When the least they could do to you was everything, then the most they could do to you suddenly held no terror.

Most mornings, rain or shine, I walk Vivian the kilometre to her school, trudging with half shut eyes through ice and slush. Most of this isn’t just walking-it’s tugging, cajoling, threatening and bribing for speed. We walk so slowly that sometimes I swear we’re going backwards in time. You’d never know that she loves school.

Winter in a schoolyard is a magnificent thing. Snowbanks to climb, to slide down, to jump in and off. Snow, simple, intricate snow becomes so many places or things. After the last snowstorm, I smiled, thinking of all the joyous voices I’d hear, running and playing on those hills.

We walk onto the schoolyard, and all the kindergartners are restrained to one, sterile area, trapped even, pacing in many cases, the length of the “play area” they’re allowed. I walk past a group who have started sliding on their bottoms down a tiny, foot high snowbank. Immediately a “teacher” rushes over, and micromanages them to the point that it’s just not fun anymore, and they scatter.

I stand with my mouth open, confused and sad.

******************

While I don’t trust people necessarily, I firmly believe in independent children. I believe in bruises incurred falling down on the driveway, small cuts after wandering around in the woods, skinned knees after tipping over your bike. The possibility of danger, the thirst of fear. I believe children should have these simple things, and I don’t mean it in that old foggie, uphill both ways kinda way.

What do we lose when we take a person’s sense of adventure? When we remove the potential for harm, for consequence? What core part of our being is affected when we minimize the world down to things you can touch, and things you can’t? We’ve evolved chasing fricken mammoths after all.

I think back to the playground “equipment” we had when I was Vivian’s age. This rickety, rusty metal spinning merry go round type thing, some metal bars that ripped the skin from your hands, a yard. In the front of the school was this huge wooden climber, complete with a long, wide metal slide. It was likely 12-15 feet high.  I remember vividly the time a classmate jumped off the top, completely missed the snowbank, and shattered his elbow. No one ever did something that dumb again.

Some kid got his tongue stuck to the fence one cold morning, the little brother of a friend. The blood mark stayed forever it seemed, and in my head, I can see, exactly where this happened. I rode a bike into a moving car once, skidded under a parked one another, tearing up one side of my body impressively.

Sure, these are stupid acts, the acts of children. But they’re more than that.

They are lessons. Mistakes let us determine the right path, on our own, or damn close. Watching Jeremy screaming and crying as hot water and blood poured down his front, we all learned in a much more lasting way, why you never EVER stick your tongue to anything metal, no matter what anyone says. Healing from road rash, I learned to pay attention to whether the bike has pedal brakes or hand brakes BEFORE trying to make the corner that fast. I also learned to better anticipate events, plan a little better (snort. that lasted) PAY ATTENTION!!! as my mother was always yelling.

The point is that I began to come to my own conclusions, learn my own lessons, and actually take them with me. As opposed to every time an adult told me something. I was one of those kids, who just HAD to do whatever she was told was bad.

Yes, I’ve stuck my fingers in a light socket. Literally. It’s not that bad to be honest.

I never wanted to listen, and take some one’s word for it. I needed to prove it. And then learn the lesson that in some things, my father wasn’t lying.

The problem with the cocoon, and managing every single second of a child’s life, telling them how and where to play, what’s safe, what they can eat, what they can wear, is that you might turn around in 15 years and have an adult living in your basement who is COMPLETELY incapable of anything resembling acting like a mature human. Because you’ve done all the acting for them. They might not have the courage to fly the coop because they’ve never truly spread their wings.

We complain that kids are far too wrapped up in themselves and their things-what else do they have if we’ve taken exhilaration from them? They have what, new cell phones and fucking left? If you take the thrill from life, what’s left to it? If you destroy the chance to hurtle down a snowy hill on a rickety piece of wood doing close to 10kms an hour, if you keep your children from feeling the snow in their face, the sun on their neck as they laugh as much from fear as from joy, are they even still human? What are they? Who are we raising then?

We truly have so little to fear now, that we create boogeyman. I know people who see the world outside as riddled with scary men in the bushes, who can’t imagine leaving their children where they might get a bruise or stumble a little. We cover everything with helmets and protective gear, leaving me thinking wistfully of long bike rides on Sunday afternoons, the silky August wind in my hair, bathed in the sun as the world felt so open and fantastic.

What will freedom be for our children?

*************************

I pick Viv up, the sun warming the snow, melt water trickling down the roads. She sprints immediately for the giant snow hills, those which are verboten during the day and taunt her. Her friends join her. I stand with their mother and watch as they slide, with absolutely no regard for their safety, down the hill, bouncing and jolting, avoiding pointy parts the next time.

“They’re still bendy at this age” I laugh with their mother, and she nods, and we just watch, the joyous cries of youth filling the air between us, around us.

That laughter sounds long into the night in my ears.

VOTE EMMA!

My new(ish) friend Emma is one of the coolest, articulate, intelligent teenagers I’ve run into in the last, oh, I dunno, 20 years or so. (snark) If you’re not reading her, you should be-she’s at Errant Sock, and she’s damn cool. Read her latest post if you don’t trust me on this. I was not this smart at her age. It’s unnatural. I imagine she gets accused of being a middle age wife in Idaho a fair bit.

ANYway, I did have a point.

My point is that Emma is in a competition, one where she could possibly win a 20k scholarship and be named sweet diggity dog something I’m too old to understand.

The real point is-I want to help her win. She’s the girl I want my girls to grow into-a smart woman already at the age if 15 (15, right Emma? I miss things sometimes) She’s the kind of person we need more of.

So what YOU can do is go HERE, register (takes on like, 2 minutes) and vote for Emma Saraff.

VOTE! She could be a fricken rocket scientist or finally find the cure for asshole. And wouldn’t THAT be nice.

oh today, I love thee

Hot fucking DAMN I am finally done my crap ass job! Forever! For good! 8.5 years of my life, 2 provinces, and I’m DONE!

I’m so bloody happy.

