purgatory on Mother's Day (#20 without my mother)

 I guess we are the point in my life where I can write one entry a year lol. So sorry to future self for not writing more -- this year has been so pivotal that it's kind of crazy I haven't been writing. 

we can start with mom, I guess. she was released after two months by the hospital back into the world, and we've lost track of her whereabouts somewhat. we know what town she is staying in, but we haven't heard from her in a while. my uncle got an email a few weeks ago so we know she's alive and communicating, but that's about it. my brother hasn't been telling me anything and I don't want to ask him if he's heard from her, so we just don't talk about it. it's awful. I hope she's ok, but I also don't want to really know.

I was relieved I didn't have to go fly on an airplane and deal with her. I was grateful I didn't hear from her directly. I wasn't surprised that she was released or that she decided to stay the course in not taking medication. I'm never surprised anymore.

what I AM surprised about is that I have spent the past 8 months taking care of myself in ways I never have. I had gotten to a point physically where my knee was in need of replacement -- and it scared me into getting bariatric surgery about two months ago. I have lost almost 100 pounds, and changed almost every aspect of my food life. it's the kind of life change that I never thought myself capable of -- and what I have always wanted. I am mothering myself with the kind of grace and love that I want to give my daughters as they grow up. (did you know there's two of them now? there are two little girls that call me mommy. it's surreal.)

so now I am approaching Mother's Day, again, with guilt and grief and joy all wrapped into one. TWENTY YEARS of Mother's Day without my mother. 

as long as I live, I will never understand how she gave me up. how she gave this future up. 

part of the deal with bariatric surgery is that you're required to do a mental health evaluation. the therapist and I hit it off so well that now she's my therapist beyond just the single eval. and she said last week that part of my mother is literally broken - her brain is broken. and that's how I can explain it to my eldest daughter, who keeps asking about my mother.

I guess that's the answer.

my mother loved me, but her brain got broken, and it can't be fixed. but that doesn't mean my brain is broken or will be - because I choose therapy, and Prozac, and loving my daughters so much that I will always choose what is best for them over me.

so happy Mother's Day to me, living in purgatory with my own mother, but living in heaven with my sweet girls. 

mama loves you. mama loves you so much. mama loves you more than anything. literally anything.

she's back.

 It's been a long, long time friends. I wouldn't say I've been perfect or had nothing to say for the past few years. I've just been so busy. And tired. I don't have much left at the end of my day to write about much. And it's a shame because experiencing motherhood through the lens of my own childhood leaves me breathless most days. 

When your parent is mentally ill, you are almost programmed to wait for the other shoe to drop when things are good. And things have been good for a while now. Too good. Too quiet. I confess I've been stalking her online blog (purely because she sent me the link once) and it's felt better to know she's alive rather than fear she was dead. It's full of bullshit and gibberish and hallucinations and all of her conspiracy theories -- all of which I hate reading -- so I usually just look for the date of the last published post and move on with my day. I was thinking about her, I check it, I see she's alive, and I continue on. Her last post was last December, and she is a prolific writer, so I've been on edge. 

I hate when I'm right.

My brother told me last week that he had heard from a doctor in a hospital, and that she had appeared in a city where she hasn't been in decades. They presume she took a train to get there. For some reason, she wandered into a police officer and said her leg hurt. And then somehow that turned into her being admitted to the behavioral health wing. The doctor found my brother's phone number and filled him in.

She's admitted.

She's being medicated.

She's eventually going to be discharged.

And my brother has found out she was evicted from her apartment, her stuff is all gone, and she effectively has nothing to her name but the clothes on her back and whatever she had with her.

Shoe drop.

I'm proud of myself for handling all this news as well as I have. It brings up so much of the old anxiety but it feels duller. Less painful. Less chaotic. Thank god for all that therapy and 20 years of grieving for her already. Would I survive this otherwise?

Things we have decided: we don't want to be involved. But we don't want her to be homeless. My husband pointed out there's no way to prevent and I know he's right. I have been careful not to dwell too much yet on the image of her wandering streets and being a bag lady. I am hopeful that she might get lucid enough for someone to get through to her that she doesn't have to live that way. That there are some limited options. Despite the political climate, I am hopeful there are enough social services left to help her find housing and food...

But no, I don't want to talk to her. I don't really want to see her. And I don't want to be responsible for her. She is a grown-ass adult and needs to handle her own life. I have my own children and my own life to live. 

