"I began to feel normal. Afterall, everyone has a mother who dies someday." (Myers)
I really needed the break from dwelling on all that stuff. I've been very smily lately and playing with Bri. I've been singing and generally dancing around the house. This is a really good change for me. Twelve months of stress, anxiety and anger have really taken their toll but it's finally starting to roll off of me.
Bri has been doing really well in her pre-preschool. She made a friend yesterday. Today she had to stay longer because we met with the lawyer to fill out and sign paperwork for the property guardianship. She saw me come in and I had to walk passed her to swipe her out at the desk and she just crumbled. Her face just fell and she started bawling like I was abandoning her. I went back over after swiping and hugged her real tight. She perked right up when I asked her to get her coat. She's been really cuddly lately and crawling in my lap a lot. I get her snuggled under the blanket and we watch cartoons. It's really sweet and I'm drinking it up.
I keep thinking about the time when she's not going to like that kind of thing. She's already got her quirks about her independence. She wants to do a lot of things for herself. Carry her dishes, put them in the sink when she's done, wipe herself after going potty, play with the kitties. She's getting a little better at that. Not getting so excited and scaring them.
Hubbie and I are still good. Still waiting on that sex drive to return. I'm being really good with my nutrition and it shows on my energy levels. I have some tea for the reproductive organs that might help with hormonal balance. I try to get at least a cup a day in. I really should do 3 cups. I'll have to work on that.
"I learn that it's okay to be imperfect, though I was punished for it as a child." (Myers)
Hubbie has been very supportive in my craziness. He's not been pressuring me for sex which I really need.
I need to just build it up again. I think about just making myself do it to please him but that's not solving the problem and potentially making worse since I could condition myself to not like sex at all, if I have it when I really don't want it.
My faults are sometimes infuriating to him but sometimes he just cracks a joke and I'm able to laugh at myself. I get hyper sometimes and fly about the house finishing a list of things to do, or making a meal in the kitchen flying about prepping. That happened a couple of days ago. I was flitting around him like a hummingbird on speed while he tried to pour a cop of coffee. He actually backed away slowly and said, I'm going to go stand in a corner until you're done.
I really laughed at that one. I know what I must look like on the outside sometimes, kinda manic and then other days depressed. It's all due to nutrition and sleep. I think the worst of the depression from mom's death and the stress from bro's crazy shit is over.
I'm laughing and having fun again. I'm really paying attention to Bri and how she's growing. Just sucking up how great she is and how much I love her. I try to make sure I show it as much as possible and hug her as much as I can. When I told Jess I wanted her to have everything that I didn't I meant the emotional stuff. I think Jess assumed material stuff. Probably because we had been talking about the inheritance at that moment. I want her to not just be loved but to know it. So far she's happy and friendly and confident.
She shouts HI at the top of her lungs whenever we get to daycare and says goodbye to everyone as she leaves. She shouts it and waves at everybody. She doesn't seem to be too afraid of anything like some kids get. I think it's a very good sign.
Reap What you Sew
A few weeks ago she was cuddled up with me on the couch watching Equestria Girls. I had started to doze off and I felt her stroking my cheek. She was looking down at me and smiling. She said hi sweetie.
This is the same thing hubbie and I do with her when we put her down to bed, stroke her cheek and her head and talking soothingly to her. I think we've done well so far.
Wednesday, January 29, 2014
Friday, January 24, 2014
Taking a Break
I'm still going to have my ritual this Sunday. part 2 of 3 of the death and grieving ritual.
I've contacted a therapist and am waiting for an e-mail. I will call next week to follow up.
The subject matter of the last few weeks has gotten really heavy and a few days ago I started to feel overwhelmed. I set aside the two books I was working in, writing memoirs and sexual anorexia, and began reading Don't Call me Mother. I'm doing the same thing with this as with the other memoir. I'm underlining things that trigger memories. I'll journal about it later when I'm done with the book.
Watership Down will be next on my list. Something totally unrelated to what I'm doing in this blog.
That feeling of being overwhelmed and not having faith that I can work my way through this, was a warning. I need to take a few days to breathe and then I can return to working through this trauma and memory.
I'll report after the ritual as well, at least to mark that I've done it. Adding anything that might be new and revolutionary. But for a few days I'll let my mind rest from the constant dredging of memories.
The first of February I'll celebrate Imbolc and start working through the different bad job experiences.
I have a good ritual or two for that.
I've contacted a therapist and am waiting for an e-mail. I will call next week to follow up.
The subject matter of the last few weeks has gotten really heavy and a few days ago I started to feel overwhelmed. I set aside the two books I was working in, writing memoirs and sexual anorexia, and began reading Don't Call me Mother. I'm doing the same thing with this as with the other memoir. I'm underlining things that trigger memories. I'll journal about it later when I'm done with the book.
Watership Down will be next on my list. Something totally unrelated to what I'm doing in this blog.
That feeling of being overwhelmed and not having faith that I can work my way through this, was a warning. I need to take a few days to breathe and then I can return to working through this trauma and memory.
I'll report after the ritual as well, at least to mark that I've done it. Adding anything that might be new and revolutionary. But for a few days I'll let my mind rest from the constant dredging of memories.
The first of February I'll celebrate Imbolc and start working through the different bad job experiences.
I have a good ritual or two for that.
Monday, January 20, 2014
Perfectionism and Isolation
"When approval is unreachable children become ashamed."
More work with the Sexual Anorexia book:
This part should be obvious. I don't know what the goals were for me when I was a kid. I only knew disapproval or neglect from parents. Mom had her moments when she was affectionate but often I also got distance and what felt like being judged or disapproved of. I wonder if my mistakes weighed on her. Maybe she didn't realize that you can't prevent your child from making any mistakes at all, just hope to prevent the worst ones you can. She took it personally like she had done something wrong and that guilt let to rage. My bro saw that rage more than I did. I imagine the attacks didn't help his perception of women in general. Mom attacking him and dad letting him attack me.
I remember times when I was little and crying myself to sleep. I remember suicidal thoughts in 6th grade, maybe younger. In 7th grade I wanted to run away. There was this feeling that I was a mistake, that I didn't belong in the family much less on the planet. I think that was one of the things that resonated later when I was 23 and living with the abusive X. He had had the same alien feelings as a kid and into his adult years. Weird way to connect with someone. No wonder it was doomed among other things.
If my mother caught me crying she'd tell me to knock it off, quit whining. She didn't let herself express her pain so no one else was allowed to express it. She must have been resentful that I would feel any pain at all when in an adult's eyes I would have had it so easy; eat, play, sleep. But without that human connection it was painful and frustrating. I couldn't seem to connect with other kids except for one or two. I was often the target of ostracizing and adults that cared had to make the other kids include me. I had a few good teachers that way, but it didn't erase the initial injury. Now I like to say it was because I was a witch and maybe others sensed the different-ness about me. But even that doesn't fully satisfy the questioning. How come people didn't love me, didn't want to be near me? Even the female characters that I wrote in fiction romance were restrained and distant. I couldn't seem to get them to express desire or affection. They weren't the ones reaching out to touch or to hold. The guy had to do all the work. A lot like my current marriage. Hubbie does all the reaching out for intimacy. It's rare I initiate.
In previous marriages the pressure to meet expectations led to co-dependence where I would completely change my goals, my laugh, my personality to meet the boyfriend's or girlfriend's expectations. David, Andrew, James, and the abusive X were just a few of those.
Mom had these anorexia tendencies as well. Besides the alcoholism, she also didn't eat. She would go through phases of losing weight really fast and not eating more than a meal a day. Toward the end it must have been pain from her body trying to digest food and clean the blood with failing organs, But earlier I wonder if she was martyring herself, or engaged in some kind of struggle with control or even punishing herself for imagined faults. Dad certainly let her know often enough how much she wasn't ideal.
She also tended not to bathe and would hoard money. She didn't spend money on herself even when she needed it. She'd wear the same clothes for years until one of her friends from school would beg her to go shopping, even take her out with them to get her to buy stuff. I think it was Jean that told her, "You are not poor. You don't have to worry about money. Just take yourself out and buy something new."
After retirement mom went in the other direction and filled four closets and three dressers with her clothes. She must have given herself permission to spend with the excuse she needed clothes for traveling on the vacations they took twice a year. It was all summer clothes mostly, beach wear and little outfits for going out to dinner.
I must have learned this behavior from her. I don't have as much as she did. I don't starve myself or exercise too much, or fill multiple closets with clothes. I'm working on the list of items that indicate sexual anorexia. I hope to answer the questions and list the things that are part of the 12 steps inventory phase. The author says this really helps the therapist, having this fully fleshed out.
Compulsive Social Isolation is another issue that I need to look into that's connected to Sexual Anorexia.
I do find myself alone a lot. I don't stick my neck out like I used to and go to coffees, meetups, or get together with friends. I've always had a hard time maintaining long-term friendships. It usually takes a lot of work on the part of the other person to keep things going. My standards are high and if I don't hear from someone in a long while I'll think that they've just dropped away and I'll let them go. I don't chase after them.
My relationships with co-workers has always been strained. I only managed to link with a couple of people professionally over the three jobs I had. Elmira being the best for that. I seemed to get along well with some of the younger people there. I went to some dinners and out to movies with a few. For some reason, no matter how open and friendly they were, I didn't feel welcome to drop in and chat or call or invite them out. Part of me told myself they were just being nice, like it was a pity. Negative self-talk apparently.
I've always been uncomfortable with hugging and touching. Casual touching has always either panicked me or angered me depending on the context. I have to coach myself into staying still and relaxing into it. I remember when the principal when I was subbing last year patted me on the shoulder as he said good morning. I froze but I smiled and said it back. I think it was pretty obvious. I may have jumped a little.
He must read people well because he hasn't done it since to my relief. Nothing was meant by it but touch is such a loaded issue that my walls are fierce, not that I suspect sexual come-ons from anyone that bumps into me, I just did not come from a household where we were touched casually, on a daily basis. It was very rare that mom hugged me. I did get hugs but it seemed like it was special occasion behavior, not every day.
I would resent others who would go out and have fun. I was invited to a few outings. I'd get really pissed when it was a bunch of people I knew and none of them thought to invite me. It may just have been as innocent as they thought I wasn't into it, or I was working or something but it always rankled me.
Sometimes I can get a bit puritanical in my disapproval of the partying type of person.
Most of my time is with family and only my husband's family. Even then I doubt I am always welcome to come over. Social situations are rife with the fear of rejection. I don't ever fully believe that I am welcome, so I never completely relax and I seem to be always vigilant for signs of rejection. This person doesn't really want to talk to me or they don't really want me here. They are just being nice because they like my husband or other friend. I tend to cut short what I want to say because I don't believe people are really interested in what I have to say.
There was this one time that I ran afoul of one of hubbie's D&D groups. I had been going to hang with them while they played, I was not the only girl there, and had gotten comfortable. My dysfunction head butted the host's dysfunction. I had entered the apartment without knocking. In my head we were welcome because they knew we were coming and we had been going for months. I had talked to the wife on my way in. The husband snapped at me about knocking, my hubbie had forgotten to warn me about this particular pet peeve. I withered. I was close to tears and sat in a chair stewing for hours, even after the host assured me that he wasn't really mad at me, that it was a mistake and he hadn't known I hadn't been warned. I never went back after that. The official reason was that I was working nights and wouldn't be able to visit and still be able to get up early in the morning for a Saturday shift. But it really was anxiety.
This break had happened right when I was starting to feel secure and calm and welcome. I was teetering on the edge of real connection and then the anger just broke it up. I couldn't bring myself to recover from it. Even now I feel a bit teary over it.
Teaching and on the job tends to be different. I seem to have more confidence and those voices don't get to me. I assert myself. Sometimes I overdo it. It's almost as a compensation. Maybe it's like the rubber band snapping.
In writing all this stuff down I'm starting to really realize how deep this all goes. The past few years I've chalked it all up to hormones, nutrition and being exhausted from work, the baby and the renovations of the house pissing me off. But as these things resolve themselves, there are fewer excuses for not being in the mood. Maybe I didn't notice this before because my anorexic periods just happen to coincide with the in-between time of relationships. When I was feeling sexually manic or adventurous I just happened to be in a relationship. I didn't notice the swings in temperament because they phased in time with my relationship patterns. Being in the same relationship for 8 plus years has highlighted how much I need to address my past and finally resolve this crap so I don't screw up a great thing.
I'm grateful he is as patient as he is, though I know it really has been wearing on him lately.
It still could be nutrition and hormonal balance, but I want to explore every avenue just in case I'm more fucked up than I thought I was when I started this quest back in October with the initial idea. I've already started trying to get more veg in and have been eating eggs and veggies instead of carbs. I'm still heavy on the carbs but today I noticed the shift in the ratio of carbs to veg and eggs. Hubbie and I will be working on a work-out plan and getting hand weights. He wants to team up for workouts which will help with motivation. I and Bri have been taking multi-vitamins and I'm working on trying to get to sleep earlier.
I have to sub-teach tomorrow so I have pressure to get to bed early.
More work with the Sexual Anorexia book:
This part should be obvious. I don't know what the goals were for me when I was a kid. I only knew disapproval or neglect from parents. Mom had her moments when she was affectionate but often I also got distance and what felt like being judged or disapproved of. I wonder if my mistakes weighed on her. Maybe she didn't realize that you can't prevent your child from making any mistakes at all, just hope to prevent the worst ones you can. She took it personally like she had done something wrong and that guilt let to rage. My bro saw that rage more than I did. I imagine the attacks didn't help his perception of women in general. Mom attacking him and dad letting him attack me.
I remember times when I was little and crying myself to sleep. I remember suicidal thoughts in 6th grade, maybe younger. In 7th grade I wanted to run away. There was this feeling that I was a mistake, that I didn't belong in the family much less on the planet. I think that was one of the things that resonated later when I was 23 and living with the abusive X. He had had the same alien feelings as a kid and into his adult years. Weird way to connect with someone. No wonder it was doomed among other things.
If my mother caught me crying she'd tell me to knock it off, quit whining. She didn't let herself express her pain so no one else was allowed to express it. She must have been resentful that I would feel any pain at all when in an adult's eyes I would have had it so easy; eat, play, sleep. But without that human connection it was painful and frustrating. I couldn't seem to connect with other kids except for one or two. I was often the target of ostracizing and adults that cared had to make the other kids include me. I had a few good teachers that way, but it didn't erase the initial injury. Now I like to say it was because I was a witch and maybe others sensed the different-ness about me. But even that doesn't fully satisfy the questioning. How come people didn't love me, didn't want to be near me? Even the female characters that I wrote in fiction romance were restrained and distant. I couldn't seem to get them to express desire or affection. They weren't the ones reaching out to touch or to hold. The guy had to do all the work. A lot like my current marriage. Hubbie does all the reaching out for intimacy. It's rare I initiate.
In previous marriages the pressure to meet expectations led to co-dependence where I would completely change my goals, my laugh, my personality to meet the boyfriend's or girlfriend's expectations. David, Andrew, James, and the abusive X were just a few of those.
Mom had these anorexia tendencies as well. Besides the alcoholism, she also didn't eat. She would go through phases of losing weight really fast and not eating more than a meal a day. Toward the end it must have been pain from her body trying to digest food and clean the blood with failing organs, But earlier I wonder if she was martyring herself, or engaged in some kind of struggle with control or even punishing herself for imagined faults. Dad certainly let her know often enough how much she wasn't ideal.
She also tended not to bathe and would hoard money. She didn't spend money on herself even when she needed it. She'd wear the same clothes for years until one of her friends from school would beg her to go shopping, even take her out with them to get her to buy stuff. I think it was Jean that told her, "You are not poor. You don't have to worry about money. Just take yourself out and buy something new."
After retirement mom went in the other direction and filled four closets and three dressers with her clothes. She must have given herself permission to spend with the excuse she needed clothes for traveling on the vacations they took twice a year. It was all summer clothes mostly, beach wear and little outfits for going out to dinner.
I must have learned this behavior from her. I don't have as much as she did. I don't starve myself or exercise too much, or fill multiple closets with clothes. I'm working on the list of items that indicate sexual anorexia. I hope to answer the questions and list the things that are part of the 12 steps inventory phase. The author says this really helps the therapist, having this fully fleshed out.
Compulsive Social Isolation is another issue that I need to look into that's connected to Sexual Anorexia.
I do find myself alone a lot. I don't stick my neck out like I used to and go to coffees, meetups, or get together with friends. I've always had a hard time maintaining long-term friendships. It usually takes a lot of work on the part of the other person to keep things going. My standards are high and if I don't hear from someone in a long while I'll think that they've just dropped away and I'll let them go. I don't chase after them.
My relationships with co-workers has always been strained. I only managed to link with a couple of people professionally over the three jobs I had. Elmira being the best for that. I seemed to get along well with some of the younger people there. I went to some dinners and out to movies with a few. For some reason, no matter how open and friendly they were, I didn't feel welcome to drop in and chat or call or invite them out. Part of me told myself they were just being nice, like it was a pity. Negative self-talk apparently.
I've always been uncomfortable with hugging and touching. Casual touching has always either panicked me or angered me depending on the context. I have to coach myself into staying still and relaxing into it. I remember when the principal when I was subbing last year patted me on the shoulder as he said good morning. I froze but I smiled and said it back. I think it was pretty obvious. I may have jumped a little.
He must read people well because he hasn't done it since to my relief. Nothing was meant by it but touch is such a loaded issue that my walls are fierce, not that I suspect sexual come-ons from anyone that bumps into me, I just did not come from a household where we were touched casually, on a daily basis. It was very rare that mom hugged me. I did get hugs but it seemed like it was special occasion behavior, not every day.
I would resent others who would go out and have fun. I was invited to a few outings. I'd get really pissed when it was a bunch of people I knew and none of them thought to invite me. It may just have been as innocent as they thought I wasn't into it, or I was working or something but it always rankled me.
Sometimes I can get a bit puritanical in my disapproval of the partying type of person.
Most of my time is with family and only my husband's family. Even then I doubt I am always welcome to come over. Social situations are rife with the fear of rejection. I don't ever fully believe that I am welcome, so I never completely relax and I seem to be always vigilant for signs of rejection. This person doesn't really want to talk to me or they don't really want me here. They are just being nice because they like my husband or other friend. I tend to cut short what I want to say because I don't believe people are really interested in what I have to say.
There was this one time that I ran afoul of one of hubbie's D&D groups. I had been going to hang with them while they played, I was not the only girl there, and had gotten comfortable. My dysfunction head butted the host's dysfunction. I had entered the apartment without knocking. In my head we were welcome because they knew we were coming and we had been going for months. I had talked to the wife on my way in. The husband snapped at me about knocking, my hubbie had forgotten to warn me about this particular pet peeve. I withered. I was close to tears and sat in a chair stewing for hours, even after the host assured me that he wasn't really mad at me, that it was a mistake and he hadn't known I hadn't been warned. I never went back after that. The official reason was that I was working nights and wouldn't be able to visit and still be able to get up early in the morning for a Saturday shift. But it really was anxiety.
This break had happened right when I was starting to feel secure and calm and welcome. I was teetering on the edge of real connection and then the anger just broke it up. I couldn't bring myself to recover from it. Even now I feel a bit teary over it.
Teaching and on the job tends to be different. I seem to have more confidence and those voices don't get to me. I assert myself. Sometimes I overdo it. It's almost as a compensation. Maybe it's like the rubber band snapping.
