Tag: TheExHusband

Things I may or may not have learned

It’s a vampiric version of Romeo and Juliet with a mixture of The Cure and Morrissey song lyrics to fatten it up a bit

– My tl;dr summary of Breaking Dawn

Dear Internet,
TheHusband was kind enough to extract content from what I was thought to be corrupted SQL tables of previous incarnation of the blog, with the date range of 2008 – 2010. Because the data was all dumped in a text file for me, I had to manually place it in EPbaB, which is incredibly time consuming. If you follow me on Tumblr or LiveJournal, you may have seen a plethora of the posts show up that while were time stamped with the correct date of their original publication, were showing up as new content in the Tumblr and
LiveJournal feeds, which caused some confusion when several people asked me what the devil was going on! Understandable, so I turned off the auto-posting when I work on the project but plan on writing up a summary (such as this) of the content posted so you can follow along.
I’ve so far have been able to get through July and early August of 2008. A month has shown me definite patterns to my thoughts, like struggles with my mother and that I was able to expand nearly 3 THOUSAND WORDS on a review on Breaking Dawn. I’m both curiously fascinated and total cringe worthy of this forensic expedition. But one thing absolutely does not change: I am always of the fierce opinion.
More to come soon.
TTFN,
Lisa

It was a dark and stormy comic

Dear Internet,
TheHusband recently said to me:

Not only are you one of the most ambitious people I know, but you’re also one of the laziest.

 
Here’s an example of that statement:
Within the last year or so, I’ve suddenly got a huge lady boner for comics. Having dipped in and out of the various comics (web and print) & graphic novels on and off for years in a variety of formats, as well as knowing a few comic books artists, this is not really that surprising I should have such a huge interest in them. What’s surprising is that the re-sparking of this passion came fairly heavy in my late ’30s and with a fervor of lust usually reserved for my love of chocolate and writing instruments.
Continue reading “It was a dark and stormy comic”

I may or may not quit you

Dear Internet,
All we’ve talked about is me, me, me. I think it’s time that we talked about you.
I think we need a break from each other. Or at the very least, we may need to start seeing other people.
You see Internet, I love you, I do. You’ve given me my husband, job & life skills, friends, and adventures galore. You are beyond delightful. But our current arrangement is not working out for me at the moment and that saddens me. Truth be told Internet, it hasn’t been working out for quite some time but I was always desperate to hold on to you and be deliriously desperately in denial of the hold you have on me. When we first met Interent, everyday was a fresh day of learning. I was always digging into your nooks and crannies, scratching you under your chin. Now, it seems, nothing is really fresh anymore. Everything is a retweet, a digg, a stumbleupon, a like, or a tweet.
I’m just not that into you anymore.
Continue reading “I may or may not quit you”

Tragedy in the style of the Greeks

Dear Internet,
I’m deeply sorry for the last month of silence. It was not fair to you, to me, or to the dozens of wonderful people who have reached out to me. I have a fairly good reason for at least half of that time:

If you’ve been following me around the social spheres, I talked about this surgery quit a bit in which I opted to have the arthritis and bone chips literally chipped away from my right ankle and the tendon in my right calf cut and lengthened. The original injury occurred in December of 1994, when in the throes of exam week, I slipped and fell on the ice glossed driveway at my parent’s house. This ice aerobics gave me a double fracture and a dislocation in my right ankle, later binded by 12 pins and a plate. When the pins and plate came out, the doctors told me at 22 that I would have fairly severe arthritis. I laughed. By the time I turned 30, the arthritis started making its introductions to my body and by the time I was 35, was becoming a roommate in the vein of single white female.
Continue reading “Tragedy in the style of the Greeks”

Spider-Fly

Dear Internet,
I’m terribly afraid that some days I’m going to completely bore you with my tales. I hope you will forgive me as those days appear for life is not always going to be sunshine and gumdrops. Or grey days and thunder clouds, though as the summer progresses, the latter will be nice.
I woke up with a fright this morning as I dreamt a giant spider with wings was flying around in a room that TheHusband and I were sitting in, and I smashed it with a newspaper, drawing blood down the wall. The body landed in bowl of chips and TheHusband turned his nose up to me when I offered him the bowl of chips with the dead spider-fly body laying on the plates, as if it were purposefully dressing the plate for this occasion. I shot straight up in bed and saw the alarm clock read 6:22 AM.
I have no idea what it means.
Renew is perhaps a good word for today. I’m renewing myself on some projects, renewing my interest in music by listening to Spotify, and renewing my connection with people in general. When I woke this morning, I decided to give a shit today, and just by giving myself permission to give a shit, suddenly I can see a bit clearly.
The blog is not meant to be a quick fix, this I know. But the purpose of this is to chronicle my feelings and thoughts on a more consistent basis. Some days there may be a flurry of long winded posts and others, there may be a dearth where I post nothing but pictures of kittens. I’m just sayin’.
x0x0,
Lisa