I often wonder what the social workers and the doctors will think of me. If they will judge me harshly. I hope not. I really am a good person -- I just can't go back to losing my own sanity for the expense of helping someone who doesn't want to be saved. She has spent 20 years on an unmedicated schizoaffective bender and I can't fix her. 

Fuck. She's back. FUCK.

toddler life and anxiety meds.

hello to those of you out there in this world of anonymous blogging. it's been a long, long time. my daughter is now almost TWO years old, and it is so hard to believe. time is a such a thief. perhaps this time period has just kept me too busy to dwell on my mother as much. or maybe i'm really good at avoiding thinking about her. 

its been almost two years since my last post and i feel as if i don't have much to offer the world in writing. i have a daily routine where I work my insane job with long hours, and cherish the hour or so each morning I get to see my child. being a working mother is the hardest thing i've ever done in my life - and i am in awe of the parents who willingly stay home each day to be a caretaker. it is all so much work, and so tiring. my daughter is just amazing. the entire world is in her eyes! she is funny, and joyful, and exuberant, and confident, and beautiful, and determined. every moment with her is better than the next, and i am in love in such a different way. 

(how, oh how, could my mother abandon me?  

the older i get, the more confused i get.) 

the more recent development, i guess, is that i had gotten to a crippling level of anxiety. i had spent the first year of her life carefully trying to keep us all safe from covid, even though i work somewhere with high probability of exposure. in january, despite all my best efforts, she brought it home from day care. and my husband developed a heart issue a few weeks later after we both caught it. it was devastating and scary. i didn't cope very well.

it has been a crushing level of stress.

so when i had my physical this past march, i was honest with my doctor. i had gotten to the point where i couldn't focus at work. everything made me angry. i wanted to sleep all day or not at all. i wasn't enjoying my time with my family because i was so busy worrying about everything. i was crying over nothing and everything. i was, quite simply, a hot mess. even more so than i remember being in those days a million years ago when i started this blog.

and my doctor said - "girl, you don't have to struggle with this alone. let me prescribe something to help!" 

maybe its the child-of-a-mentally-ill-parent thing, but i struggled to say yes. there was a brief moment where i felt... defeated. like i hadn't done enough to keep myself well. like my father, who had spent my entire childhood watching me for symptoms, had failed. 

but then i remembered my daughter. and how i was acting around her some days. so i said "ok. i'll try it." 

all i can say, weeks later now, is that i shouldn't have waited this long. the same thoughts come up, the same worries come up, but now they just dissipate in the rain and it doesn't feel like fight or flight. i can breathe. i can function.

so whoever, and wherever you are, speak up to your doctor about how you're feeling. i should've been the poster child for being honest with a doctor about my mental health, but i was hiding it. or lying to myself.

i wish i hadn't waited this long. don't you wait if you need help. there are so many resources out there and you aren't alone!! and i'm still here. tired, mommy-brained out, but here.

I'm a mother now.

My last post was so sad. It feels very foreign to me reading it back now. 

My daughter is here. She was born in the evening and climbed up my breast the minute they placed her there, ready to see my face just as much I was wanted to see hers. She held my finger and looked at everything - me, my husband, the room, the doctor. She was incredibly aware of the world and couldn't wait to be a part of it. Even now, 4 and a half months later, she has the worst case of FOMO I've ever seen. What a joy and a gift.

I haven't written about it at all since her birth, so please indulge me here. The practice of writing and journaling was once a daily affair for me. I've missed it.

No one had prepared me for the guttural, animal-like instinct that takes over during childbirth. I guess I had romanticized it based on movies. My mother had never told me about anything, and my father's answers about her time with birth was that she could withstand an incredible amount of pain, didn't need an epidural, and shooed him back home over night while she recovered only to fight to leave the hospital 24 hours after I was born. (Superwoman, indeed.) Now that I've been through the experience, I've added new differences between me and my mother to the catalog. I handled most of the birth without the epidural because it wore off halfway through, but it kicked back in for pushing (THANK YOU LORD.) I couldn't imagine my husband leaving me during the night there. And I would've stayed another day if they had let me, mostly because its a pandemic and we knew we wouldn't have help once we got home and the ability to send the baby to the nursery was sooooo lovely.

