Swimming

I am no longer a first time swimming parent.  We are seasoned pros at this.  Old hat for us.  Remembering to bring a lawn chair, rule #1.  #winning

Sometimes you make choices in life and sometimes choices make you.

We are all going to be OK

The best of friends are the ones who show up at 8pm when you lock your keys in your car.  Who offer you their beer and cigarettes and a nice warm blanket just so you can sit on their lazy boy chair in silence watching old episodes of the walking dead.
And sometimes,  that is all you really need.

You never seem to run out of things to say

There are angels all around us. Real life,  tangible angels. You don't know who they are until they text you randomly in the afternoon,  show up late with a bottle of wine,  and leave $40 on your counter even when you protest. They are the ones you never see coming,  never would have expected to be someone to help fix you,  even if just a little bit. People need people.

And all I can say is thank you. For the wine,  for the conversation, for the money that is graciously accepted,  yet completely unnecessary.

It is amazing the things you can have in common with someone you never really gave a thought of other than in passing. Knowing and being told that what you have to say, matters. Even if to no one else, to them.

Cause I know that you feel me somehow

Battered women have the makings of a battered woman.  Visible,  touchable. Even if they hide in places under shorts and pants. On rib cages and arms. On legs,  backs,  and when they are visible. Hand marks around the neck,  stitches on an eyebrow.  A black eye.  A broken nose. A broken spirit.
Even a woman who is being abused emotionally,  the depth of their eyes are empty. Dead. Trying to feel nothing because they are made to feel like they are nothing.
I have no visible unintentional markings. My nose isn't broken. My limbs are all intact.
I don't even know if my eyes are dead,  or if I am just that good at pretending, ignoring, forgetting for a moment more that this terrible thing has happened. That this terrible thing happened to ME.
And I find it had to concentrate,  try desperately to bury myself in anything but this emptiness inside of me. This loneliness.  This isolation.
I am a battered women and there no visible marks to prove that this terrible thing happened. To me.

So many terrible, awful things happen on this planet. I am warm,  and fed, and for the most part loved.

But this is still my burden. My pain. My brokenness that will never seem to heal fully. When do I get the chance to confront my abuser? When can I hold up this empty hole and say "Here, this is yours. You did this."?

Open your eyes

I don't dream often. I never really have,  at least not the type of dreams you remember.   Sure,  there are the falling asleep, started awake dreams. The are biological and your body's way of keeping you from acting out your dreams.  Completely NORMAL.  Another is pregnancy dreams.  Those mother fuckers can get weird and have no basis behind them.  None.  Yet,  are still completely normal. I'll occasionally have a wet dream, which I really wish would happen more often, but they go hand in hand with pregnancy dreams,  and are rare.  Dammit.
I am talking about those kind of dreams that startle you awake tear soaked because the person you thought you cared about has left.  Or said awful things to you, in person,  or the dream. Things that cannot be unsaid or forgotten. Things that deep down in some way you know are true about yourself. The most you can do is try to wipe the tears away,  and go back  to sleep. A sleep that comes awkwardly at best.  I haven't had dreams like that since D. Never expected to have them about Chris.

throw kindness around like confetti

The things I can offer in a relationship that are more positive than negative, though I'd love anyone to weigh in on anything I may be missing....

• my monetary debt is settled around my student loans.  It sucks, but it is a way of life.  It is my burden to bear, and not until after I've graduated, thank goodness.
• I have raised a child.  On my own.  Pretty much from conception until this point (he'll be 11 in December.)  He is pretty awesome.  He has decent manners, body hygiene, and listens well.  He is an all around good kid, and although I've had help with my parents, this has been all me.
• On the topic of Aiden, he was born with bilateral clubfoot, which will never define him, but bears into consideration MY character and that I never allowed it to slow him down.  He is now a competitive swimmer.
• I am a fulltime student.  I get crazy busy with homework, go days with little to no sleep but still manage to take care of my child, and hold down a job.
• I have a job.  It's not my favorite pastime in the world, but it pays the bills. 
• I have my own apartment, I don't live with my parents.  Other than Medicaid, (which my son qualifies for) we are government assistance-free.
• I love to travel.
• I am a terrific cook.
• I am honest to a fault.
• You will never have to question where you stand with me.  I will tell you straight up.
• My bed is extremely comfortable.
• I am not a heavy drinker, though I do enjoy going out or sharing a bottle of wine every once in a while.
• I detest liars.  I cannot stand to be ignored. 
• if you talk about open communication and then disappear for days at a time with no communication, you are not an open communicator.  I don't care the circumstance.  In this day and age, it is so easy to send a text or facebook message when you're in the bathroom let alone anywhere else that may warrant it. 
• I love live concerts. Preferably anything but country.  However, live music is awesome.
• I can talk about anything and everything, we will never lack in conversation.

  I have plenty of friends who have been married more than once.  I am not looking to get married right away,  I am looking to meet someone and build something amazing from that.  A best friend and a partner.  It is the shittiest thing in the world to say, but when I have friends who have been married  one, two or three or even four times.... but when do I get my turn?  When do I get a chance to feel that deeply for someone?  For someone to feel that deeply for me.

