Shall I Fall Down On My Knife Or Yours?

I wish the leaves would finish falling already. I'm impatient for the full blow of winter. Sometimes, no, not sometimes, a lot of the time I would like to crawl under a rock and never speak to another person again. I could hide in my house and not come out again until I'm a six hundred pound freak the police and paramedics have to come and pry out of my narrow hallway. I can definitely imagine never leaving the house again. I also think my access to the Internet should go away. I would never give it up willingly, which means it will have to be pried from my vice grip. I should not be allowed to communicate with other people. I also kind of think other people shouldn't be allowed to communicate with anyone either, especially me. We might all be better off if we hadn't come up with language.

I am sitting here at my desk with a hundredth beer because the only way I know to sooth my spirit is to write. My blog is the best place I know to do it. Yet there are a thousand things I can't say. What I want to do is lash out right now and make a list of every opinion and thought I have that I know will alienate someone and just get it over with. I'm going to alienate everyone eventually anyway. You don't think I am? Just talk to the right people and you will find out.

I'm being a little unfair to myself because other people have words too and I don't force anyone to use them unwisely or hurtfully to me. I have feelings and right now they are pretty crushed.

What I want to do is to curl up with my seven year old heart- my kid who is no longer interested in curling up with me because he's seven for god's sake which is practically grown up, and I want to protect him from a lot of people in my life. I feel that primal flush of tiger love and I have realized too late that I have exposed him in ways I didn't realize were unfair to him. Where was my tiger love when he really needed it? And Lord knows, he's going to need a lot of it still.

Even a mother who gives birth to the Devil's spawn, as I have, has to love and protect the evil she's created.

Life was so much more simple when I was just a housewife with no child. When I hung out with people who did or didn't have children but didn't have to care what their views on parenting and education were.

You can't always be looking back though.

Besides, you know what? Max is a wonderful kid and when he's had a chance to mature he will surprise a lot of people. He's got a good heart but he's 100% testosterone and that's not a quality much appreciated by a lot of my peers. I promised myself recently that I was going to stop mentioning how hard he is to parent and instead I'm going to tell people how proud I am of his intelligence, curiosity, his deep understanding of life and the universe and the incredible questions he asks me that blow my mind away.

I promised that I would stop putting him and myself down. I don't see other children who are better than him. He hasn't developed a filter for his thoughts which means that what comes out of his mouth is always truly what he is feeling. 100% honest. Which more often than not is hurtful. I am trying to teach him to think before he speaks and to not share everything. But I can't entirely malign him for his honesty, which is inconvenient for sure and pretty antisocial, but he's just saying the kind of stuff everyone would say if you asked them for total honesty. Which I don't recommend you do.

He's only doing what I always end up doing at some point in time-saying what I really think. He's going to have to find out, as I am, that people don't like honesty unless it's them that's dishing it out. I find that I don't care for it either. Highly over rated in my opinion.

My boy is an amazing kid and I wouldn't want any other kid in his place.

I am in a very bitter place at the moment and I want to say terrible blasphemous things about God to piss off pretty much everyone, but what's the point anyway? I don't even believe in God and I do believe I'm responsible for the life I'm living, for both the good and the bad in it. So let me just vent a little of this bitterness off so that I can move on with it and find my better, kinder words again.

So let me recap my life where it's at right now:

We aren't making enough money to pay for anything but the mortgage.

Even after I get myself a minimum wage job I will have to give up my health care.

Once I give up my health care I will break something.

Or get cancer.

Or a lobotomy.

Which I think I might actually like. Can one get an elective lobotomy?

I can't get family assistance because there is a waiting list.

I had to cut one friend loose already this year.

I am pretty sure I've just lost another one.

I won't be able to afford my psyche meds soon.

Some people will rejoice over that because they don't believe in psyche meds.

Those people can go shove a metal pole through their ears.

I'm pretty sure I'm a lousy excuse for a human.

But I'm also pretty sure that that opinion is made stronger by the fact that this month
I have continually been forgetting to take my meds.

My kid deserves a better parent than I've been.

Which other circumstances have made clearer than I wanted to see it.

I'm a maintenance alcoholic and I'm not open to anyone's opinions on that.

I only mention it so that anyone who thinks I don't know it will know I know it.