In writing all this stuff down I'm starting to really realize how deep this all goes. The past few years I've chalked it all up to hormones, nutrition and being exhausted from work, the baby and the renovations of the house pissing me off. But as these things resolve themselves, there are fewer excuses for not being in the mood. Maybe I didn't notice this before because my anorexic periods just happen to coincide with the in-between time of relationships. When I was feeling sexually manic or adventurous I just happened to be in a relationship. I didn't notice the swings in temperament because they phased in time with my relationship patterns. Being in the same relationship for 8 plus years has highlighted how much I need to address my past and finally resolve this crap so I don't screw up a great thing.
I'm grateful he is as patient as he is, though I know it really has been wearing on him lately.
It still could be nutrition and hormonal balance, but I want to explore every avenue just in case I'm more fucked up than I thought I was when I started this quest back in October with the initial idea. I've already started trying to get more veg in and have been eating eggs and veggies instead of carbs. I'm still heavy on the carbs but today I noticed the shift in the ratio of carbs to veg and eggs. Hubbie and I will be working on a work-out plan and getting hand weights. He wants to team up for workouts which will help with motivation. I and Bri have been taking multi-vitamins and I'm working on trying to get to sleep earlier.
I have to sub-teach tomorrow so I have pressure to get to bed early.
Mid Month Ritual January
I pulled myself together, unpacked my final boxes of books to refill the library. We've finally got it down to five bookshelves. Feels good to be lighter.
I used the dragon invocations again, specific invocations to Lugh and Brigid, and the death ritual from Advanced Candle Magick by Buckland. I find his rituals to be pretty involved but this one only used 9 candles and was pretty straight forward. I got to use the candles I had made. That felt good.
I have tons of candles. I've been really industrious lately. I think I might be getting some energy back. I made candles two days ago with new molds I got from ACMoore. And two weeks ago I made tons: 6 pillars and 48 tapers. I also made candles on Saturday afternoon with Jess. She needs them for spells too.
I wrote in my BOS during the rit. I don't recall any dreams last night but that's because of the alarm clock. I can't seem to ever remember what I was dreaming when that thing wakes me up. In the rit I focused primarily on seeing my mom happy and free. This rit requires two more Sundays in a row so the next two will focus on family for one and friends for the other.
There's another ritual in the book that involves resolution or letting go of the past, things that hurt or anger you. I think that will be good for the next mid-month ritual. I'll need to use that for the job I wrote about and probably a few more times for specific things I need to let go of.
I know I need to call a therapist. Today is a holiday so I'll have to wait until tomorrow. I have a lot of anxiety about letting someone new into my mess. Fear of judgement probably. I remember that quote I pulled out of the sexual anorexia book about me being too close to the issues to not realize that the events were abuse and not healthy and normal. An outside person can see things objectively. I still have a tendency to water stuff down and or downplay it when contrasted with the horrible stories I hear in other books and media.
I caught myself repeatedly turning intellectual when strong feelings bubbled up. That's my armor. I helps me disconnect and stay numb and safe. I'll have to confront that as I can from here on out.
I used the dragon invocations again, specific invocations to Lugh and Brigid, and the death ritual from Advanced Candle Magick by Buckland. I find his rituals to be pretty involved but this one only used 9 candles and was pretty straight forward. I got to use the candles I had made. That felt good.
I have tons of candles. I've been really industrious lately. I think I might be getting some energy back. I made candles two days ago with new molds I got from ACMoore. And two weeks ago I made tons: 6 pillars and 48 tapers. I also made candles on Saturday afternoon with Jess. She needs them for spells too.
I wrote in my BOS during the rit. I don't recall any dreams last night but that's because of the alarm clock. I can't seem to ever remember what I was dreaming when that thing wakes me up. In the rit I focused primarily on seeing my mom happy and free. This rit requires two more Sundays in a row so the next two will focus on family for one and friends for the other.
There's another ritual in the book that involves resolution or letting go of the past, things that hurt or anger you. I think that will be good for the next mid-month ritual. I'll need to use that for the job I wrote about and probably a few more times for specific things I need to let go of.
I know I need to call a therapist. Today is a holiday so I'll have to wait until tomorrow. I have a lot of anxiety about letting someone new into my mess. Fear of judgement probably. I remember that quote I pulled out of the sexual anorexia book about me being too close to the issues to not realize that the events were abuse and not healthy and normal. An outside person can see things objectively. I still have a tendency to water stuff down and or downplay it when contrasted with the horrible stories I hear in other books and media.
I caught myself repeatedly turning intellectual when strong feelings bubbled up. That's my armor. I helps me disconnect and stay numb and safe. I'll have to confront that as I can from here on out.
Sunday, January 19, 2014
Sexual Anorexia or Sexual Dysfunction
I'm reading a book on Sexual Anorexia, that's actually it's name, by Patrick Carnes, PhD.
I don't believe I have that because I don't have obsessive behavior. I don't spend all of my time dwelling on sex, obsessing over other people's sex lives, hold puritanical views or much of the other behaviors associated with obsession surrounding sex issues.
My issue is more a lack of libido. It's more apathy then aversion. But this book is touching on some issues that I think I will address. I know I will address them. Since I'm collating and stapling the pages of my past I might as well throw this shit in with the details.
One of the things that came up was a case study where the wife responds to the out of control behavior of her alcoholic husband by being perfect herself. Apparently her childhood also involved a father who was out of control sexually. She had an "extreme sense of responsibility and perfectionism". She was the kid who grew up responsible and did all the right things for approval while her siblings became alcoholics and out of control sexually like her father. Then she married a man with the same problems as her father.
The song "Perfect" comes to mind from Alanis Morissette. (Spell check suggested "terrorist" to correct the last name. WTF!)
I did not follow the same pattern. I married a man who was totally different. I think this had a lot to do with the work I did on myself while I was in college. I used my faith to help myself re-program my ideas of masculinity. I specifically used the god Lugh and worked with his energy to help re-parent myself and develop an idea of what a healthy relationship with a man could be. The god became both father figure and lover-figure. It wasn't a complete process because I still hold negative attitude toward men in general but I was able to heal enough that I could imagine a real relationship. It would be a few years later that I would be able to develop a game plan for achieving what I wanted once I had an image of what that was.
But as far as similarity, based on previous posts I've made, it should be pretty obvious. I was the sane and reliable one in a house of people that were out of control. I had a few breakdowns where my emotions raged out of control, much like a jar exploding in the canner. But over all I had my shit together. The disabling factor came with no knowing how to take responsibility for some aspects of living. I had to learn the hard way how to balance a check book, how to cook on a gas stove versus an electric stove, to remember to add soap to the dishwasher, or create a system for paying bills on time and not forgetting or losing them.
These were not things that I had been taught how to do with my parents. They were doing these things but not where I could see and not in a way I could learn.
All kids have to grow up and learn these things but my parents had no patience with mistakes while learning these things. Nor did they ever sit me down and explain a system for handling these tasks. Do it right the first time without the education or get screamed at for an hour or so when you inevitably screw up from lack of education. My first real boyfriend that I lived with mocked me as well when I made these mistakes. Ironic that he was even more helpless than I.
I react to stress by becoming intellectual and shutting off feelings. My primary philosophy really is "Work now, cry later." I tend to get stuck in the "Work Now" phase of it though. It becomes a habit of being turned off emotionally and takes great effort to get it turned back on again.
"If we are chronically angry, the anger will become sexualized."
This, I think, might have a lot to do with some of my hormonal balance issues. I know that a lot of my sex drive is due to hormones being out of balance. Estrogen can suppress other hormones or simply overwhelm those other levels when it is in excess. Fat cells produce estrogen and after giving birth a woman often experiences high levels of estrogen. I also stress eat so this contributes to my weight. I've gained atleast 10 pounds since this ordeal with mom in the hospital and dying and the will started. I ate a ton of carb and sugar rich foods while driving between here and there plus eating fast food while there.
The anger about the jobs and the anger about my family informs comfort food eating tendencies. This combined with stress hormones, adrenaline, and angry thoughts keep me from relaxing so I can think about other more pleasant things.
Sleep deprivation due to anxiety has been a contributing factor as well. Sleep dep can depress sexual urges. I can't sleep often because of thoughts I can't seem to turn off that in the past have given me chest pains and hypertension headaches from the rage circling in my head. I had that problem often after I left Elmira. Other times I don't go to sleep as early as I should because of anxiety. I have trouble falling asleep without hubbie in the house. It might be anxiety about being alone and feeling unprotected.
"First, Miriam observed that we are so used to our own history, we do not see it as remarkable or out of the ordinary, whereas others might see it as horrendous. Further we tend to minimize that which we feel shameful about. . . Finally, Miriam noted, that using courtship as a path out of pain and suffering is often delusional and deceptive."
I remember when I was in grade school, around 6th grade. I had told my friend Erika about what was happening in my house. How my brother talked to me and hit and treated me. How my dad treated me and ignored me. She had even witnessed it a few times during sleep-overs. I used to like having people over, it tended to encourage my bro to leave me alone or at least watch his wording and tone. Obviously something shameful was going on to encourage a suppression of the usual behaviors. If his behavior toward me wasn't shameful, if he had felt no shame, then he would have treated me the same way no matter where and who was present.
I had asked my friend if what was going on was abuse. She gave me this look that seemed angry and surprised. "Of course it is." That was the first time I remember being conscious of coming from a household that was wrong or harmful in some way. For all that time before I thought all fathers treated their daughters like that and all brothers were aggressive toward their sisters like that. I thought it was normal.
I guess I didn't see enough of my friends with their parents to have it really register how not normal or acceptable it was.
I remember screaming at Karrie once. She had been teasing her dad about holding a grudge or not loving him anymore if he didn't give her what she wanted. In my memory it was teasing about not loving anymore. I don't know if I wrote it in a journal so I'll have to see if I can check it when I get to my high school years. I yelled at her to not ever treat her dad like that. So many of us would kill to have such a great father like him. I remember the shock on her face. I don't know what she was thinking with the outburst. I hope it was agreement and a realization of how lucky she wise, comparing how dad treated me and how loving her dad was.
"He did not have to touch you for abuse to have its impact."
I have two memories connected to this from a very early age. One was really young. I would guess around 8 years old. I was changing in my room and I still wore those white under T-shirts that little girls wore around my time, I think. I don't know if it was normal or just what mom insisted on. I was changing into clothes in my room and my bro and his friend Shane were in the house. The burst into my room laughing and yelling. I got behind the door to try to shove it shut but I wasn't strong enough against both of them, five years older than me. They were pointing and laughing and squeezing me so hard against the wall that I couldn't breathe and the doorknob was digging into me.
I cried a lot. A few years after that I figured out how to lock the door and it gave me some relief when dad didn't get pissed and take it off its hinges. I also started changing my clothes in the closet or under the blankets, even after I learned how to lock the door. I stopped bathing since it required my going into the back of the house that was my bro's "domain". Beyond the laundry room it was a lot like his den or a separate house that neither mom nor dad would follow him into. I had a lot of skin problems, greasy hair with bleeding scalp and body odor to deal with.
Good thing around 6th grade he started staying away from home at all hours. I would have been about 11 and he would have been about 16. That's when the drugs started and he was never home. I don't know why my parents let him disappear for days.
The other memory that pops up is something that I don't remember but my cousin Matt would bring up all the time because he thought it was funny as hell. I used to get so pissed because it was embarrassing as fuck. Apparently there was this incident, I think at the farm. Matt never really said where. My bro and some boys were talking about "pussy". I apparently dropped my pants and pointed out mine. I couldn't have been more than 6.
It makes me wonder was I just being a kid who didn't know any better or had there been some sexual abuse? Matt would have been embarrassed enough to make a joke out of it to relieve his tension over such a memory. Especially if something had happened right after that. It also makes me wonder how the hell I knew what a "pussy" was. I was a very sheltered kid as far as sexual knowledge was concerned. I didn't know what french kissing was until I was 11.
Religious or familial puritanical beliefs around sexuality:
I was raised Jesuit Roman Catholic. One of the things that attracted me to paganism was its healthy attitude toward sex and sexuality. I remember as a kid touching myself. I don't really know when exploration became masturbation but I know I must have been able to give myself an orgasm clitorally sometime in grade school. I think this is a normal developmental age for such stuff. It progressed gradually and I never even really knew what it was that I was doing. I just liked the feel of it.
I also remember feeling a tremendous amount of guilt connected to that touching later on, after I had been doing it a while. Somehow I must have come to the realization that what I was doing was sex. It would lead to burning in hell. I would stop for a while until the fear subsided and then start up again weeks or months later.
Thoughts of kissing boys also lead to some anxiety and moments of terror at the thought of hell.
I know that I was attracted to girls at a young age. I don't think I really knew what that meant nor did I have the opportunity to see how far it would go. There was one incident where I wanted to kiss a boy and he didn't want to so he put two of his friends in my way to stop me from chasing him. They insisted I kiss them before I could kiss him. In hind sight I remember the feeling, I would kiss Amy but not Mike. I liked Amy. She was pretty. I didn't like Mike. He wasn't that cute and his personality wasn't friendly. I didn't kiss either of them and walked away.
Toxic Sexual Environment of Patriarchy. (this is not to assert that matriarchy would be any better. Only that a society where one gender has dominion over another cannot be healthy and will lead to dysfunction on multiple levels.
I remember in college when I had my first serious sexual relationship and wanted to go "all the way". We tried penetration and I had a panic attack. I remember thinking I was acting like a rape victim but as far as I could remember, I hadn't been raped. Was I dealing with a situation where I had internalized sexual abuse from seeing it in the media or hearing stories from others? Empathic Rape Victim? Is that even possible?
I continued to have panic attacks with that boy and we eventually broke up. I went on to have serious interest in a few other boys. Each time I suffered a panic attack during our first sexual experience together. Even my hubby had to comfort me after a panic attack the first time we tried to have sex. I would eventually overcome it with a couple of the guys. Although my first sexual experience involved a panic attack that he ignored and penetrated anyway. I guess, in a way, my first time was rape. I don't remember saying no but I do remember pushing him away pretty hard. He was the only one who didn't stop. The others all stopped and comforted me or just at least gave me my space and respected the things I told them I didn't want them to do.
I dread that journal. That would be in the big green journal, the one that's really going to be tough.
I don't believe I have that because I don't have obsessive behavior. I don't spend all of my time dwelling on sex, obsessing over other people's sex lives, hold puritanical views or much of the other behaviors associated with obsession surrounding sex issues.
My issue is more a lack of libido. It's more apathy then aversion. But this book is touching on some issues that I think I will address. I know I will address them. Since I'm collating and stapling the pages of my past I might as well throw this shit in with the details.
One of the things that came up was a case study where the wife responds to the out of control behavior of her alcoholic husband by being perfect herself. Apparently her childhood also involved a father who was out of control sexually. She had an "extreme sense of responsibility and perfectionism". She was the kid who grew up responsible and did all the right things for approval while her siblings became alcoholics and out of control sexually like her father. Then she married a man with the same problems as her father.
The song "Perfect" comes to mind from Alanis Morissette. (Spell check suggested "terrorist" to correct the last name. WTF!)
I did not follow the same pattern. I married a man who was totally different. I think this had a lot to do with the work I did on myself while I was in college. I used my faith to help myself re-program my ideas of masculinity. I specifically used the god Lugh and worked with his energy to help re-parent myself and develop an idea of what a healthy relationship with a man could be. The god became both father figure and lover-figure. It wasn't a complete process because I still hold negative attitude toward men in general but I was able to heal enough that I could imagine a real relationship. It would be a few years later that I would be able to develop a game plan for achieving what I wanted once I had an image of what that was.
But as far as similarity, based on previous posts I've made, it should be pretty obvious. I was the sane and reliable one in a house of people that were out of control. I had a few breakdowns where my emotions raged out of control, much like a jar exploding in the canner. But over all I had my shit together. The disabling factor came with no knowing how to take responsibility for some aspects of living. I had to learn the hard way how to balance a check book, how to cook on a gas stove versus an electric stove, to remember to add soap to the dishwasher, or create a system for paying bills on time and not forgetting or losing them.
These were not things that I had been taught how to do with my parents. They were doing these things but not where I could see and not in a way I could learn.
All kids have to grow up and learn these things but my parents had no patience with mistakes while learning these things. Nor did they ever sit me down and explain a system for handling these tasks. Do it right the first time without the education or get screamed at for an hour or so when you inevitably screw up from lack of education. My first real boyfriend that I lived with mocked me as well when I made these mistakes. Ironic that he was even more helpless than I.
I react to stress by becoming intellectual and shutting off feelings. My primary philosophy really is "Work now, cry later." I tend to get stuck in the "Work Now" phase of it though. It becomes a habit of being turned off emotionally and takes great effort to get it turned back on again.
"If we are chronically angry, the anger will become sexualized."
This, I think, might have a lot to do with some of my hormonal balance issues. I know that a lot of my sex drive is due to hormones being out of balance. Estrogen can suppress other hormones or simply overwhelm those other levels when it is in excess. Fat cells produce estrogen and after giving birth a woman often experiences high levels of estrogen. I also stress eat so this contributes to my weight. I've gained atleast 10 pounds since this ordeal with mom in the hospital and dying and the will started. I ate a ton of carb and sugar rich foods while driving between here and there plus eating fast food while there.
The anger about the jobs and the anger about my family informs comfort food eating tendencies. This combined with stress hormones, adrenaline, and angry thoughts keep me from relaxing so I can think about other more pleasant things.
Sleep deprivation due to anxiety has been a contributing factor as well. Sleep dep can depress sexual urges. I can't sleep often because of thoughts I can't seem to turn off that in the past have given me chest pains and hypertension headaches from the rage circling in my head. I had that problem often after I left Elmira. Other times I don't go to sleep as early as I should because of anxiety. I have trouble falling asleep without hubbie in the house. It might be anxiety about being alone and feeling unprotected.
"First, Miriam observed that we are so used to our own history, we do not see it as remarkable or out of the ordinary, whereas others might see it as horrendous. Further we tend to minimize that which we feel shameful about. . . Finally, Miriam noted, that using courtship as a path out of pain and suffering is often delusional and deceptive."
I remember when I was in grade school, around 6th grade. I had told my friend Erika about what was happening in my house. How my brother talked to me and hit and treated me. How my dad treated me and ignored me. She had even witnessed it a few times during sleep-overs. I used to like having people over, it tended to encourage my bro to leave me alone or at least watch his wording and tone. Obviously something shameful was going on to encourage a suppression of the usual behaviors. If his behavior toward me wasn't shameful, if he had felt no shame, then he would have treated me the same way no matter where and who was present.
I had asked my friend if what was going on was abuse. She gave me this look that seemed angry and surprised. "Of course it is." That was the first time I remember being conscious of coming from a household that was wrong or harmful in some way. For all that time before I thought all fathers treated their daughters like that and all brothers were aggressive toward their sisters like that. I thought it was normal.
I guess I didn't see enough of my friends with their parents to have it really register how not normal or acceptable it was.
I remember screaming at Karrie once. She had been teasing her dad about holding a grudge or not loving him anymore if he didn't give her what she wanted. In my memory it was teasing about not loving anymore. I don't know if I wrote it in a journal so I'll have to see if I can check it when I get to my high school years. I yelled at her to not ever treat her dad like that. So many of us would kill to have such a great father like him. I remember the shock on her face. I don't know what she was thinking with the outburst. I hope it was agreement and a realization of how lucky she wise, comparing how dad treated me and how loving her dad was.
