My family on Earth is so good to me.

[From a letter to a friend nearly a year ago--reflections on relocation.]

I don't know where to begin.

For the past couple weeks, in particular, I keep looking around thinking, "What the fuck has happened to my life?"  The first two days back in WV I cried constantly.  My mother settled into a chair with a tall glass of wine (with ice) and a bunch of cats on her lap to watch some nameless legal show and ignored me.  It was like being 14 all over again.

I feel homesick, although for what or where I really can't say.  Most likely I just feel homesick for one of my grandparents' front porches in the early 80s, when I had seen or experienced very little of the world and when all I needed was an extra five minutes to play outside before dinner or to finally distract my grandpa from his baseball game so he would talk to me instead ("Papaw, have you ever had a mustache?  How old were you?  How long did you have it?  Would you ever have one again?").  Obviously, I can't go back there.

And that leaves me here.

My friend came to see me.  Judith.  She lived in an identical apartment above me when I lived at 3333 W. Grace Street in Richmond, VA.  23221.  I met her shortly after I moved in.  One weekend morning I was unpacking and cleaning and whatnot, and waiting for my landlord to come and unclog my kitchen sink so I could move on with my day.  Suddenly my upstairs neighbor drained the dishwater in HER sink and my kitchen began flooding.  I threw on my flowery bathrobe and ran upstairs to plead with her to please, PLEASE plug her sink!  Just for now.  Her large dog (a boxer mix named Jojo to whom I would later sing, "Jojo left his home in Tuscon, Arizona for some California grass...") came charging and barking to the door.  After some delay, she cautiously peered out through her cracked front door.  She seemed nice but a bit reserved and more than a little startled by my dramatic, breathless appearance at her front door on a Saturday morning.

When she wanted to visit me upon my unceremonious return to the area, I warned her that I was staying at my father's and he lived a little off the beaten bath.  She said adamantly, "I will find you."  And she did, thank god.  Spending a couple days with her and watching her play with my daughter made me feel normal--like my old self for awhile.

This morning at 6am I stood at my father's kitchen sink eating a half sandwich with last night's slow roasted pork and surveying the landscape, and it felt good.

I can't say much for the events that have taken place in between Judith's visit and that sandwich.

I had a job interview on Friday.  At [a local mental health facility] in Clarksburg, WV.  It is located just feet away from the old hospital in which I was born, and it was a completely baffling experience.  The two women who interviewed me were as sweet as could be and incredibly informal.  Mary Sue and Peggy.  They stared at my resume and then up at me and said, "What brings you here from San Francisco?"

Oh, ladies.  If only I could succinctly answer that question.

The were puzzled as to why I had a PhD in psychology but no license to practice therapy.  At one point, one of them asked the other, "Did you see on her resume that...." The other one cut her off:  "I read it," she said.  "I read every bit of it."

They seemed to want to try to fit me in SOMEwhere in the organization and promised to talk to their HR to see what they could offer me.  "Honey, you might not even want the job after you see the salary," Mary Sue warned.  Possibly as much as $40,000/year less than I made at my last position.

Oh, Mary Sue, I want it.

I heard them talking about me before I was even down the hall.  "She's so nice!" was the main thing I heard.

I am nice.

My mother was dogging San Francisco as a place to raise a child.  "I hear frogs outside every night!" she bragged, as if that fact alone were enough to sufficiently make her point.

"Yes, but I could count every person of color in my high school on one hand and I can still remember all their names!" I countered.  "Because there were so few of them."

"We have the Mexicans and the Orientals here now," she offered.

Yes, it's true.  And if they're not picking our produce, they've opened a restaurant.  My friend Shannon tells me there is a popular Chinese restaurant here that keeps a large bowl of Doritos on the food buffet.  And they're very popular.  And everyone still finds it hilarious to joke that the chicken is actually cat.

To be continued.  Sorry.  I didn't even bother to edit this for typos as I usually try to do.  Stream-of-consciousness.  My household is starting to wake up.  Send.

"Planet Earth is blue, and there's nothing I can do."

I see the things he posts and he is still the same. Still exactly the same. And it makes me  miss him. I read his rants and random declarations and imagine how I would respond. I generally imagine his retort and find myself laughing. Even though nothing actually happened.

I miss the long nights we sat and talked and drank for hours. And sometimes we just drank. He knew when to hug me, when to change the music, and when to make a giant farting sound with his mouth.

