Feathers

The singular impact of doing this alone has been hitting lately.

That which I never wanted, the thing I wanted to avoid so badly, it’s here in my palm. Single parenting. In my efforts to avoid my childhood, it’s like I’ve dangled them in front of it anyway, staring at a future of them and me, instead of them, and us. Sure, I can envision a step father, eventually. But the way I trust people? I’ll never be able to fully trust another man around my children. Not deep in my heart, no matter how much I love them. It’s ingrained inside me, this shifting distrust, this whiff of suspicion. It’s totally unfair, and yet, something I have to grasp and throttle.

**

Breathe deeply. Let you anger flow through and around and out. Feel the anger. Feel the pain, feel the lonlieness, feel the ache of betrayal.

Now let it go. Breathe out and let fly the ghosts of who you were and what you wanted. Let go.

**

I’ve actually been alone for so long that I’m not jolted by it, more, I’m finally facing it and realizing it’s never just one side. Everything has a mate, a match.

Before at least, I could pretend.

**

I’ve spent my life running from alone. Running from that cold place I claimed to love. All I loved was that no one had a chance to wound me-alone I could be strong and lean against myself. Loving someone-that meant I had to lean into them.

Bitten, scorned, I’ve learned.  I can only trust me.

**

Imagine your perfect world. Mine is full of golds and greens, perfectly swaying grasses, caressing in their fields, inviting. The sun is forever in that moment before sunset, where the world glows peace and we all look twice as lovely as we ever did. There’s a voice to the wind, loving, soothing. It’s inside us and all around, and we walk forever to a horizon we might not be able to find.

Imagine we could create that here.

**

Some days it makes me want to cry. Somedays I’m so angry I could destroy anything placed in front of me. Mostly though, it’s infuriating, the fact that I can do nothing, and what’s more, that I know I should do nothing, that future me will thank him for this, that him for the end I could never quite get to. But that knowledge doesn’t cure the craving in my skin, or the days and days wasted and missed.

Maybe I make it all out to something more than it ever was. If I look at it hard enough, I begin to wonder if he ever really loved me anyway. My heart sobs to think I was so unworthy of love.

Most days I just don’t know, but I put one foot in front of the other, smile at the sun, and hope. I cling to the knowledge that I will love again, and it will be the love I want-not unquestioning, but just the opposite-a challenge, a dare, a world made infinitely more interesting together.

**

Feel yourself alone. Feel your skin, your toes, the small hairs on your neck swaying. Brace to the floor there, and let the winds try to pick you up.

You’re stronger than this. Tell yourself each day that you are stronger, and better than all this. You deserve plain, garden variety happiness.

And you’ll have it.

**

My gut churns at the thought of him with someone else. My brain tells me that it’s irrelevant now anyway, and throws the thought out of my ear.

My this seeming connection, this warring state between the head and heart? Shouldn’t hate come easier now?

**

Hope is the thing with feathers—
That perches in the soul—
And sings the tune without the words—
And never stops—at all—

And sweetest—in the Gale—is heard—
And sore must be the storm—
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm—

I’ve heard it in the chillest land—
And on the strangest Sea—
Yet, never, in Extremity,
It asked a crumb—of Me.

Mourning

We fight even via text.

Words, devoid of space and context and the slightest of vocalizations, become strangleholds, trenches we dig to lie down in, waiting for the whistle of a mortar to streak past us.

He’s mad at me. For being less than pleased with him.

He LEFT ME. He walked out of this house, and left me, and I’m to be happy? I’m now a single mother to two daughters, faced with the sad reminders of all the last few years haven’t given me. But I should be molly sunshine. I should be in a good mood.

I try, but it’s the most I can do some days to grit my teeth and now scream and bawl my pain away, the last few years of being disparaged or ignored, treated like some paranoid crazy person, when I wasn’t.

I wasn’t crazy. I saw what was real, and was told that it wasn’t. And now I know.

It hurts to know that I loved him, that somewhere inside, the place where it burns to think of him with someone else, I still love him, somehow, the he who was, that person who fled years ago, replaced by a creature I neither know or understand. Sometimes I cry and wish for him back, the person I know is in there, the person I either scared away or lost to life. But he won’t be back.

