Rejection for Christmas

Published on by cmglife

Christmas is approaching.  That’s when the old family hurts and feelings start to poke through the facade. Each year I wonder if it is easier to smile and ignore the past? So far it has been, but this year my skin feels a little thinner.

It begins when I start addressing Christmas cards. There are a few years here and there I haven’t had the mental strength to send them out and until now I haven’t realized why.

I tend to contemplate each relationship as I write the name and address on the envelope. I breeze through the names of my closest family members and friends, but then I inevitably have to write the names of those who have hurt me.  I start remembering events where I felt like an outsider, feeling misunderstood and just being downright mistreated.

And more hurtful than those names I write is the one I don’t, my mother’s.   Oh, my mother is alive and well. Physically that is.  To be kind, she is a little “off” mentally.  I don’t think this apple fell too far from the tree.  The difference is I am well and she refuses to be.  Therefore, with whatever  mental illness she suffers from she thinks she is better off without me.  I miss her. I’ve missed her for decades although it’s been only a year since I’ve seen her.

The biggest hurt was when she stopped sending me birthday cards.  That cut deep.  It’s been years and I still can’t come to terms with it.  We each have our breaking point. That is mine.

During this last year I have been tempted to contact her because, well I still miss her.  The idea will come and I will make a plan to call her.  Then the opportunity arises and I put it off.  Then I put it off again.  Next thing I know a week has gone by. I know why I don’t call, I fear the rejection.

I could go on and on about my mine and my mother’s history together, but I really don’t want to.  I’m tired of it all. Well, exhausted actually, otherwise I would dial her number again.

Skinny Bitch

Published on by cmglife

My dad told me recently that I am becoming a little cantankerous.  You know, speaking my mind, lashing out.  He thinks it might be because I work in a middle school and have to deal with all kinds of situations and it has caused me to develop an itchy trigger finger.  He may be right about that, but I don’t think so.

I think I’m becoming a skinny bitch.

Skinny bitches are one’s with the attitude because they can fit into a pair of jeans that are at least 20 years younger than they should be wearing.  That may not be the exact definition.

My husband commented that my new jeans are “really low” (low rise).  He can’t get past the fact that I am not wearing 80’s mom jeans.  Though these may be pushing it, I am thrilled I can actually wear them.

I’ve developed a weird body builder quirk.  I’m not by any stretch of the imagination saying that I am a body builder I am just acting like one, I guess.  This is just getting weirder and weirder, maybe it’s the steroids.

If there is someone acting like they are skeptical of my workouts (real or imagined I’m not sure) I’ll ask them to feel my bicep. And then I say, “And I’m not even flexing!”

Oh God, now that I’ve actually written this down I realize how insane I am acting. And yet still surprised!

Confessions of a Mad Woman

Published on by cmglife

Don’t men drive you crazy sometimes? Whether you are in love with them, living with them, married or not, female or not, don’t they just drive you crazy? As a person married to one for twenty years I will tell you it has been one of the biggest tests in my life to stay with my husband.

The other day I actually sprayed his toothbrush with Windex while I was cleaning the bathroom.  It was completely immature, but it gave me great pleasure.  He had hurt my feelings, I was mad, but I was too proud to say anything so I did something so incredibly passive aggressive it should go down in the books.  Anyway, Windex isn’t that poisonous is it?

I contemplated swishing the toothbrush around in the toilet, but that seemed too clichéd.  On the second pass at the sink I felt a pang of guilt so I entertained the idea of rinsing it under the water, but instead I sprayed it again.

Betrayed by Normalcy

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I don’t feel so upbeat anymore.  It doesn’t feel chemical, it feels more environmental.  I have a lot on my mind right now.

Allison in puberty…puberty or a miniature version of me?  I’m trying not to be ultra sensitive to her mood swings.  Crying, fits of anger.  It feels all too familiar and it is wearing on me. How should I handle it?

Dying friend, do I really have to say more? Sending a funny card once a week feels lame.

John’s got some health problems.  Threats and self help strategies just don’t seem to be making a dent.

Everyday life.

In the old days I would freak out for a few days, contemplate for another few and then act without any thought.  I would get it done.  These days I am so “normal” that I’m drowning in a whirlpool of practicality and cowardice. What the “old” me would do would have been brave and brilliant.  Now I am a dud, dead in the water… a wet blanket.  Feeling betrayed by my life in a different way.

I must knock myself free of the drug addled normalcy I am living.  This just doesn’t get any easier does it?

