“Life is pleasant, death is peaceful …

… it’s the transition that’s troublesome.”
– Isaac Asimov

Dear Mom and Dad,

There are a lot of things that I want to say to you, but can’t, or won’t, for many reasons.

I love you both for your values, your strength and tenacity, your volume and your quiet. I love you for being the first person to stand up for me whenever anyone doubts me.

I hate you both for choosing work over your child, for making me feel like an outsider in my own family, for treating me like I am inferior to my peers.

I resent that you hold my education over my head. If I had known that you would feel this meant you owned my life, I never would have agreed to let you pay for it.

Some of these things cannot be changed any more, and some of them have created such resentment in me that I don’t know how to pry it loose.

Fester, fester, fester. Rot, rot, rot.

I am ready to let go of these resentments, to move on with my life. To grow up and take care of myself.

This is something that I need to do.

I understand that you think this is a mistake — I have heard and considered the wisdom of your experience. I even understand that I may well be making a mistake, but I still believe that this is where I need to go with my life.

There are things that you want from me, that you ask me to do, that I am not ready to do yet. A house is not a responsibility that I am prepared to take on right now.

Please, please accept that I am an adult now. It’s time I started making my own mistakes.

Your loving daughter,
Moi.

Bad at it all

Some become lovers because of sex
and some you know, they just become friends
In our case we just became bad at it all
And never got good at it again.

– Butch Walker, ATL

Mom and I had a fight.

Not surprising in and of itself, we fight a lot. The difference this time is that I got up and left. The initial skirmish was over, but I still left the house.

I left with panic numbing every nerve of my body. I was shaking and crying, but I packed up everything that I knew I couldn’t live without or replace, told dad that I’d be “back tomorrow,” and left. Before I left, I made sure my bed was made, my room somewhat clean and my laundry put away.

Thank god J. was in town, because his cool logic kept me from bawling my eyes out in public. (It totally doesn’t count if you’re crying while driving or in the gas station, right?)

After I dropped him off, I went to my cousin’s apartment. It never occured to me that she wouldn’t let me stay, or that she’d think I was wrong.

I was accepted by her and her husband not just for one night, but for two. And the offer to stay more if I wanted. She took me apartment hunting today and then let me come back after I went home.

I went home to try and work things out. Not because I thought leaving was wrong on my part (maybe not my smartest move, but I’ve never been that panicked — I needed out and I needed out RIGHT THEN before my head or mouth exploded).

I went back because I felt that it was the adult thing to do. I told my mother that I left because I needed time and space to think about some things. That I didn’t like the way she talked to me sometimes, and that despite everything I wanted us to be friends. I also told her that the best solution I could come up for for our recurring arguements was for me to move out.

She told me that I didn’t take responsibility for the things I did, that I was causing a deterioration of her relationship with my father and that if I left then all he would ever see when he looked at her was that she drove me out.

She said that if I left now, we would never be friends. She said that I always made her out to be the bad guy

She also said that the only reason my dad ever stuck up for me was because I wasn’t honest with him.

She was right.

I’m not honest with him. I’m not honest with her. So after we finished our talk, I went and found dad.

And I ‘fessed up. Dad, I smoke and I take antidepressants.

He was more concerned about me being on antidepressants than the smoking.

I left home with the feeling that I would never speak another civil word to my mother, and a determination to get out and make it on my own. The nausea and headache are her bad juju inside me, I tell myself. I CAN do this and I will make it work.

I am a grown woman and I will make it through life on my own.

Anyone want to help me move?

Let’s take a trip to the stars far away

“I don’t know what to attribute to the normal ebb and flow of life and natural mood shifts and what to attribute to bipolar.” — Delicate/Demanding

I made an appointment. The one that might kick me out of the deep, dark caverns of depression, back into the city of normalcy.

But the appointment means facing a huge fear.

I am constantly and forever worried that what I feel is normal or “normal” if you’d rather. I’m terrified that the majority of the world walks around feeling this devistation or worse every day — and I’m just the schmuck who’s not strong enough to shoulder the load and keep going.

I don’t remember a time when my life wasn’t tinted with absolute despair, and I’m not sure if that’s the Johnny-come-lately depression, or if this is something I’ve been dealing with for that long (but if I’ve had it for that long then why hasn’t anybody mentioned anything — but how would they know if I didn’t say anything — but I can’t be that good a pretender — etc.). When I was in the third grade — keep in mind that’s 7-8 years old — I tried to run away. My seven or eight year old self wanted to run away from the life I was leading. Enough to actually make a go of it.