Someone asked, if I missed him, or is I missed the idea of him, the partner, the husband. And it’s that which I miss, the knowledge that someone would be home when I got there, that I could say “my husband” and still feel that little thrill that he was my husband, all these years later. I missed him for so long that the mourning was long over for him.

I miss having someone to love though.

But we fight. And we growl, and he makes it clear that whatever he wants? It’s not me, and hasn’t been for a long time. All I ever wanted was love, and attention. A family. A bond between us that could weather any storm. A bond I must have fictionalized, somehow. I was never as real to him as people behind a computer would be. And that burns more fiercely than any person of flesh could.

I mourn my marriage. I mourn the boy I loved, I mourn the girl who loved him. I mourn the family I wanted, the one I want now, to keep safe and strong. I mourn the heart that can never quite be filled.

In spite of everything, I still love him, in that cold place where it aches to think of him with someone else. In spite of all the hurt, the nasty words hurled both ways, the calm we could never quite collect, love burns, and maybe always will. Even if it shouldn’t. It will always feel like he filled an emptiness in me that was never soothed.

But in a world full of children and jobs and mortgages and temptation, is that ever enough? Could it be enough?

A new road

I’m drunk. It occurs to me on the cab ride home, hurtling down dead dark, that there’s a new life stretching ahead of me, and I’m eager to meet it.

I’ve deleted him from FB. I’ve ignored his request to stay for dinner. I’ve done my best to ignore his mentions of dates. I’m doing what I can to minimize contact. I’m (sorta) seeing a guy who, while not my physical type, makes me feel heavenly when I’m with him, telling me all the things I haven’t ever heard. I doubt it will last, but damn, seeing someone look at you, TRULY look at you and tell you you’re lovely and amazing…it’s been far too long.

It stuns me that after only a couple dates, a man is telling me all the things my husband never said in over 10 years of marriage. That a man I barely know can run a hand down my leg and tell me how lovely he finds them, even while I protest and try to keep his hand away from the cellulite lurking under my tights.  It stuns me that such simple kindness, words that may just be words, and may be more, they make me want to cry because it’s all I’ve ever wanted to hear, in years of marriage-that I was worthy, and lovely and amazing in someone’s eyes. That I mattered, that I was wanted.

It infuriates me that I always felt like I was asking too much. It saddens me that someone saying such beautiful things nearly made me cry. It angers me, that I just sat in a dead relationship for so long, that we both did. And it makes me shake my head, knowing I’d never let my daughters stay in a corner like that.

Everyone tells me I have a new life coming-and I do. It happens slowly, as I take a look ahead and see no horizon and know that it’s so very true, that with my heart and mind open, I can become that frantically happy woman I want to be. I can whistle into the wind and strike up a conversation where I wish. I can be happy in my own skin.

The counselor stressed that. Find my happy first. Then look out. And I will.

But nothing else this year will make me as happy as someone describing my skin as silk as he gently caressed my arm. Nothing can take that from me-no matter how angry my ex can make me, no matter how futile it all seems somedays, as yet another separation related tantrum starts-no one can take away the fact that I am still wanted, by myself, and by others.

Even drunk, one too many vodka and orange later, I know that being reflected in someone else’s eyes is just as important to me as being reflected in my own. And I’m good with that.

A new life, a new road. Tempered by anger, polished by my need to love.

It will all be ok.

Fair Payment

Maybe I shouldn’t be so angry.

None of how this played out is a surprise. I knew what was going on, even if I decided to play along with the lies. I kept it up while being denied the chance to fix things with us, not just with me. I changed more than I had-I started to fix me.

But it wasn’t enough.

It’s not the moving on the bothers me, making me see red and use the delete button liberally in some cases. It’s the lying. The continual lying. Not the once or twice I stretched the truth. But the in your face, for months, when directly confronted lying.

Yes, it makes me “bitter”. Because I thought that even if we grew apart, even if he wanted to just get tattoos and go to rock shows while I wanted to rebuild the house and just sit back and raise the kids while writing, we could still find a way through without so much pain and anger, so much lying and deception.

But no. And it makes me bitter because I’m angry and wounded, because that sort of betrayal, that which I would have never expected from someone I loved, because it isn’t just something I can put in a box and ignore? My anger is real, and justified, and I will move through it when I move through it. I have grieved in the past, and anger-that’s usually the one I have the most trouble with.