"He did not have to touch you for abuse to have its impact."
I have two memories connected to this from a very early age. One was really young. I would guess around 8 years old. I was changing in my room and I still wore those white under T-shirts that little girls wore around my time, I think. I don't know if it was normal or just what mom insisted on. I was changing into clothes in my room and my bro and his friend Shane were in the house. The burst into my room laughing and yelling. I got behind the door to try to shove it shut but I wasn't strong enough against both of them, five years older than me. They were pointing and laughing and squeezing me so hard against the wall that I couldn't breathe and the doorknob was digging into me.
I cried a lot. A few years after that I figured out how to lock the door and it gave me some relief when dad didn't get pissed and take it off its hinges. I also started changing my clothes in the closet or under the blankets, even after I learned how to lock the door. I stopped bathing since it required my going into the back of the house that was my bro's "domain". Beyond the laundry room it was a lot like his den or a separate house that neither mom nor dad would follow him into. I had a lot of skin problems, greasy hair with bleeding scalp and body odor to deal with.
Good thing around 6th grade he started staying away from home at all hours. I would have been about 11 and he would have been about 16. That's when the drugs started and he was never home. I don't know why my parents let him disappear for days.
The other memory that pops up is something that I don't remember but my cousin Matt would bring up all the time because he thought it was funny as hell. I used to get so pissed because it was embarrassing as fuck. Apparently there was this incident, I think at the farm. Matt never really said where. My bro and some boys were talking about "pussy". I apparently dropped my pants and pointed out mine. I couldn't have been more than 6.
It makes me wonder was I just being a kid who didn't know any better or had there been some sexual abuse? Matt would have been embarrassed enough to make a joke out of it to relieve his tension over such a memory. Especially if something had happened right after that. It also makes me wonder how the hell I knew what a "pussy" was. I was a very sheltered kid as far as sexual knowledge was concerned. I didn't know what french kissing was until I was 11.
Religious or familial puritanical beliefs around sexuality:
I was raised Jesuit Roman Catholic. One of the things that attracted me to paganism was its healthy attitude toward sex and sexuality. I remember as a kid touching myself. I don't really know when exploration became masturbation but I know I must have been able to give myself an orgasm clitorally sometime in grade school. I think this is a normal developmental age for such stuff. It progressed gradually and I never even really knew what it was that I was doing. I just liked the feel of it.
I also remember feeling a tremendous amount of guilt connected to that touching later on, after I had been doing it a while. Somehow I must have come to the realization that what I was doing was sex. It would lead to burning in hell. I would stop for a while until the fear subsided and then start up again weeks or months later.
Thoughts of kissing boys also lead to some anxiety and moments of terror at the thought of hell.
I know that I was attracted to girls at a young age. I don't think I really knew what that meant nor did I have the opportunity to see how far it would go. There was one incident where I wanted to kiss a boy and he didn't want to so he put two of his friends in my way to stop me from chasing him. They insisted I kiss them before I could kiss him. In hind sight I remember the feeling, I would kiss Amy but not Mike. I liked Amy. She was pretty. I didn't like Mike. He wasn't that cute and his personality wasn't friendly. I didn't kiss either of them and walked away.
Toxic Sexual Environment of Patriarchy. (this is not to assert that matriarchy would be any better. Only that a society where one gender has dominion over another cannot be healthy and will lead to dysfunction on multiple levels.
I remember in college when I had my first serious sexual relationship and wanted to go "all the way". We tried penetration and I had a panic attack. I remember thinking I was acting like a rape victim but as far as I could remember, I hadn't been raped. Was I dealing with a situation where I had internalized sexual abuse from seeing it in the media or hearing stories from others? Empathic Rape Victim? Is that even possible?
I continued to have panic attacks with that boy and we eventually broke up. I went on to have serious interest in a few other boys. Each time I suffered a panic attack during our first sexual experience together. Even my hubby had to comfort me after a panic attack the first time we tried to have sex. I would eventually overcome it with a couple of the guys. Although my first sexual experience involved a panic attack that he ignored and penetrated anyway. I guess, in a way, my first time was rape. I don't remember saying no but I do remember pushing him away pretty hard. He was the only one who didn't stop. The others all stopped and comforted me or just at least gave me my space and respected the things I told them I didn't want them to do.
I dread that journal. That would be in the big green journal, the one that's really going to be tough.
Saturday, January 18, 2014
Questions to help along the Way
Six inner negative critic voices:
* It's already been done or written about.
* Nothing will change. You'll still be angry and haunted.
* Your writing quality is not enough to hold the reader.
* Your story is not that bad compared to others. Nothing to really complain about.
* Having doubts about recollections and interpretation. Maybe I was wrong.
* Others will have entirely different ideas about what happened.
People who will discourage writing memoir or journal:
* Pretty much anyone who knew me or thought they new me. I withheld a lot of information and they would think I'm exaggerating or making things up. Mrs. R shook her head at me and said "I don't remember hearing anything like that." Just because she had been acquainted with me since I was a toddler doesn't mean she actually knew me as a person.
* My bro. He would deny and argue with anything I said. He would joke that it was only sibling rivalry. He might even claim I was just as abusive. He would use excuses about how he was mistreated by parents and that's why he lashed out. That I was the favorite one. He can kiss my ass.
* Old friends might disagree about things I would say about them. Stacey is the only one who comes to mind. From my perspective, she stopped returning calls and answering letters around the first year of her marriage. It may be my religion, she never approved and really believed I would burn in hell. I was told a few years back she's even more fundamental then in high school. It may be because I was single and she distanced herself from single girls. I don't really think that is the case since she still talks to Karrie and Karrie was single at the time and lived far away and didn't communicate much.
Still want to write?
Yeah, I still do. If only just for me and I never actually do anything with this blog like turning it into a memoir.
I think one of the things that makes the abuse in my history unique is its subtlety. Many stories out there detail the physical violence from parents and others. There was that but there was a softer and more subtle mind influence going on in my past.
It was a matter of where the money was spent. How many words were spoken to whom. How much eye contact occurred. Showing up for extra-curricular events for one child and not the other. Being attacked for getting Bs in classes while the other sibling was congratulated for passing at all.
Many wouldn't consider this abuse, but the message is clear when you do the math. One sibling was considered valuable and worth the time, effort, and money spent. The other should be grateful for the condescension of a few moments and a few pennies.
It wears at you over time. I was an insightful kid and I got the message. I was not welcome in that house, and not considered a good investment. I had to fight for a lot of the treatment I got that was even close to equal.
I was raised to think that working hard and doing well would be rewarded accordingly. When the time came for college a bait and switch was attempted. I lost Mt Holyoke. I got accepted but my parents cried poverty on that one. But I did manage to get another good school and manage to get a scholarship which seemed to convince them.
Everything was a fight.
Early writing life:
I started with short stories and poetry. I didn't write a longer story until about 4th or 5th grade. My stories were usually based on movies I had seen where I didn't agree with the direction and re-wrote it to my liking or added myself as a character. By the time I was in high school I was creating unique stories.
I wrote romance and paranormal. A lot of it was a way to express fantasies and ideas about real love. I hadn't a clue myself so I invented stories to help either fill the loneliness or explore what love was supposed to look like. Of course, I got it wrong having no real examples to follow.
In college I kept up the poetry and even wrote a ton more. I stopped that as soon as I left SBU. Poetry required a certain mood for me and I just couldn't find the right place and the right motivation to continue it. It wasn't a big loss for me. I was never really attached to it. I think I wrote it mostly because I thought that's what really literate people did, I was supposed to and I was competitive with others.
I stopped writing narrative periodically over the next years. I spent 3 years of Julia's story. I wrote mostly diaries and not much else during graduate school. Lots of school papers. I wrote short stories for Long Ridge and then wrote a long novel a few years ago. I wrapped that up mostly before Bri was born. Never did anything with it. I had a whole book or two full of starts of stories and characters description written. I lost interest in romance and stopped writing all together. I still have everything. I don't throw my writing out if I can help it. My mother kept a copy of one of the first stories I wrote in second grade. I found it in a drawer when she died. I kept it and have it now in a scrap book along with some other stuff she saved of mine.
Teachers that Inspired:
Mrs. Dodge in 8th grade. She gave a tremendous amount of encouragement. She was the only teacher in my experience who did regular journaling in her class. I still have the stuff I wrote in a binder from her class.
She told me I reminded her of herself a little. She encouraged me to continue writing with every piece. She also once told me that I only speak when I have something important to say.
I remember in her class once, we were discussing the over arching theme of The Pearl. Everyone was catagorizing the characters and the object by what they represent abstractly. One of the students said the pearl is greed, the diver and family was good, and the hunters were evil. I remember sweating and getting light headed. I hated speaking in class. I had horrible sickening anxiety but I know that I had an idea that was different then everyone else's. I said roughly the same thing but with a different layer of meaning.
The diver and family are good, the pearl is greed, the hunters are evil, but the baby is innocence. When good and evil fight; innocence is lost. Mrs. Dodge stood up in her chair in excitement. I was very proud of myself at that moment. I felt like I had said something really important and went above and beyond the understanding of my classmates.
Family stories that were interesting:
I remember stories about Aunt Ellen. She was the only girl among four boys. I remember her brothers talking about the time that they tied her to the tree with the dog chain. I think this story helped me see the generation patter of the way girls are treated in the family. She was left there for a while yelling. I don't know if anyone heard her or simply let the boys have their way. Later she confronted grandma about how she neglected her because she was a girl. Even mom said that grandma never really cared for girls. I found it flattering and interesting that she seemed to like me and had me around for a few summers. She shared little bits of herself with me. I say little bits because I know there was a lot to her given she had decades of living and history. I try to remember as much as I can.
There was another story about Uncle Darryll and Dad setting an old car on fire. I guess they were smoking in it out in the field and didn't put out the butts properly. Fun fact: They both died of cancer.
What do you want to heal or change with writing?
I really want to get a handle on how much I dwell on the past. I still get very angry over things that I really should let go. I'm still angry at dad for favoring my bro, for not being able to comfort or be compassionate toward me. I'm still mad at him for treating mom as he did. I blame that on why she had so little emotion to give me. It also might be why she really had it in for my bro when he was younger. There were times when she used to wail on him. I don't know if her father was like that, or grandma, or if she was mad at dad so she took it out on "his" son.
I'm mad at her for not protecting me. I'm mad at her for dying. She had a preventable illness. If she just stopped drinking she could have lived another ten years maybe. She robbed Bri of a grandma. That pisses me off. I can't share this experience with her. She distanced herself from me, perhaps out of shame or grief that she knew she was dying. She was trying to keep it a secret from me.
I don't think I can ever forgive my brother. He was a parasite and a predator. He abused me and then preyed upon mom as soon as dad was out of the way and couldn't protect her. He is the lowest of the low.
I want to process all of this and let it go so it doesn't affect my relationship with my daughter. I'm really trying to watch my temper. I try very hard not to overreact to little things because she doesn't understand language yet and doesn't understand how things are done or what not to do or what is dangerous. I don't want her relationship with me broken.
I don't want the anger toward the men in my past to affect my relationship with my hubbie. He really doesn't deserve that hatred. I know I've come a long way from the rage I used to feel toward men in general but I still have my moments when I make a comment that's really down on guys and I know he can feel it. I also don't want to pass on this attitude to Bri. I'd like her to come to her own ideas. I'll still shape her in the direction of feminist. But that comes with the second X chromosome.
(from chapter one--questions at the end of the chapter--The Power of Memoir by Dr. Myers)
* It's already been done or written about.
* Nothing will change. You'll still be angry and haunted.
* Your writing quality is not enough to hold the reader.
* Your story is not that bad compared to others. Nothing to really complain about.
* Having doubts about recollections and interpretation. Maybe I was wrong.
* Others will have entirely different ideas about what happened.
People who will discourage writing memoir or journal:
* Pretty much anyone who knew me or thought they new me. I withheld a lot of information and they would think I'm exaggerating or making things up. Mrs. R shook her head at me and said "I don't remember hearing anything like that." Just because she had been acquainted with me since I was a toddler doesn't mean she actually knew me as a person.
* My bro. He would deny and argue with anything I said. He would joke that it was only sibling rivalry. He might even claim I was just as abusive. He would use excuses about how he was mistreated by parents and that's why he lashed out. That I was the favorite one. He can kiss my ass.
* Old friends might disagree about things I would say about them. Stacey is the only one who comes to mind. From my perspective, she stopped returning calls and answering letters around the first year of her marriage. It may be my religion, she never approved and really believed I would burn in hell. I was told a few years back she's even more fundamental then in high school. It may be because I was single and she distanced herself from single girls. I don't really think that is the case since she still talks to Karrie and Karrie was single at the time and lived far away and didn't communicate much.
Still want to write?
Yeah, I still do. If only just for me and I never actually do anything with this blog like turning it into a memoir.
I think one of the things that makes the abuse in my history unique is its subtlety. Many stories out there detail the physical violence from parents and others. There was that but there was a softer and more subtle mind influence going on in my past.
It was a matter of where the money was spent. How many words were spoken to whom. How much eye contact occurred. Showing up for extra-curricular events for one child and not the other. Being attacked for getting Bs in classes while the other sibling was congratulated for passing at all.
Many wouldn't consider this abuse, but the message is clear when you do the math. One sibling was considered valuable and worth the time, effort, and money spent. The other should be grateful for the condescension of a few moments and a few pennies.
It wears at you over time. I was an insightful kid and I got the message. I was not welcome in that house, and not considered a good investment. I had to fight for a lot of the treatment I got that was even close to equal.
I was raised to think that working hard and doing well would be rewarded accordingly. When the time came for college a bait and switch was attempted. I lost Mt Holyoke. I got accepted but my parents cried poverty on that one. But I did manage to get another good school and manage to get a scholarship which seemed to convince them.
Everything was a fight.
Early writing life:
I started with short stories and poetry. I didn't write a longer story until about 4th or 5th grade. My stories were usually based on movies I had seen where I didn't agree with the direction and re-wrote it to my liking or added myself as a character. By the time I was in high school I was creating unique stories.
I wrote romance and paranormal. A lot of it was a way to express fantasies and ideas about real love. I hadn't a clue myself so I invented stories to help either fill the loneliness or explore what love was supposed to look like. Of course, I got it wrong having no real examples to follow.
In college I kept up the poetry and even wrote a ton more. I stopped that as soon as I left SBU. Poetry required a certain mood for me and I just couldn't find the right place and the right motivation to continue it. It wasn't a big loss for me. I was never really attached to it. I think I wrote it mostly because I thought that's what really literate people did, I was supposed to and I was competitive with others.
I stopped writing narrative periodically over the next years. I spent 3 years of Julia's story. I wrote mostly diaries and not much else during graduate school. Lots of school papers. I wrote short stories for Long Ridge and then wrote a long novel a few years ago. I wrapped that up mostly before Bri was born. Never did anything with it. I had a whole book or two full of starts of stories and characters description written. I lost interest in romance and stopped writing all together. I still have everything. I don't throw my writing out if I can help it. My mother kept a copy of one of the first stories I wrote in second grade. I found it in a drawer when she died. I kept it and have it now in a scrap book along with some other stuff she saved of mine.
Teachers that Inspired:
Mrs. Dodge in 8th grade. She gave a tremendous amount of encouragement. She was the only teacher in my experience who did regular journaling in her class. I still have the stuff I wrote in a binder from her class.
She told me I reminded her of herself a little. She encouraged me to continue writing with every piece. She also once told me that I only speak when I have something important to say.
I remember in her class once, we were discussing the over arching theme of The Pearl. Everyone was catagorizing the characters and the object by what they represent abstractly. One of the students said the pearl is greed, the diver and family was good, and the hunters were evil. I remember sweating and getting light headed. I hated speaking in class. I had horrible sickening anxiety but I know that I had an idea that was different then everyone else's. I said roughly the same thing but with a different layer of meaning.
The diver and family are good, the pearl is greed, the hunters are evil, but the baby is innocence. When good and evil fight; innocence is lost. Mrs. Dodge stood up in her chair in excitement. I was very proud of myself at that moment. I felt like I had said something really important and went above and beyond the understanding of my classmates.
Family stories that were interesting:
I remember stories about Aunt Ellen. She was the only girl among four boys. I remember her brothers talking about the time that they tied her to the tree with the dog chain. I think this story helped me see the generation patter of the way girls are treated in the family. She was left there for a while yelling. I don't know if anyone heard her or simply let the boys have their way. Later she confronted grandma about how she neglected her because she was a girl. Even mom said that grandma never really cared for girls. I found it flattering and interesting that she seemed to like me and had me around for a few summers. She shared little bits of herself with me. I say little bits because I know there was a lot to her given she had decades of living and history. I try to remember as much as I can.
There was another story about Uncle Darryll and Dad setting an old car on fire. I guess they were smoking in it out in the field and didn't put out the butts properly. Fun fact: They both died of cancer.
What do you want to heal or change with writing?
I really want to get a handle on how much I dwell on the past. I still get very angry over things that I really should let go. I'm still angry at dad for favoring my bro, for not being able to comfort or be compassionate toward me. I'm still mad at him for treating mom as he did. I blame that on why she had so little emotion to give me. It also might be why she really had it in for my bro when he was younger. There were times when she used to wail on him. I don't know if her father was like that, or grandma, or if she was mad at dad so she took it out on "his" son.
I'm mad at her for not protecting me. I'm mad at her for dying. She had a preventable illness. If she just stopped drinking she could have lived another ten years maybe. She robbed Bri of a grandma. That pisses me off. I can't share this experience with her. She distanced herself from me, perhaps out of shame or grief that she knew she was dying. She was trying to keep it a secret from me.
I don't think I can ever forgive my brother. He was a parasite and a predator. He abused me and then preyed upon mom as soon as dad was out of the way and couldn't protect her. He is the lowest of the low.
I want to process all of this and let it go so it doesn't affect my relationship with my daughter. I'm really trying to watch my temper. I try very hard not to overreact to little things because she doesn't understand language yet and doesn't understand how things are done or what not to do or what is dangerous. I don't want her relationship with me broken.
I don't want the anger toward the men in my past to affect my relationship with my hubbie. He really doesn't deserve that hatred. I know I've come a long way from the rage I used to feel toward men in general but I still have my moments when I make a comment that's really down on guys and I know he can feel it. I also don't want to pass on this attitude to Bri. I'd like her to come to her own ideas. I'll still shape her in the direction of feminist. But that comes with the second X chromosome.
(from chapter one--questions at the end of the chapter--The Power of Memoir by Dr. Myers)
Friday, January 17, 2014
Falling Behind Already
I am falling out of my scheduled rituals. I was supposed to do one on Wednesday on the full moon to encourage letting go of the past couple of years of stuff. On one hand I feel bad about losing ground, but on the other hand I'm not really losing too much.
I can still do the rit tomorrow night. I spent today getting stuff moved so I could start renovating Bri's bedroom. I want to have that done by her birthday. She's almost three and it's time for a big girl bed now.
I also don't feel too bad about missing the rit. It might be a sign of other slips to come but I've been getting side tracked with physical needs. Hubbie and I have been going over meal plan ideas, nutrition regimens, and ideas for working out together. The last time I had a partner in this type of stuff was back in 2002 and 2003.