And it slows, but for a dream

Dear Internet,
It is nearly midnight.
After my confession, and the cascade of tears that followed, I feel more at ease in my skin. Plans were made for a birthday dinner with my brother and husband, apparently a new family tradition, at The Chop House. Retail therapy cures everything, so before dinner I headed to the mall where I bought myself a new dress and shoes for the evening. The shoes, which while Instagram’d to death, are nude cork wedges. Totally un-Lisa like. But I’m tired of being Lisa-like, so the shoes were bought. While perusing the racks at Macy’s, I considered shoplifting as something also un Lisa-like, but decided that buying shoes that were not my style was more in speed with change. I didn’t fancy spending my 40th birthday night in jail.
Continue reading “And it slows, but for a dream”

The Summer Tale

Dear Internet,
Yesterday as I was leaving work, someone started calling after me I was walking away from the entrance of the library. As I walking and digging in my bag for my phone, it took me a few seconds to realize that someone was yelling my name. When I looked behind me, I saw a woman limping towards me and who, after my confirmation that I was who she was looking for, she began telling me she had lived at Throbbing Manor for nearly 25 years and is currently battling the bank to get repossession of the house. Taken slightly back (How do you talk to a crazy person?), we had a stilted conversation about the gardens, then she had this off-centered laugh about our battle with the ivy, and that she had also met my mother-in-law last year when TheHusband and mother-in-law were working in the gardens during the MIL’s visit. When I could think no more to say, I walked away from her with a twitchy smile on my lips and a what the fuck just happened in my heart.
Today is my 40th birthday.
I’m in my home office, still in my PJs at 1:30 3 in the afternoon. Wednesday is snoring on her pillow under the window fan. I have both windows open, the blinds are pulled down as far as they will go before they go over the lip of the opened window frame, shrouding the room in semi-darkness.
I am severely depressed.
This isn’t “JESUS FUCK, I’M 40!” depressed or even, “Christ. I’m fat” depressed or even a million things that would make us sad and blue on a daily basis. This is different. Far different. This is enveloping not only my heart, but my entire being, it’s physical as well as mental. When I walk, I feel like I’m moving in half-solidified Jello. When I am still, my skin feels like it’s being pushed on at all of its pores. I feel like I am of single mind and two bodies at once: one physical and one epheremal. I watch myself during the motions, a panel of Lisa judges on how well we passed (8.5! Work on your backflip, girl.) through the motion.
Even at my worst stages of BPD, even at the stages of when things were so bad that I felt like there was no way out, there was almost always some small thread of hope that would keep me from being incredibly stupid.
I don’t have that now. At least, not in the same form as before. I don’t have a desire to kill myself but I don’t feel like there is any hope. It seems that I’ve presented myself with a conundrum. Perhaps I am my own unreliable narrative for the second I had written the above, I knew it to be a lie: I want this to go away and I want to be happy.
On paper, everything looks great: I have a great husband, a lovely house, an awesome job. I have old and new friends who are incredible and supportive. I have a brother whose relationship I’m beginning to depend on and materialistically, I want for nothing. For the first time in over a decade, I do not need to calculate the price of an item down to a per hour working cost. But something is not right in Denmark, as all I want to do is do nothing and feel nothing. I just ate a bar of my favorite chocolate. It tasted good, because something tells me this is what I knew to be my favorite bar of chocolate, but it does not make me happy to have eaten it or treat it with joy or even acknowledge that it is good chocolate. It was a bar a chocolate, so I ate it. It’s boiled down to being that simple.
Food is not consumed because it tastes good but consumed because I know it is there for me to eat it. I drink to hydrate, not to enjoy. I watch television to block out hours, not to enrich. (Except for True Blood, because well, that’s True Blood.) I used to read 10-15 books a month, I have finished two books in the last six. When I read the news, of any kind, I have the same emotion for war pieces as I do for saving kittens from a tree. I can’t tell you the last time I felt sexy. Or when the last time I laughed because I was overjoyed. While I never particularly thought of myself as being vain, I did take care of my appearance and even that is slipping. When I do something that should fall into being beautiful, I find that I’ve placed a mask on my body instead. I’m miming what you think I should be doing because that is socially what people know Lisa to do so that is what I’ll do.
So far, over 50 people have wished me a happy birthday on my Facebook wall but I’m crying because no one has sent me a physical card, because I feel that if they really did care, they would spend the few bucks for the card and the stamp. Then I beat myself up over that bit of hypocritical wants since when is the last time I randomly bought someone a card and sent it (i.e. never). Again, a lie: Today’s post revealed a quick written post from my mother who jotted that she was far too young to have a 40 year old daughter.
I am told by people they care about me (see earlier remark about new and old friends being supportive), but I feel like they are just telling me this to soothe their own souls, even when they are being sincere and true. I have stopped engaging with most people locally because I do not know how to be a friend to them anymore as I don’t know how to react anymore to someone loving me, even platonically. When my husband says he loves me, my first reaction is that I feel like he loves me because it’s habit not because he genuinely does. Then I start to cry because I know that bit about my husband is a lie and I feel like an awful human being for even thinking this to be true. And if there is anyone in this world who loves me pure and true, it’s TheHusband.
I am an emotional mess of contradictions and fallacies, and I’m barely keeping my head above water. You were good to me years ago Internet for working things out (and cheaper then therapy). I hope you don’t mind me coming to you again.
x0x0,
Lisa