Sure, I’ve been freaked out about this, and worried, and have been feeling more than a little worthless here and there. But today, dropping that laptop and cellphone down, and walking out that door-I haven’t felt that good in that place in years.

This was necessary and good and cleansing, as painful as it’s been, and might still be.

It’s a week early, so if I do get the job I’m aiming for (nothing much-just call center for something stress free and the chance to help people again-I’ve gotten so far away from customer service in the last few years) I won’t start until the end of March, giving me a month off.

Oh yes universe, be good to me some more.

Finally, something just feels right.

“how do i explain bipolar disorder to someone?”

Sometimes I start talking to stranger, acquaintances, friends about this wonderful defect, this twitching glitch in my brain. I’ll candidly mention “the second time I tried to kill myself” or “when I was on the psych ward” or even, “last time I was at the mall, I kept hearing things calling my name. heh.” I’ll keep talking, glad to be open and rational about my disorder, until I glance up and notice the looks of horror or fear on the faces before me. The sheer inability to understand.

Explaining bipolar to a “normal” is difficult. I have noticed that first off the “oh, I get depressed sometimes too” line will come out, about 70% of the time.

This line irritates me so much I want to spoon out their eyeballs and make soup. I know it’s an attempt to relate and empathize. But it comes of as condescending and like they wish to minimize what I’ve been through.

Some people have relatives with bipolar though, or DID, or other disorders, and they will quietly admit to this, as if they’re the family demons and by speaking of them they get stronger. Like it’s something to be ashamed of.

It’s rare that anyone actually wants to hear the truth, the story behind it. What happens, and why.

I’ve had the chance, the odd time, to really explain what happens. And I’m as pointed and clear and realistic as I can be.

I explain the huge variations in mood, like summer to winter, with no chance for spring. My head can wrap itself around and convince itself that those I love hate me, or that I hate them, or that they’re spying on me, or plotting against me.

I can become paranoid, even when medicated. Patterns which would otherwise be meaningless can make me question what I’m seeing. I worry that attention not paid to me is not friendship, but betrayal.

Sometimes, all I want, more than anything, is to die. Or rather, to just not exist. It’s not a matter of wanting to die-it’s when the pain is so bad, so all consuming that it colors every.single.thing. in your world, being numb, being sterile and white and blinding sounds like SUCH a good idea, even if you need to get there to die. It’s a drive, a mission to find a dry place, a soundproof place where the voices in your head have nothing to say, and you don’t ache with the pain you imagine a star could be borne of.

The death part is the hardest to understand. A rational, normal person thinks of suicide as anathema, as well they should. But I’ve always found the suicidal urges to be the simplest. Wake up, have pancakes, pick out a shirt, maybe today I’ll do it, maybe not, ham would be nice for dinner. Just the endless loop of “just maybe”. No one likes to know about this part. (Incidentally, this has been the bit that’s most isolating, and I just really don’t have anyone to talk to about it, which is how I usually work through stuff. It’s pretty much a conversation killer)

I might talk about my mania. Thankfully mine isn’t so bad, especially medicated, but I still become infuriated when normal people talk about “how manic!” they are after a cup of coffee. (The word is hyper. Not manic) I’ve explained my black rages to people, those where I can barely rein in my anger, looking through bloody, lidded eyes. I’ve explained the agitation, akin to having creatures crawling underneath and through my skin, inability to sit still, be quiet, keep money in my pocket.

People think mania sounds “neat”.

I don’t know if you can explain away that theory. To them, mania is being happy and fun. Even for me, who rarely gets very manic, especially on the meds, it’s not fun. It’s scary. A few months back, I had a week where I was insanely manic, for me, considering I’ m medicated. I could have sworn I was floating for a few days, I was so euphoric. I couldn’t focus, I could barely see straight. I vibrated.

Not neat. But to the outsider, there aren’t enough adjectives to convey the sense of slow plodding insanity mania can give you.

I always take pain to point out that I’m otherwise normal. That with the exception of my bad moments, on medication, I’m mostly like others. Sure, I still need to work harder at some things. I’ll never be as organized as a lot of people, I’ll never be able to focus as clearly as I did before I got sick. But I still get the flu. I laugh at fart jokes. I have baggage. I’m still human.

And really, that’s what this always boils down to. Conveying to people our humanity-that mental illness hasn’t stripped that away. Sure, I’m sick. But that doesn’t make me less of a wife, or mother, or friend. If anything, I’m more human, as the experience, the internal experiences I’ve been through make me fuller than any trip or purchase could make me. I have a wealth of knowledge and living behind me, something that’s made me, even sick me, so much more of a person than I would have been.

Explain our humanity. It’s all up hill from there.

8 Ways to help your Bipolar Loved One Cope

Great article from World of Psychology. Basic stuff really, but all items that can get lost in the shuffle.

Since Niobe Asked

My eyes are hazelish. It really does seem to depend on the day, and I’m sure a non crappy webcam would do a better job. Today they’re veering more toward gold-brown, other days it’s more golden green. It’s a crap shoot.

Both girls got brown eyes-never blue, not even for a day. Just steady, unwavering brown. I find it amusing that my eyes, like their owner, can’t make up their own damn mind either.

Appetitus Rationi Pareat

Oh the guilty stolen afternoon, snuck quietly from the house, stolen to read a surprisingly awesome book (I love it so when that happens-when you buy it thinking, meh, why not, and suddenly you’re drawn in and the world is being colored around you..) The late February wind gusts around me, while puddles of new snow trickle beneath my feet. I can smell spring.

Fishing through the old clothes, I sigh a lot, all the cute things are just that much too small. We’ve grown past it. I finish eating my leisurely lunch, and while waiting for the cashier, spy a tiny boy, only 3 months, cradled in his mother’s arms as he has his lunch, eyes swollen with lunch stupor. His feet were so very small.

I’m on the bus when a little girl comes on, bundled in winter, cheeks rosy, her perfect little nose poking out, eyes curious and watchful. She stares at me with the no-stare. I’m fairly confident that I’m too far away from her to be really seen, but there’s something about those piercing little globes, like jelly beans or black jujubes.