I am not needy.  Good morning, goodnight, they go a long way.  Respect, goes a long way.  If there is a mutual respect and admiration, there is going to want to be more and more time spent together in order to get to know that person, right?

When do I get my turn?

You weren't there.

NO!
I will not play that part
not anymore
not again
I will not be
the girl who vies for
your attention and
when it never comes
lose myself in all
that I am not and
all that I am incapable of
being.
My thoughts
will not wander
to the feel of your warm
body pressed against
mine separated only by
two thin layers of cloth.
Yours and mine.
I will not imagine
your lips ever so closely
touching mine, allowing me
to escape from
these brief moments
of insanity.
This is not who I am
this is not who I want to be.
If you can't accept that
then you're simply not worth it. 
I am more than
enough
I am more than
worthy
and you could only
be so lucky as to
possess even the
smallest piece
of me.

When you say you are getting healthy, you aren't just talking about your body, even if that's the only thing you're thinking about.  When you think about "getting healthy" you think about eating the right types of foods, and getting the right amounts of exercise, and lifting weights, and sometimes even getting the right amount of sleep so your body is rested and you can get up and do it all over again the next day.

What you're not looking at though, is the WHOLE picture.  There is a whole lot up above that body that you're not even taking into consideration when you're thinking about all things healthy.  Probably the most important piece of all that needs to fall into place before any of the rest of it really can or will start matching up and making ends meet.  Your mind has to be healthy.  Or at least more healthy than not.

Over the last year and a half, I have had a very NOT healthy mind.  I'd say it was right around the time my grand mother died.  It wasn't her death that caused it, it was all of the crap that followed.  Finding my boyfriend's "secret" blog to his dead ex-wife where he told her he liked me but he wasn't really sure if he loved me and he knew I loved his boys and I was great with them and yadda yadda yadda.... I had had doubts about him before finding that little piece of information, I was pretty sure he had been talking to other women, but always too afraid to call him on it, afraid that I would have been called the snoop and then, once again, everything would have been turned back on me.  So my mind started slipping.

I started dating J, a man I had loved for as long as I could have remembered loving anyone, and it was wonderful and real, and easy.  I didn't even have to think about it.  It was like sinking into a warm bath, something I had done a hundred times before, something I didn't need to relearn.  Comfortable.  An old sweatshirt.  Even after I had lost him, I still had him.  For another few months at least.

And then the walls came crashing down around me.

This is what my shrink refers to as the catechism.  The point at which all points after this now revolve.  the hole through the floor of my world through which I would eventually sink so low that I would eventually fall through, but only if I were lucky enough.  Slime.

My defining moment flashes back to chipped beef and cream cheese, blue fuzzy slippers, dill pickle chips, "women for Obama stickers" and sea weed green sterile surgical scrubs.  The thought of any of these things and I want to vomit.  I have the same reaction to them that a pregnant woman would have to the smell of chicken cooking on an open stove.  I ate a lot of waffle cone ice cream.  I chased a lot of that ice cream with vodka and sleeping pills.  I wore a hole in my couch in the shape of my body.  I didn't answer my phone.  And no one knew how bad I was because I was so good at pretending that I was alive and not really dead.  I put on a smile, and I talked really fast, all the while thinking of ways to get Aiden out of the house so that I could kill myself.

We put the Christmas tree up a week before Thanksgiving.  I knew with the Christmas tree up, I could keep the tree lit all the time.  With the lights lit all of the time, I wouldn't kill myself.  The lights make me happy.  I wouldn't make my child an orphan before his birthday or Christmas this year.  We had no money.  I ate ice cream, and I chased it with vodka that I said was soda which was actually vodka, and ambian.  and I slept in a hole on the couch shaped like me.

This was just like a bad breakup.  I just needed a few weeks to get my shit together.  Just a few weeks, and everything would be back to normal, back to a routine.. a few weeks turned into six, I didn't shower.  I smelled.  I smiled.  I finally got a routine back.  A job.  A boy.  I fell in love and suddenly everything was better.  I was better.  OMG this was so great how did everything suddenly get all better?

This guy wants to spend time with me, he wants to be with me? he doesn't see what a screwed up mess I am, or he does and he doesn't care.  I can tell him what a screwed up mess I am and he doesn't care, and he still comes back.  He's a screwed up mess too, but I don't care because he's here, and he's mine, and he wants me, and I love that, and I love him, and YES finally someone who can love and want me in the way I need and deserve to be loved and wanted!

Crash.

When you start to base your entire world around someone, instead of really facing the reality of what you're going through mentally, it is a recipe for disaster.  I was dating a man who would proclaim loudly at the bar that there were only three things that mattered in his life.  His son, his work, and darts.  All while I'm standing there next to him, holding his next drink.  There was uncontrolled crying, and suddenly a warm bed was empty, and I had no idea where I was going to go to next.

