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My Bad

by | Nov 29, 2010 | Abuse, Adult Survivors of Childhood Sexual Abuse, Sadness, Stress, Trauma | 2 comments

10 years ago today…He is 10 today.

10 years ago today– body and mind split completely open. Each minute brought more pain. Each moment split my mind further away from my body.

Despair it wouldn’t happen
relief it was happening
despair it wouldn’t end
relief it was ending,
despair it was over.
Despair it was just beginning…and down I went.

I remember the feel of my grandfather’s dresser under my hands as I felt the beginning. Black cardigan sweater. Blue shirt, elastic waist black Kmart pants. Two days later they would be bagged up and handed to me much like forensic evidence of what had gone down. What had been killed. Blood soaked underwear, puke-stained shirt. How did I ever get them off of me? Who took them off? How did anyone keep track of them? Why do I want them back? How am I going to ever get them clean?

My water broke. I was still good…still in love with my husband, still believing I was going to be okay. The last image of my marriage as I had known it was my dear one walking me across the street to the hospital emergency room. It was a normal birth. I was a healthy woman. I had a healthy baby. I loved my husband, I loved my baby.

Everything was going great. I was okay. I was birthing the son I loved more than anything I had known. The son who had come to me months earlier as I walked around a lake and said “I am ready, Mama.” First time we tried, he came to me. My dear Zig. My dear one. We tried, he and I. We tried to follow the rules, follow the body, follow the doctors. I followed with some idealistic faith in store-bought images of motherhood not meaning the end of me. But I forgot something on my birth plan.

I forgot to remember to not forget she wasn’t there. My mother, any mother, was not there. No mother to see me through it, to protect me. I forgot to watch my back. So I missed it altogether. Idiot. I should have KNOWN. I wasn’t looking, too distracted by pain, and the slipping away of parts of my mind. I wasn’t aware when the dark figure of the lifelong fear of my father took its place in my birth room.

The dark cloud. Standing behind the door, behind me – lurking. I never had a chance. My bad.

Hide The Remotes

by | Nov 28, 2010 | Coping With Depression, Divorce, Emotional Abuse, How To Help With Low Self-Esteem, Major Depressive Disorder, Self-Esteem, Suicide | 0 comments

I was never going to write on here. I was going to comment and offer support… but I was never going to write about how I felt.

“It’ll go away later,” I’d tell myself. “There worse things out there in life than feeling down every now and then.” “Everyone gets overwhelmed this time of year.”

But then I wonder if it’s worse than that.

I’ve always been relatively smart. My elementary school wanted me to advance to 2nd grade during Kindergarten. I was in Beta Club and always enjoyed school. Then, in the 3rd grade, my parents split up.I vaguely remember an incident where my dad hit my mom.  They got back together when I was in 6th grade. But, things weren’t going well.

We moved after 6th grade. My best friend had moved away a year earlier and I had a hard time making new friends in my new town. I was smart… and smart kids aren’t the cool kids. So, I dumbed myself down.

Things weren’t good at home, either. My parents were not happy and it showed. My mom had a meeting with my teachers my sophomore year to discuss my poor grades and my English teacher told her it was because I was bored with school. It was too easy for me, and I had given up. I had driven myself to the point that I actually told my mother that I wanted to kill myself. To this day, I cannot guarantee that it was an empty threat.

After we moved, everything about me changed. I became my mother… she gets upset too easily. She’s depressed. As far as I know, she’s not gotten help for it. She’s always telling me to stop getting “into tizzies.”

I’ve been in some bad relationships where I was used and cheated on and emotionally abused. I was called a “butterface” (everything is okay about her, but her face), ugly, and fat. I think the worst thing people made fun of me for was my nose. It’s on the larger side and now every time I look at myself in the mirror all I see is that damn nose. How it makes me far from perfect.

I’m engaged now and I love my fiance with all of my heart and I know he loves me, too…but there’s this voice that comes out every now and then and eats away at me. It says that he deserves someone beautiful and he’s going to find her and leave me. I trust that he loves me and won’t leave me… but that voice in my head won’t shut up.

The best way to describe how I feel is when you go to a store like Best Buy. And you go to the back of the store where all the TVs are, and you put each TV on a different channel and close your eyes. All those voices, all the things running through your mind – and I can’t make it stop.