My entire body cascades in on itself and cries out for more. My arms ache, my womb echoes for a child, my body feels drawn. My children are now children in the fullest sense of the word, and my body, my muscles, my soul shakes in the absence.

The simple unfair fact of knowing this ache after the birthing is complete. It startles me, like a cat shook from it’s sleep, and it angers me, that I couldn’t have felt this 6 years ago, blooming with the cells that would eventually become my first born daughter. Why not then? Why not when I could have reveled in every moment, enjoyed, simply stood in between maidenhood and mother, and accepted it, embraced it? Why only now, when the over is unplugged and in pieces?

I enjoyed the last 5 years. It has been a hard ride, a rough one, the brambles of mental illness entwined with simple achievements like first words (I can’t remember Rosalyn’s, and hope I wrote it down) and birthdays. But these years have been so innocent, comparatively speaking, as I’m noticing now that I have one in school. Those first 5 are halcyon days, glowing with such wonder, fabulous flowers on a plant you always found ugly. I eagerly sold the high chair, the crib, gave away 99.5% of the baby clothes. I welcomed, with open arms, toddlers, preschoolers, and now, children.

So universe, why now huh? Why burden me with a hunger I can never satiate? Why fill me up with this longing, for another child to grow in my belly, another gasp at the quickening, the terror of crowning and the quietude of 4am? Why bestow this gift on me now, after all this time, when its unnecessary, and more than a little inappropriate?

I stared hard at that little girl’s eyes, smiling wistfully, looking a little high I imagined. I could feel that baby skin on my fingertips, the porcelain of it, the chubby fingers grasping on their own, without measure or wit. I could imagine her weight on my hip, the little sighs she’d make while feeding, her tiny thumb, barely clinging to her lips as she slept.

In her eyes I imagined enjoying the babyhood’s of my daughters more completely, sanely.

Wanting a child is merely my wish for wanting to be normal.

Having Rosalyn so soon after Vivian stole that from me. And I can breathe now, and see that, see that for Vivian, I was scared, and worried and full of far too much book learning but I loved her and my world ran around her. But pregnancy, and a new child later and I was full of venom and hate without much room for love or empathy, not at first.

I crave a do-over. I want to be able to love a child the way Ros deserved to be loved, almost 4 years ago now. I can’t make it up, but on some level, my ovaries are trying to have the great chess game, to make up, to make due.

I’ve known, for years, that there’s no going back. What was, is, and simply, I cannot change or make that up. I can only move forward now, grasp my daughter tightly as she grins and tells me I’m pretty, as her cheekbones light up, exactly as mine do. What I can do it love the baby that was, the girl that is, the woman that will be.

The pinpoints of light in that baby girl’s face, interrupted only by the hesitation of the bus on a busy street, will forever hold me in thrall. I can face that hunger down, hold the door open, ask it to leave. And accept that finally, I have been allowed a feeling so basic to women, a hunger I never dreamed I’d feel. All of this shakes me from reverie, telling me to move on, move past and beyond.

I can love that phantom child, he, or she that will never be. I can love a ghost that never was.

 

Please don’t stop the music

Currently there’s a photo floating, well, not so much floating as being rather flaunted on the internet that proposes to be a police photo of Rhianna after being (allegedly) beaten by Chris Brown.

My point here is not celebrity. I’m not going to link to the photo either, but if you want it, you can find it.

She’s 20 years old.

At first, they didn’t even bother trying to hide her identity because people would automatically know who it was anyway, she couldn’t hide. Now someone has leaked a photo, likely real, of what has likely been one of the most horrendous experiences a young woman can go through.

On one hand, I’m all for it, as an example, and proof that abuse doesn’t give a sweet hot damn about who you are, how much money you make, how talented or lovely you might be. Abuse will crawl out from under a rock and find you, and haunt you. Think you’re too young? Too old? Too famous?

Obviously you’re wrong. As my father always told me, being an asshole is not something limited to any income, creed or color. They are everywhere.

Yet I’m sitting there, staring at this face that we all know is just beautiful, a talented and lovely seeming woman (I don’t know her personally after all) in the prime of her life, a woman who should be enjoying every fucking fabulous thing this world has to offer and her eyes are closed and her face is bruised and I can’t help but feel like I’m staring at her naked-I’m not looking at Rhianna, the brand, the creation, I’m looking at any other 20 year old girl, starting her life. I’m staring into the abyss of someone’s LIFE, and suddenly I felt dirty and sad and just wanted to cry horrible fat tears for what we’ve wrought. For the fact that I CAN stare at someone’s police evidence photo, that shows what someone’s fists did to her in a fit of rage.

I should not be able to do that.

Is she a cautionary tale? Does she provide solace to anyone, support, this picture, does it make anyone think twice about hitting their partners, humiliating them? Does it serve any purpose aside from satisfying our OWN voyeurism, of which I too am guilty off. Are we all just sitting around hoping that someone will leave their curtains open and let us look inside?

I find her story compelling. But maybe for all the wrong reasons. She seems like a woman so many of us envy, with a life that just fits into itself effortlessly, although that’s likely more her handlers than anything. She seemed to have that perfect, storybook life.

And it’s compelling to see that even the storybooks truly aren’t real.

What do you think? Are we falling further down the slippery slope? Do we have a right to see this stuff?

(I’ve wanted to try the poll feature for awhile. Don’t mind me.)

snarf

As an experiment, I am going to waste no time crafting a post, perhaps complain and pick my ass while writing it, and see how many comments it gets.

I’m glad that soon, I’ll be focusing on writing that won’t be online, since damn, after awhile it’s like talking to the void.

I did get good news. I’ll be done my job over the next few days instead of next few weeks.

And I get my new glasses today. Woot!

There. Is that enough mundane crap?

Without the capacity to provide its own information, the mind drifts into randomness.

I’m annoyed, I’m pissy, I’m depressed and in a nutshell I’m trying to not go psychotic while working my last few weeks at a job, having to advise people on how to do my job and generally pretend I care. And I can’t stop eating, trying to quell some unnamed hungry I can’t quite nail down.