The Space Between

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“Oh, no.  That’s too bad, I haven’t seen it.”

That is what I will say to my daughter when she notices her rival school’s t-shirt is missing.  She says she doesn’t care if the other kids will make comments or say something. What she doesn’t realize is that I have lived way longer than she has and I know these things will hurt.

It’s almost the same as the “nice rack” moose t-shirt exploiting women’s breasts that was inexplicably lost behind the space between the dryer and the wall until a month ago when it was miraculously found.  By then it was way too small for Tristan to wear anymore.  Darn.  Too bad.

Maybe we’ll find Allison’s t-shirt in the space between the wall and my dresser in a couple of years too.

Exasperation

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I am exasperated. Nothing earth shattering, just irritated…generally irritated.

First off, I have the most annoying of annoying co-workers that I need to punch in his throat.  The fantasy just isn’t cutting it anymore.

I want to eat carbs!  I’m going to die if I don’t have a piece of bread today!  If I have to have another fat free yogurt or a grilled chicken breast I’ll end up face down on the kitchen floor sobbing.

I finally love exercising. That scares and sickens me…

Every evening for the last four years (a coincidence, I think not) I’ve had a glass or two of wine.  It’s become a boring habit.  What other vice can I possibly replace the wine with?  Cigarettes? Tried it, doesn’t work.  Meth? Too vain.  Sex? John couldn’t handle that much of me (wink)! Exercise? Already doing it.  Whiskey?  I’ll try it, but I’m not happy about it.

Just as I was getting to the stage of venom dripping from my keyboard, my  family life crept in again in the form of my favorite son, Tristan.  He came into the room and sat down right next to me with his laptop.  I did move to the other side of the couch, but he had already cramped my style.  Then there came John  and he flipped on the tv to watch the game.  I put my headphones on and tried to crawl back into the bitchy little cave I’d constructed.  It didn’t work, couldn’t get my vibe back.

I have a feeling this mood is not over. Oh no, it is definitely is not over.

A Love Letter?

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I love her.  She wasn’t my best friend and I wasn’t hers.  I was with her five days a week eight hours a day.  Why do I constantly refer to her in the past tense?  She is not dead yet.  She is a shell of the woman she was though.  A little bird.  She has known she has ALS for about a year and a half now.  The transformation has been shocking.

I love her style and her kindness.  She is so vivacious even now although she can’t talk anymore.  Her texts are all her.  That hasn’t changed, still worried about everyone else.

She has to have help getting dressed.  She must have a lot of input because even in her condition she always looks more put together than I do.

The end is closing in on us.  I say us because we are the ones that will be left behind with a gigantic hole left in our lives.  She will be out of her misery.

I’ve had friends die before, but suddenly (violently) I have never had someone so close suffer for so long.

God, I already miss her, have for about the last year.  Her voice is still on the voicemail.  A reminder of the way she was.  I listen to it sometimes just to remember her.  It’s been so long I don’t recognize it anymore.

I’m finally writing about this because I feel the end is imminent.    I feel a sense of urgency.  For what I don’t know.   I don’t know how to feel, how to act.  Do I start crying now?  Should I hold it in until it happens?  I guess I’m starting now.

Epic Spills

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During my life I have experienced many detrimental spills.

“Oh my God!” You exclaim,”What a sorry uneventful life you must have endured to remember spills!”

Well, my memories are scattered at best.  I don’t have any idea why I can remember the smell of a certain event and my thought pattern during it, but cannot recall going to a party two weeks ago.  It is very frustrating to say the least.  I feel dumb a lot of the time.

With my co-workers and friends I can usually get away with them believing I do remember the event I was a key player in.  I have to be careful not to say “I don’t remember” too often.  When I do have to say it, I can only allow them to give me a limited number of details. After it looks like I might have a grasp on the forgotten event, I lie and agree that I do indeed remember.  It’s a miracle that I’ve made it so far in life with my mask still in place.

Crazy never stops when you are saddled with a history of Bipolar II.  It feels like my memory capacity has been eaten away by some sort of casuistic chemical caused by this condition.

Hey, wait a minute! How did I get so side tracked from my lifetime of epic spills?

The first one I can remember when I was four in England.  Back then they let small children go down to the shops and buy loaves of bread.  I took a loaf from the shelf, grabbing the wrong end.  All of the bread fell out onto the floor.  The shop people were very nice about it but, that was it for me.  I didn’t shop again until I was six!