I can forgive a lot. I am, by nature, not a grudge holder. The energy it takes to hold a grudge! But I am black and white with this type of thing, and truly nauseated that the more I talk to people, the more I see it happens to so many people. It makes my heart hurt. We trade I love you’s like baseball cards, and then step back and destroy each other?

Yes,we change. But at some point, we have to also be adults, and humans, and realize that some pains are lesser than others. I’ve spent years believing I only deserve someone who is barely ever interested in me, or the family, unable to split attention from a world that only exists inside a computer. Now, I don’t believe that so much. Now I know I deserve love, affection and attention, just like anyone else does. As do my children. It’s easier to focus on them when we’re away from each other.

I am angry. I am seething, burning, need to start kickboxing or jogging angry. But mostly, I’m angry at me-for letting it get this way, for never having the balls to do more than look for apartments on Kijiji and dream of a day when he would love me, a day when family was worth working for.

As I’ve said, I have earned this anger. I have earned the right to feel betrayed.  I have earned this fire.

Hypothetical Question

If someone, within a relationship, falls in love with someone else, it’s cheating, right? If someone else has a relationship that’s sexual in nature online, it’s cheating, right?

In case I’m crazy, cheating doesn’t always mean actual sex, right?

Valentine’s Day has never been much more than a day the world gangs up on me and tries to make me feel bad if I don’t have flowers or chocolate. But for the last 12 years, I’ve had someone there with me.

This year, there’s no one, and the ache throbs. It woke me up through the night, the coldness in the bed amplified, the quiet in the house.  Nobody loves me-maybe I had always made a stink about the flowers, but I always knew I was loved.

This year, it’s a silent grey morning, and I cannot wash the sad from my face.

Saturday Blue Saturday

Who can resist a lovely clear blue sky February day? Not I, even if my moods are a swinging like a 70′s suburban housewife.

To meds we go.

So, yeah.

Plans are afoot for Spin Me I Pulsate, and it’s looking like, come March, she’ll be shutting the hell up. (I know, a bunch of you are rolling your eyes and yelling Thank FUCK for that..)

It doesn’t seem me anymore. The person in here-the happy person, the fucked up person, the person with a family and love, the person who wanted to die-none of them look like the me I am, or will be. It feels like an old pair of pants I’ve grown out of.

Maybe I’ll change my mind at some point. Maybe I won’t. I don’t know. I’ve just got too much shit going on, and this is starting to feel strange to me.

For now, I’ve started The Service of Others, fiction, based on the stories I hear each day from the people I talk to. Sure, a call center is a shitty job. But open your ears, and people will give you more than you’d imagine. And I want to write about that. More than anything, I want to be writing more, not whining and telling my story. I fuck my life up-we’re clear on that. I just don’t want to be linked with that much more.

I want control. I need control. I have control.

I don’t lose control gracefully.

I’m a control hog. I’m either leading the charge, yelling TALLY HO! on my trusty steed as I hold up my rapier, or I’m snorting in the back row of the classroom, eating peanuts and gleefully remaining apathetic. I have two speeds-on or off.

I blame a lot of things. I blame a childhood, filled with events I could not even pretend to control, that I couldn’t even have a daydream fantasy over. People in my life who left me 3 sheets to the wind so often that I never really discovered when my feet were solidly on the ground. And little old me, never trying to just find my way, instead coasting on hot air and will, the sheer force of will that has brought me through so much.

Now I face my dragon, full force. Often it seems like this is my last monster, the last door to open, the last window to clean off. Letting go.

I made an arsehole mistake with something-what it is is irelevant for right here, but trust me. I did something that goes against all of my personal values in a moment of weakness and ache and anger. And I regret it, something I so rarely do, but I admit it loudly, that I regret, and hate that I have made a mistake such as the one I’ve made. I’ve made someone look at me with hate and anger and pain, and it makes me want to crawl up inside myself and cry forgiveness. I want to be forgiven, knowing in my own head, how wrong, how hideous and gross I’ve been.

But I cannot pass those feelings on. I cannot erase what has been done, and I must lay in the bed I’ve made. I do deserve it. But coming to grips with that fact that I cannot control when someone forgives me, that I cannot make them find closure immediately-that’s what’s taking all my will. Learning to submit to the anger and disdain, learning to submit to the fact that perhaps I need to stew in what I’ve done, take full repentance. Learning to wait, without apathy, learning to say I value you in my life, I want you in it, without running the show.