I am missing my friend terribly.

Ah, Scott. Fuck.

Small

YOU don't care because you can't remember
But I do
You don't want to hear, but
I'll fill you in on the things she can't or won't
These are the things I go back to
in my mind and
I want you to understand what it's like
to feel worthless until
he gives you permission not to.

Jealousy (cubed)

My female parent has been visiting the past few days. While we've had a surprisingly nice visit, I've come to really loathe her boyfriend. He is insecure and jealous and can be rather vicious. He calls while the two of us are hanging around in my apartment and says things like, "Who's there with you? Do you have guys there?" While we were spending Mother's Day in wine country, he would call and text constantly. She wanted to get off the phone so we could continue our day, and he assumed she was in the middle of fucking someone and wanted to finish. The rest of our day was spent getting phone calls and text messages from him saying, "What the hell's going on out there? You've been out there for days. Who are you seeing?"

She defends him at every turn: "He has a good heart." This afternoon I officially got fed up and I'm spending a couple hours in my room so I don't have to listen to her reassure him over and over that she's not fucking anyone while she's here visiting me.

On one hand, I am jealous that she has someone who seems to miss her. But that's exactly where that ends. I am exhausted from dealing with him vicariously through her, and don't know how she can stand his constant accusations. My insistence that she deserves better--someone who can trust her for more than 5 minutes at a time, at least--falls on deaf ears.

Once there was a girl

This has been a long time coming. I just didn't have the courage to tell the story before.

*********************

Once there was a girl who didn’t think she was worth very much.

She was a shy, introspective, and melancholy girl by nature, and probably destined to have self-esteem problems even without the things that happened to her. She had a very young, single mom. Her mom was lost and lonely and didn’t think she was worth very much, either. So she did things to make herself feel worth something—all the things that made her feel worth something involved men and drugs. The girl’s mom loved her very much, but when she was on drugs she didn’t care what her daughter witnessed. Even when it involved men. And more drugs.

When our girl was five, her mom got married. This is when the girl’s problems began in earnest.

Her shiny new stepfather tarnished very quickly. (If you ever want a nice case study of brainwashing and pure, unadulterated physical and psychological torture, you should study this man. He still remains the cruelest human being the girl has ever personally known.)

The girl and her mom were stuck. They were broke. They were powerless against him. Other people knew he was not a nice man. No one ever knew the things they went through. He was very creative and sly.

The girl wanted to ask for help, but she didn’t know the right words. She didn’t know how to say:

“My stepfather makes me feed myself cat shit while he watches and laughs.”

Or what about, “He grabs me by the hair and beats my head against the wall if I don’t pick everything up off the floor. And even when I pick everything up off the floor, he pretends it’s still there laying in front of me and beats my head against the wall because I say I don’t see anything there. So I pretend to see what he sees, and gather up imaginary pieces of what he sees in my arms while looking at him, hoping I have pleased him.”

How was she to explain that he made it a game to see how hard of a hit she could take without falling down? She was only a little girl, and it was impossible to withstand the full force of a grown man. So she was destined to be knocked down. And to get back up. Over and over again.

When you are little, it’s not easy to tell people your stepfather held a gun to your head while the police surrounded the house and your mother screamed. He wanted to be sure she wouldn’t leave, you see. Sometimes he even hurt their pets in front of them. (This was especially hard for the girl. She loved all creatures. Except locusts. Their sounds and shells terrorized her.)

The girl and her mother were required to recite specific sentences regularly in order to ensure their powerlessness: “I am a bitch. I am a whore. I am ugly. I am stupid. I am fat. No one loves me. No one will help me. I am a bitch. I am a whore….” When the girl started off saying these things, she knew in her heart that they weren’t true and that she was just saying them to appease him. But after saying them regularly, over and over, these words started floating through her head even when she was not being forced to say them.

The girl did the only things she could think of to cope. In kindergarten, she went to school with bruises under her clothes and locked herself in the bathroom and screamed hysterically when it was time to go home. She escaped to her grandparents’ houses whenever she could. She played outside from morning to night with the neighborhood kids as often as she could. When the neighborhood kids weren’t around, she found places to hide and explore with imaginary friends created for that very occasion. She took long rides on her bicycle and ate green apples from other people's yards. She gave names and personalities to everything around her—the trees, the flowers, the animals, the broom—to make her feel surrounded by familiar faces and friends.