In short, I don’t really want to think about it, and would rather focus on other people at the moment.

 ”They said, ‘you know, you’re a very pretty lady, I like your profile,’ ” said the victim. “You feel very flattered.”

Sigh. Tell me what part of the following sentence would make anyone on the internet over the past, oh I don’t know, ten years nervous: “The compliments and commitment kept coming from the false flame, who posed as a U.S. businessman who travelled to Nigeria to buy antiques. “

hmmmmm. I can’t quite put my finger on it.

“You think you’re smarter than (the crooks), but you’re not. It can happen to anyone,” she said.

Honey, you aren’t smarter than a fucking stump.

 

Kamila was trying her best to negotiate fashion’s highest heels — and a watering can filled with water (you can see it sloshing out onto the runway as she trips).

You’re a model. You have to wear these ridiculous outfits and try and walk in shoes that don’t even LOOK like shoes. And THEN you get some asshole news anchor who you make more than in one week than he does in a year snickering to the point that you KNOW he’s crying. And you know what? It’s not funny-it’s sad and kinda scary. Sure, they’re “models”, but their livelihood is linked to those tiny little ankles. Ass. (Some of the others-where the models are ok, are amusing)

Sigh

Dude makes 200 FALSE calls to 911. Do I see any mentions of a psych eval? No, but they were nice enough to arrest him. And seriously? It takes 200 calls!?!?! You couldn’t find him in all that time?

“You can imagine the time and effort it does require. It’s not something that we’re going to tolerate,” said police spokesman Const. Jason Michalyshen.

Yeah, that’s totally why he got away with it this much. Maybe I’ll go to Winterpeg and see what I can get away with.

 

um. Scary. kthxbai

And sorta awesome.

 

And not only does Mickey Rourke creep me the hell out, but so does his weird attachment to his dogs, one of which is now dead. Let’s hope this love doesn’t run to taxidermy.

And we’re getting a snowstorm tomorrow. 

I’m still pissy. What’s new with you?

Oh, darling, let your body in, let it tie you in, in comfort.

 Diane E. Levin and Jean Kilbourne’s So Sexy So Soon seeks to address this very type of childhood experience: a complete lack of awareness about sex and reproduction coupled with a media-fed understanding of sexiness – that is, as one young girl in the book explains, getting boys to chase you and try to kiss you – that revolves around emulating TV characters and buying as many products as possible.

There’s a great book review of So Sexy So Soon at Feministe-please, go read.

But it got me to thinking.

How much time can we, as parents and mothers, spend blaming the media, the western world, capitalism, Walmart, etc, before we also realize the true impact we have on our daughters?

I firmly believe in openness, to the point of irritation I imagine. Vivian telling me that “that place” feels good when she touches it-that filled me with pride. Pride that she was able to say this to me with no fear or pretense, and that she took such obvious joy in herself. Pride that I’m starting to create a woman who isn’t afraid of herself, knows where all the proper things are, and just exists in this manner.

Because I disagree that this is fully the fault of what Mattel is selling this season, or that sitcoms have taken things too far. I disagree that it’s those damn music videos, or those stars that kids want to emulate. Not fully.

Cues are taken from parents.

How many of us were raised in a don’t ask, don’t tell sort of environment, where the most sex education you received was 2 weeks in Grade 5, and maybe a book left covertly on a counter top by your mother? How many women can’t bring themselves to call a vulva a vulva, or even know that their vagina is only on the inside? How many women can’t bring themselves to orgasm, or help their partner to do so? How many women blush at the thought of talking about all of this? How many of us learned, early on from our parents, that our hands can be dirtied so easily?

When I was Vivian’s age, I liked to rock on a specific doll-I remember, it was a pink stuffy with one of those plastic kewpie doll faces on it. It made me feel good-happy, in touch with myself, like a sun rising, so I wanted to tell my mother. I showed her.

She didn’t hit me. Instead, she looked completely horrified, and I never saw that doll again. Standing in the hallway, my mother stared at me, and held her hand out. I handed it over, cried, and stumbled back to my room, confused.

Later, a few years perhaps, when my neighbour molested me, I remember feeling like I had no control over my body, that it never belonged to me, and I should submit. I could never tell my mother-it would be my fault. I would be punished, and would still not know what was mine in terms of my body. For years I dreamed of being abused by conveyor lines of robots, people. Just my lying there, at the whim of others.

It was my mother’s responsibility to teach my about my body, about myself. It was her responsibility to teach me that there is no shame in acknowledging my humanity in this way, in embracing my sexuality, even at that young of an age.

Make no mistake-we are sexual creatures the day we are born. Which is why as parents we need to step it up right off the bat, in the most normal way, as if explaining how to make bread or why you have an elbow. Blaming media and society for one’s child wanting to dress like a Bratz doll or a 13 year old knocking up a girl-it’s a cop out. It’s easy to say “The school never taught it!” or that “Miley Cyrus made her dress that way!” and turn the other way.

Much more difficult to raise your children with appropriate sexual values and mores, to have those conversations that at times, are less than easy.

Being sexual is part of who we are-and it always has been. We now treat even into mid-twenties like teenagers, so why is it so strange that a seven year old starts to act as they might? Why is starting the mating dance at 12 so odd? What if, biologically, that’s where the drive can start for some. I began menstruating about then-if I can bear children, if I am considered a woman, physically, why can’t society, or parents be bothered to?

I may not necessarily agree with a pre-teen acting out in any way sexually-but I’m raising my daughters with the knowledge to make responsible choices, when appropriate. Will I always win? No, not with two daughters. But I refuse to use the cop-out that the world around me has more bearing on how my daughters come to their womanhood than I do.

It took me years to come to grips with my sexuality, having children being the last nail in that particular coffin. I don’t want that for them. Our bodies are wonderful, beautiful things, and by telling our daughters on what’s bad, and horrible and not allowed because they’re too young/not ready/just can’t only serves to increase the need and make it more attractive.