The Fragility of All Things

Someone who had been an integral part of my past (I’ve known him for more then half my life!) has come back to me again, through the ultra convenience of Facebook. It was a struggle and a challenge this spring when he contacted me, working through what I was feeling as our last few encounters were fairly messy. I was pretty brutal to him the last time, he was brutal to me the time before. The pattern was always the same, whenever we met.
What has been most intriguing about these textual encounters is how much my own perception of myself was sharpened from the presence of a simple Facebook message in my inbox and the conversations that followed. Things I said to M. nearly a decade ago, explanations of my then life choices, are now crystallized. What’s striking is that I knew then, superficially, why I did things the way I did but it was only now, nearly a decade later, that the full realization of those actions are finally being fully understood.
Rationally, I know that I have always understood the reasoning, but it is obvious with a decade long follow up that I was perhaps afraid to vocalize the truth. I will also shamefully admit that I have not had big thinks in a really long time, most of the what goes in and out of my brain has been fluff and candy these last few years. In my youth, I used to write about my big thinks, streams of unconsciousness that would flow unencumbered but in the last few years, it has been far too painful. I wonder, now, if much of my world would have changed if I had not become so afraid?
The surprising thing about this textual relationship is that it challenged me in ways I did not expect. I knew, for example, why I married TheHusband: I love him, he makes me laugh, he challenges me to be a better person, he knows when to let me be fanciful and when I need to be grounded.
But what I did not really realise until that week just how clearly the TheHusband sees the inner me, the one that hardly anyone ever sees; that at the core of it all, really, is my extreme fragility. That my purity of heart, nobleness, and honesty is covered by the wrapping of obnoxiousness and brassiness to the rest of the world, shines like a beacon to TheHusband. He knows that I bruise easily and this is not a strong thing or a weak thing, and it is not a taking care of yourself thing, it’s a soul who’s a little too not of this planet kind of thing.
M. also saw that side of me, but the key difference is that TheHusband lets me grow and contract, whereas M. still sees me as a 17 year old and he would never let me get beyond that and could not accept the beyond that. This is why M. and I would never work, why we’ll never work, and why we’ll always remain a fond memory of a story and never a temptation of beginning, but always the heartbreak of the end.
There will always be a story of M. and I, that will never change, but that is the has been, while with TheHusband, it will always be the will be.

conversations about mother (part ii)

