Barnmaven

Picking Scabs

I find myself circling in the center of the room, holding patterns, avoiding the loss swept into the corners.  So much pain there, so little of it truly resolved.  I pushed it away to forget it, and this new life keeps asking me to sift through those painful memories and feel them all over again, this time really feel them, so I can grieve them and let them go.

I like the center, I like the pretending part where even though I was hurt, I was tougher than the hurt and the pain didn't really touch me.  I like the middle of the room where I imagine that these things today are not monsters I helped create but that they are all somebody else's fault.  I fear getting lost down the rabbit hole of black, jagged edges where everything I was supposed to be able to trust in wasn't ever really real.  I don't want to be confronted with those feelings yet.  I wanted to wait to deal with them, wait forever as if that's all it would take to make them less painful.

That's the tricky thing about them.  You would think that time would blunt them, burn down the hard and sharp parts, soften the clout to the side of my head and ease the squeeze of the fist on my heart.  And then I find that no, there has been not one iota of change in those feelings of helplessness and grief and anger and excruciating pain.  Not one shred of lessening of the feeling that it wouldn't have happened if I had been better, if I had less ugly, less messy, less self-absorbed. 

Thousands of miles between you and I and there's no comfort to be found, no shoulder to hide my face in, no enabler to help me pretend the past isn't real and that now and the tomorrow is all there ever was or ever will be.  No strong hand to hold to reassure me that this time its different, that you are not the other one.  Every shattered nerve, every thread of anxiety that loops itself through my gut adds more miles to what already exists between us.  But really, its only me putting them there. 

Where do I find the balance between unfocusing enough to make the time pass more quickly and crawling into the hole with old grief and letting it burn its way out of my core?  How do I keep myself from dropping - no, throwing down - the lines of connection so that we can still be reached?

Trust comes so hard for me.  No, you are not the other. I know that.   Never have I had any reason to do anything other than trust you. But the ugly voice from the corners reminds me:  There was a time when I didn't have any reason not to trust him, either.  Open and transparent-seeming eyes looked straight at me, reasonable voices comforted me, soothed me and fed me buckets of steaming lies.  Which part is the part where I can distinguish between the real and the construct?  

And so I avoid the corners.  Let the things swept there lie a while longer.  

Traumatic

I have always loved words.  I grasped the concept of reading at the age of three and I never looked back.  Through the bright afternoons of my childhood and the impossibly dark years of puberty and college, reading provided me with a way to escape, an avenue of avoidance.  My life has never been so bad, but I did have a lot to avoid.

That early grasp of language earned me a boot uphill, out of kindergarten and into the first grade.  Academically I was more than ready, and it feels sometimes that I got average grades in school simply because I was always three steps ahead of where the rest of the class was learning, and so distractible if I couldn't be challenged, that I just got bored and stopped trying.  Academics were never really the issue, but social skills were for most of my childhood the crisis du jour.  Its one thing to say that I was a precocious little girl who easily got along with most adults and never met a stranger.  Its another to say that I had, then and now, difficulty making friends within my peer group.  Then, it was hard to be the child who wasn't socially mature, who was sensitive, who cried easily.  Whether it was that they sensed in me an easy type of prey or whether they resented me for being smart or just because they loathed me on sight, the girls in my classes from elementary school all the way up were not kind to me.  I had few friends, none of them from my class in school.  The older I got and the more aware of it I was, the worse it felt. 

When I started fifth grade we had a new teacher at my school.  She and I did not click well, she seemed to resent the time that I was pulled from her class for advanced learning modules, and I didn't have any respect for her.  I sensed clearly that she did not like me, and I simply refused to perform.  My mother met with the teacher a few times, and then with the principal.  When it became clear that we were going nowhere fast, my mom applied to the district to put me in a different school.

This meant Mom had to pick me up and drop me off at school every day, but apparently she felt this was worth the effort. 

It was in fifth grade that I started to develop, somewhat.  I got my first bra that year. 

