Category: Books

The Bluffers Rebuff

I miss Sammy.  I miss the way she says ‘Hello’ in the morning, or says “By by” when I leave but mostly I miss knowing there is one living, breathing person* in the house that loves me unconditionally even when she bites me.

Mom and I have plastered over the dings in each others walls, though I didn’t hurl anything heavy, she took asserting my boundaries as a direct hit and then taking Sammy away so she wouldn’t breathe in her feathers as a killing blow.  Covering the wounds works like turning off the lights instead of doing the dishes….if you can’t see it, it never happened.  I was told that I was breaking a dying woman’s heart by taking Sammy to my sisters, but if Mom truly is allergic to her feathers then taking Sammy out of the house was the only recourse.  It’s not like I would allow her to live outside even if she could.  It is still seen as an intentional, malicious action against my mother, which was not my intent, and I tell her I don’t intend on having Sammy stay away forever.  I’ve ordered air filters/purifiers/cleaners for her room and the family room and once she can breathe okay I will bring Sammy home as a test.  Mom on the other hand feels she will never be able to be in the same room with her again.  It is her way of bluffing my bluff, to see who could last the longest without her.  Well, not to be too macabre or put too fine a point on it, I’m the one that can live longer without her.  That’s not why I’m not going to buckle to her will, or maybe it is, I dunno sometimes what is going on in my head.  In a lot of ways I’m still very angry at my mom for the way she treated me, talked to me, acted towards me, and yet knowing that it’s coming from a place of fear and her interpretation of everything as pain she doesn’t know (or want to know) any better.  I can’t change her, I can only change myself so she can no longer hurt me.  But she made me cry this weekend, and honestly that seems to be the worst thing that she could have done.  That was the start of her treating me better, she thinks she broke me.  What happened was I didn’t have all of my social meds for the day and I crumbled a little but she’s taking it as a victory.

To help me overcome my loneliness and the fun in watching her, I bought a wifi camera that will allow me to log into it and I can watch her all day if I wanted to.  I won’t, hopefully.  But when I’m at home and in my room I can put it on my 24″ monitor and it would be like she was in my room with me.  It just can’t get here fast enough!

*Sammy is a feathered person….and yes, I’m one of ‘those’ pet owners.

Not My Circus, Not My Monkeys.

Mom and I hit the rocks, then the reef, then the iceberg over the weekend.  One realization that came from it was startling, sorta dream-crushing and it needs to go through the journal process before I can share coherently.  Sorry.  The other realization is that I can’t make my mother have a happy end of life.  I can’t do it for her, I can’t ease her from her dystopian state into the station where she believes she belongs.  It’s not my job to make those choices for her.  It’s like trying to have a pet polar bear in Phoenix, just isn’t going to end well.  I will be there to help her with her choices, of course, but I’m no longer going to foist them on her.

The fight was bad, things were said, apology made but we’re still dancing around each other not sure when the other one is going to launch the next salvo of words to try and destroy the other.  Neither of us willing to admit we love the other, and there are moments when she talks to me and I wonder if I still do.  I guess I do, I haven’t called the Shady Pines to come and take her away.  She hasn’t called the police to report me for elder abuse, so I guess we are still on an even keel.

What I don’t really like about myself in this fight is the war in my head of how to behave.  I don’t want to be mean to her, yet I think bad things, and wish I had the wherewithal to do what I imagine.  I get too much pleasure out of calling her bluff and watch her try and squirm away from the consequences.  For example she believes I don’t love her because I won’t dust my room or clean the birds cage on a more regular basis because of her allergies.  So, I’m sending Sammy away to my sisters to live for a while.  My reasoning is two fold, I want the feathers that stay aloft in the air for hours, the one she breathes in, to settle down and to see how well she improves and to, mostly, call her bluff.  I won’t let her use my parrot as a wrench in her manipulation toolbox.

It’s those words, the mean words, that I want to get away from.  I know I’m angry right now and I’m working hard to keep my head from swimming in the anger and frustration.  When I start getting angry I start deep breathing and chanting in my head, but that’s ameliorating the symptoms, not ripping out the foundation of them so I can build anew.  I’m at a loss of how to do this though.  How do you plug the holes and snip off the pour spout of the venom in your brain in favor of peace, love, and …YIKES…I sound like a hippie!!  I don’t want to feel the bile bubble up or the desire for revenge or strut the I’ll-show-you posture any longer.  Part of me is hoping this declaration will be enough, that making the choice to do so will be all I need to do to become that loving, peaceful zen-like person…..I guess that is my circus and one of the many monkeys that are on my back.  Reality sucks, and it’s hard work.  Maybe I should rethink the hippie thing.