Refusing to speak to your children out of embarrassment, or fear-to me, that’s worse than all the Bratz dolls and belly tops. Because our parents are our guides, for good or ill. And we do ourselves a grave disservice by leaving our daughters out to dry.

When a man wants to murder a tiger, it’s called sport; when the tiger wants to murder him it’s called ferocity.

 I open CNN to a poll:

“Do you think people with a history of mental illness should be allowed to buy guns?”

1. Yes

2. Yes, with tighter restrictions

3. No

Guess which answer is at 85%.

I don’t deny, at any point, that the mentally ill can be unstable and downright dangerous. We can be, if not managed  by therapy, drugs and hard work.

I become incensed at the idea that we should be controlled with restrictions, a grand database in the sky tracking us, telling some 18 year old in Walmart if I’m allowed to own a gun, letting them know that I’m the crazy, run away! The very idea that anyone with ANY mental illness history (which frankly, is a LOT of people) can’t even touch a firearm because of that ILLNESS is disturbing.

I, like hundreds of thousands of other people, have a mental disorder that can rear up, much like cancer can come of remission, if we don’t take our medication. Because I have bipolar, is it ok to discriminate? What if I only had anxiety? What if I only had depression that was cyclical, dependant on the season?

At what point are the mentally ill truly people?

I read people talking about how “Octo-Mom’s” uterus isn’t up for anyone else’s discussion-despite the fact that she’s impacting 14 children, 2 parents and herself. We should leave her alone, not discriminate, she might be “sick in the head.”

Are we all going to pop out multiple children because we’re mentally ill? No more than we’re all going to pick up a semi-automatic weapon and start killing people. However, people will make that blanket statement, assuming that none of us should ever have a chance to touch a gun, perhaps drive a vehicle, own a house.

And again, soon, that we shouldn’t have any children at all?

It’s easy to climb on a horse, point a finger and say THOSE people shouldn’t be allowed. Much easier than say, supporting mental health initiatives, demanding that mental disease be portrayed truthfully, or pushing their local and federal governments for more funding for care and support.

Taking the gun away is inadequate at best. Supporting the person, treating the sickness, giving them a safe place to land when the chaos does occur-these are solutions. Assisted living for some individuals, out-patient treatment, increased numbers of doctors so we can receive REAL care.

Money is better spent on helping the mentally ill be the best people they can be, than reducing us to caricatures and limiting our lives.

It’s not the guns I care about. At the end of the day, I don’t see why people need guns in the first place, or why they need automatic weapons. But it’s not about that-it’s about how rights can be scrapped away from a group of people in the name of “safety”, and everyone will fall in line.

There’s an exception to every rule. “Normal” people kill people with guns ALL THE FREAKING TIME and yet no one says, in any seriousness, “Stop selling guns, period.”

Fuck, that’s unamerican, right?

The mentally ill, who live in some sort of vacuum, don’t get leeway, don’t get sympathy, they get judged.

It scares me because one it starts, where does it end? And does it end with us? What if statistically, white males 18-24 who like black pants and smoke Player’s are the ones doing the shooting? Will we take away a right? Will we lock them up?

Will we make a problem where one doesn’t exist?

We will spend money on fantasy, and yet not on treatment and everyday living.

You don’t have to be mentally ill to think that’s completely fucking crazy.

*********************

No red flags. My ASS.

Liking the Saw movies is not a flag. Someone who:

stopped taking an antidepression medication for obsessive-compulsive disorder and anxiety three weeks before the shooting

THAT is a flag. Dropping your medication off suddenly can trigger events that otherwise wouldn’t have happened. Wearing a fucking dog collar is strange, not a red flag. Emails to friends that are out of character-flags.

This assumption that he couldn’t possibly function normally because he was crazy, that he lived “a double life”-THIS is what keeps people swimming in the crazy. People will think the worst regardless. People will think our love for horror or black humor means that we’re monsters anyway.

People hurt. Instead of being given help, they’re called “strange” and “weird” and isolated further.

The red flag is life.

 

I can has…

anyone feel like making me a new header since I suck? I’d like to have a few I can cycle through, or clear instructions on HOW to do so…

Please explain…

why getting Rosalyn to admit that her underwear ARE indeed on wrong is so bloody panic inducing, and why I seem to be condemming her to a life of hellish agony just because I’m trying to reduce the odds of major wedgie?

I mean come on…..that MUST hurt.

Reduced to Nothing

I feel all the good leaching from my body, sucked through my pores like water, and I melt through it, until I become the hard core once again, that shuttered place, hard as diamond, yet not nearly as pretty.

I’m eating my feelings, I joke, but it’s true, stuffing my maw with anything that might fill the ache I’m currently hosting, anything to fill this sudden void that haunts, teases.

“You’re no good” it whispers “You can’t even stay employed”

I wander the aisles in the grocery store, asking myself, outloud, “How did I get here?”

How? Or better yet, why. The upheaval over the last year or so-it’s nearly done me in, but yet, I feel like change, now, is what I need, what’s craved, after so long of puttering along, feeling nothing, staying in places because I had to, because I had no choice.

I have choices-I always had. Some are just hard, and scary to make.

I’ve been up and down and back-spending a few days hypomanic, unable to sleep without some kind of pill, being giddy and happy and hopeful, and now, settling back down to that general feeling of unloved and uneasy, this horrid feeling that causes me to draw in and want to lash out all at once, wanting nothing more than strength to hold me down, prop me up, remind me that I’m not the terrible person I’d make myself out to be.

My life is what it is, but my brain, I’m tired of it, and dammit, could my pdoc come back soon please? Her replacement I loathe, and will not help. Bearing up gets hard, tiresome. Frustrating.

I want your brains. I want all the answers. I want something fantastic to happen. I want to feel happy.

I want this echo off my chest.

Oft expectation fails, and most oft where most it promises; and oft it hits where hope is coldest; and despair most sits.

In an attempt to soothe my aching head over my impending unemployment, I did some shopping on the weekend. (Most was needed stuff, and not for me. Sigh)

I picked up some cheap books-the bookstore having a 4 for 10$ sale, which makes it a “who cares if it sucks” sale.