But the process of learning to breastfeed was traumatic. It was really hard. She wouldn't latch, and it was a struggle from the very first minute. Here again I thought of my mother, who used to tell me I was "allergic" to her and couldn't breastfeed. My father has since explained that she just didn't want to deal with breastfeeding me and put me on formula about a month in. Maybe that's why it was important to me to figure out - and we did. Five traumatic weeks of having an LC come to my house in PPE in a pandemic to help me and my baby learn. Five weeks of her screaming at my nipple and refusing the breast. Five weeks until she gave it another try and figured it out and made us both relax about it finally. Every time I nurse my daughter, I see a long line of women in my family history and our connection, and it makes me feel so... whole. Like belonging to something bigger than myself. I feel so right in the world, but also so sad for my mother. Perhaps that why our bond wasn't strong enough to get her the help she needed. I may never know. But I'm grateful my daughter figured out how to latch and build that bond with me. 

When I look at her, I see my own childhood through a completely different lens. Surely, my mother and I must have had these moments too... laying in bed together, her nursing, me playing with her hair. Bathing her in the sink. Watching my husband teach her how to stick out her tongue and make her giggle during diaper changes. (I could write an entire novel based on my husband's dad instincts, and how much I've fallen in love with him all over again.) Rocking her in my arms before bed. Picking out her outfits, and doting on her new discoveries of feet and her reflection in a mirror. 

How did my mother go from this period of love and mother-daughter bonding to willingly giving up our relationship just to stay off her medication? I am struggling more and more with understanding her. Before it had made sense. She told me the drugs made her feel dead inside and she'd rather feel something than nothing. I understood that. But to choose that over her relationship with me is more confusing than ever. Perhaps she really didn't make the choice the way I have imagined it these last 15 years. Perhaps the illness made her feel like she didn't have a choice, and it was her life over mine. Perhaps she didn't realize the choice I was forcing her to make. Either way, I cannot imagine ever choosing ANYTHING over my daughter. 

Every night, and every morning since she's come home from the hospital, I have leaned into her ear and whispered the same thing:

"Mama loves you. Mama loves you so much. Mama loves you more than anything."

I mean it. There is nothing I wouldn't give or do for her. 

...so why couldn't my mother do the same?

i'm still here.

It's been a long time. Many, many years at this point, which surprises me. Does anyone still even read this blog?

If I were to delve a little more deeply into why I haven't been writing, I'm sure that the usual answers would come up: I'm actually happy. I've been internalizing too much. I've been leaving my feelings at arms length, or ignoring them completely. How do I catch you up? What do I even write about right now?

My mother. It all comes back to my mother, and where we are now. Which is the same place we were. She is still off meds, still stalking me online, still a shadow in my life that comes and goes. This period of time after my wedding has been new and wonderful and heartbreaking in so many ways. Because after marriage, you start to want children. I've always wanted children, but now there's an urgency. I'm 37. I'm not getting any younger.

Exactly one year ago, I was pregnant. It was Mother's Day 2019. We had practically just found out, and the immediate family knew. Everyone wished me a happy Mother's Day, which made me insane because I'm Jewish. You don't do that... it's bad luck.

I couldn't believe it had finally happened - we had been trying for over a year. A year of heartbreak every single fucking month. If anyone out there has struggled with pregnancy, you know exactly what I mean. We had gotten to the point that my doctor had sent us off to a fertility doctor, and we had found out exactly how much money it was going to cost us to have a baby. My weight was a huge concern, along with my age, and the tests that they had done made us concerned about it actually happening without an egg donor. At literally the last possible second, we conceived naturally. It was a miracle. It was crazy.

It was too good to last. We lost the baby at the end of June.

So how does this all tie back to my mother? Well, I didn't know what a miscarriage really meant. I didn't get the full picture. The details and the business of losing a baby at 9 weeks are emotionally draining, but it was the physical affects that left me speechless. And I wanted my mother. I wanted to know if she had been as afraid as I had been that whole time. I wanted someone to take care of me. My husband and his mother were amazing. They held me up the entire time, and put me back together again. It was a messy, horrible and painful time, and once again I was reminded how lucky I was to be married to my husband.

My father also somehow stepped up and into my recovery. He moved near us a few months before that, and it's been incredible to have him so close. He came over almost every day while I lay on the couch trying to not fall apart again. He tried to remember my mother's health history with pregnancy. He did his best.

And I healed. Physically. I tried again. And miracle of miracles, we got pregnant again. I'm now 2 months away from meeting my child during a fucking pandemic. There are so many other feelings to unpack but I think I'll leave it for another day.