“I just want to spend all the time I can with you…”

Raise your hand if you don’t think is a guilt trip…..

Yea, that’s what I thought.

Little Miss Cranky Pants

Mom is happily watching her 49ers play while I’m tucked inside the “cooling room”, the only room in the house where I can  bring the temperature down to a livable level for me…like in the mid 60s.  With headphones and a stockpile of cookies you’d think I’d be a happy camper, but no.  I’m irritated, my eyes want to pull down the lids and block out the world.  I’ve only taken my puppy upper pills this morning but that’s about it.  I need to change that so I don’t miss them any more.  I can be such an idiot sometimes.  I know better, I’ve seen the difference in myself between medicated and non medicated, the world knows the difference when I’m medicated or not medicated.  And yet I let these slips happen.  I’m such an idiot.

I want to just hide away in my room, in my bed where it’s safe.  And I would too, if my mother could take care of herself in the least.  She likes having a lady-in-waiting.  It fulfills her imagined royal imagining that she is of royal blood, the she was ripped from the courts of the refined and noble world and put into the mire with the rest of us peasants.  I’m not kidding.  It’s put more sarcastically than I probably should state, but since I discovered that we really are related to the Plantagenet kings of England it has amplified her delusions of royalty.  I haven’t researched the bloodline but I’m sure we’re there by way of a Fitz-Something*.

Okay, I know, cranky.  If I had the patience I’d try to write this out in my journal, or if I had the energy I’d try to get some work done or my beads put together.  I’ve decided that when I can sit and do 100 Om Mani Padme Hum’s in one sitting with beads interspersed for deep breaths then I will have the discipline to move into a more focused, or Zen like mediation.  That is a worthy thing to do, especially for the Sabbath, but F it, I think I’ll take a nap instead.

Wanting Vs. Doing Vs. Needing

I want……….

  • to go back to school to spiff up my phlebotomy credentials (long story)
  • to write at night and on weekends
  • to have a clean and neat room, with my bed made and laundry done
  • to go on hikes on weekends and maybe learn to Glamp from time to time
  • to make jewelry for gifts and for myself….maybe even to sell
  •  to keep working a full time job so I can have a full time pay

Vs.

I’m doing……….

  • 8hrs a day on a less than taxing job but still need to take a nap in my car
  • I’m registering for school but will have to do it in person instead of online, terrified I’ll sleep through it or fail
  • I clean my room by turning off the light and turning on the TV
  • I get out of bed late on weekends and then require a few naps to get through the day
  • The thought of pulling out and putting away all my jewelry making stuff is exhausting in itself
  • Honestly, I don’t know how I’ve been able to keep a full time job.

Okay, I’m tired right now. I really have no reason to be, other than I stayed up too late last night. But when I’m in these moods I wonder if I will ever be able to have a normal life, if I’ve ever had a normal life. My Mom is insistent that I just need to “push through” and “fight back” and basically “get over it” and I will be fine. Sometimes I think she’s right, very rarely, and I try and spin myself back out of control. I think I need a routine…a “doing” and slowly build from there. I keep changing this idea of what my day should look like beyond going to work, going home, going to bed, getting up and going to work, going home, going to bed.

Right now I’m thinking that Mediation is the direction I should be going in. Of course I can’t do that until I have a space cleaned in my room, which means I need to work in my room, which means I need to do my laundry and find a meditation pillow and make hand knotted-silk strung beads and a tassel for meditation……See how the wanting and the doing are always dancing?

I need to……….

  • JUST meditate

    • I don’t need a clean room to do it
    • I don’t need my laundry clean to do it
    • I don’t need a special pillow to do it
    • I don’t need specially strung beads to do it (yet, I want them because it means shopping and creating)

The only thing I need to do is make time. Or in my case take time.  And take comfort in the hope that the needful will allow for the mental space for doing the wanting.

The End is Nigh….or not.

The diaphanous veil between the living and the dead is getting thinner.  I can feel my father closer, my brother.  They are waiting.  I can’t really say this to my family because we’ve been saying “Mom won’t make the next XYZ” for the last 24 years. It’s gotten to the point where we won’t believe it until we see it.  And who knows how long a person can.