We have this picture of Mom and Dad and A., my little brother. He’s not even a  year old yet, and the three of them are all smiling into the camera. Every time I look at that picture, I think “They’re perfect together. They don’t need me.”

But I need them.

When I went away to school, I got… touch starved. No one touched me at school. I’d go home and I’d want to hug everyone and not stop, because I hadn’t had any human contact since the last time I was home.

Sometimes I ache to be one of those people who can casually touch. A pat on someone’s back, an arm around their shoulders, a hug of greeting. I get a thrill out of receiving all of these, but I’ll be damned if I know how to give them. So I don’t touch. At all.

I may have made a major mistake tonight. I told mom that I’d made the doctor’s appointment. And that I was going to look into getting back onto anti depressants. I waited right there for about fifteen minutes but she didn’t say another word to me. Not even goodnight.

She asked me to tell her if I ever started the medication again. I will NOT let her make me feel guilty about seeking the help I need.

I do need it. I do.

Please remind me of that, because I will forget.

Just when you think that you’re down and out

Nights always make things more desolate for me. I get home from work at an hour when most women my age are going out for the night.

Instead of enjoying my life I feel like I am being dragged through it. All for less than minimum wage.

I don’t know why I drag my feet to help myself. For a short period in my only-miserable-to-me existance, I was happy. Medication made me happy.

Sane people want to be happy, right? So why is it that I don’t seem to?

I offer up the fate blindly. If I don’t make the appointment then I’m not meant to make the appointment. Fate will work it out and when I’m meant to go, I’ll go.

The god I don’t believe in moves in mysterious ways. Give me a sign, o Lord.

Tarot, I Ching, yarrow sticks, stones, but I’m too blind, stupid or stubborn to follow their signs.

I tell myself, “It’s too bad. Make the appointment. To hell with what any of them (doctor-mother-father) thinks, you need it, so do it for you.”

But it’s too early to make an appointment and there’s no one there.

And then it’s 9:30 and I have a meeting

When I remember at noon, I’m too busy trying to finish a story

At four o’clock I’m scrambling to get those last few things done and then it’s five p.m. and too late to make the appointment.

And I get Scarlett syndrome.

Tomorrow is another day.

Maybe I’ll be happy then.

I don’t wanna be the girl who has to fill the silence…

… The quiet scares me ’cause it screams the truth.

I’m drowning.

Every day I take in a little more water, sink a little lower, give up a little more of the horizon.

Every day I think, “This is it. I can’t take any more.” And then the next day I get right back up and go back and take some more.

Every night I sit in the dark and have black thoughts. Every morning I tell myself that if I just work a little faster, a little harder then things will be better again.

In the morning I will forget how crushingly hopeless the water feels, but for tonight, I drown.

Shitty dog is shitty

I’m such a good friend that I promised to blog about my shitty housesitting experience and then promptly forgot.

I only promised to do it at the beginning of this weekend, though, so it still counts, right?

I spent last weekend house/pet sitting for a woman I work with. Oh shit, did I mention this was a two part story?

Wait, maybe it’s a three part story. Aw hell. It’s complicated from start to finish.

———

Let’s go back to high school.

I was very good friends with my cousin, E. I knew all her friends (but I was invisi-girl to them, but even at their fringes I felt cool and powerful) and I got to hear all her (I thought) awesome adventures.

E. went to her senior prom with P., an incredibly geeky kid (I thought of him as incredibly geeky, so we’re talking about someone who’s King Geek of Techie Mountain). Though she made it clear to him that she wasn’t interested, and that she was just going as his friend, he — like many teen-aged boys (I imagine) turned into a touchy feely octopus and wouldn’t lay off.

Nothing bad happened, except for the breakup of a 10+ year friendship. She tried to apologize and explain her side of things, he called her a whore and a lying cheat.

Totally even, right? Right.

—–

Fast forward to last summer.

The paper I work for hires a new proofreader, C. I only hear her first name until the day she stumbles into our dysfunctional little sitcom.

She’s P.’s mother. I know this with the gut wrenching certainty that comes from finely honed instincts. Psychics don’t have as much certainty as I do at that very moment.