My mother's absence from the most painful experience of my life was harsh. But the older I get, the more I realize that there are other people in my life that absolutely stepped in and held me together. If I can get through a miscarriage without her, I know sure as shit I can get through a birth without her.

I feel my strength every day lately.

an entire year has flown by.

i've thought about writing and then not writing. or forgetting. or not wanting to delve too into my own mind over such a year.

it's strange to think about how much can happen in just a year. it looks like such a short amount of time on a calendar.

after the last post, my boyfriend moved in with me. before i knew it, we were engaged. and even sooner after that, we were married. just like that. a blink of an eye. and everything felt so perfectly timed. when i think about the year, it just comes as adjectives. amazing. whirlwind. romantic. happy. lucky. loved. different.

very different.

i'm still not sure how or why i get to live this life with the most perfect man. but i do, and he's mine, and i never have to give him up, until the good lord separates us. if anyone had told me that i would get to keep him, i would have held on even tighter convinced that something would happen to take him away. i'm still terrified he'll just go away. or get tired of me. or realize i'm really not his dream. i am so careful to lock away the part of me that deals with my mother... the side of me that sometimes just weeps, and aches in places that i can't describe properly. the side of me that makes me feel utterly alone, even if i'm physically not alone.

today was my birthday. i had to work, and he did everything right. he made me breakfast, and took me to lunch, and sent me flowers, and made me dinner. and i laid in his arms at bedtime, and just unraveled about my mother for a solid 30 minutes. he was sleepy, and saying the right things, and falling asleep, but i couldn't stand the restlessness. so now i'm up, and sitting here writing in the hopes it will get her out of mind and i'll sleep at some point. he's snoring in the other room, and i'm crying over my mother.

where do i even begin? this snow globe of bullshit swimming in my head right now is so frustrating, and familiar. and annoying. i thought i was past it.

i am jealous of other women in my life and their mothers.
i am jealous of his sister, and her relationship with her mother, and i tell myself that i'll never have that with her. that she doesn't want that with me.
i am jealous of my brother's wife, and her relationship with her mother.
i am jealous of all of them.

i will never have it. i will try to have children someday, and have to be alone in it. i will not have a mother to help me, like they all have. and i resent it. and i hate it. and it terrifies the shit out of me.

i've carefully created families within my friendships, and i latch onto my aunts and my cousins and my friends like they can fill this void. but they can't. they're a cheap replacement for something i will never regain, and i hate it.

i hate her for this. i hate her for not being strong enough. for not loving me enough to just stay on the fucking medication and do the hard work of living with mental illness. she chose paranoia and voices and mental immobilization over loving and caring for me, and i will never be able to forgive her.

and fuck it all, i miss her. more than a decade of this, and i still can't get over the simple fact that she's gone. and i won't replace her.

fuck. FUCK. i hate her for this. i hate me for being this upset over it, tonight of all nights.

i'm stronger than this, dammit.

The round sky goes on minding its business.

Your absence is inconspicuous;

Nobody can tell what I lack.

–Sylvia Plath, “Parliament Hill Fields”

her sister died.

my mother's sister and i had a troubled relationship. i loved her so much as a child - she was the "cool" aunt. she had the nice house, and the good snacks, and her kids were the same age as me and my brother. she was the one who let me sleep over, and had the pool in the backyard.

i got a phone call in mid-october that she had been in a serious car accident and suffered a brain clot in her brain. the whole thing was so surreal. i didn't believe it was as bad as they told me, and held out hope, even as she clinged to life in a medical coma. she couldn't die. she just couldn't. she was 61, and a new grandmother, and she was always there. always. a pain in my ass, but always there.

a few days later, she was gone, just like that. the bleeding in her brain hadn't stopped, and her children had to make the decision to let her go. the same day, i had tickets to go out of the country on a vacation that was pre-paid and couldn't be rebooked. i did the dick move and went on the trip. i knew it meant i would miss the funeral, and i tried to cope with that fact. you see, i'm always the one in family to do the right thing. i am usually the first one to cancel all the plans and go help. it felt awful to not do that this time.

but this was so complicated.

this woman, this aunt, whom i loved so much as a child, had hurt me so deeply as an adult. i've written about her on this blog before - she was the one who scolded me for not keeping in touch with my mother (even as she had an order of protection.) the one who helped my mother "kidnap" my brother and i the night before our parent's custody decision was announced by the judge. the one who constantly berated me for my weight and for always being single. she made me feel like shit pretty much every time i saw her. and we hadn't spoken in almost a year.