They didn't make stretchy little cotton training bras back in 1975.  They made torture ensembles of heavy straps and heavy cups, or so it seemed to me.  But I was proud of my new bra.  I thought it made me very grown up.

My first day at my new school with my new bra, I showed it to one of the girls in the bathroom.  "What size is it?" she asked.  "32A," I proudly replied.

That was the last moment I was proud of my boobs for a number of years.  Because the minute I walked out of the girls bathroom into the hallway and onto the playground for recess, my new classmates had cleverly concocted a little chant just for my benefit:

Roses are red, Violets are blue - Mary wears a bra sized THIRTY TWO!

I wanted the pavement to crack open and swallow me whole.  I spent recesses for the next few weeks inside the classroom or in the library, reading books and making every effort to escape my classmates.  They would find me, though, and the chanting would begin, until I think finally some teachers and playground duties cracked the whip and the taunting stopped. 

By the time I started my first menstrual cycle in junior high I knew WAY better than to tell anyone.

Of course, it wasn't easy to hide those bulky kotex pads that you had to pin inside of your underwear.  It would have been less obvious to wear a diaper.  Fortunately by then, most of us girls were menstruating and the girls that weren't didn't want to make it obvious that the rest of us were more "mature" than they were, so they kept their mouths shut.   We were all old enough to be horribly embarrassed by our rapidly changing bodies, and topics of menstruation and "female things" were mercifully left untouched.  Besides, there were plenty of other things to find fault with.

Thankfully I've recovered from the horror of those early days of development.  I've learned to appreciate my bosom and to not feel embarrassed when other people (visibly, verbally, whatever) appreciate it too.

Two weeks ago my daughter came home from her dad's wearing a cute new outfit.  The top has patterned sleeves and a hoodie, but the part over her chest and torso are thin white cotton.  Looking at her twirl and preen in front of the mirror, I was smiling under my hand when the awful realization struck me.    I wanted to throw up.

My baby girl needs a bra.

Its different for her, thankfully.  She's not the first one in her class, not by far, and the selection of bras for budding girls is by far superior than what we had available to us thirty-odd years ago.

We went shopping.  She picked out three - one gray, one pink, one turquoise.  She looks adorable.  Not once has she come home in tears having been teased by her peers for wearing one.

Do you know what's more traumatic than being teased for wearing a bra to school?

Being the mother of a girl who is now old enough to need a bra.

 

Embracing uncertainty

The combined lessons of my adult years, when viewed through the lens of history, have an intricate and consistent similarity.  This creates with within me a tendency to agree with those who believe that our life cycle and the challenges we face have a very clear purpose.  I'm also inclined to think that the people who believe we create our own reality have a certain inside line.

If there is one quality I've lacked abundantly, its been patience.  Read Mom's anecdotes in my baby books if you don't believe me.  Better yet, spend a day or two with me when I'm running full-tilt at a project. 

Impatience has dogged me in every facet of my life, from school to work to relationships to parenting.  I've spent more years than I like to think about wondering why does this have to take so long?  What's the big wait for? 

I wrote about the big schedule change with SG, then I wrote that no, there wasn't a change.  Except that now there is another change and so at this point I'm just going to stop writing about it because it seems that the life of a Road Tech is nothing but uncertainty and I am too busy dealing with the knot of anxiety that's currently twisting my small intestine.

I just can't plan my life, and the more I try to plan it right now, the more it resists being planned.  I'm certain there's a lesson in here for me, an opportunity, and I know the longer I spend being wracked by stress about something I can't do a damn thing about the longer it will take me to find the good parts. 

But I'm going to take a few minutes longer to wring the last bit of drama out of the stress.  If you need me I'll be hiding in my closet.

 

Wherein much gnashing of the teeth occurs

(Answers phone) Oh, hey honey.  What's up?

Did you get your tires done?

Yep, all ready to go.  Now I just need to go to that place across town to plug it in and find out why the Check Engine light is on.  I'm at your folks' house now to get the kids.  We're going to have a spot of lunch here and then head out.