To support NaNoWriMo this month, I’m finishing the 30+ odd drafts laying about and posting them through the month of November.
Part I: Conversations about mother
Part III: Conversations about mother (part iii)
I lied.
But I’ll maintain it was for the sake of good copy. The realization to write about my family is not something that came to me in an instant but something that I’ve been struggling with for months. My panic attacks and anxiety levels, which have been fairly dormant these last few years, have come aggressively to the surface with the move to Grand Rapids. My precious supply of Klonopin, when before I used so sparingly and only when under extreme need, I’m now eating like TicTacs.
On the surface, things are falling into place for TheHusband and me after months and years of sacrifice and financial starvation. Things are not absolutely perfect (I work part-time as opposed to full-time, as an example), but when are they ever? We are starting to build a lovely life – so why all the goddamned almost crippling anxiety? Again? The conclusion: If after ruling out everything else that could be detrimental to my mental health and the only thing left is my family, therefore they must be the cause of this unwarranted stress. It is also equally important, I feel, that in order to continue on discussing my familial relationships, it is also equally important to lay out the history of my anxiety.
I had my first panic attack when I was barely a teenager. What I can recall is that I was walking with a girlfriend from one class to the next when my heart started racing a million miles per minute. I can also remember looking down and seeing the fabric of my shirt move ever so slightly to the tune of my heart beat. I do not remember the eventual underlying cause for the attack but it was, in my living memory, the first real physical experience of being physically anxious. The heart racing went on for a few moments before settling back down to its normal rhythm. And as it happened, just like that!, it also ended. I must have, at the time, reported the incident to my mother who took me to the family GP who announced I had mitral valve prolapse. Stress, fear or anxiety were never mentioned in my diagnosis though much later, I would find out it is those things that triggered it.
(For many years I told people I had a literal broken heart. It sounded much more dramatic and romantic while fueling my ever active imagination.)
As I age, the anxiety comes and goes in ebbs and tides. Sometimes, symptoms are minute and barely noticeable when I know I am under extreme stress and others, it would have me convinced that I was having a heart attack, dying or riddled with cancer when I felt I had no stress in my life. Sometimes still, the more frightened, cornered, or helpless I feel, the more intense the symptoms would manifest. Others, I would be conscious that I was anxious or upset which easily could explain the flight or fight feeling while others, I could be at an event having a good time when the symptoms would begin to manifest themselves for no apparent reason.
With me, there is no straight path with anxiety, and almost always, if it happened one way before it would not necessarily happen the same way again. The symptoms would almost never repeat themselves. Sometimes it would be a racing heartbeat for a few minutes, other times it would be traveling aches/pains that would appear and disappear with no introduction or farewell. Once I had hair randomly fall out for months and then stop. This past winter, after TheHusband and I moved to Grand Rapids, I got something in my eye when I was getting ready for bed. Most normal people wash their eyes out and continue on with their life, but instead, I became ultra-hysterical and belligerent. I was convinced I had cancer, I was going to lose my eye and thus was going to die in five minutes! After washing my eye out with water AND saline a million times, on top of crying hysterically; TheHusband could not find the offending piece of whatever that was driving me insane. The only way he could calm me down was by drugging me up. Within minutes I was asleep and was incredibly sheepish about the whole incident the following day.1
To be fair, the anxiety of my youth paled to that which would come in my 20s and 30s as illustrated by the examples above. By 1997, I was desperately unhappy with my life and under the wooing of a man-boy, I sold all my worldly possession and ran to the Bay Area to start my life anew. The man-boy promised fame and fortune, but instead left me in an illegal apartment culled out of a walk-out basement, in a house controlled by a dominatrix. Within several months of my move, he and I were over and I was working for a small tech firm in San Francisco. Within a year, TheHusband (then as TheBoyfriend part i) and I were living together in Oakland. According to TheHusband, I spent most of our relationship during that time on wild bouts of alcohol infused desperation. I don’t remember much of our time together during that period other than I drank a lot, we were dirt poor, and it seemed no matter what I did to improve my life, I was still so desperately unhappy.
By the summer of 1999, TheHusband and I were broken up but still living together. I was restless and always on the lookout for an escape route to get out of California2. I found the escape by applying for and being offered a position at UUNet, located a million miles away.3 For the move, I was driving across the country alone with the most precious of my worldly belongings in my car and the rest shipped to my final destination. To make the move even more bittersweet, the day I went to hand in my resignation, I was made redundant from my current job.