Learning to let go, and let people come to me. Not chasing them for love, or friendship, but letting them find their way back out of anger, back to who I really am when not blinded by rage or sadness. Letting them lead.

I don’t do well. But I’m learning. I become completely irrational, seized by a need to make people love me.

I want to break this pattern, break myself of it. I can be loved, without forcing the hand before me. I can be treasured, and cared for, more even, if I let people come to me on their terms.

I want to be the person who can stand and wait, hopeful, yet not cutting off my nose to spite my face.

Hope. I want more of that.

 

(to add: I’m slowly coming to grips, clearly, with the fact that I’ve been behaving in a codependant manner for years, trying to control the people in my life, trying to make them happy, trying to fill the voids left in me. It’s been easier for me to never meet my own needs-something I’ve been told multiple times over the years that I’m only truly grasping now. And I’m lost. I struggle to make myself happy. I don’t want that anymore, but how do I break free?)

Low Fat Fattie.

“Vivian, why didn’t you eat your snickerdoodles?” I’ve emptied her lunchbox to find the sandwich, juice and kiwi missing. The only thing left are 1.5 homemade cookies, lonely in their tupperware.

“Well….I don’t want to get a belly like yours Mom. I want to eat a low fat diet.”

“….”

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

I want my daughters to be healthy. I acknowledge that I have work to do on my body, and have told them that the parts I’m not happy with are because I eat poorly and don’t always get enough exercise. I’ve told them that we exercise to keep our bodies strong, and we eat good food like fruits and veggies and protein to make sure we have good fuel. And we eat cookies or candy as a treat.

But then one day I saw something posted at Vivian’s school that mentioned a diet. I worried about it, thought about asking then school, but after some thought, realized it was on the “parent” bulletin board, and wasn’t meant for the kids anyway. But I still worried-what are they teaching about healthy habits and food? They serve mostly junk in the cafeteria-I don’t find shepherd’s pie or lasagna particularly healthy. And to be honest, she watches far more TV and plays online much more than I’m happy about-and most days, that’s an hour, maybe a bit more.

But I can’t be next to her every moment of the day. I wander by when I’m home, check what she’s doing online, what she’s watching. But while I’m not a fan of her necessarily having access, I also realize she’s a child growing up in a new world, and I can’t, and won’t cut her off. I can provide the commentary. I can remind her that healthy insides aren’t always tiny outsides, just as I can remind Vivian women can be warriors.

But what if it isn’t enough?

What if I cannot fight it all? The magazines, the commercials, the clothing, the people around us-what if no matter how comfortable I am in my skin, how often I remind them that health is priority-I worry that the message they will still get is that you aren’t good enough. You must give something up. You must be something else.

How many 6 year olds don’t want cookies?

***

Or perhaps, she’s just internalized what we see and hear and LIVE each day. That food is TEH ENEMY and we must gird our loins in preparation, and is just spouting what she sees.

Or maybe, instead of saying she ran out of time, she just said whatever came to mind, and it doesn’t mean anything.

She’s 6. I didn’t think I had to worry about this just yet.

Death+

Death haunts our shoulders.

We shouldn’t see it coming, not clearly. It should be peripheral, shards  to be brushed off, remembered by the crumbs left on our fingers, the sadness in the corner of our eyes on a cold, windy day, tears that stream unbidden and unrequired down our face as we warm the seat on the city bus each morning. We shouldn’t have the portent, the hidden gas valve in the corner of our future, of our ending.

But taste of it I do odd days, the dusty breeze of an age, the memory of black behind my eyes, of a body unseeing, released finally from bondage. The sweat and the fear and the ruin. The absolute of nothing.

It sits behind me, breathing slightly, lightly on my skin. Waiting.

***

Something today triggered the thoughts. The times I nearly died, the blackness.

Once, at 14, I swallowed a bottle of muscle relaxants. I don’t remember that I was in much pain. I was just so tired of being alive, of everything seeming like an uphill battle I couldn’t possibly walk in crutches. The pills stuck to the back of my throat as I sat in a cold fall park, swallowing them 3 or 4 at a time. Everyone else had gone back to school, and I sat.

When nothing happened, I figured I couldn’t even figure out how to kill myself correctly, and trudged back to school. It was until a few hours later when I kept just randomly falling down that I realized what I had done. The ringing started, the world took a shine, and I fell to sleep for hours and hours.