but i wept. oh how i wept for her.

i couldn't decide at the time if it was for her, for her kids, for me, or for my mother. you see, her kids didn't want my mother to know. she hasn't been in touch with my aunt for years, and the concern was that telling my mother would cause some sort of reaction. no one wants to deal with my mother. no one.

but my aunt was always the one who explained her to me. no one knew my mother quite like her, and somehow in my mind, i had always assumed she would be there as my mother aged and my brother and i had to make decisions about her. now she's gone, and i have no idea what she would have told me.

i wish i had asked her more questions. asked her for more stories to get to know my mother better by proxy. i should have called her more often. i should have... i should have...

even now, a month later, it doesn't feel real. her birthday and my birthday are two days apart, and she always called me. it's hard to imagine her not calling this year. i took it for granted she would always be there. it makes me feel more alone in this burden of my mother's illness.

healing takes a lot of time

i've been working on a project where i am archiving all of my family's photos. it's been intense - a journey through their lives from the 1890s up until now. i just got through the end of the 70's, and it took me 7 months to work up the nerve to really start scanning the year of my parent's marriage. seeing photos of them together is still weird and it leaves me wondering more and more about what my mother was like back then. it's so much easier to imagine my father in his late 20's. my mother is such a more difficult puzzle to put together.

she was so beautiful, and young, and fresh. these photos don't remind me at all of the woman i knew as a child or as an adult now. it's so obvious that my father loved her to distraction. how hard it must have been for him too...

mental illness is such a beast. it steals the ones you love so completely if they go untreated. i would have loved to know this woman in the photos - i bet she was amazing.

but that's the thing about photos right? they only capture the good and the great moments. they rarely catch the beast within, or the fights i knew my parents had. photos can lie.

mother's day #10 without her.

i've survived the day.

slowly, over a lot of years, this feeling of survival has become more difficult to detect. 10 years ago, when we were in the middle of her spiral and her eventual (and sadly temporary) incarceration, it was raw rage. grief. sadness. i couldn't make it through the day without drinking or going fetal on the bed for the afternoon.

over the years, it's taken different paths. i'd work the entire day just to keep myself busy. i'd spend it with my grandmother, who spent decades filling in for my mother in my life. the last few years have been the "easiest", i guess. i've found it harder to remember exactly how many years it's been since i've seen her, or how long it's been since we had a conversation.

but i know this is absolutely mother's day #10 without her.

it's so strange to watch people's Facebook messages on mother's day. it's hard for us motherless daughters. maybe if i had kids of my own, i wouldn't hate this fucking holiday, but i don't. i have nothing to distract me other than the thought that i'm a heck of a cat momma, and my employees are my kids in many ways. my job has been my sanctuary for all these years, and today i wasn't there.

no, today was a different routine.

i spent mother's day with my boyfriend and his mother. i bought her a bracelet. i couldn't help myself. it was the first time in a decade where i felt like i had someone to do that for. (looking back on this, i should've sent my grandmother a card. tomorrow.) i was almost giddy about it. this overwhelming thought of, "i have someone to celebrate this year!" and even though she is not my mother-in-law (yet, at least) and we still don't know each other well, she has taken me into her arms and hugged me so hard that i almost cried. she has texted to see how i'm feeling, and made me feel like a part of her family. and every bone in my body is just praying so hard that someday i will actually be her daughter-in-law. i had always hoped that someday i'd meet the right guy, and that he'd have a mother that i could love as my own. i know that i have. i am so in love with him, and all i dream about anymore is our lives together.

i'm so terrified it will all go away again. i'm praying so hard that they never go away.

i made it through most of the day without talking about my mother. my boyfriend brought it up and i shrugged it off defensively, as i usually do. we took a nap in the afternoon, and he had me in his arms, and i started crying but he didn't notice (thank goodness.) i didn't want to explain why. it was a private thought. it was a moment i will always remember - because i felt so safe, so lucky, so happy, and so heartbroken over her.

look at how strong i am. look at how much i've grown in 10 years. would she even recognize me? would i recognize her?

this guilt just never goes away.