I spend a week weighing the pros and cons of mentioning that E. is my cousin. Surely she’d put two and two together sometime. E. works just down the street and we lunch together frequently. But she’s got a new last name and surely C. won’t remember her. Mothers are funny though, and anyone that’s hurt their kids is Public Enemy Number One for them.

I take the plunge, though, and mention that E. and I are related and that P. took her to the senior prom. Nothing negative, just that I am privy to this information. “I remember her,” C. says. “She broke his heart.”But he’s doing better now, she assures me. He’s working for the CIA.

We never speak of E., P., or proms again.

I frantically text E. He works for the CIA! He probably watches everything you do from his private spy satellite!

E. vows to never go outside again.

——-

Jump ahead again to last month.

C. and her husband are going to Florida for a week and need someone responsible to house/pet sit. Would I be free for 7 nights, 6 days of watching one dog and one cat.

Absolutely!

Awkwardness aside, 7 nights out of my parents’ house sounds like heaven. Who wouldn’t jump at the chance to watch two animals for a week of blissful freedom. They have cable TV, wireless internet and a fireplace. It sounds like heaven.

Come over this weekend, C. says. I want to have enough time to get another sitter if you’re not comfortable with the dog. He’s a little deaf, and mostly blind.

Bah, I think. I am Super-Sitter; a little dog is no match for me!

I go and meet the dog, get the skinny on the house, feeding schedules and the cat. And we’ll leave you my brother’s number, in case you have any problems. Actually, you might know him. His daughter A. went to your high school.

—–

Jump back to college

Not that long ago, really, but A. (who I did indeed go to High School with) and I shared something else. A support group for children of alcoholics (or in my case, children of children of alcoholics).

A.’s father, an alcoholic, has Asperger’s syndrome and beats her mother. But says that it’s not his fault he beats her because of the condition.

——

Fast forward to last weekend

I completely forget from one day to the next that I’m going to be house sitting and so I spend an hour after work packing up anything I might need for a week away from home. Sure, I could come back, but the whole point of this exercise is a week away from Mom and Dad.

I arrive, a mere 4 hours after C. and her hubby have left, to find a pool of piss on the floor.

It’s not so bad, I tell myself. It’s on the tile and it’s not stinky. Be thankful for the little things.

The cat and I chill out on the couch, a state I am thrilled with until the little fucker bites me, deep enough that I still have a wound.

Thursday I clean up three puddles of pee; one when I wake up, one when I stop in on my lunch break and one when I come back from work.

The dog and I just need to get on the same schedule, I tell myself.

Thursday night I am hyper-vigilant. If the dog so much as rolls over, I am awake and turning on the lights so that I can guide it to the porch where it does its business.

I go to work Friday exhausted, but pleased. We have an understanding, the dog and I, an agreement. We will do just fine.

I wake up at 11 and 5 to let the dog out, but there are no messes to clean up.

Saturday passes uneventfully, except for the snowstorm which strands me inside the house. They only have basic cable and the internet connection isn’t fantastic. Still, I make do, and manage to not get bored enough to watch the all-Catholic channel for more than a minute.

Sunday morning, I wake up at 3 a.m. because something. Is. Not. Right.

I turn on the overhead light and see the dog squat down. I do everything I can think of to stop him short of kicking him across the room, but he just lets it flow, right there on the linoleum.

My fault, I think. I just wasn’t fast enough to let him out.

I get the paper towels and he trots off like he’s just left me the hope diamond to play with.

When I finish cleaning it up, I put the garbage can back and am just about to put the towels away and go back to sleep when I sniff.

Sniff again.

Again.

I smell shit.

I turn on more lights and find it immediately. Runny, brown shit on the linoleum, slowly spreading like it wants to coat the entire floor.

I throw up a little in my mouth and clench my throat closed. I will not puke. No sirree not me.

Half a roll of paper towels later, while I regret ever eating dinner, I have not thrown up.

I wash my hands twice and spray down the garbage can with bleach.

But I still smell shit.

Like a bloodhound, I follow my nose into the formal living room where I immediately see two more runny piles of shit on the hardwood floor.

I gag.

Two more piles cleaned and I still smell shit.

And then I see why.

There are two nicely firm, gray-ish piles for my viewing pleasure on the carpet of the formal parlor. Fresh, judging by the sheen. For one surreal moment, I contemplate whether or not they’d steam if I threw them outside.