I can’t even make simple decisions like what I want to eat for dinner. If I go to make a speech or presentation in class, I get so shaky I can barely stand up, let alone speak. In some classes I can’t understand the material, so I cry, and when Tony asks me what I don’t understand so he can help, all I can muster is, “I just don’t understand.”

What is the most important thing I don’t understand? Why I went from a smart, outgoing kid to someone who wants to hide in their room with the lights off.

And, then there are days when I feel great and nothing is wrong and I just say to myself, “it went away like usual. See? Everything is better. Sometimes people just get sad.”

Until that voice in the back of my head finds those remotes again

You May Not Understand

by | Nov 28, 2010 | Baby Loss, Coping With Baby Loss, Grief, Loss, Stillbirth | 4 comments

Her daughters were stillborn, but born still.

This is her story:

here comes another one

i know. i can feel it.

oh this is a big one

yes. i feel it.

my father sat in the corner, still and quiet until he saw the line on the screen start moving up, showing my contractions not only for me to feel but for the room to see. he announced each one to us five. it was all he could do. the best way he knew how to handle it, and that’s the only reason that it didn’t drive me crazy.

each clench was readying my body for something i was willing every shred of my being against. what we all were wishing against. we watched as the line went up…and down…sometimes higher…then lower…

i was in denial i guess, or shock. whichever. i wasn’t reeling in pain or wracked by sorrow. i was focused. i sat and felt my belly pinch and waited for the announcement.

another one is coming

T had panic attacks. my mother called all the nurses and doctors she had on speed-dial. my sister stared. my brother called and cried. my nana called and cried.

my father and i watched the screen.

the screen that showed my babies’ heart rates, as perfect as they were. the screen that showed my contractions; big, small and in between, ex-fucking-actly 4 goddamn months too soon.

until she came in. she said it was time to unhook the monitors, said it wasn’t necessary anymore. and in a moment, dad and i were back again to the quiet, still  place. T tried to control his rage, my sister still stared. my mom talked and nursed and fixed my blankets and monitored my pain.

i felt my girls kick and bubble and turn. how could i tell them it was their last day, their last hurrah? why did i have to let them go so easily? you would think the one thing in the world you would be able to, absolutely need to do is fight for your children’s’ lives, right? i should have been able to motherfucking fight.

it was quiet. too quiet. i longed for my monitor back, and i asked the nurse for it every time she came back in the room. suggested it as a solution to whatever random issue she happened to be concerned with at the time.

maybe we should put the monitors back on?

and the same answer came every time; somber, no. she heard the undercurrent in my voice, growing more desperate with each request. no. she didn’t explain. she just said no.

now i know why.

even now i’d give anything to be back in that room. (a room that i can hardly imagine continues to exist, holding happy families and living babies)

back in those moments when i had them, even under those horrifying circumstances. i’d give it all up to be there holding them inside, watching the screen with my father. looking from right to left and seeing people who loved me and my daughters. we had waited for them so long and we didn’t even get to fucking fight to keep them. they just slipped away.

but what i wouldn’t give to be back there.

back when they weren’t safe for long, but held for now.

bliss.

Happy Birthday To My Type One Diabetic Dad

by | Nov 27, 2010 | Dementia, Diabetes, Juvenile Diabetes, Myocardial Infarction (Heart Attack), Stroke, Transient Ischemic Attack (TIA) | 11 comments

Today is my dad’s 64th birthday and it’s a miracle he’s here to celebrate it. He’s a Type I Diabetic and has been since he was four years old.

Growing up, I thought diabetes was no big deal, my dad seemed like a regular guy.  He water skied, ate chocolate cake and drank Coors Light. If he ate or drank too much, he just had a little extra insulin. It seemed simple and without consequence. The only “drama” was that he almost went blind when I was a baby, but several rounds of laser treatments fixed that. I thought my dad was invincible, which was perfect, because he was my world.

Fast-forward to my senior year in college. I was on a bike ride with my fiance in Southern California, when I got the call that my dad had suffered a heart attack and was in a hospital in Northern California. I pause here to wipe away the tears because  even eleven years later, the panic of that memory still grips me. What?  A heart attack? My dad is invincible.  I peddled hard and fast to get my ass home, packed a bag and drove like a bat out of hell to get to my dad.  (Pausing for more tears.)

As I raced across the parking lot, I heard my dad’s voice yelling my name. I looked up to see him hanging his head out the window, waving at me. Okay, he’s still invincible.