my brother put up a photo of his wife and mother-in-law today and said that they were the most important mothers in his world. isn't it funny how we both have latched on to our significant other's moms? not funny. not the right word. i can't even put into words how unfair it seems to me. we have been cheated out of a life with our mother, and the fact that we do everything we can to fill that void with women who mean something to us just shows how hurt we are. hurt little kids missing their mommy.

i wonder what she did today. who she was with. did she go out, or stay in? i have no idea. i don't really want to know.

i just want my boyfriend here and his arms around me so i can feel safe again. i don't feel safe right now. i feel scared and lonely and sad. i can't believe it's been 10 whole years. it feels like a lifetime.

being motherless - not by death, but by choice - is a special kind of torture, and it just never seems to heal up right.

she's still in my head today.

you did not break me
i'm still fighting for peace

well i've got thick skin and an elastic heart
but your blade it might be too sharp

and i will stay up through the night
let's be clear, i won't close my eyes
and i know that i can survive
i walked through fire to save my life.

emotional crossroads.

my brother and i talk about my mother sporadically. tonight was apparently one of the nights that we had a sorta serious discussion, even though it lasted for about 5 minutes. it went something like this:

him: "i haven't heard from mom lately."
me: "i haven't either."
him: "i'm starting to feel really bad about it. like it just feels so wrong."
me: "i know what you mean."
him: "it felt wrong 5 years ago."
me: "yeah but i was a lot angrier 5 years ago. i needed the space."
him: "well she's getting older. she's too tired to keep up with the antics. yeah, there's risks. but she doesn't even know her oldest grandchild."
me: "at some point, one of us is going to have to go up there. probably me. i mean, she's just going to be a nuisance if she's back in our lives."
him: "yeah, but i can handle it. you can handle it. the kids can't."

and that was kinda it.

i think we are realizing that she is truly aging. the raw rage that we had is fading, and it's coming to a point where we are going to have to make some kind of decision.

what in the world are we going to do?

neither of us want the financial or emotional burden of dealing with her shit. but neither of us want her dying alone and unloved. and i think that's what i'm coming to terms with. i do love her. i always have. it hasn't always felt like it, but it's the love that can't be broken between a parent and a child. i really don't want her back in my life. it's so peaceful, and so nice, without her.

what in the world are we going to do?

we are at an emotional crossroads - two healed little kids, who were once so broken, heartbroken, and angry, are now coming to terms with the reality of cutting their mother out of their lives. did we truly mean for it to be forever? did i? did i really mean it?

are the risks as bad as i think they are? or have i healed enough to test them? i'm scared. i'm really scared to let her back in.

would i rather live with guilt, or regret? either way, it feels like shit. and either way, i can't fix her. if i let her back in my life, it would be solely for her benefit. not ours. not mine. is that enough of a reason?

whirlwind romance.

i'm in love. in love, in love, in love, with a wonderful man. he came out of nowhere, and creeped into my life and my heart like a thief in the night. we were set up by his sister, years after she had first told me about him. out of stupid fear, i had said no before. he lived too far away. he probably didn't like curvy girls. he couldn't possibly like me. how could anyone?

and now he's such a huge part of my life.

he makes me want to be more. be better. heal and grow. take on the world. embrace a new chapter in my life.

i'm terrified he'll disappear. i had a dream the other night where he left me for another woman. someone older, and uglier. i woke myself up crying.

i've never been so scared, or happy, or grateful, in my life.

i want him wrapped up in every part of me. i want his heartbeat next to mine all night. i want his arms around me when i come home. i want hazel-eyed ginger children.

my life suddenly feels so full of possibility that i feel impatient. my therapist has told me to stay patient, stay calm, and enjoy this ride. but the little kid in me, so abandoned and so lost, is screaming for stability and control. i'm having trouble telling that little kid to listen. i just want to start my real life already.

there and back again

i was free, i thought. i had banished so many demons to the past. i had felt like i conquered the world. i was on the right path. i was careful in the goals i was setting.

i fell back into old patterns. i overwhelmed myself back into sleeping all day. she sent an email invite to see her photos online, and i barely dealt with it at all... let alone dealt with it well. her face started to haunt my dreams again. i started to call my father all the time.

i ate like crap, and gained weight.

and inch by inch, nail scratch by scratch, i continue to pull myself out and away from the abyss. i've fought too hard to allow this. i've done too much work to let myself say "fuck it" and fall back.

i'm not where i was. but i'm holding on. i'm holding on so hard.

tethered.