He needs to lose a bit as well. We both have apple body types and those are the ones prone to heart attacks, liver disease, other organ problems and diabetes. Fat in the gut means fat around the organs.
I'll be meeting with Jess tomorrow. I have a few books on spells for jobs and money and good luck that she's been needing. Hubbie was going to make her a money spell candle a few years ago but then renovations and life got in the way.
This time she can pour her own candle and add what she wants. She can charge it as she makes it. It's always better to have as much a hand in the creation of spell items as possible.
*******
I worked on Thursday and had a bit of a rough day. It was the day after our discussion, after my last post that I put up before I left for school. Exhaustion and depression hit me. It's depressing that I've numbed up over the past few years. Some of that is birth trauma, ptsd, and finally depression and anxiety from this past year or so with mom's affairs.
Some of it is resentment at having someone point out things that need to be fixed. I know I haven't had a sex drive in a while but it didn't bother me that much. It really bothered him because our drives were completely opposite.
Feeling close to tears sucks but at least I'm feeling something. I'm hoping these different thoughts and feelings might indicate that I'm starting to thaw out. I'm letting some of the stress out and little holes of relief are bubbling up.
Will still be looking into that therapist.
********
Am dreading the large green journal. That book contains the worst relationship I have every had before. I haven't decided if I'm going to process the other two teaching jobs and the guy I dated before hubbie. I haven't decided if I'll just skip straight to that green book.
I'll let my dreams and feelings tell me what I should write about next. My narrative might start jumping around because I don't want to suppress something that begs to be written about because it falls outside of the linear plot I had planned for my calendar.
I can still do the rit tomorrow night. I spent today getting stuff moved so I could start renovating Bri's bedroom. I want to have that done by her birthday. She's almost three and it's time for a big girl bed now.
I also don't feel too bad about missing the rit. It might be a sign of other slips to come but I've been getting side tracked with physical needs. Hubbie and I have been going over meal plan ideas, nutrition regimens, and ideas for working out together. The last time I had a partner in this type of stuff was back in 2002 and 2003.
He needs to lose a bit as well. We both have apple body types and those are the ones prone to heart attacks, liver disease, other organ problems and diabetes. Fat in the gut means fat around the organs.
I'll be meeting with Jess tomorrow. I have a few books on spells for jobs and money and good luck that she's been needing. Hubbie was going to make her a money spell candle a few years ago but then renovations and life got in the way.
This time she can pour her own candle and add what she wants. She can charge it as she makes it. It's always better to have as much a hand in the creation of spell items as possible.
*******
I worked on Thursday and had a bit of a rough day. It was the day after our discussion, after my last post that I put up before I left for school. Exhaustion and depression hit me. It's depressing that I've numbed up over the past few years. Some of that is birth trauma, ptsd, and finally depression and anxiety from this past year or so with mom's affairs.
Some of it is resentment at having someone point out things that need to be fixed. I know I haven't had a sex drive in a while but it didn't bother me that much. It really bothered him because our drives were completely opposite.
Feeling close to tears sucks but at least I'm feeling something. I'm hoping these different thoughts and feelings might indicate that I'm starting to thaw out. I'm letting some of the stress out and little holes of relief are bubbling up.
Will still be looking into that therapist.
********
Am dreading the large green journal. That book contains the worst relationship I have every had before. I haven't decided if I'm going to process the other two teaching jobs and the guy I dated before hubbie. I haven't decided if I'll just skip straight to that green book.
I'll let my dreams and feelings tell me what I should write about next. My narrative might start jumping around because I don't want to suppress something that begs to be written about because it falls outside of the linear plot I had planned for my calendar.
Thursday, January 16, 2014
Depression and Libido
Okay, here's the part that sucks. Being this involved with the shit that has happened over the last 12 months has really messed with my head. It was the whole reason for writing all this out and ritualizing a healing practice. I knew I had depression. Given the situation it shouldn't be surprising.
I've always dealt with it myself. I've been depressed in the past but it's always been situational and environmental. It can be traced back to stuff. I think this is also environmental but I think it might be so much stuff to process that I shouldn't be doing it on my own much less than it being a question can I?
After the baby was born it was easily 9 months before sex stopped being painful. The episiotomy left scar tissue and it pinched. We had to abort sexual activity mid-act a few times. I was getting nothing out of it at best. This lack of interest may be part a habit of attitude and mind-set on one hand.
Depression for obvious reasons combined with anxiety for obvious reasons contributes chemically to the problem. I need to work through my shit and anyone who has been following this blog can see it's a slow process. I'm running into road blocks. I might need someone who knows how to ask the right questions so I'll be looking into therapy soon. Probably when I get back from work today when the baby goes down for the night.
Add to this a horrible inconsistent sleep schedule and that sucks as well. I've been doing some reading online and sleep deprivation is a huge contributor as well.
Hubbie is getting really upset. He actually cried on my shoulder last night. I was trying to get into the mood and cuddling with him. He asked me if I was in the mood and I was honest. I'm not but I could be with some help. He totally deflated after that.
I tried to explain to him it wasn't him. I gave all my romance novels away and have no interest in any romance or erotica writing or movies. I don't fantasize about hunky guys or even girls anymore. I don't masturbate like I used to. There's just nothing there. Don't take it like I don't desire you. I don't desire anyone or anything really.
I could also be early onset symptoms of menopause. I know sometimes the chemical changes can happen early.
Most likely this is due to depression and maybe some birth trauma mostly from the episiotomy. So as soon as I find a therapist who works well with me I'll be working that into this program. It's probably best given I haven't really been able to process anything in maybe a decade. I've been holding onto rage over jobs lost and moving from town to town and family issues since before I met hubbie.
Writing for healing combined with therapy to help with digging for questions and answers combined with possible supplements might be enough to get back to normal or better.
I've always dealt with it myself. I've been depressed in the past but it's always been situational and environmental. It can be traced back to stuff. I think this is also environmental but I think it might be so much stuff to process that I shouldn't be doing it on my own much less than it being a question can I?
After the baby was born it was easily 9 months before sex stopped being painful. The episiotomy left scar tissue and it pinched. We had to abort sexual activity mid-act a few times. I was getting nothing out of it at best. This lack of interest may be part a habit of attitude and mind-set on one hand.
Depression for obvious reasons combined with anxiety for obvious reasons contributes chemically to the problem. I need to work through my shit and anyone who has been following this blog can see it's a slow process. I'm running into road blocks. I might need someone who knows how to ask the right questions so I'll be looking into therapy soon. Probably when I get back from work today when the baby goes down for the night.
Add to this a horrible inconsistent sleep schedule and that sucks as well. I've been doing some reading online and sleep deprivation is a huge contributor as well.
Hubbie is getting really upset. He actually cried on my shoulder last night. I was trying to get into the mood and cuddling with him. He asked me if I was in the mood and I was honest. I'm not but I could be with some help. He totally deflated after that.
I tried to explain to him it wasn't him. I gave all my romance novels away and have no interest in any romance or erotica writing or movies. I don't fantasize about hunky guys or even girls anymore. I don't masturbate like I used to. There's just nothing there. Don't take it like I don't desire you. I don't desire anyone or anything really.
I could also be early onset symptoms of menopause. I know sometimes the chemical changes can happen early.
Most likely this is due to depression and maybe some birth trauma mostly from the episiotomy. So as soon as I find a therapist who works well with me I'll be working that into this program. It's probably best given I haven't really been able to process anything in maybe a decade. I've been holding onto rage over jobs lost and moving from town to town and family issues since before I met hubbie.
Writing for healing combined with therapy to help with digging for questions and answers combined with possible supplements might be enough to get back to normal or better.
Monday, January 13, 2014
Funerals and spirits
I've had strange experiences all my life. Most recently it had been around my mother's death. While she was in the hospital I went to visit her the second time she was there. She kept talking about going to visit family and having a large gathering in Syracuse. Syracuse was where she was in the hospital.
I remember feeling a buzzing right then, when she started naming the participants. I remember thinking, these are all family members who have died. I could feel pressure as if a lot of people were crowding in around me. I could almost see shapes of people. I remember thinking that the spirits were gathering already for her. It kinda shook me and I had quite the crying fit when I got to the car.
Later when I visited her she stopped me before I could leave. The snow storm was picking up and I wanted to get out for a good drive instead of getting stuck in the drifts. She called me over and said dad really appreciated all the hard work I was doing. My father had never expressed gratitude or approval toward me in my life. On one hand it was really hard to stop from crying because I had been doing a ton of work that weekend before I visited her. I had driven up to Massena, spent 20 hours between two days going through papers and cabinets to clean out bottles of booze, pills and organize her finances so I could tell what was going on. I washed everything in the house and boxed good clothes, hung up usable clothes and threw out damaged clothes. I was really tired.
My mother must have been having one of those psychic moments. She's always been sensitive and I almost wonder if that was part of the drinking problem. She felt too deeply, heard voices of spirits and angels and drank to keep it away. I wonder. I handled it by becoming active in the occult and finding explanations for it and protection to make the bad stuff go away. I didn't need to numb it. But Catholic school can only teach you so much about the other side. Fear of the unknown and guilt over having these powers is still much a part of many church's teachings.
I also wondered if maybe it was an actual message from my dad. When she said it my spine prickled. When a person passes over to the other side they see things differently. The flaws and limited understanding of the human brain is shed and they can finally see things in full color with full history and context in a way the human mind is not physically capable of grasping. Maybe my dad finally saw who I was and not just his perception of who he thought I was or his fear of who he thought I would become. He finally got it. Mom just delivered the message. In his own way he was her protector in life and I took on that role when mom went into the hospital and I became POA. I had been having little conversations with him all that weekend as I sorted through the house. I knew he would have dragged Ian out of the house by his skin if he had been alive and able to protect mom. The message she gave me helped me let go of a little of the rage I had had toward him from my childhood. I felt appreciated for the first time.
There have always been incidents when I was a kid where I thought I heard Mom calling me and she hadn't been. She had been thinking about me and wanted to talk to me but hadn't actually called me yet. I've known when she was on the other end of the phone and vice versa. There was one time one of the voices told her to call a boy up the street because I needed a ride back to college and we went to the same one. But she couldn't have known that he would be there because he was supposed to have spent that Xmas in Boston. He had changed his mind at the last minute and she couldn't have known that. But the voices were right. Mom had been sober at that time.
I've doubted my sensitivity to spirits and energy. Much of this doubt has come from the times that my instincts told me something was wrong and I'd check with mom or whoever I was worried about and they would say everything was fine. I'd doubt that the sick feeling in my stomach was accurate. Maybe I had been having a moment of free-floating anxiety. But now I know that most of the time mom was lying or keeping up appearances as she always did. I bet most people I knew did the same thing. I let that lead to doubting myself instead of doubting the person.
As for funerals, instinctively I think of them as useless things. To the survivors it gives ritual to mark the passing of a person, psychologically a chance to create closure, and physically to bury the dead. I've always had a hard time with them. I hate viewings and am so glad mom did not want one. When I went to Grandma Moore's viewing I was mostly just frustrated to be there, that nothing could be done and uncomfortable. The viewing had some nice parts but I was required to chat with people. I hate small talk. I've never been very comfortable around my family. When I was younger it was a constant feeling of being judged and found wanting. There's also the awkwardness of having nothing to say or contribute to the conversation. Grief is something I've always been alone with.
The actually church service was nice. They drove her from the funeral parlor up the hill passed the farm where she lived all her adult life before taking her to the church. That was very meaningful. There were some really nice speeches and talks given. I cried a bit. She was a really cool person. I'm glad to have been able to have spent some time with her in this life. I have some good memories.
But at neither my mom's or grandma's funeral have I ever felt like they were there. I haven't felt their closeness. At Sarah's and Erika's funeral I didn't feel their closeness either even having known them in life on a closer level than family. The leaders of these services don't invoke spirits to attend. That's got a lot to do with it. The Samhain rituals that I've done have been much more powerful and emotional than any of the funerals or viewings that I've been to.
If emotional catharsis is what people seek at funerals I haven't experienced it there. Maybe it's the introvert in me, but alone in circle or writing or just sitting and thinking is when these messages come in. I don't get these things in crowds of people. I've been shielding so long that any empath ability I have is heavily muted.
So besides all this emotional crap I'm working with opening up to energy. Maybe the key to is to feel safe in my environment again. It has been a long time since I've been able to do work or even just feel energy without needing to slap up as many protections as I can in that space of time. I know logically protection is necessary, but too much creates a damn that nothing can get through including creativity and inspiration.
I have been too afraid for too long. I've used my bravado to battle that fear. Vulnerability has its strengths too.
I remember feeling a buzzing right then, when she started naming the participants. I remember thinking, these are all family members who have died. I could feel pressure as if a lot of people were crowding in around me. I could almost see shapes of people. I remember thinking that the spirits were gathering already for her. It kinda shook me and I had quite the crying fit when I got to the car.
Later when I visited her she stopped me before I could leave. The snow storm was picking up and I wanted to get out for a good drive instead of getting stuck in the drifts. She called me over and said dad really appreciated all the hard work I was doing. My father had never expressed gratitude or approval toward me in my life. On one hand it was really hard to stop from crying because I had been doing a ton of work that weekend before I visited her. I had driven up to Massena, spent 20 hours between two days going through papers and cabinets to clean out bottles of booze, pills and organize her finances so I could tell what was going on. I washed everything in the house and boxed good clothes, hung up usable clothes and threw out damaged clothes. I was really tired.
My mother must have been having one of those psychic moments. She's always been sensitive and I almost wonder if that was part of the drinking problem. She felt too deeply, heard voices of spirits and angels and drank to keep it away. I wonder. I handled it by becoming active in the occult and finding explanations for it and protection to make the bad stuff go away. I didn't need to numb it. But Catholic school can only teach you so much about the other side. Fear of the unknown and guilt over having these powers is still much a part of many church's teachings.
I also wondered if maybe it was an actual message from my dad. When she said it my spine prickled. When a person passes over to the other side they see things differently. The flaws and limited understanding of the human brain is shed and they can finally see things in full color with full history and context in a way the human mind is not physically capable of grasping. Maybe my dad finally saw who I was and not just his perception of who he thought I was or his fear of who he thought I would become. He finally got it. Mom just delivered the message. In his own way he was her protector in life and I took on that role when mom went into the hospital and I became POA. I had been having little conversations with him all that weekend as I sorted through the house. I knew he would have dragged Ian out of the house by his skin if he had been alive and able to protect mom. The message she gave me helped me let go of a little of the rage I had had toward him from my childhood. I felt appreciated for the first time.
There have always been incidents when I was a kid where I thought I heard Mom calling me and she hadn't been. She had been thinking about me and wanted to talk to me but hadn't actually called me yet. I've known when she was on the other end of the phone and vice versa. There was one time one of the voices told her to call a boy up the street because I needed a ride back to college and we went to the same one. But she couldn't have known that he would be there because he was supposed to have spent that Xmas in Boston. He had changed his mind at the last minute and she couldn't have known that. But the voices were right. Mom had been sober at that time.
I've doubted my sensitivity to spirits and energy. Much of this doubt has come from the times that my instincts told me something was wrong and I'd check with mom or whoever I was worried about and they would say everything was fine. I'd doubt that the sick feeling in my stomach was accurate. Maybe I had been having a moment of free-floating anxiety. But now I know that most of the time mom was lying or keeping up appearances as she always did. I bet most people I knew did the same thing. I let that lead to doubting myself instead of doubting the person.
As for funerals, instinctively I think of them as useless things. To the survivors it gives ritual to mark the passing of a person, psychologically a chance to create closure, and physically to bury the dead. I've always had a hard time with them. I hate viewings and am so glad mom did not want one. When I went to Grandma Moore's viewing I was mostly just frustrated to be there, that nothing could be done and uncomfortable. The viewing had some nice parts but I was required to chat with people. I hate small talk. I've never been very comfortable around my family. When I was younger it was a constant feeling of being judged and found wanting. There's also the awkwardness of having nothing to say or contribute to the conversation. Grief is something I've always been alone with.
The actually church service was nice. They drove her from the funeral parlor up the hill passed the farm where she lived all her adult life before taking her to the church. That was very meaningful. There were some really nice speeches and talks given. I cried a bit. She was a really cool person. I'm glad to have been able to have spent some time with her in this life. I have some good memories.
But at neither my mom's or grandma's funeral have I ever felt like they were there. I haven't felt their closeness. At Sarah's and Erika's funeral I didn't feel their closeness either even having known them in life on a closer level than family. The leaders of these services don't invoke spirits to attend. That's got a lot to do with it. The Samhain rituals that I've done have been much more powerful and emotional than any of the funerals or viewings that I've been to.
If emotional catharsis is what people seek at funerals I haven't experienced it there. Maybe it's the introvert in me, but alone in circle or writing or just sitting and thinking is when these messages come in. I don't get these things in crowds of people. I've been shielding so long that any empath ability I have is heavily muted.
So besides all this emotional crap I'm working with opening up to energy. Maybe the key to is to feel safe in my environment again. It has been a long time since I've been able to do work or even just feel energy without needing to slap up as many protections as I can in that space of time. I know logically protection is necessary, but too much creates a damn that nothing can get through including creativity and inspiration.
I have been too afraid for too long. I've used my bravado to battle that fear. Vulnerability has its strengths too.
Saturday, January 11, 2014
Year 2010
The end of that year in Elmira was painful. The principal took the class away and gave it to the reading teacher. I was put on hall duty. I ran into one of the vicious girls wandering the halls and she screamed at me the whole way escorting her back to class and then blew up her classroom.
The reading teacher came to me after school and chastised ME for blowing up her classroom and for how I talked to the student. I should apologize to her. At that point I just took a deep breath and blew it out. I told her I was done. She was the first person I actually told about leaving the school. I was sick of people talking about me behind my back, and students attacking me to my face. I told her I was sick of the abuse. It seemed to deflate her balloon a bit. On one hand I was totally justified in deflating her. On the other hand it took a lot for her to confront me. I'm a bit of a bulldozer sometimes and she was a very timid person who avoided conflict with out fail until she snapped. She mentioned once a while ago that she had a history of abuse, so we had that in common. I just chose to become a lion instead of a mouse.
I remember a meeting I had with the English departments between all of the schools. I had developed a reputation for speaking out to defend alternative and being quite assertive in that. I would argue with other teachers with tenure and 20 years experience. I had a reputation of confidence and fierceness. It got to the point where people would discuss things then make eye contact with me waiting for my okay to move along.
Kinda cool for a new teacher. At the last meeting I had already handed in my resignation and the principal had taken my class away. I was really exhausted and beat down. At the meeting I contributed nothing and even when asked what I thought I kinda shrugged. One of the teachers had been so concerned by this 180 attitude shift that she called the principal. He called me into the office, told me about the concerned call and then asked if I was okay. I looked him straight in the eye and so no I wasn't. He then changed the subject on me and said, well, you have a job to finish. Make sure you take care of your responsibilities. I was actually insulted that he assumed I wasn't going to finish the year like a professional.
I had also gone into therapy to deal with the violence I was feeling in response to the regular attacks. I went to 6 weeks of meetings. It was paid for by the district through the BOCES. The therapist was really laid back and congratulated me on recognizing my own warning signs. I told her I had always been upset with teachers whose attitude was "just surviving the day" and said if I got to that point it was time to quit. So there I was quitting. She helped me figure out some strategies to deal with the rage that was boiling.