Unfortunately, her stepfather was not the only one who made the girl think she wasn’t worth very much. There was more than one man, in her family and otherwise, who were more than willing to let her know she was only good for one thing.

One of them was an uncle who had his own cross to bear. He did things that no little girl should ever have to experience. She was five. She wore Care-Bear pajamas. While it happened, sometimes she would stare at a picture of the devil whose iridescent paint gleamed at her in the moonlight; other times she stared out the window and directly at the moon itself. The girl felt so dirty and was so ashamed that she wanted to curl up and die.

But she did not.

She got really good at picking up the pieces of love and acceptance she could find and curling herself around them like a cat.

Years later, when the girl and her mom (and now two brand new baby brothers) finally got away from the stepfather by going into hiding for awhile, the girl’s mother fell apart. And rightfully so. But then the girl’s one constant ally through those times, her mother, felt more than ever like she wasn’t worth very much. And she tried to make the girl and her brothers feel as bad as she felt because she didn’t have anything else left to give them.

…Fast forward…

Our girl is 15. Her physical situation is much more stable now, but she is confused, hurting, and lonely inside. She is mortally self-conscious and shy and terrified of every move she makes—what if she makes someone mad? She gets better at hiding these things and at doing the things a normal girl should. She is positive, however, that if anyone really knew all of the things that made her up they would be horrified and disgusted and not want to be around her. They would discover for themselves what she’d always felt inside—that she wasn’t worth very much.

At that young age the girl fell in love with a shy, introspective, and melancholy boy. He didn’t have the deep, dark secrets that she had, but he listened to her secrets and didn’t make her feel ashamed. This boy gave her the courage to try for things she never thought she could do. She left home when she was 16 and set about trying to make those things happen.

She actually did some cool things.

She went to college and she was very, very serious. Others around her had the liberty to fuck around, but the girl knew she had one shot and she had to make it happen. She didn’t fuck around at all—not even one little bit.

She started to explore the world. Every chance she got to do so, she took it.

She didn’t know what she wanted to do when she got out of school, so she went to school some more. She wanted to know things and to feel she had some power and control over her life. She used to laugh when she thought of herself with any kind of high-falutin' graduate degree. It seemed terrifying and unattainable and ridiculous to her. So she decided to shoot for it. She eventually pulled it off.

The boy was there through it all--even when she tried to test him by pushing him away. (She was still very afraid, you see, of everything and everyone.) She warned the boy, “If you ever lay a hand on me, I will set you on fire.” She was pretty sure he wouldn’t hurt her, but she also knew a thing or two about self-preservation.

When the girl was 24, she started to honestly look around at her life for the first time. She started to look deep inside herself, too. She started to realize that she needed more—that what she had was not enough. She even started to admit to herself that the boy was not enough. This was terrifying to her. He had loved her and given her strength and courage when she needed it most.

She realized she had been in survival mode for a very long time.

Upon these realizations, she felt lost and lonely inside. She knew what her instincts told her but she hadn’t yet really learned to trust them. She was uncertain of who she was, what she needed, and how to go about finding out either of those things. (It was a tough time.)

Once again, she didn’t know the right words. She was now an adult and had a much wider vocabulary at her disposal, but she didn’t know how to tell the boy, “Thank you for loving me even when I couldn’t love myself. Now I need to move beyond these fences we’ve built; they are pinning me in and I am dying inside. You loved me as a child, and now, should I be lucky enough to love and be loved back again, it needs to be as the woman I am.”

When she was 28, the girl did another thing she never imagined she could do and that was very terrifying to her. She left everything and everyone she loved behind and moved far, far away to try to make a completely different kind of life for herself. It was very painful. It actually took her a couple of years to make it all come together, but she made it happen. At the last minute, the boy decided he wanted to come, too. The girl thought it wasn’t the right thing, but she felt like it was worth one last try. (She was still afraid, you see.)

It was a disaster from the start. The girl knew that living with anyone would never be easy, but this move proved to her once and for all that she loved him, but her relationship with him was not enough. She was honest with him from a very early point that it wasn’t working for her. He kept trying. It broke her heart, but it wasn’t enough. The girl finally told the boy she was moving out, that it might take some time to put the pieces in place, but that it was going to happen and he needed to make plans for himself. It was terrible, of course, and still continues to be very, very difficult. Her friends, both near and far, have helped her find the courage to move forward.