she must have a spiritual connection with me... a cosmic string tethered between my heart and hers. i received a letter from her today. after worrying that something was wrong, this shows up in the mail:

"dear xxxxxx:
i developed this address for you as above online. besides that, nosy databases state that you are friends with "XXXXXXX", a neighbor. Well, good for you!

yes, i know several years ago you stated that you didn't want future contact with your mom: me. i just find that hard to accept because i loved you so.

one last try to put things right between us. i'd like to see you and talk things over. i'm free in august and could travel down by bus. i'd like to ask whether you'd consider letting me stay over for one night at least. i'm a rather poor person without assets. still, i've prospered enough to pay for a round trip bus fare. no, i do not have plans to move south. i could never afford to without help on a regular basis.

as for the rest, i'm really quite healthy these days, xxxxxxx. healthy and normal. i've been working for the past five years. i have a credible life. please share it with me. i am now 63. perhaps you might recall that i was your wet nurse. and that i loved you very much.

i broke ties with the past and began a new life under a new name. it's been rather good for me. i am very alone and sad about it. i care about you. i am also curious about what you have done in the past eight years. so, please write back and give me permission to visit you in august. it might be august 7th until the 9th.

all my best,
xxxxxxxxxxx."

letters from her like this make me uneasy. there's a reason i didn't open them when they would arrive. nothing good comes of me reading them. at best, they make me more angry. at worst, they make me feel like shit.

either way, i file them away for another time... maybe for another life. my mother, as i knew and loved her, is dead and gone. this woman - she is not my mother. she is a stranger, trapped in a psychotic world of hallucinated realities, and while her words might seem otherwise, i know it is all a front. she is not medicated. she is not well. and i am not ready to let her into my life.

maybe that makes me an asshole. or selfish. i like to think of it as the purest form of self-preservation.

mirror mirror

my second niece has arrived in the world. it's a funny thing, this growing up. watching my brother welcome his second child. seeing so much of him in his daughter. wondering what it was like when i was the toddler meeting the newborn sibling for the first time, instead of my oldest niece staring at her new sister in the swing... this cyclical pattern of lives over generations. 

i watched the child cradled in her maternal grandmother's arms and instantly thought about my own mother. she is missing all of this. these beautiful sweet girls do not know the touch of their father's mother. i am watching them grow, cherishing them as if they were my own, and secretly weeping that my mother is not here.

she will not be here for these moments in my life.

i have not heard a peep out of her in months. since december. is she alive? is she under a roof? is she fed? will i ever have the strength to truly seek the answers?

i stood on my patio for a while tonight, and looked into the sunset. i can't help but wonder if there is someone out there for me - someone who wants to build a life and a family together. i look at my nieces and long for little dirty blonde children with green eyes... i want to name them something beautiful and powerful, and teach them what it is to have a life filled with love. i want to give them the kind of mother i never had. 

i'm ready for my own life to start. i let my hair go wild after a shower tonight, and caught myself in a mirror. for just a moment - a split second - i looked so much like my mother, it hurt. it felt like she was right there staring back at me. 

even in my most hopeful moments, her shadow is right there. her reflection is looking back at me, and taunts me with the reminder that she is not here. she is not here, and i am motherless all over again.

my friend's mother died

when these things happen, it's always sad. i never know quite what to say, and i'm never near where my friends are because i live so far from everyone... but this one hurts me. after her mother passed, she put up a message on Facebook that said, "hug your mothers for me, even if they're a pain in your ass."

i get what she meant. but i am not able to do that.

a coworker this week asked me about my mom. she was curious. she was appalled (or shocked?) that i couldn't remember the last time i had spoken with her. i think it was at her father's funeral, but i can't remember anymore. this coworker asked so innocently, "will you talk to her ever again? what about if she was sick or in the hospital?"

my mother's aging is something that i've thought about at times, but it leaves mixed feelings. i don't know what i would do if she were suddenly in a hospital and dead three days later, like my friend's mother. i don't know how i would react. i don't know how the ball of guilt and shame would weigh me down -- surely, it would. but i can't deal with it now.

maybe if and when the time comes, i'll know how i want to react. i'd feel so much better if i had a plan for the inevitable. but how can you plan that?

i can't hug my mother. i've already grieved for her for many, many years. the woman alive now is someone i don't know - my mother, the mother i knew and loved, is long gone. the woman alive now is a shell of the woman i loved as a child, and i don't know if i'll mourn her in quite the same way.