I also talked about the baby my hubbie and I were trying to conceive. We had only been trying for 2 months so were early in the game. She said she counseled a lot of teachers and other professionals who saw these kids having babies but they couldn't. I told her it almost felt like being punished for being professional and responsible; waiting until you have finished your education and established your career and a stable marriage before bringing a child up. Like values and rewards are turned upside down. She really seemed to understand that. Apparently a lot of women in my position have expressed the same resentments.
Thankfully I didn't have trouble conceiving. I think Bri was conceived sometime during exams in June. I must have been holding onto that sperm since the weekend and the egg released at just the right time. I was pregnant before I left but didn't know it yet. I'm grateful for leaving then as well. I don't feel it would have been a healthy thing to be pregnant and have Bri marinating in those stress and rage chemicals while in the womb. It might have negatively affected her personality. She's an amazingly happy girl.
Another reason I was really keen to get out of there is things were getting bad with certain people. My dad's cancer had returned so I was stressed about that. The first treatments had left him an invalid and mentally incompetent. I knew I might be called to help. I thought my bro had it in hand. I had no idea he would use it to fleece mom.
My cat had been diagnosed with bone cancer in her jaw. She only had a few months left to live. I really wanted to spend time with her. When I finally got back to the house I underwent a huge cleaning project of the florida room. We had been using it as a storage and work area and I really wanted an open room for pillows and chairs so she could lay out in the sun. It looked nice when I was done. She really seemed to enjoy it.
Shortly after I got back, a matter of days, Grandma Young fell down the stairs and ended up at the hospital. I had visited her on Monday, I think. She was complaining of her sciatica and I offered to go to the store for her. I got her some groceries and stuff for us to nibble on. I told her about the pregnancy and not to tell anyone yet because it was so early. I had taken the test on Saturday. Of course she mentioned it to my father in law. He seemed pleased as well. I think it was a Wednesday morning before dawn that she fell and they took her to the hospital. It was actually two, she had to be transferred to the emergency hospital in the city due to the severity.
Hubbie and I visited her a few times. She was awake and aware. But after about 3 weeks she started to fail. Her lungs stared filling with fluid and she lost consciousness and never really came back awake. She died after about 6 weeks in the hospital. That really messed me up. I know she wasn't my biological grandma and I had only known each other for a few years but I really felt bonded to her. I didn't come from a close family and my hubbie's family was so affectionate I latched on. We still talk about her when we see a show she would have loved or something that reminds us. It sucks she didn't get to see Bri. She was really excited about her.
I also tried to get unemployment. With not Jobs on the horizon I needed that income and couldn't even find min wage work. The economy was shot and jobs were just not there. The wanted sections in the paper were horrifyingly slim. I couldn't get it because of the fact that I resigned and wasn't fired or layed off. I started to go through the process of protesting it because I felt due to the hostility of the environment I was pushed out. I had no choice but to leave. I filled out the paperwork, took the phone call interview and waited for notification of the court date. It was to be a conference call with a judge on the phone.
When I got the court notification I had a break down. I had been having problems with emotional out-of-control reactions to things that involved school. Hearing the word school, driving passed one, anything with the letterhead of Elmira would throw me into a panic attack and crying fit. So when I got those papers I had a total meltdown in front of my husband. He told me not to pursue it. It wasn't worth the emotional trauma and drain. He couldn't stand seeing me like that so he told me to drop it. I actually just let the time appointed for the court phone call to pass and didn't call in. I received a default judgement denying my claim. As expected.
My cat died a few weeks after Grandma Young. I had to have her put to sleep. The tumor was growing back against her throat and she couldn't eat and eventually had trouble breathing. It was better than letting her suffocate.
I had an altar for her and would light candles daily. The grief was sharper and purer. People are complicated to mourn for. There are so many conditions, what ifs, and baggage. But an animal is just a companion without the complicated crap so the grief is so much closer to the surface and acute. I had dreams about her as well after she died even after I gave birth.
So two major losses in July and August of 2010.
Then in January 2011 my friend from third grade, Erika, died from an overdose of pain killer meds. She had some addiction problems. It was shortly after I had spoken to her on the phone. The first time we had talked with voices and not through letters in a decade. I still have all the letters she sent me. I love collections of letters. I hate that people have started to use texting and the art of writing letters and having these keepsakes is being lost though this tech familiarity.
I gave birth in February 2011. My uncle died in March of 2011. Grandma had to leave the farm and went to live with another Uncle. She was in her nineties and couldn't take care of herself. Dad died in July of 2011.
It just did not stop that year.
Spring of 2011 in June I started subbing at the local high school. I was still raw and I know that me reactions to some things in the classroom were out of wack. I would let things go that I shouldn't have and I would over react to simple things that were manageable.
I tried to continue subbing in the fall and pump for Bri. That was a pain to go all the way to the nurse's office to pump and try to get in and out in one class period. I dried up pretty quickly. Luckily I had surplus we could bottle feed her with in the freezer from that spring and summer and she was getting onto 10 months old at that time so solid foods were in her diet and cow's milk wasn't too far away.
I had a bit of a breakdown in December when I saw a student have a freak-out in the hallway. I was on my way to pumping anyway so I cried while I pumped. I hated people and I hated all their problems and seriously considered not taking anymore calls. Felt better after the break. I think by the fall of 2012 I'd finally managed to be in a classroom and have a more level emotional response to things. It took me two years to be able to be fully functional in a classroom even close to what I had been like before Elmira.
The reason I get so pissed and rant about that school is because on some level I feel like it ended my career. I had two years of working through the anxiety and emotional trauma because of the abuse that I had been on the receiving end of with no support from any administrator. It had used up two years when I could have been looking for a job that would have been more suited to me instead of working my ass off for that school.
I got burned. The references felt like they were useless. I know there must have been some code language in the reference the principal gave me, even though I read them, that only administrators know as red flags. I don't know those catch phrases in politics that would raise a red flag, or even more important, what comments were missing completely that would raise a red flag. Why did this principal not say this about the candidate? Does that imply she's incompetent in that area?
Those references have expired and all I have is this subbing job and a whole ton of discriminating habits that keep me from even applying to certain kinds of schools. I will not work for a charter school ever, don't care what it's reputation. I will not work in the city, don't care what the pay is like. I am very critical of public schools to the point of looking into home schooling or paying almost 100K over the next 12 years for Bri to go to private. We're already paying 800 a month for her pre-preschool experience. She loves it and we're not sweating for money so we're indulging her. She's an only child and needs the socializing.
So I have this resentment and anger toward this district in particular because I feel like they ended my career. They ruined the 12 years I've worked and toiled and moved and put off marriage and family and investments in community for that career. So I'm really pissed.
On the ironic side, didn't that school close about a year and a half later. I looked it up the other night just because I had been meaning to and it crossed my mind when I couldn't sleep after writing about Elmira last time. I found a reference to an article in a community discussion board that not only was the school closed over Xmas break but the faculty had not been informed it would be closing before the article was published. They found out from the article and they would not be able to trans to other jobs in the district. They laid off a bunch of teachers and are now condensing the two remaining high schools into one 10-12 grade building and another 7-9 grade building with the other middle schools as they are. They might close one of the grade schools as well. That district is so burned.
On one hand the vindication makes me happy. I knew this shit was coming. The superintendent made no secret he wanted that school shut down. Board members ran on an anti-alternative platform. They not only wanted that school closed but those kids and their families driven out of town. They only said this in speeches and news articles. These delinquents don't belong here. Why should they drag the rest of us down. It was a witch hunt against poverty and minorities. I guess that answered my question: why the other two high schools were sending their minority students to alternative so we had an over 50% minority rate while the other two had under 20% each.
But now I see things going on in education that really freak me out like the common core. Hubbie asked me today would I have finished my career and left education anyway even in a different district. I'll never know.
It's amazing the difference supporting administrators and mentors can make. Mentors who actually mentor not just have the position of mentorship to make the district look good and the state happy on paper.
This common core and the politics might have driven me out. Supportive environments for new teachers are few and far between. I might have left in another district, even one like Jamestown that I loved minus the discrimination I got for coming from Buffalo. I don't know how I would have adapted to the choke hold of this new program. The local teachers here are doing well. They seem to be keeping things as similar as possible to the old ways of their teaching style while keeping kids calm. They don't act stressed or scared and that gives kids confidence in their confidence. They feel like they can trust the teacher and she knows where this is all going and how to get there.
The teachers here are really amazing. The one's north of this town are great too. I'm hoping when we move we stay close. I'm really impressed by how they are handling things. But there's no point in looking for a full time teaching job when every year more teachers are being laid off. You get a job just to be let go the following year through no failure of your own but due to budget cuts. It kills your resume and any principal looking at the record of district hopping.
I'm content with subbing. I have control of when I teach and money is not tight anymore.
I know I've said this before. I will be working on a letting go spell for this job in particular. I need to let go of the resentment and rage I've felt toward staff and students. The one saving grace was a friendship I built with the counselor there. We went out to dinner and vented to each other our frustrations. It really helped my survival that last year and I hope it helped hers as well.
I came across a card she had given me around Christmas 2009 thanking me for being a friend. It's too bad she's all the way in Syracuse. I'd love to hang out with her again.
The reading teacher came to me after school and chastised ME for blowing up her classroom and for how I talked to the student. I should apologize to her. At that point I just took a deep breath and blew it out. I told her I was done. She was the first person I actually told about leaving the school. I was sick of people talking about me behind my back, and students attacking me to my face. I told her I was sick of the abuse. It seemed to deflate her balloon a bit. On one hand I was totally justified in deflating her. On the other hand it took a lot for her to confront me. I'm a bit of a bulldozer sometimes and she was a very timid person who avoided conflict with out fail until she snapped. She mentioned once a while ago that she had a history of abuse, so we had that in common. I just chose to become a lion instead of a mouse.
I remember a meeting I had with the English departments between all of the schools. I had developed a reputation for speaking out to defend alternative and being quite assertive in that. I would argue with other teachers with tenure and 20 years experience. I had a reputation of confidence and fierceness. It got to the point where people would discuss things then make eye contact with me waiting for my okay to move along.
Kinda cool for a new teacher. At the last meeting I had already handed in my resignation and the principal had taken my class away. I was really exhausted and beat down. At the meeting I contributed nothing and even when asked what I thought I kinda shrugged. One of the teachers had been so concerned by this 180 attitude shift that she called the principal. He called me into the office, told me about the concerned call and then asked if I was okay. I looked him straight in the eye and so no I wasn't. He then changed the subject on me and said, well, you have a job to finish. Make sure you take care of your responsibilities. I was actually insulted that he assumed I wasn't going to finish the year like a professional.
I had also gone into therapy to deal with the violence I was feeling in response to the regular attacks. I went to 6 weeks of meetings. It was paid for by the district through the BOCES. The therapist was really laid back and congratulated me on recognizing my own warning signs. I told her I had always been upset with teachers whose attitude was "just surviving the day" and said if I got to that point it was time to quit. So there I was quitting. She helped me figure out some strategies to deal with the rage that was boiling.
I also talked about the baby my hubbie and I were trying to conceive. We had only been trying for 2 months so were early in the game. She said she counseled a lot of teachers and other professionals who saw these kids having babies but they couldn't. I told her it almost felt like being punished for being professional and responsible; waiting until you have finished your education and established your career and a stable marriage before bringing a child up. Like values and rewards are turned upside down. She really seemed to understand that. Apparently a lot of women in my position have expressed the same resentments.
Thankfully I didn't have trouble conceiving. I think Bri was conceived sometime during exams in June. I must have been holding onto that sperm since the weekend and the egg released at just the right time. I was pregnant before I left but didn't know it yet. I'm grateful for leaving then as well. I don't feel it would have been a healthy thing to be pregnant and have Bri marinating in those stress and rage chemicals while in the womb. It might have negatively affected her personality. She's an amazingly happy girl.
Another reason I was really keen to get out of there is things were getting bad with certain people. My dad's cancer had returned so I was stressed about that. The first treatments had left him an invalid and mentally incompetent. I knew I might be called to help. I thought my bro had it in hand. I had no idea he would use it to fleece mom.
My cat had been diagnosed with bone cancer in her jaw. She only had a few months left to live. I really wanted to spend time with her. When I finally got back to the house I underwent a huge cleaning project of the florida room. We had been using it as a storage and work area and I really wanted an open room for pillows and chairs so she could lay out in the sun. It looked nice when I was done. She really seemed to enjoy it.
Shortly after I got back, a matter of days, Grandma Young fell down the stairs and ended up at the hospital. I had visited her on Monday, I think. She was complaining of her sciatica and I offered to go to the store for her. I got her some groceries and stuff for us to nibble on. I told her about the pregnancy and not to tell anyone yet because it was so early. I had taken the test on Saturday. Of course she mentioned it to my father in law. He seemed pleased as well. I think it was a Wednesday morning before dawn that she fell and they took her to the hospital. It was actually two, she had to be transferred to the emergency hospital in the city due to the severity.
Hubbie and I visited her a few times. She was awake and aware. But after about 3 weeks she started to fail. Her lungs stared filling with fluid and she lost consciousness and never really came back awake. She died after about 6 weeks in the hospital. That really messed me up. I know she wasn't my biological grandma and I had only known each other for a few years but I really felt bonded to her. I didn't come from a close family and my hubbie's family was so affectionate I latched on. We still talk about her when we see a show she would have loved or something that reminds us. It sucks she didn't get to see Bri. She was really excited about her.
I also tried to get unemployment. With not Jobs on the horizon I needed that income and couldn't even find min wage work. The economy was shot and jobs were just not there. The wanted sections in the paper were horrifyingly slim. I couldn't get it because of the fact that I resigned and wasn't fired or layed off. I started to go through the process of protesting it because I felt due to the hostility of the environment I was pushed out. I had no choice but to leave. I filled out the paperwork, took the phone call interview and waited for notification of the court date. It was to be a conference call with a judge on the phone.
When I got the court notification I had a break down. I had been having problems with emotional out-of-control reactions to things that involved school. Hearing the word school, driving passed one, anything with the letterhead of Elmira would throw me into a panic attack and crying fit. So when I got those papers I had a total meltdown in front of my husband. He told me not to pursue it. It wasn't worth the emotional trauma and drain. He couldn't stand seeing me like that so he told me to drop it. I actually just let the time appointed for the court phone call to pass and didn't call in. I received a default judgement denying my claim. As expected.
My cat died a few weeks after Grandma Young. I had to have her put to sleep. The tumor was growing back against her throat and she couldn't eat and eventually had trouble breathing. It was better than letting her suffocate.
I had an altar for her and would light candles daily. The grief was sharper and purer. People are complicated to mourn for. There are so many conditions, what ifs, and baggage. But an animal is just a companion without the complicated crap so the grief is so much closer to the surface and acute. I had dreams about her as well after she died even after I gave birth.
So two major losses in July and August of 2010.
Then in January 2011 my friend from third grade, Erika, died from an overdose of pain killer meds. She had some addiction problems. It was shortly after I had spoken to her on the phone. The first time we had talked with voices and not through letters in a decade. I still have all the letters she sent me. I love collections of letters. I hate that people have started to use texting and the art of writing letters and having these keepsakes is being lost though this tech familiarity.
I gave birth in February 2011. My uncle died in March of 2011. Grandma had to leave the farm and went to live with another Uncle. She was in her nineties and couldn't take care of herself. Dad died in July of 2011.
It just did not stop that year.
Spring of 2011 in June I started subbing at the local high school. I was still raw and I know that me reactions to some things in the classroom were out of wack. I would let things go that I shouldn't have and I would over react to simple things that were manageable.
I tried to continue subbing in the fall and pump for Bri. That was a pain to go all the way to the nurse's office to pump and try to get in and out in one class period. I dried up pretty quickly. Luckily I had surplus we could bottle feed her with in the freezer from that spring and summer and she was getting onto 10 months old at that time so solid foods were in her diet and cow's milk wasn't too far away.
I had a bit of a breakdown in December when I saw a student have a freak-out in the hallway. I was on my way to pumping anyway so I cried while I pumped. I hated people and I hated all their problems and seriously considered not taking anymore calls. Felt better after the break. I think by the fall of 2012 I'd finally managed to be in a classroom and have a more level emotional response to things. It took me two years to be able to be fully functional in a classroom even close to what I had been like before Elmira.
The reason I get so pissed and rant about that school is because on some level I feel like it ended my career. I had two years of working through the anxiety and emotional trauma because of the abuse that I had been on the receiving end of with no support from any administrator. It had used up two years when I could have been looking for a job that would have been more suited to me instead of working my ass off for that school.
I got burned. The references felt like they were useless. I know there must have been some code language in the reference the principal gave me, even though I read them, that only administrators know as red flags. I don't know those catch phrases in politics that would raise a red flag, or even more important, what comments were missing completely that would raise a red flag. Why did this principal not say this about the candidate? Does that imply she's incompetent in that area?
Those references have expired and all I have is this subbing job and a whole ton of discriminating habits that keep me from even applying to certain kinds of schools. I will not work for a charter school ever, don't care what it's reputation. I will not work in the city, don't care what the pay is like. I am very critical of public schools to the point of looking into home schooling or paying almost 100K over the next 12 years for Bri to go to private. We're already paying 800 a month for her pre-preschool experience. She loves it and we're not sweating for money so we're indulging her. She's an only child and needs the socializing.
So I have this resentment and anger toward this district in particular because I feel like they ended my career. They ruined the 12 years I've worked and toiled and moved and put off marriage and family and investments in community for that career. So I'm really pissed.
On the ironic side, didn't that school close about a year and a half later. I looked it up the other night just because I had been meaning to and it crossed my mind when I couldn't sleep after writing about Elmira last time. I found a reference to an article in a community discussion board that not only was the school closed over Xmas break but the faculty had not been informed it would be closing before the article was published. They found out from the article and they would not be able to trans to other jobs in the district. They laid off a bunch of teachers and are now condensing the two remaining high schools into one 10-12 grade building and another 7-9 grade building with the other middle schools as they are. They might close one of the grade schools as well. That district is so burned.
On one hand the vindication makes me happy. I knew this shit was coming. The superintendent made no secret he wanted that school shut down. Board members ran on an anti-alternative platform. They not only wanted that school closed but those kids and their families driven out of town. They only said this in speeches and news articles. These delinquents don't belong here. Why should they drag the rest of us down. It was a witch hunt against poverty and minorities. I guess that answered my question: why the other two high schools were sending their minority students to alternative so we had an over 50% minority rate while the other two had under 20% each.
But now I see things going on in education that really freak me out like the common core. Hubbie asked me today would I have finished my career and left education anyway even in a different district. I'll never know.
It's amazing the difference supporting administrators and mentors can make. Mentors who actually mentor not just have the position of mentorship to make the district look good and the state happy on paper.
This common core and the politics might have driven me out. Supportive environments for new teachers are few and far between. I might have left in another district, even one like Jamestown that I loved minus the discrimination I got for coming from Buffalo. I don't know how I would have adapted to the choke hold of this new program. The local teachers here are doing well. They seem to be keeping things as similar as possible to the old ways of their teaching style while keeping kids calm. They don't act stressed or scared and that gives kids confidence in their confidence. They feel like they can trust the teacher and she knows where this is all going and how to get there.