I want her to have a good end of life, but I don’t know how to bring that about.  She has a DNR, C. will make the final judgment if we need to turn off her machines and pacemaker. (there will be mighty discussions between the three of us girls before hand, it’s not just hers alone)  Her cremation is paid for, our plan to have a boat take us out to the Golden Gate Bridge or beyond to allow her to travel the way she never could in mortality.   I guess now it’s just a matter of all the family to make amends with their own soul and forgive grandma/great grandma and let her go being loved.  She wasn’t trying to hurt us, not consciously anyway.  She wanted what was best for us, even if what she wanted was skewed towards what she needed more, but truly is that her fault?  She relied on the way she was raised, and the pain she experienced on our side of the conversation must have been worse as she believes she wasn’t loved or wanted.  Mom wanted us, she loved us to the best of her ability and with the few tools she was given, and isn’t that all what we can do?  Holding someone to a standard you hold yourself to is just as unfair, lacking compassion and sincerely extremely selfish to the point of narcissism.  True narcissism isn’t something you choose, it’s not like fat where you can go on a diet and emerge a shadow of what you used to be….Narcissists don’t believe the need help or to change, the rest of the world should.  I wish I could take this understanding, acceptance and love and share this enlightenment I’ve been given to my family but I can’t, and even if I can will they have the frame of reference of the months past to understand it with.  Or the desire to truly forgive her and let her go?
The depression and the tentacle like grip the other accessory ailments has robbed me of the ability to feel a lot of feelings.  Well all feelings except anger.  With the containment and proper placement of that merciless flame  the other emotions are coming to the surface and I can say something I never thought I would be able to say.  I love my mother.  I started this journey hating her and silently planning her funeral like a mother plans her daughters wedding.  My biggest fear was that I would hum “Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead” in my pew at her funeral, now I’m not afraid to loose her, or my reaction to it, but mostly that I will be unable to take care of myself without her to remind me to eat, to wake me up when I fall asleep on the couch, to guilt me into cleaning up the house. (I know, I’m a grown up, for heaven sakes, I should be be doing that for myself already).
This feeling of love for my mother and the spiritual lifting I’ve had over the last several weeks makes me wonder if that’s why I am able to feel the veil so close.  The only thing you really take with you is your knowledge and your love.  Love you give is the silken strands that weave your body for the next life and the love you receive is the decoration.  Or so is my belief.
(I’m not saying my Mom is in the throws of dying, she’s not.  I do know her body is starting to give up and betray her in ways she never thought it could.  I’m just saying there are people waiting for her and I can feel their presence.  It could happen today (better not it’s my birthday and her sister already died on my birthday) or it could happen next week/month/year/decade etc.  My nephew J has a saying “At the end of time there will be Dick Clark (rip), Grandma and cockroaches.”  There are days when I look into her eyes and see the steel will to live and I actually start to believe that he isn’t far from wrong.)

Slowly I Turn, Step by Step, Inch by Inch

There are twelve steps and twelve traditions in the OA handbook. I’ve been stymied by the first three.

  • Admit you have a compulsive eating problem

Okay, admit you have a problem. I wouldn’t allow myself to believe it even when I admited aloud that I have a problem, even though we are required to introduce ourselves at the meeting as “Hello, my name is Pamela and I am a compulsive overeater”. Even when they are listing the things that overeaters do and I’m nodding my head in a silent confession, even when more of me oozes off the folding chair than is on the seat, I’m not a compulsive overeater. I’m not, I’m not I’m NOT!

I am.

With the lightening of my psyche, coming out of the depression and controlling the anxiety I see myself more clearly. What used to be hiding in the shadows or under all the other fluff of my life is cluster of barnacles that won’t come off by wishing, hoping or praying. My standard operating procedure in things that I don’t want to do, say housework, is to either shut the door or turn off the lights. If you can’t see it, it’s clean. Tada! I could do just that, deny that I have a problem, let the barnacles continue to infest, grow legion until they ultimately sink me. Careening is the process of beaching a ship at high tide to expose one side of the ship to scrape off the parasites. The sole purpose is to allow the ship to reach its full potential on the water. Yes, I’m well aware of the easy fat jokes I’m not utilizing, but the days of being the jolly fat girl has come to an end. In my own best interest I’ve beached myself and scrape back the shell that hides the real reasons for my compulsive overeating. Believe me, I don’t think I eat this way because I’m physically hungry. I need to do the hard work but thankfully, not alone.
 