It took a very long time and seemed like a simple lesson to learn, but she finally started to realize that she is worth something. She also realized that she deserves something more. (The girl’s mother has not yet put these pieces together for herself. The girl has no idea how to help her.)

There are days, of course, when the doubts creep in and when “moving forward” seems to be at a glacial pace, but there it is.

This was that girl, a long time ago:



And this was the first postcard secret she sent out in the world to try to be set free:



(She still has work to do, but she has been fighting for years now with everything she has. She will make it.)

THE END

Musings

This blog has generated a bit of a stir.

A couple things before I go on:

1. This is my journal. You don't have to read it.
2. When I said I was thinking about moving I meant what I said. Thinking about it.
3. If you work with me and we are not friends and you read this I think it's really inappropriate. Especially if you are management. Ahem.

Anyway.

I'm trying to remember how it felt when I knew it was time to leave Richmond and come to San Francisco. I had been there for 6 years and I was itching for change. It felt like I had learned the things that I needed to learn there and I wanted to move on. I was restless and pent up and pacing. It's weird, because that's not really what I'm feeling right now.

I feel defeated and tired. Really fucking tired.

People have asked me where I would go. I'd probably start with North Carolina, but I think realistically I would end up in Richmond again. I know. That sounds weird after I described being ready to leave, huh? It's just that the times I have returned to Richmond since I have been here, I have felt absolute joy. When I feel homesick, it is for Richmond. When I hear a weather report or a news story about Richmond, I feel a pang. When a friend mentions traveling to or being in Richmond, I am incredibly jealous. I miss it. I miss Judith and Amber and Dave and the folks I used to work with. I think it's the closest thing to "home" I ever felt.

I don't know.

The last time I made this decision it was a natural transition period in my life. Plus, I had someone to go with. This time I have neither going for me. Can I do it again? I don't know. I am considering it seriously enough that I told my friends here. I promised Nannette that before I made the decision I would work on getting to a mentally healthier place.

I am working on that.

Thinkin' 'bout leavin'

Last night the Golden Gate Bridge had my number again. I'm terrified of that thing. There's something about it that draws my brain to it in times of despair.

I'm thinking about leaving San Francisco. Like, for real.

I used to feel optimistic. I used to have a feeling that things were going to work out for me--somehow, some way. I felt that good things were in store for me. That all ended a couple of years ago. I've struggled to figure out how to get it back, and I keep coming up short.

Things have gotten bad again, and it wasn't until last night when I told anyone just how bad they had gotten. I barely do the things I need to do to take care of myself, and this has to change. I deserve a lot more.

I'm giving some serious thought about moving to North Carolina, at least as a temporary stop en route to somewhere else, to be with my aunt for awhile. I need to leave the job that makes me want to slit my throat. I need some mental and emotional support. I can stay with her awhile while I look for a job. I can focus on myself and stop struggling so much just to survive. I need to sit with the idea a bit. If I do it, I need to seriously save some money, so it probably wouldn't be until after my summer class is over.

I'm scared. But I feel like there might be away out of this mental prison I'm living in.

Text message from my mother

Ok your mom is officially a biker's bitch. Lol

A conversation with my mother long ago

I am 13 years old, and it is the summer before my 8th grade year. I'm sitting on the couching reading a book when my mom comes into the room.

Mom: Go outside and play.

Me: I'm too old to go outside and "play."

Mom: Then just go outside and do something.

Me: I'm reading.

Mom: Boys don't like girls that are too smart, you know.

Me: Then I don't like boys.

Mom: What are you, some kind of lesbian?

Family vacations

My brother Dan is in the Navy and is supposed to be coming home from his tour of duty in January. My mom has become somewhat obsessed with the idea that she’s going to get all of us together to take a vacation. She first suggested a fishing trip. I flatly refused this idea because the thought of spending a few days cringing while hooks were stuck into worms, tearing up when fish were caught and breathing their last thrashing, flopping breath, and gagging when they were cleaned sounds like no kind of vacation to me. It sounds only slightly more appealing than finding my significant other in bed with another woman while I was being simultaneously punched in the face, audited by the IRS, and told I had an inoperable brain tumor.

Mostly, though, she has become fixated on the idea of us taking a cruise together. From her fantasy world perspective, I can see why this sounds appealing to her. She has visions of the four of us sipping strawberry daiquiris and staring off into the sunset, bonding and reminiscing over our idyllic childhood while a waiter named Jose replenishes our drinks and a maid named Maria slaves away in our rooms, folding our towels into the shapes of anchors and leaving little chocolates on our pillows.