I'm fat and gross.

I'm not funny.

My cat is getting so mean I think he's going to kill me in my sleep.

There are some things I can't talk about with a single other human being on earth and it really really hurts to keep it inside.

On the plus side, my sister is visiting.

And I am really amazed by the things she's doing and the person she is continually becoming.

Plus she gave me, like, ten zillion compliments on my dill pickles and my food.

I loved her before she complimented me though.

My mom also gave me lots of warm compliments and helped my Thanksgiving be so good in spite of the awfulness I set in motion that same day.

My husband loves me even when no one else does.

He's crazy too.

(Yes, that's on the plus side)

I haven't lost all my friends.

My friend Chelsea called me up to make me feel better.

I feel a little better now.

Even though I've still had to cry a lot today and yesterday.

And I don't cry easily or often.

My friend Sharon apparently still loves me too and called.

Unfortunately I missed the call.

I have considered closing down this blog. I have considered not writing ever again (which amounts to deciding to never breath again). When things go wrong in my life I have always had an unfortunate tendency to turn the knife inwards. Even when I have a righteous anger at someone else. (And what anger doesn't imagine itself as righteous?) When I was thirteen I would bite myself until I bled. Then a couple of years later I would cut myself which has had a never-ending effect on me because I wear and see the deep scars every single day of my life. Then it became just a mental exercise of self-castigation. Mental knives I twist into my own gut whenever I make a false step in life or whenever anyone else hurts me. My fault, my fault, my fault. If I had a leach I'm sure I'd bleed myself.

I take that back. That's like a tick and is one of the most disgusting things I can think of.

If you ask my friend Chelsea she will tell you that I'm a baby about ticks. Although I would like to argue that because it puts me in a poor light...it's true. Damn it.

My fault, my fault, my fault, my fault...

As I have become mentally healthier this tendency has become less vitriolic. Yet it still persists. If you throw a dart at me I will twist it deeper in my gut. Or my heart. Or whatever you were aiming for. I'll make sure it gets there. Sometimes, without being asked, I will just take the stupid knife from your hand and I will do the whole thing myself because, truthfully, you'll probably do it wrong anyway.

Life doesn't live itself.

That just in from planet Angelina.

Which I think is much too small to be a "planet".

You know what? Everything isn't always my fault. Just like everything isn't always Max's fault.

If I just keep typing here and never go to sleep and therefor never have to wake up, then I will never have to deal with anything again except these fucking annoying tears that I don't want anyway because I'm super tough and I don't let my heart break over the little stuff right? Right. Fucking life.

Fucking stupid complicated life. I think it's the things that I can never ever say out loud or in print or even whisper to another human being, even Philip, that are going to kill me in the end. Maybe sooner than I expect. Is that why people write fiction? To tell the things you can never really tell without absolutely cutting yourself off from every other human being?

I lose friends when I open my mouth with questionable stuff, what would I lose if I open my mouth with the unquestionable impossible words that no one is ever allowed to say because if they do they betray every human being on earth and break our trust in the unknown and the trust we all have that it will remain unknowable?

Maybe if I don't let my fingers leave this keyboard they will not find some other weapon to turn. A knife would be cleaner, but cheating. If you think I'm talking literally at this moment, then you are your own sick bastard. I shouldn't even bother reassuring you that I would never leave my wee bairn in this world with the legacy of a suicidal mom. I have not been truly suicidal in over twenty years. I know this week, better than ever before, how much my bairn needs me to be his champion, his PR company, and his mother. His loving imperfect crazy mother.

My child says to me "Are you CRAZY?!"
I say "As a matter of fact, I am. And not ashamed."

If I wasn't on a seven year campaign not to swear in front of him I would have said "Totally BAT-SHIT FUCKING CRAZY."*

So I say to my kid "Are YOU crazy?!"
and my kid says "Yes. Yes I am. So who cares?"

Who indeed.





*An assertion that annoys everyone I know who is in the Therapy profession who feels that this only applies to people who have psychotic episodes. I think I know who I am and my own diagnosis so I'll appreciate not hearing anyone deny my clinical diagnosis which entitles me to call myself crazy if I want. After all, there are thousands of degrees of crazy and I'm not claiming to be non-functioning. Just leave me the fuck alone already!