OK.  Cool.  Have something for me. Did you find out where you're going and when you have to leave?

Ummmm, yes.   (Long pause)

So? 

Well.  Uh.

Oh no.  Nebraska?

Uh, no actually.  As it turns out, they don't need me to go until October.  (Insert list of reasons here, mostly to do with Roadwhore culture and terminology I don't understand).

So you're not leaving this weekend?

Nope.

Here's where a blistering silence ensues, during which my brain manages to turn about twenty thousand loops in a split second.

So, I'm going to let you go, and eat lunch with your folks because it sounds like you're upset.

Right, because why should you sit on the phone with me and offer support when the knots I'm all tied up in are a direct result of the impact of YOU in my life?  (We do sarcasm here.  Frequently and often completely underappreciated.)

So first I call the school and ask if its too late to get the bus for the boy changed for the first day of school when I've already asked for it to be changed three days ago because I thought the bottom was falling out of my plans.

Then I smile.  Because I'm not going to be suddenly alone.  And I can still have Option B without the bereft forever part.

Oh, life, you are grand and constantly surprising.  From one moment to the next you pull me this way and that, push me off balance, knock me on my ass, pull me upright, tease me with this and flatter me and woo me and put me off.  You are fickle and cold and ablaze with seduction all at the same time.  You never fail to keep it interesting.

 

On being right

Who doesn't like being right?  Raise your hand.  Right now.  I want to know if there is anyone out there who doesn't like to be right. 

Right.

Because we all want to be right.  It starts young.  My children already have fights to the death over the most inane topics, all because one of them wants to be right and thereby prove that ergo,the other one is WRONG.  Sadly, the one-upmanship very often persists long past its usefulness. 

I know people who are perfectly OK being wrong about some things, but with most people, if you try hard enough you'll find at least ONE subject where they will doggedly persist in the correctness of their position even in the odds of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Its a fascinating concept, this battle over who's right and who's wrong.  There are a billion things that are matters of fact and record, which makes it easy to identify the winner in many of these wrestling matches of certitude.  But when it comes to people and emotions and situations, when perception is the only player in the game, all concrete wisdom flies straight out the window.  Absent of the ability to actually read another person's thoughts, we must rely on a different set of tools. 

I've noticed that the more time passes, the more I am willing to suspend judgment of intent.  But I'll own right up to the fact that this is not always the case.  Its a crazy-making thing, isn't it?   Someone does something that has a negative impact or connotation to you.   They forget to invite you to a meeting or a social event.  They acquire something that you intended to buy or apply for the promotion you were trying to get.   You make a pact or agreement with them and it turns out they can't (or won't) hold up their end of it. 

What's your first assumption going to be?

They did it on purpose. 

She KNEW I wanted that promotion and the only reason she applied for it was to spite me.  He lied to me on purpose.  They only got that expensive thing-a-ma-jig so they could make their friends feel jealous.

But we all know its not that simple.

Have you ever been cheated on in a relationship?  I have.  It sucks, doesn't it?  I mean really, down to the bone, hurts like a someone's taken a motherfucking buzzsaw to your heart.  And when you first find out, after your heart stops trying to jump out of your chest and you very carefully put down the baseball bat you found yourself carrying as you were marching up the sidewalk, the first thought in your mind is "How could s/he DO THIS TO ME?"  As if the indiscretion actually had anything to do with you at all in the first place.  Well, maybe it did, and maybe it didn't.  In my experience, infidelity seems linked more to a problem with the perpetrator.  Unless its a revenge thing, most people who cheat seem driven to do so by reasons they don't even understand.  They're not thinking about you.  In fact, they're working so hard to maintain denial about the moral slippery slope they're falling down, they try very hard not to think of you AT ALL.  Infidelity is a selfish and self-serving act, and has little to do with whether someone really loves you or not. 

