it's sortof convenient for you. And don't tell me that the kid wanted to go and she just couldnt bear to disappoint him. You are the grownup. You are the woman who throws up your early childhood /elementary degree at me, along with your triply certified masters of special ed and all those years in the classroom. Deal. Its not the first time you've said no to a small child.

I believe that I'm entitled to be heard, should I speak, without having to repeat myself five or more times because the words coming out of my mouth are so at odds with what my mother believes I should be saying.

I believe that I'm entitled to the truth of my own past. While others may have their own perspectives on how they felt during events, and they may want to put their own interpretation of that perspective on top of mine, I'm allowed to say that this is not the way I thought about something, am thinking about something, have experienced something.
I'm also allowed to correct false assumptions as they occur in order to...something. I don't know what that something is. it's not wrong of me to want to correct them, anyway.I have the right to say no to something even if I can't justify or defend my no. It's okay just to say no.

It's okay if I want to decide for myself who to friend/unfriend on any social media. Likewise, it's okay to not share pics of my kids if I don't want to do it. Nobody is owed pics. Especially not if they're in the habit of forwarding them to a hundred people that I have never met.

Family is no excuse for being a bitch.

When I confide a closely held painful issue to a relative, I expect them to keep it to themselves. Especially if I'm crying. Super especially if it's a really big issue. When I discover that it has been communicated to my mother's small group at church, two bible study groups, her sunday school class, and whispered to two dozen of her cousins, I am allowed to feel betrayed. It does not matter if they're all on the other coast, and that I'm likely to never meet them. And that they will never meet people who may know me. That's not the point. I'm allowed to feel horribly betrayed by it.


...and now I'm all depressed and sad again. This exercise started out so strong. I don't feel strong anymore.

 

[Sheer Force of Will]

I am sorry that you don't feel strong anymore, but your list of affirmations is amazing and inspiring and beautiful! The way you stated all the things you believe is so powerful, and you are so right and justified. You have a beautiful voice and I hope to hear more of it.

 

[maryel42]

Eighteen months ago I didn't believe any of this to be true. It probably cost my marriage. At the least of it, it will never be what it was.

Today I feel as though I'm crawling uphill on broken glass.

I need to cry but I cant figure out how to release it, so I'm doing the next best thing. I'm rereading all the old worn favorote books that I know will make me cry.