sarahntastic

I call him the mother hen.  He has always loved his kids more than anything.  He worries.  We worry him.  He takes care of us, emotionally, financially, tire-changing-ly.  He’s not perfect.  He can pout and get pissy.  He thinks we make crazy choices.  He doesn’t understand lots of what we do.  But he is the funniest person I know.  He would crack up my grandmother to the point she was running to the bathroom screeching “Dan! you’re making me pee my pants!”  He made us funny.

And no matter how much we frustrate him with our choices, he is there.  He’s the reason I never moved away, any of the times I seriously considered it.  Because I need him.  And because so far, no one has come along who could possibly compare.

Get married young, stay married forever.

1969

1991

When she married my dad in 1969, she was 19.

When I married in 1991, I was 19.

I thank all that is good and right in the world that the best of these marriages is still in tact, successful, fun, silly, weird, crazy, and loving.

…that my grandmother loved me.  Always.

I imagine climbing into your lap and wrapping my legs around your waist.

I imagine touching every bit of your face with my finger tips.

Your nose, your lips, your eyebrows, your forehead.

I imagine kissing every bit of your face with my lips.

I imagine resting my head on your chest, listening to your sweet heart beat.

I imagine staying there until I am filled up with what you have.

I imagine it is the missing bits of me.

There was a time not too many years ago depression meant sleeping for days on end, no showers, binge eating, never getting dressed, going to the store dirty and smelly, wandering in a foggy haze to walk the dogs, feeling nothing, never crying, jumping at the sound of the phone because I would forget there was any sound other than silence.

And slowly I came away from that.  With help.  Some from friends and family, mostly thanks to medication.

And I’ve spent a significant amount of energy since then making sure I never fall into it again:  the darkness, the isolation, the irrational thoughts, being locked inside my head, being someone no one knows what to do with, yet causing pain and grief simply because I am so far away, so completely unreachable.

And recently I feel it coming back.  Not nearly as horrific.  Certainly I’m functioning, at least a bit.  But I’m not working.  I’m not doing anything.  Except for keeping my head above water.  It’s all I can do.  Simple things like try to exercise, walk the dogs, talk to friends, go to the store.  But I’m teetering.  Losing my balance, not feeling the strength to stay in the clear, instead stumbling into the very foggy place in my head that makes no sense.

And because I can feel everything now (before medication, I felt nothing but exhaustion), I’m crying a lot.  I’m confused and terrified and anxious and not sleeping.  Because  I’m obsessed with making sure I stay here with everyone else in the world.  And it takes a lot of energy.  And the days go by so quickly and without any sort of productivity.  Just today it took me many hours to exercise, then take a shower, and now I can’t figure out how to get dressed, or why I should.  I can only cry.

This is my ultimate fear.  That the depression will never go away.  That it will keep coming back like this, to eat up my life and take away huge chunks of time I will never get back.

I am coming undone.  Again.

This morning when I finally had a good cry – - the kind where I’m in a ball on the floor getting it all out, my mind hurriedly running through my list of people I might call, a decidedly short list to be sure, and realizing there is not a single person in my life I can trust with my shit or want to burden with my shit – - I realized I am just like her.

She might be out-of-this-world wacky.  Over a gender-confused man who wants nothing to do with her except when it serves his ego.  And she might be a compulsive liar.  And she might take a handful of Xanax every night.  And she might teeter between reality and her not-so-carefully crafted delusions.

But I’m just like her.

I want what she wants.  Love.  Acceptance.  Someone to tell me I matter in this world.  Someone to remind me of my value so that I steer myself from this detour of mediocrity, depression, and sadness I’ve been on for far too long.

Too bad she’s not just like me—keeping my motherfucking crazy to a few paragraphs on the interwebs where no one can find me.

_____________________

p.s.  so I wrote this earlier today only to learn her lies have reached epic proportions tonight.  I will just say this:  mental illness is not a joke.  No matter how ridiculous and sad this chick is, I have endless empathy for her, because she is so ridiculous and sad.  And because I am just like her, minus the delusions.

p.p.s. and my endless empathy will not serve to deter me from talking about her crazy, just in case you were wondering if I had some sort of epiphany.  I didn’t.

I was married to a wealthy man from a wealthy family.  I don’t say this to brag my way out of your heart.  Obviously you know me well enough to know I wouldn’t do such a thing.  But just to lay this out:  I had an engagement ring and jewelry I was embarrassed to own, and never wore, mostly because its value was the same as a home in Silicon Valley; extravagant trips; extravagant gifts; gorgeous cars; successful investments; and so on.

But none of it meant anything to me.  Because I wanted a rich marriage, not a rich husband.  My former mother-in-law actually brought thousands of dollars worth of jewelry to me the day she arrived to take her son home to marry another woman.  My parting gifts, apparently.  I used it as an opportunity to finally tell her no.  She thought I was foolish to turn down the payoff.