Divorce is a situation where pain is unavoidable.  Its simply not possible to take any step of any sort without causing pain to your former spouse.  Intention to hurt may or may not exist -- but hurt is done, and the more hurt there is, the more bitter and angry people become.  I'm in the middle of it now, and there's so much I'd like to say and can't, but I can promise you that it is painful, that it is bitter, that it is angry.  It is a wandering line of suck that at times is unbearable and at other times thins to the point of being barely tolerable.    I hurt him, he hurts me.  I do something, he believes I'm only doing it to hurt him, he does something, I believe he's only doing it to hurt me.  Maybe I am and maybe I'm not.  Maybe he is and maybe he isn't.  There's really no way to know who's right.  I can judge by past history and the knowledge of a person that years together bring me, but I can't read his mind, nor can he mine.

All I can do is my best to be authentic and to do the right thing and not get sucked into bitter and angry.  All I can do is try to remind myself that it might seem as though things are said or done with ill intent, maybe they're not.  And all I can do is protect myself and my family and remember that even though things are bad, they could be so much worse.  Remember that there is a history here, that even though I feel like I'm experiencing death by a thousand paper cuts, that it won't last forever.  That I can swallow my bitterness and pain and focus on the things in life that are good and real and positive -- my kids tumbling up the sidewalk, coming home from time with dad to now spend a week with me; dinner and wine on a warm evening with good friends; strong arms of love that hold and support me when I need them; the love and support of family and friends; a bevy of wagging tails and horrid doggy breath waiting at the door for me; a long ride on a beautiful horse with a good friend. 

You may think I do this or that simply to hurt you, but if you really believe that, you'd be wrong.

Slice and Dice

"Mommy, when do we get to come to your house?"

"Just a few more days baby."

"I don't want to stay here.  I want to come to your house NOW."

"I know, baby."

A week later (possibly less):

"Mommy, when do I get to stay with Daddy?"

"A few more days, baby."

"I want to stay with Daddy NOW!"

"I know, baby."

Divorce is hard.

Divorce sucks.

Feeling like you've made every bad decision in the book multiplied by ten thousand gazillion...

And they know it.  They feel your weakness.  Some days, they are really crying for the other parent.  Its not that they don't love you, its that they love him too, and they want to love you both at the same time in the same place.   Some days they are crying for you.  Some days they are crying for him.  And others?  They sense your latent guilt and they reach into your chest with needle-sharp claws and clutch the strings of it and pull and pull.  They pull on it until you feel like you can't take another second of how much it freaking hurts that your failure as a human being and as a wife and as a partner has undone everything.

It gets easier, right? 

PLEASE TELL ME THIS GETS EASIER.

On to first grade...or not

I shot an email off week before last to the school counselor to find out when we would meet to discuss progress on his IEP and start making plans for next year. 

One of the things we talked about the last meeting came up in her reply email, and so now push has come to shove and we need to make some decisions. 

Kinder started horribly for my son.  I had worked hard to identify what his day would look like and help him to have reasonable expectations that the school then blew out of the water when they changed him from one teacher and one classroom to another teacher and another classroom, and then screwed up on his bus not just once but twice, and none of that really helped me get off on the right foot with the school, either.  Its not always fun to be the "that parent," but sometimes its useful. 

The year has flown by, and while he's made tremendous progress, there's a long way to go.  Our IEP goals were extremely basic: 

Follow directions two out of three times

Limit disruptions in the classroom

Join activity without continuous teacher prompting

Use kind words toward others

By the marking period mid year, his official progress toward goal was a "P" meaning he was making good progress, the objectives were not yet met but there was a reasonable expectation that they would be.

BUT.  That doesn't mean he's ready to move on to first grade.

Even if he meets the goals for the year, there are still concerns as to whether he has the stamina to do full-day school.  He has more good days than bad days, but his ability to rebound from setbacks is very limited.  In kinder, a bad morning means he only has to hold it together or have an adult observer to stay with him for a short time until he can get on the bus and go to aftercare.  Full day school would be a much different animal.