  •  Locate your Higher Power (Heavenly Father/God in my case)

I have always had a Higher Power. Even when I wasn’t actively engaged in His good cause. I’ve always known God lives, that He loves me. I’ve been blessed with this innate knowledge that seems to have eluded most of my family. However, knowing it and living that knowledge hasn’t always gone hand-in-hand for me.

 

  • Admit you can’t handle your life anymore, God can. I’ll give it to God to deal with.

I’ve seen His miracles, both large and small, I’ve seen the power in the Priesthood, and felt His healing touch when I was sick and afflicted with things I didn’t want or need any more. Knowing that the path I’m on will only lead to a double sized cemetery plot of I don’t do something about it, I still won’t can’t seem to reach out to Him for help in this. It’s my problem, my weakness, my life and I am trying to live it as close to His book as I can. It’s like I want to be perfect now and then give myself to him as a testament to my beliefs and how I’ve lived them in the world.
Unless perfection weighs in at 300+ lbs, I’m as far away from perfection as the Mariana Trench is for shell-seeking scuba divers. Perfection isn’t for this life, I’m not even sure it’s attainable in the next, but it is the conglomeration of knowledge and our ability to act on that knowledge that perfects us for exaltation. I know this. And yet perfection seems to be my goal in EVERYTHING. This is a trap because I know I’m not perfect yet and I need to be perfect, or at least perfect in all the things I can be perfect in, otherwise I’m sinning, and as a sinner I cannot ask nor expect help from a caring, loving Heavenly Father.

Yea, I caught that little oxymoronic paradox. If He is a loving and caring Father in Heaven, He wouldn’t care that I am perfect or not, only that I’m struggling and suffering. Even if the suffering is self-inflicted. He loves me, and He wants what’s best for me. I lack faith. I have been going through a dirge of hopelessness for what seems like ever, but it twinkles back every now and again, so I know it’s not dead, but those two small words are the key. We are to have faith, even if it’s the size of a mustard seed, and when planted in prepared soil (hope) it will grow to bring shade and provide homes for small helpless animals of the meadow. I lack these things, the hope and the inner-wherewithal to act on that faith. Faith, is a verb, I know it doesn’t sound like it is, but it is. Faith without works is dead. Maybe I’m afraid of the work, maybe I’m afraid of the success, all these things need to be examined but nothing, ever, will get done unless I jump.

I’m not ready to jump.

Last night I did it. I took the first small step, well actually all three. I am a compulsive overeater. God knows this and I have turned my life and sanity over to Him. Yes, I’m still prying fingers off one at a time to relinquish full control over to Him, but slowly I’ve turned and, step by step, inch by inch I will turn my life from compulsive overeater to humble personal achiever.

 

Footnote:

[1] When I hear the word “Careening” I think about careening out of control, which is what I am, but now careening seems to represent “caring” and that is the type of careening I need done.

Zen & Now

I’m reading Zen Path Through Depression.  At the end of each chapter it has a suggested meditation to follow.  I haven’t had the space to do that lately.  It’s not like my Simply Being App which is just sitting and listening to the woman talking, which is simply easy, has done me a world of good when I remember.  It requires the listener to blank out ones mind and focus on the moment.  If thoughts creep in, let them creep out, notice everything around you (with your eyes shut, of course).  I’m not ready, I don’t think, to not have a guide with me to keep me on the path of meditation and not getting snarled in a bunch of dark and spiky thoughts which are always toed-up to the line to jump in and distract me. 

What I found really interesting was that Zen requires a focus spot and to imagine yourself up on a huge hill, feel the air and the freedom and the expanse.  Then you invite your depression into the meditation and take a good look at it.  This is where I’m lost.  I have no idea what depression looks like.  I thought it was like a big sucking black hole of hopelessness or some sort of snarling animal that wants to, at any weak moment, devour me whole.  I realize I have to identify it, name it and then tame it into a space where I retain the lessons learned from it but our of the way and reach so  it can no longer leach time and bar my talents from expression.  I’ve been a firm believer that if you don’t learn your lessons from life you are doomed to live the same trial over and over again until you master it.  I feel like I’m finally pushing through.

There’s this story that I know that gives me hope that my trials will be for good:

“Once there was a man, thin, weak and penniless.  He pled with God to help him.  God responded with “My son, push on this rock,” So the man set to the task of pushing the rock every day.  He would get up push on the rock, go home, eat and get up and do it all over again.  After a while the man is no longer thin or weak but he had huge muscles on his arms and abdomen and chest.  He threw his arms up to go and said “Why do you have me pushing around this rock when it’s too heavy for me to move by myself.  God responds back with “Oh, my son, I never told you to move the rock, just push.  Now you are ready to do that which I have chosen for you.”