well, these are sad thoughts for a sunday night. for now, i will comfort my friend as best i can - without ever saying, "i know how you feel." i don't. i don't think i ever will.

fading rage

the anger with her has dissipated. after so many years of raw, unmitigated rage, i am left with a peaceful hollow feeling. it has been a weird journey, and i know it's not over. but the girl i was - the one who wrote those blog entries in 2009 - is not who i am now. the woman i am now is much stronger, more resourceful, more compassionate...

i have been meditating on who i am a lot lately. i lost myself for a long time. i now recognize myself in the mirror. i may lose it in moments here and there, but overall, i am finally, finally comfortable in my own skin. i may not like everything i see, but that's just the physical stuff. the mental stuff - the emotional stuff - that, i OWN. i am proud of it. i am celebrating it. 

i am who i am because of my parents. because of the family members and friends that have held my hands over the past ten years. because of my own relentless determination that i would not, could not, ever give up. i had a very deep conversation with my therapist this week, and she started to cry when i said something. we were talking about how i had overcome some really dark emotions at work, and i said, "i might not get it right, but i'll try and try over and over again until the cows come home." 

she said she got emotional about it because it "sums you up so perfectly."

i will falter. i will struggle. but unlike the girl who tried desperately to keep herself together in the aftermath of her mother's abandonment, i am already together. i am able to cope, and recognize, and understand, and adjust. those abilities weren't there ten years ago. 

so here i am. still under the weight of being motherless, but learning to rely on my own inner mother. i have been thinking of her a lot lately, and her own path compared to mine. by now, she was a mother. at my age, she was married with a new child, and seemingly had all the things that should've felt like fulfillment. her illness stole that. i am proud of who she was, and is. it doesn't mean i'm ready for her to be back in my life - i'm not - but i am proud to be her daughter. that isn't something i would've said ten years ago.

i'm saying it now. i am the daughter of a mentally ill woman, and i am going to be ok.

(now, if only i could make as much progress on the physical stuff.)

the deafening, deafening silence

i am having trouble remembering how long its been since i've seen her in person. or heard her voice. it occurred to me that i have to stop and think about how old she is now, and even harder to remember details about her. i have not heard from her in months, and the sound is stifling.

and always, the thought lingers, "when will the other shoe drop?"

this quiet cannot, and will not, go on forever.

happy little normal life.

i didn't realize how long it's been. i'm going to chalk it up to the fact that i am truly able to handle things in my life so much easier now.

i actually travelled all the way to confront the man i was starting to fall in love with, and had my heart smashed like a piñata. but the toolbox i've developed over the past year - the self-love i've been trying to practice - has helped me so much. i am so much quicker to bounce back.

my job is going fine. my daily life is going fine. i've started running, which i've discovered is as therapeutic as an hour in my therapist's office... i'd like to believe that this is my true self. it feels as if the last ten years of healing were just me surviving. that it was just a decade of going through the motions and putting all my energy into working and hating myself.

lately, it's been different. i think that the guy helped with pushing me into thinking about certain stuff. he made me see myself differently. worthy of love. of sex. of someone wanting me for me, even if he didn't want me permanently in his life because his own was too complicated to add another issue. but i told him things in our brief moment together. that i wanted to run again. that i wanted to start my life, but for real. that i felt left out of so many things. and having that moment with him, although brief and passionate and real for me, just left me convinced that what i want is a partner for my life, and a family of my own. i'm so over the waiting game, and telling myself that i can't have these things.

i'm ready for a new story to tell myself.

i feel so powerful. so beautiful. so ready to take on my life. its a paradigm shift that has been slowly building over the past two years, and i love it. i love feeling like i can take any knock. i love that i can think about my mom lately, and feel less like weeping. there's an emotion there that i can't name yet, but it reminds me of acceptance or resignation.

i had a dream about her the other week that was so real i woke up in tears. but it did not destroy me. it did not level me emotionally. i acknowledge the feeling, and moved on with my day. a few years ago, that dream would have curled me into a ball for days. not now.

i am so much stronger than i used to be. and i am on the right path. i know i am.

thank you for still reading, out there. you are more important to me than you will ever know. and i am always here for you.

same old thing.

why am i so quick to give my whole heart? to someone who doesn't want it, or doesn't have room for it?

i'm pining away for a man that i don't get to have. even if he wants me too. it's incredibly unfair, and all too predictable.