The teachers here are really amazing. The one's north of this town are great too. I'm hoping when we move we stay close. I'm really impressed by how they are handling things. But there's no point in looking for a full time teaching job when every year more teachers are being laid off. You get a job just to be let go the following year through no failure of your own but due to budget cuts. It kills your resume and any principal looking at the record of district hopping.
I'm content with subbing. I have control of when I teach and money is not tight anymore.
I know I've said this before. I will be working on a letting go spell for this job in particular. I need to let go of the resentment and rage I've felt toward staff and students. The one saving grace was a friendship I built with the counselor there. We went out to dinner and vented to each other our frustrations. It really helped my survival that last year and I hope it helped hers as well.
I came across a card she had given me around Christmas 2009 thanking me for being a friend. It's too bad she's all the way in Syracuse. I'd love to hang out with her again.
Thursday, January 9, 2014
Year 2008-2010
I'm still ranting about shit that happened at my last full time teaching job. I remember talking to Kelly about it when she was here and how I mentioned that I'm pretty much finished with the field of education. I can't find any teaching jobs and my references just expired last year. I'd have to get new references and that would necessitate observations and possibly at least a short term sub position.
I don't think that's going to happen. The idea of returning to teaching full-time just depresses me. I think about it and all the time that goes into lessons, grading, meetings and even just class time and it just exhausts me thinking about it. Then the politics pitfalls of saying the wrong thing at a meeting, getting a reputation for speaking out and being a trouble maker, like I do, make it tenuous at best when it comes to security. I've never known job security so it's reasonable to assume it's never going to happen in my lifetime.
It was nice of Kelly to feel pissed for me. It's not fair. It's not right that someone with my education, dedication, history of going above and beyond, focus on the kids, is not something that is welcome in our current educational climate. Common Core brought this home to me and I'm really glad to not be a part of it. Common Core has teachers teaching the same content on the same days using the same worksheets as other grade level and subject teachers. Yes it standardizes everything, making sure the essentials are taught. But it also presents a cookie cutter approach to education with not time built in for re-teaching when necessary and differentiating for differences in interests or abilities of students. Many will be left behind in the mad dash to the middle. Including bright kids who will be bored to insanity.
I've written a whole pessimistic article about this, including how the stress levels of kids can lead to brain tissue damage and loss of learned skills, at best a physical inability to learn. It has been called Cognitive Child Abuse by at least one neuro-scientist that I've heard of.
So I substitute and try to impart wisdom however I can to those that care to listen. I'm able to fly under the radar and not get caught up in the politics, meetings and curricula hell that public schools seem to be suffocating under. I enjoyed it for a while. Now I'm getting to the point of exhaustion again. Maybe I just can't seem to stick to anything. I resent students who don't know how to treat others like people with dignity and respect. Too many of them seem to have no manners. This year is actually better than the previous ones. We got rid of quite a few dickheads through graduation and movings.
So anyways, the damage as far as I can tell really started my second year in Elmira. I had taken the job in 2008 and moved 3 hours away from my house and husband to live in an apartment there. The apartment was shit with a leaky roof over the kitchen that drove me into more than one screaming fit of frustration. It was really unlivable and I probably should have pushed the issue but I was let out of the lease early when the house sold. I took an apartment across the street which was much better but again not perfect. Ants in the walls, next to a vacant house that smelled horrible and when I moved in I found mice droppings in the cabinets. I had to flush everything out in order to feel safe enough to put food in there. It was at least dry and warm.
2008 was a tough year but the principal seemed to have our backs. The whole staff every Friday would go to this Irish pub place and chat over appetizers for a couple of hours. I was really happy with the job. Maybe I said too much how I liked the place. I tend to be loud when it comes to whether I am pleased or displeased. The second year I may have been really loud about how pissed I was and how I felt we were being thrown under the bus. Word gets around apparently.
Anyway, I had problems with students. I had classes that fell apart because the kids would get so worked up they would mutiny. It was usually only one class per semester so it wasn't too bad but there were some incidents that stood out. I had one kid try to throw another out the window of the second floor. I had a serious issue with a student who was known to be incredibly violent towards women. I did not feel safe with him in the class and wished he'd get busted and tossed. Interestingly it was the day after I wrote that wish down that it happened. I was developing a bit of manifestation and was sometimes able to prod things into happening to the point where people would sometimes say word for word what I was thinking. Hubbie thinks it may have been the other way around. I was actually picking up on what they were thinking or something that was going to happen, premonitions instead of manifesting desires.
Whatever, he got caught punching someone in the head on camera on the front steps so that was the end of him. The biggest problem that year was a class of about 5 kids. One refused to come and skipped all the time. One was kicked out repeatedly for harassing me and pulling that superiority because he's a guy thing. I sent two of the only good kids next door to be with the reading teacher with worksheets and assignment sheets I sent with them. I couldn't figure out how to teach with all the aggression in the room. I had to babysit the idiots and wanted these two kids safe from harm. They didn't feel safe either. The last two boys ganged up on me. It was daily sexual harassment and personal attacks on me. A condom put on the handle of my door, pictures drawn and nasty things said constantly. I kept a book and wrote quotes of everything the little shits did. The principal was very on the fence. On one hand I had plenty to go to the police about, but on the other hand he assured me he would handle it. He needed enough ammunition to go to the board about this behavior.
I was at that meeting and it was a joke. I wasn't really questioned at all except over one thing to clarify something the student had said that I had said. Other than that I learned that all of the write-ups we had been writing had somehow decreased in number. I know I put in a write up a day for this kid. But somehow between all his classes he had less than 50. That doesn't make sense. I spoke with a couple other teachers who had been concerned that their write up copies had not come back to them. They started photocopying their write-ups before handing them in to keep tabs on what actually was happening and not just what the principal was admitting to.
I probably should have made a stink about it that year given what the science teacher went through the following year but I really thought things would get better. I believed the principal when he said he was working on it. And I really just wanted to get into a district and have an actual career. Not this one year and I'm out crap. There are bullshit reasons for the other two jobs being lost but I'll get into that later. These administrators have decades under their belt so they know all the manipulations and catch phrases to use to wiggle out of responsibility for maintaining a safe working environment. If a student attacks you it's your fault for having no classroom management skills, and it's all part of teaching. If you can't handle it then find another career. This is what the principal said to the counselor when a student tried to stab her with scissors. Get a thicker skin or find another job.
The second year started off good. I had some really good classes. I don't remember any major problems. 2009 ended well in the spring with a co-taught class of 9th graders and the reading teacher. We had fun. The principal wanted to repeat the experience so he set it up again in the fall of 2009. It didn't go as well. The reading teacher didn't really have much skills in enforcing boundaries. The kids would hide in her room and I'd have to go get them. She wouldn't shoo them out or anything. I don't care if the kids thought I was scary and mean. Their work and their responsibility was next door, not sipping tea and eating candy with the reading teacher. Class started at 8am and they would still be in there at 8:30am. So we didn't work well that year. I did manage to get a couple students to sit and work and actually pass that semester in that class. A lot of one on one time with one student in particular. I'm really glad I put the time in with him.
He was a senior with only 4 credits. His original school in the district would give him easy classes in the fall during basketball season then drop their support and let him sink as soon as basketball season was over. They used him then dumped him. Totally not fair. As a result he started out not even wanting to put his name on paper. But I had created worksheets that would present tasks in a fill-in-the-blank way. I had one two page essay drafting worksheet like that to help kids stretch out their essays modeled after step-up-to-writing.
I found that if I presented writing like mathematical equations the kids seem to respond better and feel like it was not a big risk and doable. I got much better responses after that.
He was doing really well by the end of the marking period. He got a 58 on the ELA in Jan and volunteered to review and take it again in June to get a better score. His attitude had gone from no self-confidence to being sure he could do better and working accordingly. Total turn-around.
There was another young lady I got off on a rocky start with but the second year things turned out well. In 2008 she was in my english class and I was doing short stories for plot analysis and practice writing thematic essays. It was quicker to read a short story and analyze it so we could write more essays for practice. Most of the assignments were modeled after ELA tasks since I treated my English 1 as a remedial course. Most students had already taken and failed it at their other school so I approached it totally differently. We had head a short story about the witch trials and she got upset. She left in protest because another student brought up Wicca. His mother was a practitioner. Apparently she had had a run-in with a Satanist that had turned nasty. At least that's the rumor that was passed to me. The reading teacher next door worked with her on an alternative assignment. I had her to a comparative essay on two articles about slavery instead of the witch hunts. She seemed to calm down quite a bit after that.
In 2010 in the spring she was in my journalism class and blossomed. The final assignment was a choice of journalist skills. Create your own newspaper, magazine, radio broadcast or TV anchor broadcast. Each choice had a list of requirements meant to demonstrate a total of what they had learned. All different types of skills and articles used. She did a great job. She was one of those students that had encouraged me to stay longer than I really meant to. She had brought me a Christmas card in December when I was really down and it made me cry. I stayed that spring semester because of that card. I got to see her graduate in June and that at least felt like completion.
The final nail in the coffin as far as why I left had to do with a complete attitude shift from the principal that second year. NYS had decided to audit the school. We had been declared a "school in need of improvement" the first year I was there but hadn't been notified of that status until august 2009. Over a year after the declaration. We got an extension on the requirements because Albany dropped the ball. All of a sudden the encouragement and comaraderie went out the window. Everyone descended on our school and started attacking us. The principal was ready to throw us all under the bus to save his own job and the union rep as well. They were both really close to retirement and didn't want to be let go because of the school closing.
I had to defend myself against attacks from board member and others, not just me but the other English teacher who wasn't there. We were blamed for failing grades of students that had never actually sat in our classes. It was the previous English teachers students, the ones he had taught, that were failing the exams. The kids that we taught when they took the exams in 2010 did really well comparatively. I still had the assist. principal yelling in my face that it doesn't matter, even with correction for attendance, we still are responsible for those scores.
I was so thankful when the auditor came right out and told the other two principals in the district to stop using the school as a garbage dump for the kids they don't want to deal with. The sad thing about alternative is that the first year it opened over a decade ago, it was decent. Kids had to fill out a graduation plan, have a portfolio of work and interview to get in. Kids wanted to be there. The second year the district decided to let the other two high schools send whoever they wanted and alternative couldn't turn them away. That's when everything changed. Kids viewed it as a punishment, as being labeled garbage (which it was in the district's eyes) and they acted out. That's why it was so crazy and violent. The math teacher year 2008-2009 said that she had been there from the first day and noticed the change when the district made that decision. That first year had been heaven and then the change made everything hostile and crazy.
So, I believe that I was sabatoged that spring. Either that or his expectations from the previous semester based on how I had helped that one kid, were way inflated. He told me he would give me "a couple" of 8th grade students that he thought were ready for ninth grade. They were also age appropriate having been in the alternative middle school longer than they should have been. I was okay with it. He said that if they didn't do well by the first five weeks he would move them back. I now know he must have told the middle school teachers something different. When I saw a troup of ten kids coming down the hall I about flipped. What the heck was that? He gave me a TA from one of the middle school rooms the "help transition" but she was only there 30 minutes out of 80. She also sat at the back table and did nothing. Even when I asked her to work with a student her response was to ask him if he "needed" help. He said no and she walked away and went back to sitting. I'm wondering what the middle school teacher had told her. Did she tell her to not help me to let me sink because they had plans to push me out?
It certainly felt that way.
These kids were not ready. They couldn't write sentences, much less paragraphs and essays. I don't know what the middle school teacher was doing with those kids in her room but teaching them according to NYS standards was not it. By 8th grade kids must be able to write a 4-5 paragraph essy. They must know their literary terms. They must be able to engage in discussion in a classroom or with a partner. They must be able to pick out themes and analyse literature. Not at an 11th grade level but the beginnings of analysis occur around that time. I had been in her room and seen her workbooking them. No discussion or teamwork seemed to ever occur. These kids had no idea how to function in a classroom.
Add to that a total brawl on day one because two girls who had restraining orders against each other were seated in the same room, and all hell broke loose. I was pretty much done by week 2. I held on because of the assurance that the five week mark would lead to a look at who should stay and who should go. The two seventh graders were definitely on my list.
I was being sexually harassed by girls. The things they said, like I'd enjoy being raped cause it was the only action I would get, were just disgusting. Don't get me wrong. I found out about her sexual abuse so I get why she was so crass and fucked up. But that doesn't make what she was saying and doing any less than abuse.
Five weeks came around and no changes. By ten weeks I was work booking the kids and doing independent projects with the upper classmen. I had one poor student stuck in this class, a good kid, but she's get so worked up by the idiocy and hostility that the following period in Eng 2 she would be uncontrollable until halfway through the period. finally around week 13 he took the whole class away from me. I had been telling him over and over again that he needed to remove all but two 8th grade kids. So he took the whole class and gave it to the reading teacher. That's when I contacted the union president. The counselor gave me her e-mail. I let her know what had happened and she told me to not count on a recommendation and to check my employee file to make sure nothing suspicious was added without my knowledge. I guess it's not unheard of for principals to add complaints after the fact that the teacher never knew was in their to sabotage other teaching job opportunities.
I did all that. At the same time I advised the science teacher to contact the NYS labor board because of sexual harassment from a student in her room. The kid was never disciplined for his behavior. Finally, he grabbed her ass in class and she flipped out screaming and threw a book at him. They had to evacuate the class and counsel her down from her hysteria. I think he got 2 days and then was "counseled" back into her class.
We had also done away with write-ups. The principal was trying to cover the tracks to not get us labeled a violent school. We were that close because of the violent write ups from the previous year. We had like 400 of them. So we did away with write-ups and went to counseling forms instead. We would send a kid to the counselor or the building Teacher Instructor and they would counsel the student on their behavior. Then they'd be brought back to class. This worked horribly.
As far as staff, most of the teachers were great. The history teacher not so much. He was an oversized frat boy. He criticized my classroom management. I respond, ofcourse I have trouble controlling kids who only recognize physical prowess as worthy of respect. I don't manhandle my students.
He did. He grabbed a girl and lifted her up and swung her into the classroom then slammed the door in the other kids face. He bullied staff members. He ignored the counselor and slammed the door in her face. He'd walk away when she tried to talk to him about a student. He screamed at the Teacher Instructor to get the hell out of his room. He was a huge bully. But apparently his daddy has status in the school district so his precious snowflake can rest assured that his job will never be in danger.
****************************************************
Gotta quit. It's late and I have to substitute tomorrow. I'll re-read and try to do some emotional work with all this. Ranting can't be left by itself. It does not good and does no healing. The ritual for letting go of a job would be appropriate in the next week or so.
Next ritual date is the 15th of January.
I don't think that's going to happen. The idea of returning to teaching full-time just depresses me. I think about it and all the time that goes into lessons, grading, meetings and even just class time and it just exhausts me thinking about it. Then the politics pitfalls of saying the wrong thing at a meeting, getting a reputation for speaking out and being a trouble maker, like I do, make it tenuous at best when it comes to security. I've never known job security so it's reasonable to assume it's never going to happen in my lifetime.
It was nice of Kelly to feel pissed for me. It's not fair. It's not right that someone with my education, dedication, history of going above and beyond, focus on the kids, is not something that is welcome in our current educational climate. Common Core brought this home to me and I'm really glad to not be a part of it. Common Core has teachers teaching the same content on the same days using the same worksheets as other grade level and subject teachers. Yes it standardizes everything, making sure the essentials are taught. But it also presents a cookie cutter approach to education with not time built in for re-teaching when necessary and differentiating for differences in interests or abilities of students. Many will be left behind in the mad dash to the middle. Including bright kids who will be bored to insanity.
I've written a whole pessimistic article about this, including how the stress levels of kids can lead to brain tissue damage and loss of learned skills, at best a physical inability to learn. It has been called Cognitive Child Abuse by at least one neuro-scientist that I've heard of.
So I substitute and try to impart wisdom however I can to those that care to listen. I'm able to fly under the radar and not get caught up in the politics, meetings and curricula hell that public schools seem to be suffocating under. I enjoyed it for a while. Now I'm getting to the point of exhaustion again. Maybe I just can't seem to stick to anything. I resent students who don't know how to treat others like people with dignity and respect. Too many of them seem to have no manners. This year is actually better than the previous ones. We got rid of quite a few dickheads through graduation and movings.
So anyways, the damage as far as I can tell really started my second year in Elmira. I had taken the job in 2008 and moved 3 hours away from my house and husband to live in an apartment there. The apartment was shit with a leaky roof over the kitchen that drove me into more than one screaming fit of frustration. It was really unlivable and I probably should have pushed the issue but I was let out of the lease early when the house sold. I took an apartment across the street which was much better but again not perfect. Ants in the walls, next to a vacant house that smelled horrible and when I moved in I found mice droppings in the cabinets. I had to flush everything out in order to feel safe enough to put food in there. It was at least dry and warm.
2008 was a tough year but the principal seemed to have our backs. The whole staff every Friday would go to this Irish pub place and chat over appetizers for a couple of hours. I was really happy with the job. Maybe I said too much how I liked the place. I tend to be loud when it comes to whether I am pleased or displeased. The second year I may have been really loud about how pissed I was and how I felt we were being thrown under the bus. Word gets around apparently.
Anyway, I had problems with students. I had classes that fell apart because the kids would get so worked up they would mutiny. It was usually only one class per semester so it wasn't too bad but there were some incidents that stood out. I had one kid try to throw another out the window of the second floor. I had a serious issue with a student who was known to be incredibly violent towards women. I did not feel safe with him in the class and wished he'd get busted and tossed. Interestingly it was the day after I wrote that wish down that it happened. I was developing a bit of manifestation and was sometimes able to prod things into happening to the point where people would sometimes say word for word what I was thinking. Hubbie thinks it may have been the other way around. I was actually picking up on what they were thinking or something that was going to happen, premonitions instead of manifesting desires.
Whatever, he got caught punching someone in the head on camera on the front steps so that was the end of him. The biggest problem that year was a class of about 5 kids. One refused to come and skipped all the time. One was kicked out repeatedly for harassing me and pulling that superiority because he's a guy thing. I sent two of the only good kids next door to be with the reading teacher with worksheets and assignment sheets I sent with them. I couldn't figure out how to teach with all the aggression in the room. I had to babysit the idiots and wanted these two kids safe from harm. They didn't feel safe either. The last two boys ganged up on me. It was daily sexual harassment and personal attacks on me. A condom put on the handle of my door, pictures drawn and nasty things said constantly. I kept a book and wrote quotes of everything the little shits did. The principal was very on the fence. On one hand I had plenty to go to the police about, but on the other hand he assured me he would handle it. He needed enough ammunition to go to the board about this behavior.
I was at that meeting and it was a joke. I wasn't really questioned at all except over one thing to clarify something the student had said that I had said. Other than that I learned that all of the write-ups we had been writing had somehow decreased in number. I know I put in a write up a day for this kid. But somehow between all his classes he had less than 50. That doesn't make sense. I spoke with a couple other teachers who had been concerned that their write up copies had not come back to them. They started photocopying their write-ups before handing them in to keep tabs on what actually was happening and not just what the principal was admitting to.