But I have been on vacations with these people before and I know how they go.

We didn’t have a lot of money when I was growing up, so if we did anything it mostly involved small day-trips. There was one ill-advised trip to Disneyworld in 1992. We went to Red Lobster in Orlando—what my family considered to be the epitome of fine dining—where my mother and step-father got into a no holds barred fight in the middle of the restaurant. He ended up throwing his lobster’s claws at her after she accused him of “fucking dog-face again” and stormed out in dramatic fashion to fume in the parking lot, still wearing his little plastic ‘Seafood Fest!’ bib.

On that same trip we had a rental car. Riding in this car was like being in the fiery pits of hell because we couldn’t get the air conditioner to work nor the windows to roll down. This was in Florida. In the middle of summer. Anytime we had to go somewhere in the car there was a lot of screaming at each other and howls of “Stop looking at me!” and “Get your sweaty body OFF of me!” [Side note: Eventually we broke down and called the rental car company and the problem was easily fixed. Something about having turned the key “too far” in the ignition. All that suffering. For naught.]

We came home from that trip sun-burned, not speaking, and with a time-share we couldn’t afford because my parents were dazzled by free tickets to Universal Studios.

That same summer we had a big outing to a Pittsburgh Pirates game. During this trip one brother threw the possessions of the other brother out the window and this resulted in a knock-down, drag-out brawl all over the back of our van as they tried to kill each other. On the way back to WV that night, my step-father got mad at my mother in McDonalds for something else she said (it probably had to do with “dog-face”) and threw French fries at her as we sat and ate in silence. They bounced off her forehead one by one as she tried to maintain her dignity by ignoring him and continuing eating. She later paid him back by refusing to get in the car, and we drove for at least a half a mile down the road at 4 mph as they argued about whether she would be joining us for the return trip home.

Finally, there was a second ill-advised trip to Disneyworld in 1993 in order to use this time-share that we couldn’t afford and had been struggling to pay for during the previous year. My mother and step-father were separated by this time (big shocker, I know) and she’d woken up in the middle of the night to him pointing a gun at her head and saying calmly that he was going to kill her. I don’t know how it all played out except that my mother survived and he left, and then suddenly we were on the run. My mom rushed us all into the car without all of our bags packed, convinced that he was coming back to kill her, and we peeled out, spewing gravel from our country road behind us. We didn’t have the money for hotels en route, so we slept in the car in motel parking lots.

My heart swells with nostalgia.

All the lives I'm not living

Alternative title: Stay/go, yes/no (I don't know)

Sometimes I am so tired of thinking about all the lives I'm NOT living, all the things I'm not doing. I want to feel like absolutely anything is a possibility.

I used to price apartments in other cities--Paris, Vienna, Barcelona--and try to imagine myself there. (How would I feel waking up with a view of the Eiffel Tower? Would it change the way I buy groceries? Would showering feel any different?) Once someone said to me, "Why do you do that? You're never going to live in those places." It crushed me. Maybe I really won't live in those places. It's not like I speak the language or have any job prospects there. But I want to feel like it's a possibility.

This contrasts with my strong urges to have roots and security--to have people who depend on me and whose day is not complete unless I am in it. There are no people like that and it's a very lonely realization.

My family would be happy if I moved back to WV and married a man who goes deer hunting and drives a big truck and has dirty fingernails and who can talk about things like carburetors and horsepower. We could have children who wear grubby, stained t-shirts and a house that needs a new roof if we could only stop living paycheck to paycheck. My husband would change the oil in our old minivan himself.

Oh my God.

To liberally borrow from a Tom Waits' song I heard for the first time recently, I packed up all my expectations and moved out to California. It turned out that I was better at starting over than I thought I would be. I've never known what I would be doing after June 30, 2008 when my fellowship ends. At first I was so homesick I was sure I would go back to the east coast afterward, but now I'm not so sure. I like San Francisco. But will I ever have anything here? I don't know. Would Portland or Seattle or Philadelphia be any different? I don't know that either.

I guess I've just always wanted to feel like I was somewhere I belonged. I had it for a brief time in Richmond, and I'm not sure how to find it again. ("I know I'm at my house, but I wish that I were at home...")

I do know that I need to get out of the mindset of waiting for my life to begin. It's here. It's now. It's underway.