Layer after layer of paper towel between my hand and the dog’s parting gifts and I lift them as carefully as possible into the garbage can, spraying with carpet cleaner and blotting the doggy doo-doo left behind.

I’ll never eat again.

Carpet cleaned, hands boiled in the sink, I no longer smell shit. It is 4:45 a.m.

I go back to bed.

The dog seems to be doing just fine until I let it out at 10:30 that same morning.

It is, in fact, almost dancing as it comes back through the door.

With what looks like an entire pile of shit in its ass fur.

Not the easy-to-clean runny shit. This looks like quick-dry cement. Looks, frankly, like it was molded there for permanence.

I contemplate leaving it there. It makes me a bad pet sitter, but I don’t care. I don’t care about hygeine or my job or the dog’s comfort; maybe it’ll just fall off and I won’t have to worry about it.

I spend five minutes trying to make myself wipe the dog’s ass.

What finally makes me take action is the idea of that shit smeared across the white carpet in the hallway. I hook the dog to its leash and take it to the bathroom.

And I wash its ass fur with the handheld shower head. I aim the stream so that the turds come out of the fur and fall into the shower floor, my head as far away as possible so that if I puke, it won’t be on top of the shitty dog.

Clean and dry, the dog wanders off to take a nap.

I curl up on the couch and cry.

It only pees on the floor twice more for the rest of the stay, but I can’t deal with it anymore. By the time my last day comes around, I am fully packed and leave for work a full two hours early, just to be free and clear of the job.

For the rest of the week, I’ve slept 10 hours a night; I still wake up exhausted from dreams filled with dog shit.

I am here

So today’s my birthday.

I figured I should just lay that one on the table right off the bat because i’ve been hiding from the fact all day.

I was doing a pretty good job of hiding it from my coworkers until my aunt sent a bouquet of Happy Birthday balloons.

After that, the kitty was pretty much all the way out of the burlap.

They got me a cake and a card, which had a sex joke on it that no one but me got.

But the best part of the whole day was watching Obama being sworn in.

Which is kind of a cheesy statement, but it’s still true. This is the first election in my lifetime that I’ve been excited about.

Photographing seventh graders watching the inauguration, I felt hope.

Maybe things can get better.

Another weird night in the universe

It’s another one of those weird nights where things feel… portentious. I want to have deep meaningless discussions with someone about life and faith and important things that aren’t really important to me.

It’s a night when I don’t think I could be funny to save my life. It didn’t start out that way. I was actually feeling fairly silly when I came home.

I talked with my parents, something I’m only inclined to do when I’m feeling particularly manic.

Then I came upstairs. An old friend from a gaming guild I was in during the first part of high school emailed. He’s almost done with his books, and he’s tracking people down one more time to make sure that it’s ok to use their “likeness” in it.

I was joyously typing away until I realized that he might be my best chance to contact my cousin N.

N. more or less ran away from home a few months ago. He’s 23, and has every right to, except we don’t even know if he’s alive.

We grew up together, more like twins than cousins. We actually had a hard time convincing some of our classmates that not only were we not twins, but that he was adopted. We explained it over and over, but few really believed us.

And N. is an asshole. Which you probalby knew from this little stunt, but it bears repeating. A grade-A asshole. He used to lie to me all the time, and being pure as the driven snow, I believed him. Time and time again he chewed up my trust and spit it out, and I crawled right back for more.

I was a sad, sad child.

Point of reference: He was the only person I considered my friend until sixth grade.

So I typed my no-appearance-of-desperate desperate email, hoping for any word that he’s alive out there somewhere.

And life seemed a little less fun.

Just a little lost › Edit — WordPress

via Just a little lost › Edit — WordPress

Grandma

My grandmother saved everything. Everything.

In her kitchen, there were neatly folded piles of aluminium foil underneath the bread in her breadbox. She had a wooden stand to dry out her zip-lock bags once she’d finished washing them.

Part of the fun of holidays was snooping around her library, looking at the issues of National Geographic (you know which ones I’m talking about) and poking through desk drawers.

When she died, we found drawings that the kids of the family had made years and years ago.

Drawings and… other things.

Like the potato-turkey that one of the cousins made.

The potato turkey that he gave her over five years before she passed.

The one that sprouted and started to grow, tucked away in a dark cupboard.

So I guess she really did love us, at least a little. Even though she forgot birthdays, ignored us and never really wanted to see us.

Because she kept the potato-turkey in her cupboard.