I probably should have made a stink about it that year given what the science teacher went through the following year but I really thought things would get better. I believed the principal when he said he was working on it. And I really just wanted to get into a district and have an actual career. Not this one year and I'm out crap. There are bullshit reasons for the other two jobs being lost but I'll get into that later. These administrators have decades under their belt so they know all the manipulations and catch phrases to use to wiggle out of responsibility for maintaining a safe working environment. If a student attacks you it's your fault for having no classroom management skills, and it's all part of teaching. If you can't handle it then find another career. This is what the principal said to the counselor when a student tried to stab her with scissors. Get a thicker skin or find another job.
The second year started off good. I had some really good classes. I don't remember any major problems. 2009 ended well in the spring with a co-taught class of 9th graders and the reading teacher. We had fun. The principal wanted to repeat the experience so he set it up again in the fall of 2009. It didn't go as well. The reading teacher didn't really have much skills in enforcing boundaries. The kids would hide in her room and I'd have to go get them. She wouldn't shoo them out or anything. I don't care if the kids thought I was scary and mean. Their work and their responsibility was next door, not sipping tea and eating candy with the reading teacher. Class started at 8am and they would still be in there at 8:30am. So we didn't work well that year. I did manage to get a couple students to sit and work and actually pass that semester in that class. A lot of one on one time with one student in particular. I'm really glad I put the time in with him.
He was a senior with only 4 credits. His original school in the district would give him easy classes in the fall during basketball season then drop their support and let him sink as soon as basketball season was over. They used him then dumped him. Totally not fair. As a result he started out not even wanting to put his name on paper. But I had created worksheets that would present tasks in a fill-in-the-blank way. I had one two page essay drafting worksheet like that to help kids stretch out their essays modeled after step-up-to-writing.
I found that if I presented writing like mathematical equations the kids seem to respond better and feel like it was not a big risk and doable. I got much better responses after that.
He was doing really well by the end of the marking period. He got a 58 on the ELA in Jan and volunteered to review and take it again in June to get a better score. His attitude had gone from no self-confidence to being sure he could do better and working accordingly. Total turn-around.
There was another young lady I got off on a rocky start with but the second year things turned out well. In 2008 she was in my english class and I was doing short stories for plot analysis and practice writing thematic essays. It was quicker to read a short story and analyze it so we could write more essays for practice. Most of the assignments were modeled after ELA tasks since I treated my English 1 as a remedial course. Most students had already taken and failed it at their other school so I approached it totally differently. We had head a short story about the witch trials and she got upset. She left in protest because another student brought up Wicca. His mother was a practitioner. Apparently she had had a run-in with a Satanist that had turned nasty. At least that's the rumor that was passed to me. The reading teacher next door worked with her on an alternative assignment. I had her to a comparative essay on two articles about slavery instead of the witch hunts. She seemed to calm down quite a bit after that.
In 2010 in the spring she was in my journalism class and blossomed. The final assignment was a choice of journalist skills. Create your own newspaper, magazine, radio broadcast or TV anchor broadcast. Each choice had a list of requirements meant to demonstrate a total of what they had learned. All different types of skills and articles used. She did a great job. She was one of those students that had encouraged me to stay longer than I really meant to. She had brought me a Christmas card in December when I was really down and it made me cry. I stayed that spring semester because of that card. I got to see her graduate in June and that at least felt like completion.
The final nail in the coffin as far as why I left had to do with a complete attitude shift from the principal that second year. NYS had decided to audit the school. We had been declared a "school in need of improvement" the first year I was there but hadn't been notified of that status until august 2009. Over a year after the declaration. We got an extension on the requirements because Albany dropped the ball. All of a sudden the encouragement and comaraderie went out the window. Everyone descended on our school and started attacking us. The principal was ready to throw us all under the bus to save his own job and the union rep as well. They were both really close to retirement and didn't want to be let go because of the school closing.
I had to defend myself against attacks from board member and others, not just me but the other English teacher who wasn't there. We were blamed for failing grades of students that had never actually sat in our classes. It was the previous English teachers students, the ones he had taught, that were failing the exams. The kids that we taught when they took the exams in 2010 did really well comparatively. I still had the assist. principal yelling in my face that it doesn't matter, even with correction for attendance, we still are responsible for those scores.
I was so thankful when the auditor came right out and told the other two principals in the district to stop using the school as a garbage dump for the kids they don't want to deal with. The sad thing about alternative is that the first year it opened over a decade ago, it was decent. Kids had to fill out a graduation plan, have a portfolio of work and interview to get in. Kids wanted to be there. The second year the district decided to let the other two high schools send whoever they wanted and alternative couldn't turn them away. That's when everything changed. Kids viewed it as a punishment, as being labeled garbage (which it was in the district's eyes) and they acted out. That's why it was so crazy and violent. The math teacher year 2008-2009 said that she had been there from the first day and noticed the change when the district made that decision. That first year had been heaven and then the change made everything hostile and crazy.
So, I believe that I was sabatoged that spring. Either that or his expectations from the previous semester based on how I had helped that one kid, were way inflated. He told me he would give me "a couple" of 8th grade students that he thought were ready for ninth grade. They were also age appropriate having been in the alternative middle school longer than they should have been. I was okay with it. He said that if they didn't do well by the first five weeks he would move them back. I now know he must have told the middle school teachers something different. When I saw a troup of ten kids coming down the hall I about flipped. What the heck was that? He gave me a TA from one of the middle school rooms the "help transition" but she was only there 30 minutes out of 80. She also sat at the back table and did nothing. Even when I asked her to work with a student her response was to ask him if he "needed" help. He said no and she walked away and went back to sitting. I'm wondering what the middle school teacher had told her. Did she tell her to not help me to let me sink because they had plans to push me out?
It certainly felt that way.
These kids were not ready. They couldn't write sentences, much less paragraphs and essays. I don't know what the middle school teacher was doing with those kids in her room but teaching them according to NYS standards was not it. By 8th grade kids must be able to write a 4-5 paragraph essy. They must know their literary terms. They must be able to engage in discussion in a classroom or with a partner. They must be able to pick out themes and analyse literature. Not at an 11th grade level but the beginnings of analysis occur around that time. I had been in her room and seen her workbooking them. No discussion or teamwork seemed to ever occur. These kids had no idea how to function in a classroom.
Add to that a total brawl on day one because two girls who had restraining orders against each other were seated in the same room, and all hell broke loose. I was pretty much done by week 2. I held on because of the assurance that the five week mark would lead to a look at who should stay and who should go. The two seventh graders were definitely on my list.
I was being sexually harassed by girls. The things they said, like I'd enjoy being raped cause it was the only action I would get, were just disgusting. Don't get me wrong. I found out about her sexual abuse so I get why she was so crass and fucked up. But that doesn't make what she was saying and doing any less than abuse.
Five weeks came around and no changes. By ten weeks I was work booking the kids and doing independent projects with the upper classmen. I had one poor student stuck in this class, a good kid, but she's get so worked up by the idiocy and hostility that the following period in Eng 2 she would be uncontrollable until halfway through the period. finally around week 13 he took the whole class away from me. I had been telling him over and over again that he needed to remove all but two 8th grade kids. So he took the whole class and gave it to the reading teacher. That's when I contacted the union president. The counselor gave me her e-mail. I let her know what had happened and she told me to not count on a recommendation and to check my employee file to make sure nothing suspicious was added without my knowledge. I guess it's not unheard of for principals to add complaints after the fact that the teacher never knew was in their to sabotage other teaching job opportunities.
I did all that. At the same time I advised the science teacher to contact the NYS labor board because of sexual harassment from a student in her room. The kid was never disciplined for his behavior. Finally, he grabbed her ass in class and she flipped out screaming and threw a book at him. They had to evacuate the class and counsel her down from her hysteria. I think he got 2 days and then was "counseled" back into her class.
We had also done away with write-ups. The principal was trying to cover the tracks to not get us labeled a violent school. We were that close because of the violent write ups from the previous year. We had like 400 of them. So we did away with write-ups and went to counseling forms instead. We would send a kid to the counselor or the building Teacher Instructor and they would counsel the student on their behavior. Then they'd be brought back to class. This worked horribly.
As far as staff, most of the teachers were great. The history teacher not so much. He was an oversized frat boy. He criticized my classroom management. I respond, ofcourse I have trouble controlling kids who only recognize physical prowess as worthy of respect. I don't manhandle my students.
He did. He grabbed a girl and lifted her up and swung her into the classroom then slammed the door in the other kids face. He bullied staff members. He ignored the counselor and slammed the door in her face. He'd walk away when she tried to talk to him about a student. He screamed at the Teacher Instructor to get the hell out of his room. He was a huge bully. But apparently his daddy has status in the school district so his precious snowflake can rest assured that his job will never be in danger.
****************************************************
Gotta quit. It's late and I have to substitute tomorrow. I'll re-read and try to do some emotional work with all this. Ranting can't be left by itself. It does not good and does no healing. The ritual for letting go of a job would be appropriate in the next week or so.
Next ritual date is the 15th of January.
Wednesday, January 8, 2014
Suppressing the narrative
In the book Writing as a way of Healing, the author talks about a student who tried to stick to a linear form of writing. She kept suppressing stories that she wanted to write about because it wasn't time to get to them. Not all stories get drafted in linear, first to last, order.
That being said, the thing that has been on my mind the most lately has been my experiences in Elmira. I want to go into that in detail. Not right now.
I'm going to spend the morning making large 4 inch pillar candles because that's what I really want to do right now. But I will need to write about that last job experience tonight or tomorrow. I'm hoping tonight. Hubbie has the day off and it's very hard to write in the same room as him. He keeps laughing at web comics and it distracts me.
Another ritual day is coming up soon. Will post more when I get to that time period.
That being said, the thing that has been on my mind the most lately has been my experiences in Elmira. I want to go into that in detail. Not right now.
I'm going to spend the morning making large 4 inch pillar candles because that's what I really want to do right now. But I will need to write about that last job experience tonight or tomorrow. I'm hoping tonight. Hubbie has the day off and it's very hard to write in the same room as him. He keeps laughing at web comics and it distracts me.
Another ritual day is coming up soon. Will post more when I get to that time period.
Tuesday, January 7, 2014
Cynical about Litigation
http://www.ibtimes.com/sea-shepherd-releases-footage-japanese-ships-whale-sanctuary-claim-wrongdoing-1527926
Even though the spirit of the law is being violated, the letter of the law is not. That's how the Japanese are getting away with this shit in the international groups that are supposed to be enforcing these laws.
It pissed me off because that is the same shit I went through with my bro. I've gotten really pessimistic about law and law enforcement. All that's happened makes me feel like it's a joke.
How does someone break into a house and repeatedly steal furniture, which is felony burglary, and it not be a crime? Well he's a beneficiary and no ownership has been assigned through the will so he has a right to take what he wants.
I knew that shit was coming after the check fraud fiasco where they refused to pursue it and take it to court.
That's why I flipped and started emptying the house and got it on the market in under 2 weeks. I was actually packing the china up when I got the call from the investigating officer telling me that the DA had decided not to pursue burglary charges because of the above explanation.
So when someone dies or goes into the hospital the family members can pretty much destroy anything or take anything, including squatting in the house, and no crime has been committed. No wonder this shit often ends up in fist fights and shoot outs. If the law won't act to keep things civil, and wills and executors have no actual power to protect the estate, then people have no recourse but to get aggressive about what they want. In the absence of legal bodies, there is only vigilantism.
On that note, I called both lawyers today. The property guardianship papers for Bri are being drawn up. I'll get a call tomorrow or Wednesday to fill in any other information she paralegal may need. This is very cut and dry filing and getting signatures so I don't need a full lawyer to litigate in court.
I chatted with Attorney Adams wife about the papers I got today. I got official papers filing a claim against the estate for the 60K that my bro claims we owe him. Adams is not denying it. He apparently told the other attorney that the 60K was deposited, we have the deposit showing on her bank statement from 2011. We also have the paperwork showing that it was paid out and then some. He's going to deny it or some other legal term for it.
My bro paid this law office 55K to keep them on retainer for the year to deal with the estate and I would bet to also deal with his arrests for DWI that he still needs to have resolved. it's been a full year since the second arrest and he's still not paid the piper.
It really pisses me off when crimes like this happen and nothing is done to make those people pay. It makes me feel unsafe in my own town and home. And I get angry and want to get violent. What else am I supposed to do? If the police won't protect people, what's left?
So I still have a lot of anger to resolve. I will look into rituals for dealing with letting go of anger about someone and something you cannot change. I need to do this so I can let go. If I keep getting pissed and ranting out this to myself when alone, to my hubby or anyone else, then I obviously have not processed the anger and have not let it go.
We're so close to being done. I need to know that I won't miss having something to bitch about when all the drama ends. My hubbie likes to joke. I say Bri doesn't seem to be happy unless she's fighting against something. He laughs and says, who does that remind you of?
I also need to get that ritual for letting go of past jobs. I wrote it into my BOS a year or so ago. I never got around to doing it. I really need to do it now and for multiple jobs. I still rant about Elmira and Jamestown even now and get pissed. Not as much as I used to but I need ritual release to trigger the subconscious letting go. That's the deep resolution I so need.
Even though the spirit of the law is being violated, the letter of the law is not. That's how the Japanese are getting away with this shit in the international groups that are supposed to be enforcing these laws.
It pissed me off because that is the same shit I went through with my bro. I've gotten really pessimistic about law and law enforcement. All that's happened makes me feel like it's a joke.
How does someone break into a house and repeatedly steal furniture, which is felony burglary, and it not be a crime? Well he's a beneficiary and no ownership has been assigned through the will so he has a right to take what he wants.
I knew that shit was coming after the check fraud fiasco where they refused to pursue it and take it to court.
That's why I flipped and started emptying the house and got it on the market in under 2 weeks. I was actually packing the china up when I got the call from the investigating officer telling me that the DA had decided not to pursue burglary charges because of the above explanation.
So when someone dies or goes into the hospital the family members can pretty much destroy anything or take anything, including squatting in the house, and no crime has been committed. No wonder this shit often ends up in fist fights and shoot outs. If the law won't act to keep things civil, and wills and executors have no actual power to protect the estate, then people have no recourse but to get aggressive about what they want. In the absence of legal bodies, there is only vigilantism.
On that note, I called both lawyers today. The property guardianship papers for Bri are being drawn up. I'll get a call tomorrow or Wednesday to fill in any other information she paralegal may need. This is very cut and dry filing and getting signatures so I don't need a full lawyer to litigate in court.
I chatted with Attorney Adams wife about the papers I got today. I got official papers filing a claim against the estate for the 60K that my bro claims we owe him. Adams is not denying it. He apparently told the other attorney that the 60K was deposited, we have the deposit showing on her bank statement from 2011. We also have the paperwork showing that it was paid out and then some. He's going to deny it or some other legal term for it.
My bro paid this law office 55K to keep them on retainer for the year to deal with the estate and I would bet to also deal with his arrests for DWI that he still needs to have resolved. it's been a full year since the second arrest and he's still not paid the piper.
It really pisses me off when crimes like this happen and nothing is done to make those people pay. It makes me feel unsafe in my own town and home. And I get angry and want to get violent. What else am I supposed to do? If the police won't protect people, what's left?
So I still have a lot of anger to resolve. I will look into rituals for dealing with letting go of anger about someone and something you cannot change. I need to do this so I can let go. If I keep getting pissed and ranting out this to myself when alone, to my hubby or anyone else, then I obviously have not processed the anger and have not let it go.
We're so close to being done. I need to know that I won't miss having something to bitch about when all the drama ends. My hubbie likes to joke. I say Bri doesn't seem to be happy unless she's fighting against something. He laughs and says, who does that remind you of?
I also need to get that ritual for letting go of past jobs. I wrote it into my BOS a year or so ago. I never got around to doing it. I really need to do it now and for multiple jobs. I still rant about Elmira and Jamestown even now and get pissed. Not as much as I used to but I need ritual release to trigger the subconscious letting go. That's the deep resolution I so need.
Sunday, January 5, 2014
Year 2011-2012
I haven't kept really good records of the past 3 years. I have only one book of journals from all that time. Half of it is in a book that starts with my pregnancy and return to Buffalo after leaving my job in Elmira in 2010. The book is full of 2011 up to 2013. The most recent book start a week before mom died in April 2013.
Much of this can be explained with simple parenting. I had Bri in Feb of 2011. It was a long birth. I wrote about it in a previous entry on my other blog. I can copy a reprint into this one. The recounting is just that, no room for reflection or feeling.
My birth experience was less than ideal but better than it would have been if I had had a traditional doctor. I know I would have ended up escalated to surgery if I had stayed with the OBS we had started with. The midwife was fantastic and patient. The birth left me feeling exhausted obviously, but also really disappointed. I really didn't want to go to the hospital and it took a long time to stop feeling like I failed somehow. I guess I totally fell for that mumbo jumbo about natural birth and orgasmic birth. It is better but my brain wouldn't let me let go.
I know the reason I wasn't dilating on some level was because I didn't want to. Bri started coming 4 weeks too soon. At first I was scared she would be too small and not ready. Totally not the case. She was full sized. Must have been the the daily meal of eggs I was eating. I wasn't ready. I wanted to keep her inside me a little longer. I was expecting a few more weeks before she came and I think psychologically I really needed that time.
Part of me was just afraid. I don't have a lot of faith in the world as a whole and I couldn't stand the idea of her leaving me and getting hurt. Or just the idea of her leaving me. I wrote a letter to her in the old journal:
"From the moment you were born you've been moving away from me. Each day, one roll, one crawl away. I hold close those times when you cuddle on my lap and put your head against my chest and sleep. Sometimes you look up at me and it's the sweetest thing, it cuts." (10/23/2011)
I know growing up is part of the way things are and I'll get used to it. But at the moment of birthing her, I really wanted to hang on. My conscious mind would not let go and so my cervix didn't dilate. We were fighting against each other. She was ready and I was holding her back. It still happens occasionally.
After the birth my experience was really rough. Breastfeeding was a horrible struggle and at one point even hubbie wanted to go get formula just so I could get some sleep. I was exhausted I didn't know what I was saying or even doing sometimes. And then I'd erupt. As much as I loved her, I resented the loss of freedom, sleep, showering, eating, or anything I used to be able to just do and not have to worry about another person. I felt trapped. I had been planning her entry into my life since I was 19 but I resented it. The change I had to make to take care of this helpless person.
I resented my hubbie because he seemed to so easily be able to walk away. Of course he couldn't breastfeed her. I started pumping so he could feed her at night so I could get more sleep. That helped to take the edge off and I started to feel a little more human. He had a job to take him out of the house and I lost all connection to any friend I had. There were maybe four visits from friends that first 12 months. Taking her out was a pain. She would just cry and I'd get so worked up it wasn't worth it. I didn't do breastfeeding in public because I wasn't out in public.
Dad died that summer when Bri was only a few months old. We had to cart her to mom's house and stop to breastfeed on the way. Stop to eat for ourselves. A 5 and half hour trip took about 7. Dad got to see her before he died but it didn't seem to phase him. It didn't phase many in the family. We had a large gathering around Easter before he died and the only ones interested in her were two of my aunts, mom and grandma.
Aunt Hilda and Bruce and Dad were completely unfazed. Mom was in and out of it. She kept coddling the dog and would sometimes ignore Bri in favor of the dog.
In a way it ticked me off, the way certain members of the family ignored her. It struck a nerve. She was getting the same treatment from them that I had gotten as a kid. Definitely a nerve was hit. But how could I expect anything else? It's not like they had had any epiphany that would lead them to treat me and others differently.