I know that Heavenly Father has a plan for each and every one of us, and it has a lot of trials in it.  One way to look at it is the greater the trials the greater His love and the greater good you are meant to do in the world.  He never forgets us, never throws us under the bus for a greater person because we are His, and He loves us each unconditionally and individually.  I don’t always feel that in my life, but it helps to know it’s true.

Revenge Is A Dish Best Served With Whipped Cream

Okay, a rather long title.  I’m still flying a little bit on the cheese cake(s) from my celebratory vengeance expedition at the local mall.  Perhaps I should say that revenge is best dished up with a credit card and someone elses money.  It goes back to the whole “I’m really ashamed of the way you present yourself.” and “I don’t want you to embarrass me” crap that I got from my sister today and my mother on Saturday.  So,  went shopping to buy clothes to wear to work with my sister.  Despite the fact that I got a great deal on the clothes, like saving over $200 on the majority of it, I used the money I’m supposed to pay my sister with.  Can’t have both, money and a sister that doesn’t embarass you.  Pick one.  I do have to say, retail therapy is VERY effective.

I did something I can’t believe I did but I have absolutely no regret on and that was buying a purse that is all leather, that fits all my writing paraphernalia and is just elegantly understated and is so not the tattered bag I’ve been carrying around with me because it fit everything I needed to carry around.  It’s sitting here next to me and the smell of the leather is soooooo nice.

So, let’s address the issues at hand.  First of all, I got angry and went shopping.  Everyone I talked to about how I had been so mightily abused agreed with me, even though I looked horrible, dirty shirt and torn jeans and tennis shoes, everyone agreed that was just out-of-bounds for anyone to say to another person, especially a family member.  But the sting of the anger that I normally would have been fussing at before, even though I’m off my anti-anxiety pills briefly due to supply, has me feeling more empathy for Cyndi and even understanding that she thinks it’s okay.  I’m trying to get beyond the crap our childhood has mired us in, she’s happy as a clam up to her nose in it.  She is hurting me because she is hurting and doesn’t realize it, and I can’t hate her for that.  And I’m going to keep trying to maintain that attitude.

So, the clothes, socks, pj bottoms, purse, make-up, face care and make-up brushes are my ways of compensating myself for the slight by giving Mom and C what they want, me to not shame them in public.  Of course, this doesn’t mean I won’t wear the dirty shirt and the torn jeans when we’re out as a family.  I’m not going to stop who I am because it offends their narrow interpretation of what the world should look like in order to be accepted.  They can just bite me if they think  I’m ever going to be like them.  The one thing I am keeping is my Mickey Mouse watch.  They can pry that off my cold dead wrist before I’ll give that up.

I love my purse.

The Winds Blow Against Me

The breath of negativity seems to be pushing against my resolve not to melt into a gibbering puddle of tears.  Today, I’ve been told that my sister is ashamed of me, that I’m a hoarder who needs help and that since I didn’t make any money this year so I’ve lost my mothers exemption because I apparently am no longer worthy of it.

Okay, so I’m sensitive today.  My teeth have been on edge all day, wanting to scream and run away.  I’ve had images of sawing through my wrists again.  My anxiety level is high, and I’m running low on my anti anxiety pills.  The next few days are going to be an unmitigated joy. (That’s sarcasm, btw, in case you don’t read sarcasm fluently).

It didn’t help watching Hoarding: Buried Alive on TV today because Mom lost the remote in the garbage so we couldn’t change the channel.  It taught me something though….Messy inside, messy outside – tidy inside tidy outside.  I need to put more effort into keeping my surroundings neat and tidy, I know it’s something I need to learn to grow up and do, at least according to the blowhards that are content to sit back and judge me.  Maybe I am being a big baby and I’m throwing a sort of rebellious tantrum, but F’em.  I’m ging to go through the Bradshaw stages, starting with infant and work my way through to healing my wounded inner child back to being a wonder child and champion myself the way I never have been in my life.  I am a loved daughter of God, and I am worth the effort and time this is going to take.  So, yea, F’em.  I’m not shameful, I’m not a hoarder and I don’t need the exemption.  I don’t need them F’ing up my growth or their attempts to blow me off course.