While all of this was going on over the course of the summer (breaking up, drinking binges, concocting wild & desperate plans to escape), I started getting intense physical pains in my right arm – eventually to the point that it would not bend or move as it was meant to bend or move. Soon, I needed to have TheHusband’s help to get clothes on or off. This was in addition to the minute symptoms of stress also occurring, such as the rapid heart rate, clammy skin and random aches and pains. Convinced I was dying, I headed to the emergency room, where after battery of tests I was informed nothing was wrong with me. As soon as the diagnosis came, the pain vanished. I was as healthy as a horse, except for the tiny, picky little thing called stress. The ER docs did warn me, however, that if I did not do something about it soon, I may find myself slightly dead.
Sometime shortly thereafter that announcement, I bade TheHusband goodbye, climbed into my car and left San Francisco and all of my California problems behind, forever. From San Francisco to Virginia, with a pit stop in Atlanta, my drive was the 5->10->20 and then north, cutting across the lower part of the U.S. and across the widest part of Texas.
I felt fine in LA and in Phoenix (no minute or heavy stress attacks) as I drove but somewhere around Las Cruces, NM I began to have a major panic attack. It was late at night, I was stuck between two semis and the 10 had turned into single, each way lanes coupled with high cement shoulders due to construction. To top this wondrous night off, it was raining and raining hard. I began to panic. I couldn’t stop, I couldn’t breathe and I was freaked out of my wits. This stepped up the racing thoughts that any second I was going to careen into the cement shoulder, hit a semi or get run over by the semi behind me. After what seemed like hours but was probably only mere minutes, I pulled off the road when I found the first mom and pop motel where I grabbed a room for the night. Even by taking myself out of what I thought was a dangerous situation, my heart wouldn’t stop racing. I made deals, bets, begged, cajoled, pleaded and bargained with whatever deity was above me to make this end. Nothing happened. I paced my room, smoked a million cigarettes and did everything I thought of in my power but I could not calm down.
The situation was made more intense that while I was no longer freaking out about my impending death on the 10, new thoughts would appear about my situation. I was in the wilds of New Mexico! Alone! With hardly any money! No one I know for hundreds of miles! With a crap cell phone!4I was literally thousands of miles from my destination, alone, nearly broke, and frightened and scared.
Common sense roused its stately head and forced me to go wake mom and pop up to explain in very poor pidgin Spanish that I felt like I was unable to breathe because that was the first thing I could think of to tell them. I could hear the crackling of Spanish on the radio in the make-shift lobby as I spoke. I remember how warm the night felt against my skin and the air hung with wetness from the recent downpour. I must have looked like a crazy person, standing there, begging for help in a reasonable voice while my heart raged on and clearly, able to breathe.
EMTs shortly arrived thereafter and gave me oxygen, which upon my first inhale I immediately calmed down. They found, just as the ER docs found a few weeks before, nothing wrong with me. Healthy as a horse. It is like once the attack has been fully addressed in some manner, it decides to leave as quickly as it sprang up. Instead of being thankful to the EMTs for the reassurance, I remember feeling chastened. Slightly ridiculous that I called them out in the middle of the night for a panic attack. Also a little stupid, a little insane and a whole lot of embarrassed.
Moments of lucidness during my attacks, when I knew I was fine and I knew I was not in harms way were always felt to be made like disappearing bread crumbs along a well worn road by the panic. It is a struggle, still in the now and sometimes almost daily, to differentiate between the world colored by anxiety and the world in which is real. It is an exhausting struggle within my brain to fight for what could be potentially destructive behavior as compared as to what is termed normal behavior.
Intensive bouts of therapy over the years has taught me how to work with and for the anxiety, to control it, subdue it and to live a fairly normal life. In 2003, in addition to being diagnosed with anxiety, I was further diagnosed as a high functioning Borderline Personality Disorder. Treatment via talk therapy (I had a regular shrink) coupled with techniques learned from dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT)
1. We laugh about this incident now and anytime one of us has a something in their eye, it’s automatically termed the problem is cancer.
2. Which I would later swore I would never return nor step foot west of the Mississippi. That too turned to be false when I would go visit a friend of mine in Sacramento in 2003. So much for big threatening gestures.
3. Northern Virginia.
4. Back in ye olde times when cell phones were bricks, on analog service and you paid by the minute.

