It's my party and I'll cry if I want to

My abusive mother died during my month of wallow. I didn't find out until yesterday.

I almost put the title as "I will always love you," but I don't so I didn't. I care about humans, even those that hurt me, but I don't love everyone.

In that song I almost used, there's a line, "I hope that life will treat you kind." It goes on to wish the person love. I hope those things for my mother. It also spoke of bittersweet memories.

When mother's husband died a couple of years ago, I thought of something funny to say about him. The only thing that comes to mind with mother is the time my sister Cokie and I were riding up to visit grandma. I was about 13 or 14. Mom goes "Look at all those pine nuts on the trees!" and Cokie and I both said "ohhh yeah wow that's a lot"

Mom drove on for a couple of minutes and bursts out laughing. "You guys can't see the trees! Why would you say you could?" We told her that it's just easier to say we see something than make sighted people stop what they're talking about and show us.

With all the neglect and abuse, my mother never EVER laid any trip on me about my eyesight. She also never insulted my intelligence. I have okay memories about her talking to me about sex and taking drugs. Her calm demeanor left me feeling confident I could handle saying no without feeling pressured.

I know that her deep pain drove her to act the way she did. I wish she had found a way to recover from that.

She lived a long life. Old people die. This is the way of things. I will speak of her again. I will complain about what I survived and continue to have moments of grieving. Not so much about her absence from the planet, but from my life since birth.

One never really says goodbye to anything. The trick is learning to weave the experience into life's tapestry. Make flaws a feature.

Mother had a near death experience once. She said she felt calm. I feel calm for her too. I hope she got that.

Short People

Or short posts. I wanted to comment on the comments and a few things going on. I don't know what's wrong with the comment feature, but it appears to be mucked up. I'll ask Murry to help me again on the weekend and we'll see if we can get that fixed up. No promises though, he tired last time and it didn't go.

The book is going well. You would think writing a survival story would make one depressed, but in many ways it's doing the opposite. Thought I wouldn't pretend it's emotionally easy.

I've written about 6000 words so far. It's not really a lot for my goal of finishing a rough draft by the end of February. It's enough for now. I sometimes have to stop and think happy thoughts for a while.

Joy still visits me often. Perspective reminds me that "that was then, this is now." I learned so much. Living well is the gift you find when you unwrap the past.

My past does define me. I encourage it to do this. We don't give potential employers a resume of our being, but of our doings. We share our experiences. Though we do tailor this outline to show only our best side. They still ask what we think we lack.

We get to answer that question for ourselves. Where am I still broken, where do I need to shore up my psyche and how can I be in the now while dealing with the then?

Pondering such things gives ME character and makes me like me more. Like yourself a little and look behind for a few minutes. Might find some gems under that dirt. Ya never know.

Do you really want to hurt me?

Much of my life I've felt like prey. You know, lions eat rabbits. I get it, something always has to provide food for another to live. It's a system like that.

How did you come to the decision that I was here for you to eat? Who established these roles for you and I?

Maybe I did. Or maybe I am just taking it all too serious. Oh, that's something that I've been told. "Lighten up." Also, "You have to forgive." And let us not forget Attila the Mom's favorite, "stop dwelling on the past."

Right. They have whole departments of history at most major universities, but me exploring my personal past somehow threatens to unravel the universe? Okay, yeah. Don't I feel powerful now. I am the lion, where all the white rabbits at? Yes, I did just parody Blazing Saddles. Gotta problem with that??

It's all a matter of journey. I am both lion and rabbit or maybe bear. I hibernated in a blanket of grief and now I must take my emergence with care. 

Going from a comatose to an awakened state requires a few steps. And while doing that, I am both prey and predator. The mix depends on the needs of that state. 

The trick is to not devour yourself before you emerge from your cave. 

Kind comments encouraged. 

Paperback Writer

I decided to turn my December 2014 month of wallow in self pity month experience into a book. Here are my EXTREMELY rough chapter outlines. I will change the order most likely, I just wanted to get my "goal" out to the universe.

Be the Light You Want to Follow

What I learned from my month wallowing in self pity

1. Swimming in self pity is like getting a colonoscopy. It's a shitty test but necessary once in a while.

2. This blog and I are both awesome and I have shiny thoughts

3. Dream shitters can fuck off now. Support my crazy ideas on the off chance they're not crazy and you're just afraid.

4. It's OKAY to feel good during a month of wallow and tell funny stories about tragic things or during funerals. You can't force people to "lighten up," but when they do it, you can bask in the glow.

5. I'm sad that my mother is Attila the Mom, but that isn't about me. She has sickness and also did the best she could. I know that. I'm still never going to speak to her or any biological family. I don't see any point. Not from hopelessness, but from awareness. They lack that "be nice" gene. I wish them peace.