I'm not sure where we're going to end up next year.  I have no idea what the team is going to recommend and honestly, right now, I'm not sure what it is that I think needs to happen.  My next steps are to understand what the options truly are -- and then look at him objectively and determine where his needs will best be met.  Would he repeat kindergarten?  Enter a special program where he was in the regular classroom part of the day and in resource room the rest of the day?  Do half day of regular school and go to his aftercare group for the rest of the day? 

I want to be able to send him into the next school year with a much better start than we had this year.  I think things wouldn't have been so bad for him if the school year hadn't been so screwed up from the get-go.  I think next year will go better if we, as a team, do a better job of helping him to know what will happen and then make sure things go reasonably within expectations.

Its a lot to think about, and I really need to get this one right.

Our bleeding hearts

My parents would gently admonish me.  Friends would roll their eyes.  Boyfriends (and later, husbands) would think at first that it was sweet, cute, but eventually they, too, would just sigh and shake their heads.

It could be a dead cat on the side of the highway.  A goose with a broken wing, or one that had lost her mate (they mate for life, you know).  A dog stranded in the middle of the road near the concrete divider.  A racehorse who shattered her leg in the final hundred yards of the race and had to be euthanized on the spot.  Anything.

My heart would crack wide open, the tears would come.  I would imagine their pain, their fear, their suffering, and suffer right along with them. 

The older I get, the more I learn that not everyone loves them the way that I do, that tragedy and loss are a part of life, that we can't fix everyone's suffering.  At least, I pretend to learn these valuable lessons, but secretly, deep inside, I go on grieving those souls.  Animals cannot speak to us in words, but our pets,they give us the best that they have, they love us unconditionally.  Animals in the wild live purely and without guile; they don't know how to be anything but exactly what they are.  They are beautiful beyond words, beyond breath.

My daughter, she has this bleeding heart too.

Picking her up at the aftercare place the other day, I find her tear-streaked and sad-eyed.

"What happened, baby?"

"The other kids were laughing at me.  They were horrible."

"I'm so sorry, sweetheart.  What were they saying to you?"

"Well, there was this CAT, mom and it only had three legs.  And it was kind of hopping along, and it was just so sad that I cried."

My heart cracks in two right along with her.  "Oh, baby."

"The other kids all laughed at me and they were teasing me.  They were saying horrible things like about a dog that got hit by a car and another dog that broke its leg.  One kid was telling me about shooting squirrels.  Shooting them!"

I hate their cruelty.  Not just to my daughter, but that they could be so callous about the pain of a living creature.

 

Your children are not your children.

They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.

They come through you but not from you,

And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts.

For they have their own thoughts.               

             ~Khalil Gibran, The Prophet

 

Yes, she has her own thoughts, her own heart.  

 

A bleeding heart, just like her mama. 

On being the stable bow

I think life must be far simpler at age 6 than it is at 9.  I also consider the truth that my children are not the same person and each reacts to life's challenges differently, individually.

For instance:  My little race-car man capital L and italicized LOVES S.  They have been fast friends since shortly after they met and watching them together and listening to their conversations makes my heart go thump-thump in my chest.  So much love between them, and the love inside of me swells and surges up through me in response.   My amazonian princess is a bit of a different story.  Her reactions to S are more complex.  She is very reserved with her affections for him.  At first she was insistent that she liked him, but eventually her father informed me otherwise, which prompted some gentle conversations between us.  Its not that I insist she like S, not at all.  Her feelings are not mine to dictate.  I'd rather have a loving conversation about how she really feels than waste my energy ruining our relationship and ensuring that she never share anything important with me.  So we talk.  Its not that she doesn't think he's a nice guy.  She's not uncomfortable with him - but with the concept that I have a boyfriend. 

(I hate that word, honestly.  I'm in my middle forties.  I really don't think boyfriend is the appropriate term, but we don't live together and we're not married, so partner isn't quite the right term, friend is too vague, and both lover and special friend are just too...ewww....so I continue to use "boyfriend."  I just want you to know that I loathe it.)

Its not that she doesn't want S to be my boyfriend - its that she doesn't want anyone to be my boyfriend.