One book in particular caught my eye, “A Year and a Day“, by Leslie Pietrzyk. It’s the story of a 15 year old girl whose mother kills herself, parking her car in the path of an oncoming train.

And oh, it makes me cry on the bus almost every morning so far.

I’ve searched for books on motherloss that would really hit the right tone, and for the most part, they don’t. They try to hard, they don’t understand the little missing pieces, or the fact that the larger hurt is underscored by the silences death brings. This book…it brings us to them. Tearing the house apart searching for recipes-I’ve done that myself, searching high and low for that crumbling Five Roses cookbook my mother had when first married, marked by flour and grease and her fingers. I never found it.

The anger. The lashing out in strange ways, at friends, at those who profess to care but have problems (seemingly) less than your own. The repentance. The confusion. The utter inability to process something as simple as Christmas. Having to be the adult. Having to not say what you want to say, wanting to scream at the top of your lungs,

“She’s DEAD! Not lost, not passed away. GONE.”

The vestiges of my former self, my younger, more fragile doppelganger, they live in this book. My memories came alive reading this, tears spring unbidden at the repeated “I’m fine.” through the book, the mirror of my adolescence, the constant refrain of “I’m ok, I’m fine” when all I wanted to do was fall into the arms of the speaker.

Alice, the girl in this book, she can’t fall either, the hurt in her heart far stronger than the need for comfort. The dry distance between her needs and wants, and the crippling prison grief becomes, especially at so young an age. Her need to comfort, and almost protect the pregnant 16 year old Paula, her helplessness. Her scorn for the one person she lets in, the one person who allows her to mimic her mother, Joe Fry. Her sweet pleasure in his gift of an acorn for her pocket, as she fiddles.

I could have been Alice. Well, except for the part where her dead mother speaks to her.

There’s a part where her brother has ran to Boston, and returned, and he’s talking about how he thought he saw her in a crowd, but realized it wasn’t her, and that this, THIS was when he knew she really wasn’t coming home.

I’ve seen my mother, in faces, side profiles, coats. And realized that despite not remembering her, not much at all, her face was imprinted on me, her movements. She’s never coming back either.

Seeing this written, truly seeing it as I have, it’s a blessing. It’s recognition.

It’s like home.

*********************

Yes, I am losing my job.

Some of it’s performance. Some of it’s having a poor manager, some is the needs of the business are outstripping my abilities. There’s a lot to it, most of which I don’t wish to get into publicly. I will say that as someone who has been with a company for over 8 years, it hurts. It hurts how this company treats tenured employees, and seems to consider tenure and accomplishment meaningless unless you’re an ass kisser.

I was once passionate about my job-loved it, loved that I helped action change for millions of customers. But in the last few years, that was smothered, as my job became more about making things “look good” than about actual change for Joe customer on the street. Things changed, my manager changed, and I no longer felt part of any team. Just another sucker doing shit work for a paycheck.

It hurts. I’ve been so proud keeping a job for this long, many years of it unmedicated, and succeeding that way. It’s almost like things only went south once I started achieving some measure of stability. Go figure. But I’ll never be uber organized, I’ll never be perfect, especially under pressure. I recognize these things in me, and realize that now, this isn’t the place for me, and at least for the time being, I need a job where I can just enjoy helping someone, a job which doesn’t find me working on the weekend and after “work” on a regular basis.

I don’t want that, and I never really did.

So I’m kinda scared, but kinda excited as well. I’m getting a reasonable severance, so I can’t complain, and they’re keeping me on till the bonus payout so I can get whatever payout is owed. So they aren’t completely inhuman. Having to sit through conversations about helping report automation learn the reports I was producing-that sucks. Hard. It’s like everything you worked for is taken away so easily.

I never truly felt like I was my job, and I’m glad of that. I’m happy, sated almost, to be done with this job, the constant panic and rush, never feeling like I had time or opportunity to truly do what I felt my job was. Excuses maybe, perceptions. But only hearing the bad stuff from a boss for months does this to you. Wears you down until you ARE that bad employee.

So we’re moving on. I hope to find something simple for now, easy, no stress. I’d love to take a month or two off, but I’d rather have a laptop. If I have an easy job again, I might start writing again. Reading Piertrzyk’s book has made me realize that I really do want to write that memoir of my childhood, even if I never do a damn thing with it.

Losing my job is making me realize all the things I want to do, things that are so much bigger than pulling data for someone.

******

This morning, walking to school, Vivian tried in vain to climb a snow-hill I promised her she could climb the day before. She tried and tried, and I grew irritated, knowing I was missing my bus. Finally I had to drag her off the snow hill and push her forward.

“You NEVER keep your promises to me!” she screamed. “You promised!”

Promises are funny things. They change when you least expect it.

There

 

In the air, this sweet break from the cold, rivulets down the road with winter dissolving, floats forever ago, a place disappeared, a land where the nights were long, crisp journey’s into another world, where time lasted and spun it’s magic around my ears. This air, reminds me of the warmth in our kitchen, the images of my mother’s hands across my back, on my head, in the sink, dishes clanging as I sat, underfoot, studying the patterns there. This air, it marries us across the years, the me then, the me now, handfasted, tied with thread and IV lines.

This air, it burns my eyes.

Taking advantage of a state of hypomania lasting more than 30 minutes (and explaining away my need for sleeping pills last night) I rip apart the bedroom, old clothes sorted out into a garbage bag, magazines on to the porch, to give away, to save for that day all trash is allowed, anything, maybe even the monkey’s on your back. I shift the bookshelves, notice the “unread” pile has grown to 20 or more books, smile. See my lonely photo album, the only evidence that I had a childhood, somehow tucked under the cat’s sofa, ragged and old.

Rosalyn, who has been “helping me” by laying on the futon and rolling around with Bride Barbie, sees the album and is drawn, as all children seem to be, by these frozen moments trapped. 