6. The goodness or badness or lesson comes from experience only on reflection. Destiny looks only backward.

7. Feeling all the pain heals. It's like picking up the pieces after an explosion. Repressing feelings is like holding a beach ball under water. After a while, we get tired and the ball pops up and bashes us in the face. Better to let it up to float away.

8. Grieving heals.

9. Mistreatment leaves a scar. There is no "magic" in "forgiveness." Forget leads to future mistreatment. However, we can learn to remember with compassion for ourselves and the person who harmed us. US first, though.

10. Reframe failure as the steps to success. No one criticizes a baby falling down when it is learning to walk, so why beat ourselves up for making mistakes? I am an emotional baby taking my first steps into self awareness.

That's it. I'm going to expand on each of these points as chapter heads. I hope to have a completed rough draft by the end of February. I feel that's a very ambitious goal and I think I can do it. I choose happy. 

Kind comments welcome.

She's not THERE

Perfect song for my Zombie Blog! The title of the most famous song by the Zombies. I love it when life gives you the best thing at the right moment.

I totally lost my way with the blog. It happens. I'm going to just take up from here and be happy I got back to writing.

Writing and exploring my soul makes me happy. It took a lot of years and two great therapy experiences to get here. And I am eternally grateful for the Survivors of Incest 12-step group I found in the early 90s. They reflected who I was and showed me who I could become.

I now understand what threw me off the blog horse and it's TOTALLY okay. Last summer, I broke up with my remaining biological family. They began to pressure me to "get over" the rift between me and my mother.

Maybe rift fails to reflect the true nature of my relationship with Attila the Mom. I use that term because my husband pointed out that people would not urge me to reconcile if my mother was Hitler. Of course she isn't a genocidal maniac. Just a psychological self abusing maniac who first made and then abandoned her child.

My mother planned for my birth. She hoped to save her marriage. When I failed at that, she abandoned me. At the same time, she was using me to get back at my oldest sister. I'm sure Attila the Mom had no idea she was doing this, but the more I reflect on the situation, the clearer it becomes.

My mother became pregnant with my sister around the same age my sister was when mom had me. I feel mom resented my sister getting to live her high school years with freedom.

So when I was born, she brought me to my sister to take care of. My sister did care for me as best she could, but this built a deep resentment in her.

I feel so sad that my sister had me as a burden. I couldn't help but bond to her as a child bonds to a mother. There's a story of me getting hurt at a grocery store and I wouldn't stop crying until mother took me to "My Kathey's" high school so she could kiss my booboo.

Kathey married, had a child of her own and moved far away at about the same time as my parents divorced. I was four. I so get that none of this had to do with me. Though my mother and sister acted as though it did. I'm sure they didn't realize they were. That doesn't make it any less painful, it just made me confused until I sorted it out.

So there I was, resented and abandoned by both mother and bonded to sister. These resentments continued into my adulthood.

Attila the Mom hurt me more than MyKathey so that relationship broke down first. Twice ATM and I had major fallings out where I quit talking to her. Both times, my connection to my sister waned as well. I didn't quit talking to her, but I decided not to put any energy to keeping contact.

As an adult, my sister called me three times my entire life. Once when a cousin died, when my grandmother died and finally when my father died. I didn't even know the cousin. She was peeved at me for not knowing him. I do understand they were about the same age and she was feeling very mortal.

People tell me "you have to understand" a lot. When do I get the understanding?

Okay, so, I still had a kind of relationship with my sister because, well, she's my sister. After dad died, she and I were Facebook friends. She didn't post much, I saw more from her daughters. She would occasionally say things like she loved me after a post where I talked about something going on that wasn't working out.

I lashed out over that. I didn't call her by name, but I posted a Facebook where I complained that you can't act unloving and just say you love and make up for all the crap you pull. She replied that I didn't know what was in her heart.

I know that's very true. I don't know what's in anyone's heart. I do know how I am treated.

Last summer, ATM started having some health problems. My niece told me because she '"thought I should know." I told her that, though I wish her peace, I still didn't want to have anything to do with my mother.

My niece got hostile and told me how I needed to "get over this." That stressed me greatly for a couple of days. I realized, they would never understand the depths of the pain I survived. Though that makes me sad, it is OKAY.

I realized that I was holding on to a fantasy that family could "get me." They lacked the capacity to love me where I was at.

I broke up with them. I had to grieve that for all of December 2014. That's a whole other post that I'll write later.

Please understand, I am not asking anyone to quit their family like I have. You get to follow your own path. This is what is best for me. I even encourage others to try and find some common ground.

For me, I had to let go of the family ties the other party had let drop ages ago. Mostly I feel relieved.

Kind comments are encouraged. I'm BAAAACK!