On Saturday mornings when I was a little older my sister and I would go to the local department store to hang around and get items for my mom.  Hair color was on the list on this particular Saturday.  In a strange coincidence the bottom of that box also gave out and the dark brown hair dye bottle hit the ground and shattered!  Mortified is the best way to explain my eight year old feelings.

26 years ago Emily spilled red artificial colored juice on the carpet that cost me my deposit on an apartment.

While visiting home one summer my husband fell asleep with a very dark beer on a futon. We had to shamefully explain what happened to my dad.  I don’t remember replacing it.  Did we?  No memory of that…means nothing.

Tristan kicked my glass of red wine on our new $1300 pillow top mattress.  Of course, it was my side.  To this day I still sleep on a brown stained corner.

Last year my phone was plugged into the truck and as I reached to answer it I caught a very full Starbucks with the cord and spilled an entire Grande vanilla late on me, the seat and the floor of John’s new truck. Yes, the same one as in the aforementioned parking garage.

This morning Allison was rolling around on the floor doing something flexible with her legs in the air and my terminator like vision zoomed in on a half-filled glass of wine across the room on a side table.

“Watch that glass!” I yelled and finally avoided another epic spill.

Actually, I’m not a big woman…

Published on by cmglife

Last summer my “sleep” doctor said to me, “You are not a big woman, but you could stand to lose 5 to 10 lbs.”

But weight (Freudian slip) …a triumph!  I have lost 13 pounds since August.  Why is this significant?

Well, other than I may be looking a little bit “hot”*, it gives me some comfort that maybe my new life on medication is finally working and maybe I will be alright after all. An awful lot of maybes in that last sentence.

What am I doing you ask?  I know it’s unconventional…diet and exercise.  It’s a new feeling for me to be in control of anything.  I don’t think I’ve ever experienced control before anywhere or in any way. Yeah for drugs!

* Parentheses and an asterisk must be used by me for the word “hot” because I am 47 and still haven’t quite adjusted to this word that has been substituted for the more appropriately descriptive “good looking”.

A Little Taste of Crazy

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Lately I’ve been feeling a little manic.

I don’t seem to have much of problem at home because everyone there is more used to the “old” me than the recently “normal” and medicated me. In my old manic state I would be solving the world’s problems, finishing the laundry and writing the next great American Novel all in an afternoon.

It’s at work around other people that I notice I’m beginning to interrupt and be the queen of the one-liners (because I am so funny).

The other day, our Campus Monitor, Mark was helping me find my daughter’s phone that had been lost in the grass during lunch.  Did I mention that Allison goes to the same school I work at now?  I know, too bad for my blog, no more charter school escapades.

“Where was the last time you saw it? “I asked.

“I put in in my pocket at lunch.  I think it fell out when I was rolling down the hill.” Eleven year olds…what are you going to do?  One minute they are too cool to be seen with you getting out of your car and the next minute they are rolling down hills at lunch.

Next thing Mark said he found it and held it up.  I was so excited or manic that I sort of walked/skipped over to him and said,” Oh, I could just kiss you!”

As soon as I said it, I regretted it.  What? A kiss?  What the hell?  I mean I’m glad I didn’t do it (I’m not that crazy) but why did I say that in the first place?  Well, because in a manic state, either I can’t help myself or I am just one step ahead of fantasy.  A split second between thinking something in the head (which we all do) and not saying/doing it.  That gap is breached in my manic state quite regularly unless I am really focused.  When something happened like today, I used to promise myself that I would “hold it together” the next day.  That would last about an hour or so until I forgot and got comfortable making a “one- liner” jokes with each person that came by my desk.

At home it’s just a matter of me having a cutting edge opinion on everything from a pair of shoes to the contestants on the Voice.  All of a sudden I become an expert fashion designer and a vocal coach.

The mania is not quite as intense as it used to be and I’m not experiencing the depression. I am enjoying the high that I haven’t had in a few years since the medication.

I’ve mentioned this to my sister and asked her to keep track of this mood and let me know if she notices anything disturbing.  She said, “Great, I can’t wait to go on this roller coaster ride with you.” She says it feels like I’m playing with fire.

I’ll mention it all to my doctor, but I’m not sure if it will make a difference.  I’m still at the wait and see stage. It’s a difficult place to be in.  I want to do the right thing, but on the other hand I have been level for so long that a taste of crazy is hard to resist.  Can I have my cake and eat it too?  Something tells me no.