Interrupted by nothing but an endless, firm darkness which neither rejected nor embraced. It just was.

When I woke up, I swore I’d better. I swore life was worth living, as I stared at an achingly lovely blue sky.

Death 0. Me 1.

Long, long years in which guilt kept me tethered to the earth, where my obligation to others seemed to outweigh my needs. I spent years ripped inside, burdened by the one thought I don’t want to be alive and yet feeling forced to stay put, stay together and whole. Years of stagnation, years of anger and ache. Years of blind living.

Then children, and internal re-org. Facing the demon down once, taming it, then cracking oh so easily one summer night.

I didn’t cry. I was circular by that point, the noise in my head incessant with static and the thought that death was the answer-death was one way to prove that I was needed and necessary, that I was worthy. I crammed 100 some odd pills in my maw, lukewarm water pushing them down. I didn’t cry when I wrote a letter, sorry sorry I can’t I loved you. I laid my head down, and stared at my children, smiling in an old picture. New guilt. Good guilt. A warm tether to my heart.

Calmly at a desk I told the nurse i took too many pills. I don’t want to die.

And they believed me. As I began to slip from the earth, as I felt my arms and body grown tired and limp, my eyes rolling as the room filled with the smell of cupcakes, the nudged me back down, until my body rid itself of my wish. Of my death.

And since then, it’s been like I was stripped clean.

***

I’ve seen nothing  to convince me I go elsewhere when I die. I saw nothing, felt nothing when my mother died but an aching void, a darkness. Both times I have tried to rid the world of myself, there were no warm bodies waiting, no messages, no moments of wholeness, no metatron. Just, black. Just the dark, and the question. Nothing more.

I wanted to. I’ve always wanted to. I dream of the security of knowing that somewhere, my mother waits for me, her arms warm and kind. I wish I could rely on thoughts of there being a better place, even a different place. But nothing has shown me anything but the simple barren emptiness of what I’d imagine deep space to feel like. Think big. Then think bigger.

And so today I was thinking of those times, laying back, eyes unseeing yet staring, and how I wanted so badly for the universe, for anything to take my into it’s arms, and whisper

yes.

and how it never has.

Depending

There is a term that applies when we sacrifice our happiness at the expense of others.   This term is co-dependency.  Co-dependency is: a set of maladaptive behaviours learned by family members in order to survive in a family experiencing emotional pain and stress.

I read the email back from my e-counseler and I immediately regret reading it while waiting for the bus at work. Tears fill my eyes as I blink furiously, trying to clear the glaze.

they have been taught in various relationships, perhaps beginning in childhood, that it is not okay to try and get their needs met; somehow the message is that they aren’t worth it.

I can’t stop the tears, realizing that my life, the life I fought so hard for, the life I thought I wanted, might as well have been a figment.

Seeing your life, reduced to sentences you might find in the Self-Help section, and realizing that it’s so very true? Hideous, and demanding and ultimately far too real.

****

There’s no bad guy here, not really.

I don’t think either side is the devil, full of fire and rage and hurt. Rather, I think we’re two people thrown together, people who love each other, but people who just can’t. My learned behaviours stretch far back, as I long suspected. Having every adult in my life supercede me in some way-by hurting me, by being sick, by dying, by drinking, by the slow hand of turning off, the neglect of grief. The constant “shhh” of living with cancer as a child, the sense that your pain, for all the merits of relativity, is not and will never be as meaningful or important.

Being told, without words, to never talk about any of it. To stare loss in the face, to stare betrayal in it’s vacant black eyes and know that you cannot say the words to make it flesh.

This person can be afraid to ask for what they need, because their needs have never been adequately met by anyone before.

I’ve always been told, in one form or another, that I ask too much. That what I want, that what I crave, the focused attention of love and affection, the warm glow of acknowledgement, is unreasonable. I’ve know this was not true, but I’ve never experienced it, and remember even as a child being so desperate for my father’s love, his attention and gaze.

All I’ve ever wanted was someone on my side-someone who didn’t worry about them, or someone sick or dying or just plain someone else. I wanted someone for me. I want someone for me.

Maybe that’s wrong, and selfish. But there’s a damn pouty little girl who never had anyone listen to her, and she’s stomping on the bone I’ve got left to love with. She’s not asking too much. She’s just asking.