Conversations About Mother (part i)

My brother and I are not on cordial enough speaking terms to the effect that we do not meet up, speak/text or are even Facebook BFFs. Our only connection is in regards to our mother, and even then contact is either brief moments filled with monosyllabic conversations or heated arguments that result in a lot of shameless threats thrown from both sides.
TheHusband, who finds my brother to be a gigantic asshole and refuses to allow him to step foot into our home until my brother apologizes for several unsavory things he’s said to me, did agree that any kind of “family” gathering should be done in a neutral location to keep the drama to low murmur. This is done to appease mother who continually harps and makes noises on “Why can’t you all just be civil to one another?” whenever my brother and I begin to bicker. Mother, however, seemingly and innocently forgets that much of my brother’s and I intolerance of each other has been started by her in some way and additionally while complaining about our sibling behavior, chooses to ignore the fact that she’s not spoken to half of her own brethren (she is the eldest of seven) in nearly five years for various infractions only known to her (and of which she can never explain when asked). Regardless of historical nods, my frustration levels skyrocket whenever a tentative olive branch is swung out to greet him, my brother will consistently denounce any kind of gathering, neutral or otherwise and effectively cock blocks any kind of civility I attempt to share when planning “family time,” regardless of how desperate my mother is to have it.
Therefore to save my sanity and have less dealings with my brother, family celebrations are now split in half for mother, who spends half her time with me and the remaining with my brother.
It is no surprise for this past Mother’s Day, I told mother that she should make plans with my brother first and then we would do our plans around those plans with my brother were made concrete. A day or two later, she tells me that she and my brother were having a mid-day meal at the retirement villa and that after, she’d like to come to our place to hang out while TheHusband and I gardened, followed by meal and game playing (Scrabble or Trivial Pursuit). Because it was her day, I also told her to pick the meal which to her meant giving me the breakdown of a four course (but very simple) meal, which TheHusband and I shopped and prepped for the day before. As mother no longer drives due to neuropathy in her feet caused by diabetes, additional timing is taken into consideration when scheduling events with her. I made it very clear to her that due to my work schedule the following day, it would need to be an early night and that since dinner would take about 1.5 to 2 hours from prep time to table, we would like to eat in the later afternoon with her tucked up back home at a fairly reasonable hour. She agreed.
With surface history of the dealings with my brother mentioned, I was not surprised upon receiving a call from my mother an hour before I was to pick her telling me that my brother could not make it to the mid-day meal (of course) and that instead, he was picking her up in the mid-afternoon to go to a party that was being held in his honor (his birthday was last week). With no thought to our feelings, plans, or prep for the meal she informs me that she’s going to this party. I asked her to call me if she was going to be arriving later then 5pm so we could plan accordingly. She in fact didn’t call until 6pm and was terribly surprised to find out that no, I was not picking her up and no, we were not having dinner as planned and in short, no, we’re not celebrating Mother’s Day with her. I made mention to dropping off some items of hers at her house the following day and hung up.
The following day, I kept to my promise and dropped some goods off at her apartment that I had ordered for mother from Amazon. Mother looked emotionally beaten and was clearly visibly upset. While I sat ramrod straight in a chair, pissed at how rude she behaved the day before, she proceeds to tell me with fat tears running down her cheeks that my brother spent the most of their time together the day before berating her for her behavior. Why was she not fast enough with her cane? Why is she so slow? Why is she not doing a million things at once like she used to do? My brother then apparently bragged that the people who were throwing him the party considered him as a second son (their own son died in a car accident in October 2010 and he and my brother were quite close) and that he wanted to be adopted by them. My brother is 32. On Mother’s Day, my brother used his time with her to talk about her failings, her missed actions and how horrible she was as a mother and did absolutely nothing else.
I struggled with two things that day: One how best to approach mother diplomatically in regards to her own fairly atrocious behavior and secondly, to not get caught up in the mother/brother drama that has pervaded me for nearly my entire life. I succeeded in the first but failed in the second.
This is a gloss over the day to day workings of my immediate family, which accounts for the partial disjointedness of the writing when attempting to explain in the shortest amount of time possible a second in a dysfunction that has been ongoing for decades. Much like that day when I sat ramrod straight in the chair, upset and angry for her behavior towards me, I could feel the undertow pull of her laying down the guilt no matter how much I fought against it. The unspoken listing of her wants and needs, rejecting the possibility that she’s ever done anything wrong is strong. How dare I criticize her when clearly my brother offended her the most with his behavior? Obviously, she should not want to live if we both think she’s the most horrible mother in the world!
I realised then I had two options: Instead of writing short stories where the mother is always violently killed, I would end up murdering my own OR I could start writing publicly about my family to get the tale out into the open. At the very least, it will keep me out of prison. At the very most, it will serve to help articulate years of feeling inadequacy for being born and save me thousands in future therapists bills.