As many nice things I’ve owned, seen, done, nothing matters if, well, if it doesn’t matter.

So the other day a friend said a particular car is sexy, and my reply was “I don’t think cars are sexy, I think paying rent is sexy.”  And by that I mean, taking care of your family in the simplest way is sexy.  Cars? eh. I’ve had them.  But trust, reliability, hysterical funnies, generosity of one’s heart?  Much, much sexier than a car.

*  “did you just say ‘paying rent’ is sexy?” quoted from this funny guy.

“He’s been ill. He must have mistaken you for Grandma.  Just stay out of there.”

It was a perfectly reasonable explanation to me.  When I told my parents about what my Grandfather had been doing to me for as long as I could remember, I knew his behavior was wrong simply by the way my mom’s eyes nearly popped out of her head and my dad sunk down into the bed, his head falling into his hands.  But the explanation seemed reasonable.  He was a sick old man.  We never spoke of it again.  I was seven.  It was 1979.

But something seemingly irreparable was already set in place.  I worried about everything.  I tortured myself with thinking the simplest things through to horrible conclusions, even at a very young age.  I binged in secret.  I climbed into the pantry to find my parents’ treats so I could scarf them when my mom napped.  I refused to play outside.  I fought my dad every step of the way learning to ride a bike.  The air, the sun, the openness terrified me.  I wanted to be inside.  I only felt safe inside.

School was easy for me.  Socializing was not.  I had few friends.  I trusted everyone and was always shocked when I inevitably found out everyone wasn’t trustworthy.  I liked boys but mostly stayed away from them.  I was in love with a couple but always made sure to be their best friend while they had girlfriends.  I lived with a never-ending sense of worthlessness and depression, no matter my grades, my kindness, my generosity, my creativity.  I never tracked any of this back to sexual abuse.  I actually rarely thought of my grandfather after he died a couple years after my revelation.  I was still under the impression my parents knew best.  Their explanation still held for me.  By this time I was overweight, and that was the source of all my problems.  Unsure why, just that I was.  Being fat meant I was unworthy of love, of a normal teenager’s life.  Instead I worked, bought things, took my brothers where they needed to go, stayed mostly at home.

I married way too early, under the mistaken assumption the first boy who showed interest in me I should cling to forever more.  I had no role model other than my parents, now married 40 years and mostly happy that whole time, married when they were nineteen.  Thankfully my marriage ended after not too many years.  Around the same time my beloved grandmother became ill.  Heart surgery at UCSF brought all of us together-and apparently brought out everyone’s need for gut-spilling.  My aunt revealed my grandfather molested her until she was fourteen.  And then did the same to her daughter, my cousin, just one year older than me.  My cousin who still now battles drug addiction and has never held a job or left her parents’ home to live on her own, suffered the same abuse as me but manifested her pain in a much more destructive way than I.

Suddenly my mother wanted to discuss the day fifteen years earlier I told her my secret.  I hadn’t thought of it in so many years, it seemed foreign to me, detached from my life, no longer part of me.  She felt guilty, she wanted to make things right.  But really, there is no making right what a child’s psyche does to protect itself.

I never had the anger, the confrontation, the hate-your-abuser phases some people go through.  It just didn’t happen for me.  I went to therapy.  I couldn’t conjure the anger therapists wanted me to.  Even now, realizing the indelible mark of worthlessness that the abuse left on me, that this is the legacy of my abuse, still I cannot be angry.  I just want to fix it.

Because here I am, still, fifteen more years on, learning, making mistakes, massive and small.  Self-loathing ruling my life, fat ruling my life, poor choices ruling my life.  But I choose this, right?  I have always told myself that it’s my doing, my choices.  But is that more self-hate?  Blaming myself for things I happen to not have the skills to do well?

There is no happy ending here, yet.  There is still more learning.  And I must say, I get tired of the lessons.  But there is no other way.

I lost a lot of weight.  I stopped losing weight.  I gained 20 pounds.  NO ONE is more disappointed, sad, depressed, horrified, terrifed than I am.  I don’t need you to look at me, comment toward me, or otherwise spend any energy on me and my fat.  Because, rest assured, I think of little else.  One doesn’t get fat without obsession and addiction.  And the obsession and addiction doesn’t just stop with food.  Anger, shame, disgust, self-hate, worthlessness are all things I am plenty skilled at feeling-obsessing on-being addicted to feeling all on my own.  If I could replay the tape that is on loop in my head 24/7 you couldn’t handle it.  Because it’s horrifying.  How much I hate myself.  So, thanks, but no, I don’t need you.  I’m already plenty fucked in the head about this.  You? I just want to beat the shit out of with all my fat.