The sun and the summer were able to hide some of it.  An excuse to get outside, lay in the sun and bake my skin, and bake my brain, and then I didn't have to think about how lonely I was, or how messed up everything was.  I hated my job, I hated my friends, I hated my clothes and my hair and the color orange.  I didn't write nearly as much as I wanted to since I couldn't form coherent words.  Aiden flourished, I kept better care of him than I took care of myself.

Then darkness.

Around a four week period of time when I drifted in an out of an insomniacs world.  I don't remember much.  I slept, I worked, I studied.  Finally, after my CLC certification, I realized that what I was feeling was not ok, and that this had gone on for long enough.  I finally reached out for help.

I was me again.  My sense of humor was back.  I still carry around this huge PTSD hole inside of me, that rears its ugly monster head from time to time, never know what it going to trigger it, but just being aware that it is there, helps me to keep that monster at bay. 

"I tried to be more than me, and I gave until it all went away."

I guess all that is left now, is for me to just keep swimming.

An open letter to anyone who is my friend.

I want to be perfectly straight with you. I think it's important that you know what you're getting into if you're getting into a friendship with me. There are some things that I absolutely will not do as your friend. 

I will not sleep with your crush. I will not have sexual relations with, make out in a dark ally with, and even if in ten years, you are happily married and have children, I am going to have serious doubts about even developing any sort of feelings for this person that you used to have a crush on ten years ago. I may kiss them close-lipped in front of you at a New Year's Eve party, along with a hundred other people, and I might hug them if we are friendly, but I promise, unless there is a naked picture of me floating around somewhere that I don't know about, they will not see me naked. 

I will not let you walk around with a period stain on your pants/food in your teeth/booger in your nose/guacamole smeared on your forehead. I will tell you. How discretely I do this will be in relation to how much I have had to drink. 

I will not let you date a douche bag without telling you that I think he/she is a douche bag. I am sure you are already aware of this. I am sure you don't want to hear this. I also know that sometimes we avoid certain things because we don't want to hear them. If I have to listen to your boyfriend call you fat, he is a douche. If your boyfriend accuses you of cheating with your gay best friend and your straight female friend, continuously, he is a douche. If he borrows money from you, from your family, from his friends, your friends, the bank, doesn't have a job, and doesn't pay anyone back, he is a douche. You get the picture. 

I will not ever tell you to build a bridge and get over it. This is your life. I am here. I will ALWAYS be here. No matter how many douche bags you fall in love with or how many times you fall back in love with the same one. I will point out the inherent flaws each time, I will listen to the repeating stories, I will offer my advise, always. I will never expect you to be someone you are not and let go of something or someone before you are ready. (Note: unless you are being physically abused in which case I will call the police on that mother-effer.)

I will never realign my priorities so much that I will not have a place in my life for you. I am always a phone call or text message away. At most.  One of the most devastating moments in my life came in the form of a text from a friend who I thought would be there forever. "I do not know where our friendship stands. My priorities have shifted greatly..." And that was pretty much it. I will never leave you hanging. If you are my friend, you will always know where you stand, where we are at, and that you are one of my priorities, even if we go a period of time without talking. 

I will never intentionally leave you out. I never enjoyed the cliques in high school, I don't particularly like them outside of high school. I don't enjoy the drama that seems to follow some people around, and I most certainly don't enjoy making other people feel like less than. 

The Truth is the Truth

I'm going to tell you something about me.  I am an over-sharer.  Shocker, right?  I know this truth about myself.  The truth about it, is that most of the time, I don't really care.  There are times that I realize I do it in inappropriate situations in which case I end up with a very bad case of foot-in-mouth and find it hard to remove myself from those situations.  For the most part though, there are very few things about myself that I don't mind sharing, or talking about.  I wish more people were more open and honest about things.  I think life would be a lot easier.  I think relationships, friendships and everything in between would be a lot easier.

You will NEVER have to wonder where you stand with me.  Because I will tell you.  If I don't like you, I'm not going to go out of my way to tell you this, chances are I will go out of my way to not be in your general vicinity.  If I find myself in the company of people I am less than fond of I am capable of being polite.  If you pissed me off, I will tell you.  If I think I've pissed you off, I will ask you.  I am not shy about this.  If someone up and unfriends me on Facebook, I have a tendency to ask why.  I don't like unresolved conflict.  I don't like that rock-in-the-pit-of-my-stomach feeling.

That brings us to the purpose of this little blog post which I have been writing in my head for weeks now.

I have noticed a trend going around lately of people talking about how they are just "out there living their lives."  They say what they want, and they do what they want, and they are sick and tired of everyone judging them and their choices.  They are living THEIR lives!

Well yes!  You are. 

Go you!

Now, this may sound callous, but I'm assuming that because if it's gotten to the point where if you're posting something about being able to say and do what you want, that you've had people telling you that what you are saying and doing is upsetting to them on more than one occasion.  Is that a correct assumption?

Saying what you want and doing what you want is great.  Being an adult is great.

But did you ever stop to think that other people aren't really judging you, and maybe you're just an asshole?

Just some food for thought.