“That’s me!” she screams at the baby pictures. I find myself correcting her, but not really, so entwined we seem, so much the same, the air between us thin and enraptured, time meaningless. She sees me in full ballet regalia, the hated tutu, the flower hat my mother made that I wasn’t allowed to wear in the recital.

“I want to look like that Mummy.” she mutters, staring intently, eyes boring through the photo. Her grandmother deserved this child, she who loves pink and Barbie and babies and ballet, everything my mother wanted and wished for in a daughter, none of which she got. My mother deserved this granddaughter, who would have made her so proud, so happy, so fulfilled in all the ways I never could. Rosalyn deserved my mother, deserves her still, to embrace her in the ways I cannot, and possibly never should.

I turn, find the one lonely shot of my mother and I, the only picture I have of her holding me, the only one where she’s smiling, where her face isn’t forced for the camera’s or fighting back the pain I know she suffered. She’s gorgeous-my mother was beautiful and I try to show Rosalyn, try to make her understand how lovely and perfect my mother was when I was her age, how I must have crowed “You’re the bestest mumy EVER!” to her in the mornings but I just can’t find the words, all gummed up like marshmallows in my throat and it won’t make any sense, not now.

Possibly not ever. How do you explain an absence to someone who’s never felt it? What’s the point is deciphering that which will never be?

My mother was who she was, and all the things she wasn’t and never would be. She loved me. Maybe I only have one picture and it’s fading and cracking but she’s sitting as I sit now and holding me as I hold my girls and I know, without doubt, her heart glowed for me and shone in the darkness that were her last days.

She loved me. That I can tell Ros. That makes sense.

I point to another shot, curled up in that hideous chair from so long ago, pointed at the television. Shot taken while I was in the grip of the nightly news I imagine, legs pulled under, wearing only underpants, despite my hair being neatly pinned back.

“Ros, who is that?”

She knows it’s me, but waits, looking into my eyes.

“I hated them too, see? No pants. Hated pants.”

“Like me!” she sings, grinning.

“Like you Honey Bear. Just like you.”

The air shimmers, and I can taste the air in that room, liver and onions perhaps, my mother’s ribs, a Sunday dinner of hamburgers, chips and illicit soda. It’s warm and secure and snug around my shoulders like one of those granny square afghans you find in the thrift stores now and again, the work wasted on the receiver, or maybe dead. We’re there together, Ros and I, but it’s her little legs on that chair, my hands holding the warm milky tea and buffing my nails before bed. We’ve merged and danced into each other, my childhood, my memories becoming hers, settling in to a quiet corner where in 10 or 20 years she’ll find herself telling a story about a little girl in a room full of amber light and love and they’ll never be able to tell what’s mine and what’s hers or where it’s all gone.

They’ll never know for sure.

It breaks my heart to never know my mother. I’ll stare at her eyes in photographs, thinking I’ll know the secret if I look at her long enough, that somehow, I’ll absorb enough of her to really know my mother, for her to mean something more than the sum of her loss.

But you can’t know the dead. You can’t know the people they were-you can only wave to the people you want them to be, the people you think they were once, before everything happened. I can stare at her face, the before face, the one before the chemo and the radiation and the pain, the pain of knowledge, the pain of leaving, the pain of facing your life ending, a plane crashing into so many lives. I can’t know that. I’ll never know that in the ways that kept her up at night or guarded her eyes as the days grew closer.

I will never know my mother. She will be that perfect garden in a picture, all beauty and tragedy, curves and angles, youth and hope. She will be annectodal memories for my daughters, the one we cannot hurt, the one who lives forever in our hearts and fingertips and the glittering spring leaves in the broad maple behind the house.

The one that got away.

She was happy once, that I can convince myself of, even when I stare at a face yellowed by treatment, frightened by what might come, and yet absolutely resolute in her ability to ignore what will be. Hope via ignorance. How very catholic of her.

She was happy once. God fucking dammit, she was happy, and alive and beautiful and she was my mother. Sometimes the air arches back and around, like today, and I imagine her, young, like I am, newly blessed with children, just breathing in the air, glad to be alive, remembering when she was young, and all the stories she’d some day tell.

She was happy there.

Angels dancing on the head of a pin dissolve into nothingness at the bedside of a dying child.

Looking out the window, my head pounding, sinus pressure making me wonder where my tongue fits in, I’m taken by how lovely such desolation looks. Snow covering my deck, the yard, the trees, blanketing the messes left by incomplete projects, time not had. The odd flakes glitters it’s way down from a random tree branch, and everything looks clean.

But baby, it’s COLD out there.

I ache this time of year for spring, for growth, for newness, that particular color of green in new grass, the anticipation of buds opening again. We know we’re on the downslope, that soon the shushed white of winter will turn warm and wet, breakdown, and follow itself into the sewers. We eye the seed packs in the store, imagine the garden we just didn’t get finished last summer.

We tense, waiting. We start remembering that the summer clothes won’t fit, start grabbing sandals now since they won’t be there in June. We smile remembering how delicious the air is come the end of May.

We know it’s all just one big dance, in circles, ad nauseum.

************

Today I received the news that a long-time coworker lost her daughter, her beautiful, vivacious 16 year old daughter, the spitting image of her mother, all soft caramels and long dark hair. The same laugh I imagine, and cautious approach. I stare at her pictures, read the comfort family and friends take in their god. Through tears I ask myself, as always, how on earth they can believe in anything that let something so precious as a daughter like this one leave.

I don’t have the answer, but I envy their comfort, the simple yet strong faith they have to propel them through this, through the utter horror of losing a child.

As a mother, holding my oldest, I’m broken hearted and speechless thinking of it, thinking of Vivian in 10 years, diagnosed with leukemia, going through chemo and bone marrow transplants and how she’d be strong and how it still wouldn’t matter, I’d still be closing her eyes for one last time on a narrow hospital bed, her wit and beauty and strength sapped and missing, fragile coat of a body left for us. As a mother I turn away in protection, my heart and mind finding it far to easy to understand what my coworker must be feeling today, not even 24 hours after they let her go.