A few months later when Dad died we met up with that branch of the family again. This time there were more people and so there was more interest in her. I felt much more vibrant by then. It's ironic that on the day of dad's funeral I was happier than I had ever been. I also got more attention than I had ever gotten from that family. Bri got a lot of squealing and cooing. I have some video but for some reason the audio didn't engage so it's silent but in color at least. That was the last time I saw grandma alive so I was really upset for a while after reviewing the film and finding it silent. I got over it. I supposed it's better than nothing.
(One really interesting thing that happened, really creeped my hubbie out. When the baby started crying all of the women in the room went "Awww" in full chorus. I don't think he had ever heard that before like that. It scared him. The same thing happened at mom's funeral reception when he carried her in in her little sun dress. A full chorus of coos exploded and he said he actually had a moment of freezing in place and wanting to run out like he needed to protect her. Being female, I'm familiar with this kind of occurrence and so it's already a part of my gender culture. It didn't freak me out but made me feel a part of something, this female experience.)
Mourning for dad started in 2008 when he was diagnosed with brain cancer. I tried to reach out to him emotionally once again. He avoided all talk of affection and hung up quickly. Even now I think what I miss the most is what could have been. I have all this anger toward his indifference and his resentment and bullying that I need to process. How much easier would this all have been if I could just have had that closure and healing while he was alive? But again, what did I expect? There hadn't been any confrontation or spiritual awakening that could have rectified our 30 years of issues.
Besides, why should I have to do all the work. I'm the kid. It's the parents' responsibility to nurture the relationship and teach the kids how to nurture relationships. Kids are ignorant from birth and need to be taught how social connections and affection works. My parents failed in this. Dad especially but in some significant ways, mom failed as well.
So it's not him I miss. I never really new the man. Only the disappointment and verbal attacks. It's all the potential that was in my head. All those times healing could have occurred, including that huge outburst I had years ago before I met Tom.
After the funeral mom wanted us to stay another day. She didn't want us to leave so soon. We were only planning to stay two nights. Bri wasn't sleeping well in a strange room and the energy of the past was echoing in my head and messing with my balance, not that I had much after the birth and returning to my home town.
Anyone who is energy sensitive who has driven up there with me has noticed right around Canton, I get really tense and the energy around me gets anxious and spiky. My shields go up.
Sometimes I wonder if she was looking for a buffer from my brother. I wonder if she new he was going to start working her over now that dad was gone. Dad was always a shield, even if a poor one, for my mother. He would do all the screaming at my bro and make the decisions as to what my bro would get and when. With him gone, she was left to defend herself. She never let on that she was afraid or nervous or that her relationship with either of them was rocky. Given my history in that house I should have known. But I let her talk me into believing he was getting better and doing well.
It wasn't until much later that I was told what was really going on. How my bro went through not only 60K on his inheritance that she kept and doled out monthly checks, but an additional 15K above his inheritence, plus two new cars in less than 2 years, all of his mortgage and utility bills, plus petty cash. In that time mom lost almost 200K to him when the bills are totaled up and her account became overdrawn from the check fraud.
So mom bought us a car in order to get one more day with us. She didn't need to do that. It feels yucky that she felt like she needed to bribe me to stay. We could have stayed another day if she had just asked. If she had said she was lonely or sad and just wanted another day with me and the baby, we would have stayed without the bribe. Dealing with my brother must have thought love needed to be bought.
I didn't stay away from the house because I didn't care about her. There were too many angry and sobbing ghosts in that house. Too many fights, too many echos of who I was as a child and a teenager crying myself to sleep way too many nights. Feeling like an alien, unwanted and hated by people who are supposed to love you and have your back. I did resent her a bit for not sticking up for me. I can only guess why she didn't have the strength to do it. She couldn't stand up to dad. Maybe she felt financially dependent on him, just got used to being taken care of, really believed divorce was a sin or at least that she had failed as a woman in some way. She had to keep up appearances and pretend to be happy, even pretend to have the upper hand like the mother in My Big Fat Greek Wedding.
Power is not real when you have to manipulate someone else's power in order to manifest your own.
And dad did his share enabling her alcohol addiction. I think he ignored it most of the time. I know he pleaded her case the last year of her teaching with the board to get her into therapy and then to make sure she was paid for the four weeks she took off to go to therapy plus making it count to her pension. I don't think he ever confronted her on it or pleaded for her to stop. She was functional. There was no reason to. Of course I don't know what he did when I wasn't there and I don't know what he was thinking.
I stayed away from that house because of him, because of my bro and because of the pain that just seemed to vibrate from all the surfaces in the house. It physically hurt to be there. I'm not an empath in any remarkable sense but when every atom in a house is screaming out, you can't shield all of it away.
Bri picked up on it too and we were sure that was why she couldn't sleep there. Plus were were staying in my parent's room, the master bedroom. That echoed of an unhappy marriage. We thought of staying in a hotel like we had during Easter, but I thought it would be good for mom to have someone physically in the house with her after dad was gone. The emptiness would get to her. I'm sure it did after we left.
But besides prickling with negative energy and bad memories mom was starting to get to me. She was kinda batty. She'd forget things, and do loopy stuff. Like looking for the dog in the baby's room when we had just put her down for her bedtime and wake her up. I'd have to go through the whole tucking her in again. The dog had been outside the whole time. Part of me knew she was sick then but I didn't know what it all meant until I finally got a doctor to tell the whole truth while she was in the hospital.
We did stay the extra day and bought a car we're not entirely happy with but it made mom happy. She was determined that we would get rid of the Jimmy which was over ten years old and had no air conditioning. She said the car was for the baby. Her granddaughter would have air conditioning.
As it turned out, she may have had another one of her psychic moments. There was an accident on the 90 around the time we would have been passing through there and traffic was at a stand still with 95 degree heat. Bri would have been fit to be tied in a situation like that.
Mom has always had these moments of divine inspiration. When she was sober she was amazing.
Hubbie was a bit freaked. He doesn't come from money like my family. We weren't rich but we always were comfortable and went on vacations every summer. When I mentioned it to him he got really quiet and rolled his eyes. He might not have realized at first that she wasn't offering a down payment and we wouldn't have to deal with car payments for the next five years. The Jimmy had been paid off for a while so we were enjoying not having that. Her writing a check for over 30K for the car at the dealership the next day didn't really phase me. It might have shaken him up a bit. He refused to drive the thing for a while.
I laughed it off. We just come from different backgrounds. Money wasn't a big deal with my parents. They were careful and invested and saved well for retirement. Hubbie and I will not be able to do the same with one income and the economy as it is currently.
I don't recall going back to visit at Christmas in 2011. We had planned to go up new years in 2012-2013 but that's when mom went into the hospital so those plans were boshed. We stayed away in 2012 but I called her when I could. The calls became less often.
She did come to visit us in the summer of 2012. Mrs. Wanzer brought her up and we played with Bri and watched an old black and white movie.
The last few years of her life I felt really awkward with her. There was this huge distance that we couldn't really separate. Hugging her felt really half-hearted. I don't know if she was conscious of the physical change in her body and how thin and frail she had gotten. She didn't want to hug me tightly like she used to to try to hide her physical state? I don't know. Maybe it reflected the secrets she was keeping? When she was here we just didn't have anything to talk about. It just felt really strange. Mrs. Wanzer came to pick her up and that was the last time I saw her mentally with it and functional.
I think she knew she was dying at that point and knew it would be soon. I think she wanted something from me but I don't know what it was. I think I failed her somehow that last visit. I'm not an empath. You usually have to hit me pretty hard over the head to get a message through to me. She was just so good at pretending everything was perfect that I just couldn't see through that facade.
It's like these movies where there's always some spiritual connection made or deep emotional revelation the grows and bursts and everyone in the theater is crying and taking something deeply personal away with them. We didn't have that moment. Maybe that was what she was looking for. I'm more than able and willing to have a moment like that I just didn't know to look for it in that particular moment. I forgot she was mortal.
I took it for granted there would be other times for connection and evolution.
And after everything that has happened this past decade, I should have known better.
I'm still learning that lesson repeatedly and too late.
Much of this can be explained with simple parenting. I had Bri in Feb of 2011. It was a long birth. I wrote about it in a previous entry on my other blog. I can copy a reprint into this one. The recounting is just that, no room for reflection or feeling.
My birth experience was less than ideal but better than it would have been if I had had a traditional doctor. I know I would have ended up escalated to surgery if I had stayed with the OBS we had started with. The midwife was fantastic and patient. The birth left me feeling exhausted obviously, but also really disappointed. I really didn't want to go to the hospital and it took a long time to stop feeling like I failed somehow. I guess I totally fell for that mumbo jumbo about natural birth and orgasmic birth. It is better but my brain wouldn't let me let go.
I know the reason I wasn't dilating on some level was because I didn't want to. Bri started coming 4 weeks too soon. At first I was scared she would be too small and not ready. Totally not the case. She was full sized. Must have been the the daily meal of eggs I was eating. I wasn't ready. I wanted to keep her inside me a little longer. I was expecting a few more weeks before she came and I think psychologically I really needed that time.
Part of me was just afraid. I don't have a lot of faith in the world as a whole and I couldn't stand the idea of her leaving me and getting hurt. Or just the idea of her leaving me. I wrote a letter to her in the old journal:
"From the moment you were born you've been moving away from me. Each day, one roll, one crawl away. I hold close those times when you cuddle on my lap and put your head against my chest and sleep. Sometimes you look up at me and it's the sweetest thing, it cuts." (10/23/2011)
I know growing up is part of the way things are and I'll get used to it. But at the moment of birthing her, I really wanted to hang on. My conscious mind would not let go and so my cervix didn't dilate. We were fighting against each other. She was ready and I was holding her back. It still happens occasionally.
After the birth my experience was really rough. Breastfeeding was a horrible struggle and at one point even hubbie wanted to go get formula just so I could get some sleep. I was exhausted I didn't know what I was saying or even doing sometimes. And then I'd erupt. As much as I loved her, I resented the loss of freedom, sleep, showering, eating, or anything I used to be able to just do and not have to worry about another person. I felt trapped. I had been planning her entry into my life since I was 19 but I resented it. The change I had to make to take care of this helpless person.
I resented my hubbie because he seemed to so easily be able to walk away. Of course he couldn't breastfeed her. I started pumping so he could feed her at night so I could get more sleep. That helped to take the edge off and I started to feel a little more human. He had a job to take him out of the house and I lost all connection to any friend I had. There were maybe four visits from friends that first 12 months. Taking her out was a pain. She would just cry and I'd get so worked up it wasn't worth it. I didn't do breastfeeding in public because I wasn't out in public.
Dad died that summer when Bri was only a few months old. We had to cart her to mom's house and stop to breastfeed on the way. Stop to eat for ourselves. A 5 and half hour trip took about 7. Dad got to see her before he died but it didn't seem to phase him. It didn't phase many in the family. We had a large gathering around Easter before he died and the only ones interested in her were two of my aunts, mom and grandma.
Aunt Hilda and Bruce and Dad were completely unfazed. Mom was in and out of it. She kept coddling the dog and would sometimes ignore Bri in favor of the dog.
In a way it ticked me off, the way certain members of the family ignored her. It struck a nerve. She was getting the same treatment from them that I had gotten as a kid. Definitely a nerve was hit. But how could I expect anything else? It's not like they had had any epiphany that would lead them to treat me and others differently.
A few months later when Dad died we met up with that branch of the family again. This time there were more people and so there was more interest in her. I felt much more vibrant by then. It's ironic that on the day of dad's funeral I was happier than I had ever been. I also got more attention than I had ever gotten from that family. Bri got a lot of squealing and cooing. I have some video but for some reason the audio didn't engage so it's silent but in color at least. That was the last time I saw grandma alive so I was really upset for a while after reviewing the film and finding it silent. I got over it. I supposed it's better than nothing.
(One really interesting thing that happened, really creeped my hubbie out. When the baby started crying all of the women in the room went "Awww" in full chorus. I don't think he had ever heard that before like that. It scared him. The same thing happened at mom's funeral reception when he carried her in in her little sun dress. A full chorus of coos exploded and he said he actually had a moment of freezing in place and wanting to run out like he needed to protect her. Being female, I'm familiar with this kind of occurrence and so it's already a part of my gender culture. It didn't freak me out but made me feel a part of something, this female experience.)
Mourning for dad started in 2008 when he was diagnosed with brain cancer. I tried to reach out to him emotionally once again. He avoided all talk of affection and hung up quickly. Even now I think what I miss the most is what could have been. I have all this anger toward his indifference and his resentment and bullying that I need to process. How much easier would this all have been if I could just have had that closure and healing while he was alive? But again, what did I expect? There hadn't been any confrontation or spiritual awakening that could have rectified our 30 years of issues.
Besides, why should I have to do all the work. I'm the kid. It's the parents' responsibility to nurture the relationship and teach the kids how to nurture relationships. Kids are ignorant from birth and need to be taught how social connections and affection works. My parents failed in this. Dad especially but in some significant ways, mom failed as well.
So it's not him I miss. I never really new the man. Only the disappointment and verbal attacks. It's all the potential that was in my head. All those times healing could have occurred, including that huge outburst I had years ago before I met Tom.
After the funeral mom wanted us to stay another day. She didn't want us to leave so soon. We were only planning to stay two nights. Bri wasn't sleeping well in a strange room and the energy of the past was echoing in my head and messing with my balance, not that I had much after the birth and returning to my home town.
Anyone who is energy sensitive who has driven up there with me has noticed right around Canton, I get really tense and the energy around me gets anxious and spiky. My shields go up.
Sometimes I wonder if she was looking for a buffer from my brother. I wonder if she new he was going to start working her over now that dad was gone. Dad was always a shield, even if a poor one, for my mother. He would do all the screaming at my bro and make the decisions as to what my bro would get and when. With him gone, she was left to defend herself. She never let on that she was afraid or nervous or that her relationship with either of them was rocky. Given my history in that house I should have known. But I let her talk me into believing he was getting better and doing well.
It wasn't until much later that I was told what was really going on. How my bro went through not only 60K on his inheritance that she kept and doled out monthly checks, but an additional 15K above his inheritence, plus two new cars in less than 2 years, all of his mortgage and utility bills, plus petty cash. In that time mom lost almost 200K to him when the bills are totaled up and her account became overdrawn from the check fraud.
So mom bought us a car in order to get one more day with us. She didn't need to do that. It feels yucky that she felt like she needed to bribe me to stay. We could have stayed another day if she had just asked. If she had said she was lonely or sad and just wanted another day with me and the baby, we would have stayed without the bribe. Dealing with my brother must have thought love needed to be bought.
I didn't stay away from the house because I didn't care about her. There were too many angry and sobbing ghosts in that house. Too many fights, too many echos of who I was as a child and a teenager crying myself to sleep way too many nights. Feeling like an alien, unwanted and hated by people who are supposed to love you and have your back. I did resent her a bit for not sticking up for me. I can only guess why she didn't have the strength to do it. She couldn't stand up to dad. Maybe she felt financially dependent on him, just got used to being taken care of, really believed divorce was a sin or at least that she had failed as a woman in some way. She had to keep up appearances and pretend to be happy, even pretend to have the upper hand like the mother in My Big Fat Greek Wedding.
Power is not real when you have to manipulate someone else's power in order to manifest your own.
And dad did his share enabling her alcohol addiction. I think he ignored it most of the time. I know he pleaded her case the last year of her teaching with the board to get her into therapy and then to make sure she was paid for the four weeks she took off to go to therapy plus making it count to her pension. I don't think he ever confronted her on it or pleaded for her to stop. She was functional. There was no reason to. Of course I don't know what he did when I wasn't there and I don't know what he was thinking.
I stayed away from that house because of him, because of my bro and because of the pain that just seemed to vibrate from all the surfaces in the house. It physically hurt to be there. I'm not an empath in any remarkable sense but when every atom in a house is screaming out, you can't shield all of it away.
Bri picked up on it too and we were sure that was why she couldn't sleep there. Plus were were staying in my parent's room, the master bedroom. That echoed of an unhappy marriage. We thought of staying in a hotel like we had during Easter, but I thought it would be good for mom to have someone physically in the house with her after dad was gone. The emptiness would get to her. I'm sure it did after we left.
But besides prickling with negative energy and bad memories mom was starting to get to me. She was kinda batty. She'd forget things, and do loopy stuff. Like looking for the dog in the baby's room when we had just put her down for her bedtime and wake her up. I'd have to go through the whole tucking her in again. The dog had been outside the whole time. Part of me knew she was sick then but I didn't know what it all meant until I finally got a doctor to tell the whole truth while she was in the hospital.
We did stay the extra day and bought a car we're not entirely happy with but it made mom happy. She was determined that we would get rid of the Jimmy which was over ten years old and had no air conditioning. She said the car was for the baby. Her granddaughter would have air conditioning.
As it turned out, she may have had another one of her psychic moments. There was an accident on the 90 around the time we would have been passing through there and traffic was at a stand still with 95 degree heat. Bri would have been fit to be tied in a situation like that.
Mom has always had these moments of divine inspiration. When she was sober she was amazing.
Hubbie was a bit freaked. He doesn't come from money like my family. We weren't rich but we always were comfortable and went on vacations every summer. When I mentioned it to him he got really quiet and rolled his eyes. He might not have realized at first that she wasn't offering a down payment and we wouldn't have to deal with car payments for the next five years. The Jimmy had been paid off for a while so we were enjoying not having that. Her writing a check for over 30K for the car at the dealership the next day didn't really phase me. It might have shaken him up a bit. He refused to drive the thing for a while.
I laughed it off. We just come from different backgrounds. Money wasn't a big deal with my parents. They were careful and invested and saved well for retirement. Hubbie and I will not be able to do the same with one income and the economy as it is currently.
I don't recall going back to visit at Christmas in 2011. We had planned to go up new years in 2012-2013 but that's when mom went into the hospital so those plans were boshed. We stayed away in 2012 but I called her when I could. The calls became less often.
She did come to visit us in the summer of 2012. Mrs. Wanzer brought her up and we played with Bri and watched an old black and white movie.
The last few years of her life I felt really awkward with her. There was this huge distance that we couldn't really separate. Hugging her felt really half-hearted. I don't know if she was conscious of the physical change in her body and how thin and frail she had gotten. She didn't want to hug me tightly like she used to to try to hide her physical state? I don't know. Maybe it reflected the secrets she was keeping? When she was here we just didn't have anything to talk about. It just felt really strange. Mrs. Wanzer came to pick her up and that was the last time I saw her mentally with it and functional.
I think she knew she was dying at that point and knew it would be soon. I think she wanted something from me but I don't know what it was. I think I failed her somehow that last visit. I'm not an empath. You usually have to hit me pretty hard over the head to get a message through to me. She was just so good at pretending everything was perfect that I just couldn't see through that facade.
It's like these movies where there's always some spiritual connection made or deep emotional revelation the grows and bursts and everyone in the theater is crying and taking something deeply personal away with them. We didn't have that moment. Maybe that was what she was looking for. I'm more than able and willing to have a moment like that I just didn't know to look for it in that particular moment. I forgot she was mortal.
I took it for granted there would be other times for connection and evolution.
And after everything that has happened this past decade, I should have known better.
I'm still learning that lesson repeatedly and too late.
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