My stepmother had driven him to a Kaiser hospital (where we are not members) rather than have an ambulance take him to his hospital. I spent the next several days getting him transferred.

Once in his hospital, he had to have a simple angiogram.

After the procedure, the doctor explained that being a Type I Diabetic had shot his vascular system (a statement I would come to hear many times) and that from here on out things would get dicey. The irony is I didn’t believe him, he didn’t know MY dad, he didn’t believe that my dad was a superhero.

What happened next should have opened my eyes. There was some complication from the angiogram and something went wrong, very wrong. He didn’t look right, he was acting funny. I asked my grandmother to take my younger brothers down the hall to get a soda. I screamed for a nurse. They ran in and assessed him, I stared at the Code Blue button on the wall, I knew it was going to be hit.

It was.

The next thing I knew, the room filled with people and a crash cart as we -the family -were ushered out.  I stood in the hallway praying, shaking, crying. My brothers, thankfully, had no idea, my husband (fiance at the time) heard the Code Blue call and didn’t imagine that it could be MY dad.  hey stabilized him, put in a stint and he was sent home. Then the deterioration began.

Fast forward four years of minor emergencies, medication and doctor’s appointments. I got another one of those calls that makes your blood run cold. Dad had another heart attack and it was major. He needed triple bypass and fast – “the Type I Diabetes had thoroughly shot his vascular system.”

They were transferring him by ambulance to the hospital to perform surgery the next morning. This time, we were three hours away from him  My aunt and I took off, driving through the night to make sure we were there to see him before they put him under for surgery. I wanted to donate blood but there simply wasn’t time. I wanted something, anything besides wait. I was a wreck.

He made it through surgery and we were allowed to see him when it was over. He unconscious and still on life-support. I have never seen so many tubes and machines.  The equipment that surrounded him, dwarfed my larger-than-life dad.

The next five weeks were tough. When I ran out of sick time at work, I drove up every weekend, sleeping on his bedroom floor, giving my step-mother a break, listening to make sure he was breathing. (I don’t think it was medically necessary, but it was emotionally necessary for me).

On one of these visits, I was upstairs when I heard my stepmother screaming. I ran down the stairs, my dad looked catatonic, she had a phone in her hand that she handed to me as 911 picked up.  (Pausing for more tears.)

I explained to the emergency operator that we needed an ambulance, it looked like a seizure, but I wasn’t sure.  Of course I wasn’t fucking sure, I was just a terrified girl who didn’t want to lose her father.  It was the middle of the night, I said no sirens, I didn’t want my little brothers (who were 6 and 11) woken up to more scary sights.

By the time the paramedics and firemen arrived, my dad had come back.  They determined it was a vasovagel reaction from the pain.  But they wanted to take him back in, just to be sure.  I rode in the front seat of the ambulance because I am protective like that.  He recovered from the surgery, but he dropped out of cardiac rehab because apparently, he still thought he was invincible.

As years passed, he did deteriorate as predicted.  He has suffered multiple TIA’s.  He has no long-term and very little short-term memory.  He is bound to a walker.  He can never remember the names of my kids or my husband. He can’t be left alone for long periods of time.

Diabetes has caught up but it hasn’t won… yet, sort of.

My dad is still alive today to celebrate his 64th birthday, but the man I knew is gone. Every visit with him is hard for me.  I used to talk to him multiple times per day.  Now I have to remind myself to call him every couple of weeks. It should be more frequent.

I still panic if the phone rings too early or too late, but in some ways, I don’t have much left to lose.  I talk to him to make him happy, but it pains me to see him confined to his wrecked body.  I struggle with guilt every day because I should call more, visit more, do more.  But I feel empty and I know that is not right.

Sure, there are extenuating circumstances – my stepmother and I have always had a strained relationship. She wanted me there to help with my dad’s recovery, but she doesn’t want me there for family vacations and birthday parties.

They would put me in charge at hospitals and then berate me when it was over for trying to control things.  I could go on and on.  I could explain that I have a family that needs me with them now.  But in the end, they are just excuses why I don’t go more, do more and watch more as my superhero continue to fade away.

Happy Birthday, Dad.  I love you and I miss you.

But the you I miss is gone.