I look for the beauty. I look for the covering snow for that life and I just can’t find it, and all the “maybe it’s what it should be” platitudes don’t make it ok. There is no spring to awaken to in this death, not buds to unravel, just the shortening of a life, the ending of what could be, and the sore broken hearts of a family.

I never knew this girl, a teenager in another country, her mother and I passing like sheets in the winds in different roles. She rarely ever spoke of the illness itself, and I understood. But there’s a level that mother’s can find and stand on-the horror of losing a child. We can know each other there, in the spaces where we love, and were loved.

Our winter stays there, hidden, and waits to wrap itself around us when we need it too.

I’m sick which means lazy

Jen shot me some questions on the “5 Questions” meme like, a month and a half ago, and I’m just now getting around to it. That tells you how quick I am with the email.

Heh.

Plus, the sheer amount of meme tagging on Facebook has me going a little batty, so why not keep it going. And frankly, I’ve had the urge to write the past few days, but I feel too much like something you’d scrape from under a table to bother.

So…Questions

1. What would be your dream job and why?

Simply put, I want to be a midwife. The reasons aren’t deep or much beyond “Dude, I get to help someone be ALIVE!”. But the reasons are also knowing so many women who have had such horrid experiences with their births, experiences that don’t need to happen if people learn to back the fuck off 80% of them. Of course, I want to go into nursing first to have that grounding, but now that midwifery is becoming possible in my province, I might be a little closer to my 10 year goal.

2.  If you went into politics, what issue would you focus on? 

Mental Health. I think it impacts for more people than we allow ourselves to believe, and not just in the “batshit, needs drugs” sorta way. Making it “ok” to be sick in this way, developing a culture that understands that mental and physical health go hand in hand. A world where a difference in brain chemistry doesn’t make one a pariah.

3. What draws you to other people?

Not much usually. I don’t really like people, not in any intimate way. But if someone does catch my attention, it’s usually because of what they’re saying, reading or listening to, in that order. Intellect usually draws me in, and common sense. Pie in the sky only works if you’re high.

4.  What do I love most about my husband.

His ability to make me giggle, regardless of what’s going on. It’s saved my sanity many times, and allows me to step off my “this is serious thread. I is serious cat” stool and see the forest for the trees. SOMEONE has to poke holes in my pomposity.

5.  What is it that you love the most about yourself?

Depends on the day. My survivalism I suppose-nothing ever really, truly gets me down, aside from my own innate lazy streak.

 

Apparently there are rules;
“Want to be part of it?
Follow these instructions:
1. Leave me a comment saying, “Interview me.”
2. I will respond by emailing you five questions. I get to pick the questions.
3. You will update your blog with the answers to the questions.
4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the same post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.”

A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.

“Well, you know she doesn’t NEED it. She’s just too lazy to work.”

“You’ve seen what they drive. Welfare. Pfft. As if.”

“They dress better than us. How dare they be on any sort of assistance.”

“Why should the soup wagon stop there. They look fine to me.”

“I’ve worked around people like that. They’re just ripping us off-those are my tax dollars!”

 

We’ve heard it all. Maybe we’ve even said these things, or worse. I know I have, in moments of frustration with life that must be someone else’s fault.

How dare the poor have anything. How dare they be poor and ask for anything more than the bare minimum. How dare they consider themselves full members of my society! They don’t work! They’re lazy! They’re dealing drugs! They can’t keep care of their homes, they abuse what we give them.

What we give them.

“These” people work jobs we won’t because they pay to little to life. They feed us, clean up after us, watch our children. We’ve set market prices, what we will pay, which dictates what they are paid. You love that cheap childcare? Those cheap jeans?

Actions have consequences.

They might be ill. Might have an addiction, an injury. Like your mother, your brother or cousin. But it’s different for them, right? They had money saved or family to look after them. They aren’t mooching. They aren’t living off our backs now are they? Not like those poor people, ripping off the system. How dare they be sick! How dare they be human!

We call ourselves kind. We drop a bag into the food box bin at Christmas, but we scorn those who might actually need to use it. We feel virtuous dropping clothing off to a homeless shelter, yet see no irony in accusing people on welfare of being lazy.

Maybe it’s because I can see myself there, easily. Because I can visualize the steps that would put me in one of those houses, apartments. I can see how little it would take for me to become “one of them”.

How limiting and repulsive our language is, as if we’re talking about something we just stepped in. “Those people”, as if they’re lepers.

Some of the kindest and best people I have ever known have been on assistance. They shared what they had, would go out of their way to do what they could for me. They were the farthest thing from lazy I’ve ever seen-watching some families stretch nothing to feed themselves for a month-I couldn’t fathom it. Watching the disgust on the faces of others if that family managed to scrounge up enough to eat out once every 2 months or so. That was a lesson.

Most people don’t want to help. They don’t want the poor to become settled, find their footing and perhaps heal a bit, find their way. It’s easier to have someone “worse off”. It’s easier to sit in one’s 400,000 home and laugh at those with less, accuse them of cheating because their car is too nice. They could never have won it, inherited it, be gifted with that which you take for granted, mobility. How dare they have something nice?

I’m learning my lessons lately about the assumptions I make based on where people live, how they live, what they wear. Do I still understand why someone not working needs to drive their child 2 blocks to school? No, I don’t. But I don’t understand the parents who stay home with their children who don’t walk either. And I’m trying to better understand both.

But when I see accusations, and superior attitudes in environments which are, relatively blessed with health and food and money and clothing not on the 3.00 rack at Walmart, I almost can’t stand it. We’re all the same people! Those poor people you think are criminals-they could be you tomorrow! How many of us are 1, or 3 paychecks away from poverty? A lot more than we might think.

We are not so mighty that we can’t fall to the ground with a resounding thud.

Stuff like this-it’s why I can’t find grace in small things, or see the silver lining. Because we still live in a world where helping your fellow man, where compassion and mercy and TRUE grace, where these things are figments, trotted out only when it’s popular or deemed appropriate.

Rich or poor, we all cry the same exact tears.