So we talk.  And I hear her and I acknowledge her feelings.  And I let her know, gently, that I understand how she must feel, still wishing that her parents were together.  I say that I am sorry that we hurt her by not being able to stay married to one another.  I say that I wish that it were different, but that it is not and cannot be.  And I let her know also, that I love and care for her so very much.  And that I am a grownup and that I am going to make grownup decisions for myself, such as having a boyfriend.  And she is more than perfectly welcome to share her feelings about that.  And we talk some more, and we hug each other and put our love for one another to words and we move forward.  I hope that someday she is able to cognitively separate her feelings about me having a boyfriend from her feelings from S.  In the meantime, this will do.  She is friendly to him, if aloof, and she is not rude or disrespectful.  I could not ask for better behavior, and I feel that all things considered, she's doing the best she can.  Its more than enough for me.

I'm learning too to put a tight lid on my feelings in regards to parenting time.  She loves her dad, so does my son, and their dad loves them.  There are times they want to be with me when its not my parenting time and there are times they want to be with their dad when they are currently with me.  Its hard sometimes to hear your children say, for whatever reason, that they'd really rather see their dad right now and not feel like you're failing at some level.  Its hard to put personal feelings aside, but nothing else will do.    Logic rarely informs the initial emotional response, and so I am learning to school my features carefully, to refrain from saying anything until I can put a smile on my face and into my voice and accept their feelings for what they are.  Even when I wish they felt differently. 

Its not just that I hope there is payback for this someday in the form of being loved more than the other parent, or that there is some sort of karmic return (although I wouldn't mind a winning MegaMillions ticket, thankyouverymuch) for being a good person.  I think maybe the motivation is more along the "do no harm" scale than anything else.  Common sense and experience tell me that if I attempt to dictate or control my children's feelings that I will be harming them, unforgivably.

Its just more of the growing pains of being a parent, I suppose.

 

 

You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you,

For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.

The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.

Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;

For even as he loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.

    ~The Prophet, Khalil Gibran, 1923

Survivor

 

 

A few years back, my sister Vicki sent me a draft copy of what was meant to be the beginnings of a book.  She's spent a good number of years exorcising her demons, and she knew that the act of telling her story would be a valuable tool in the healing process.

In all honesty, the first time I read through her account of what happened to her as a child, I threw up.  I cried.  I raged.  I HATED.  Vicki and I have talked so much over the years, usually into the wee hours of the morning and well into several bottles of wine (mine) and whiskey (hers) about what she and my other birth siblings endured, the impact it has had on her life, her relationships, how to deal with it in ways that were useful.  I've expressed to her the survivor's guilt that gnaws at the core of me, the guilt of having escaped what happened to the rest of my siblings.  We've talked about these stories, about how to tell them.  i know that one day she and I are going to sit down together and the entire story will be told.  We'll write the book and we'll get it to a publisher.  For now, its mostly in her head and partially on paper.  Several months ago I reread some of what I had edited for her and decided to at least get the beginnings of it out there.

My sister has survived things the weight of which would crumple most people.  Much of what she has endured is practically unspeakable.  It is the kind of abuse you never want to imagine happens to children, the stuff of nightmare and denial.  It is the kind of abuse that once exposed to the light causes you to never look at another human being in the same way again, because you realize that people who walk around looking like normal men and women very well could be, in the privacy of their own homes, horrible monsters.

The first step to publicising Vicki's story was published today at Violence Unsilenced. 

It is graphic.  It is true.  It is one reason among many that I choose to have no relationship with my birthmother.

Please honor my sister.  Read her story, leave a comment over at VU.  Thank her for being a voice for other survivors, for being courageous enough to let her personal truth be public in hopes that it will encourage other victims of violence to speak up.  To know that they do not suffer alone, that there are people out there who understand, who have been there or are there right now, people who want to help.

If you or anyone you know is a victim of domestic violence or abuse, I encourage you to call your local domestic violence hotline or call the national hotline at 1−800−799−SAFE(7233) or TTY 1−800−787−3224.