A Letter To My Younger Self – Guilty Squid

by | Nov 27, 2010 | A Letter To My Younger Self | 0 comments

Dear 16 year old me,

I’m pretty sure you’re going to have a hard time believing it’s me. For one thing? It’s going to seem really stupid that if I had the ability to send a letter back in time, I wouldn’t actually go back in time my whole self, but science is very confusing for us and we don’t actually understand all of the technology involved, just that it worked. If you’re still in doubt then I’ll tell you that I know on the weekend of your 16th birthday, you cried bitterly and you said something selfish and stupid to Daddy that we can’t forget and even though you didn’t mean it? You wish you could take it back. Also? I know exactly where you got that Def Leppard T-Shirt, and it wasn’t from a concert. Yeah, that’s right. You believe me now, don’t you?

Listen, if I had my way, we’d never need to have this letter. You’ve spent a lot of time wondering how your life would be different “if” and you’ll spend a lot more time wondering. Hell, we probably won’t ever stop wondering. But the truth is you’re going to be okay. I know it doesn’t seem like it, and there’s going to be lots of days where it doesn’t seem like it, but you will be okay. One day? Someone will understand and you’ll spend many happy moments on the road to “okay”. Hang in there.

School sucks for us and it doesn’t ever really get better. Teachers are going to say a lot of crappy things to you because they don’t understand you. Please stop listening to those awful things they say. They are wrong. They are so, so wrong. Forget about trying to make them happy and do more things that you enjoy.

Not that every teacher is going to suck. Take time to thank Mrs. Simmonds. She’s going to love the things you write and she’s going to spend so much time helping you build your confidence. And your vocabulary. What she will give you will shape who you become later in life, and trust me – she didn’t have to spend all that extra time encouraging you. She’s the first person who looks past the fear you have and sees the amazing person inside. She’s helping the awesome that is inside you. She’s making sure you’ll be ready to shine. Thank her.

Stop trying to fit in. In a few years, everyone will be fighting to stand out from the crowd. You’re already ahead of the game. Fitting in usually ends badly, anyway. All the times that you say no to things even though saying yes would make you fit in, will be something that you’ll be proud of your entire life. Remember, you’re going to be okay.

Hug Daddy more often. Hug him harder and listen to him more. Enjoy being with him. He’s the first man who loved you unconditionally. Do better showing him how much you love him too. The next time you hug him, do me a favor, would you? Take a minute to just breathe in the smell of Dad’s cologne and relax in the safety of his hugs. Then remind us to never, ever forget that moment.

Skip the typing class with the big clunky typewriters and the business class with the actual ledgers. Just trust me. It’s a total waste. I know you’ll want to take the class that most kids take, but go on and take that computer programming class instead. Just trustme on this one.

I know you told that guy Johnny “no” right before school started. And you did the right thing. He wasn’t the one, and it wasn’t right. (Uh, seriously, he ended up on something called Baywatch and no one ever heard his name again. Plus? That acne is not going to clear up on him for years. Which also means you probably just realized we’re still somewhat superficial.) My point is, you were right to say no to Johnny and you really should say no to Brad. You’re going to fall for him. And for a couple of years you’ll make him your world. But it will end, you’ll get your heart broken, and you’ll end up doing a lot of stupid things for a lot of stupid years because you won’t understand that it’s okay to just walk away when you have that first nagging feeling of it not being right. Which reminds me: Start listening to that feeling. Trust yourself. Stop pushing that feeling and that reaction down and moving forward in spite of it. Move in a different direction because of it.

This high school thing is not the best time of your life. It’s not even close. You’ve got a great deal ahead of you and you won’t even believe how you turn out. You have friends. You have great kids. You write all the time. It’s fantastic over here and you’ll be glad you made it to this place. You laugh. You go months without nightmares. You never really get over the whole birthday thing, but those friends I mentioned? They understand it. And they love you anyway.

You’re going to be okay.

We’re going to be okay.

I am okay.

Hang in there.

Love~

Me

P.S. Let’s just try to love ourselves a little more, okay?

P.P.S. Oh, and that dress that your Aunt talks you into getting? That blue number with the lace collar? Just, no. No, no, no.

P.P.P.S. Hammer-Time is *not* going to last forever, so don’t get any of those pants, George Michael is gay, and save your money and buy all the stock you can in something called Google as soon as you can.

P.P.P.P.S. I KNOW! The George Michael thing seems so obvious after you look back at the old Wham! videos, right?