Madness

I find it easier to talk about my father than my mother.  His was such an overt evil that even when I lose myself to denial, I find my way back quickly with the jolt of a single memory.  Because they are all bad.

So much is made of the father/daughter and the mother/son relationship and how that connection shapes a person.  But what about the mother/daughter relationship?

My mother.  I believe that I was the beginning of the end for her.  During the holiday with my father's family I learned that I spent time in a mental hospital via my mother.  She was pregnant and they found her trying to abort me.  I'll spare the details but off to the loony bin she and I went.

How does something like that shape a daughter?  I have always known that she did not want me.  Even that she wished that I had never been born.  Once I was in this world; I forever connected her to him and she was trapped. 

That makes me sad for her.

His eyes were always black with rage, lust or something in between.  Her eyes danced with madness.

I have always bristled at the assertion that she was crazy.  It feels like an excuse for her.  But what it really is; it's terrifying.

I remember being in kindergarten waiting for her to pick me up.  I was almost always last because she was always late.  Fridays were the best though because I got my Weekly Reader hand out.  I would sit at the end of the hall and tear tiny pieces away and eat them.  A good day was when I only had the time to eat half of the back page.

It started as a good day when she picked me up.  The teacher called my name and I crammed my paper into my bag.  I always rushed down the hall but each time the doors opened I would slow as I approached her car.  I suppose I was trying to gauge her mood but really I just irritated her by being slow.

This day she leaned across the front seat to fling the passenger door open.  As the door creaked to let me in I saw her.  A gauzy pink robe.  Her naked belly bulging with my sister due in early June.  Curly hairs that I had to tear my eyes away from.

hurry up.  get in the car.  it's hotter than hell sitting around waiting on you.

None of this was spoken in her mean voice.  This was that scary sing song voice and when she picked me up like this it was the worst.  Mean; I knew what to expect.  Crazy; I couldn't anticipate a thing.

I scooted across the hot vinyl seat as I heard her say something about ice cream.  I wanted to tell her that I wasn't hungry but I did not want to be the one to pull her down in a crashing heap.

She wasn't dressed.  Not even close.  But as I stole a look I saw perfect make up and perfect hair.  These were the hardest days to figure out.  Depressed body.  Happy hair and face.

Steel blue eyeshadow surrounded her pale blue eyes.  Her pupil was the calm eye of the dancing hurricane whirling in her mind.  Music blaring.  Hot wind blowing my pigtails in my face.  She's singing as she lights a cigarette.  Between her legs is a pretty bottle hiding in brown paper.  Her robe is moving with the air and I can see the cuts and scars on her thighs.  Madness.

Baskin Robbins... 31 flavors... what kind of ice cream do you want?

we can't go in.  you don't have clothes.

Don't be silly... I can tie my robe... what do you want?

a clown cone.

I can remember thinking... clowns are scary but not as scary as you are.  Madness.

I sink down in the seat while she goes in.  Looking for something to do, I open the glove box and see her silver bottle.  I pull it out and screw the top off as I hear the sound of liquid.  I tip it back and my head follows.  It burns but I keep on drinking.

I finish it and put it back as quickly as I found it.  This isn't my first try.  I don't know what it is but I know that it makes me feel weird but better.  Calmer.  And warm.

I hear her yelling as she storms out of the shop.  The tie of her robe is trailing behind her.  There she is but not ashamed.  In one hand is my clown cone.  In the other is a cup of chocolate ice cream; her favorite.

I hate chocolate ice cream.

She gets in the car and practically throws my cone at me.  The white wrapper falls to the floor but I save the clown.  She is incensed.  As I lean down to pick up the paper I peek again at her naked belly and I see the baby moving.

Tried to do something nice for you... this is the thanks I get...

I whisper a thank you and she slaps me across my face.  I feel bad about eating the clown.  I'm scared to hurt his face.  It starts to melt and make a mess.  She grabs it and throws it out the window as the car weaves between the cars and lines around us. 

Pick your feet up... we are on a magic carpet... feel the hot desert wind... close your eyes to keep the sand out...

There is no sand but I feel really funny so I close my eyes.  I lay down on the vinyl seat; as close to her without touching her.  Hot ashes sprinkle on my cheek.  They sting but I am too tired to care.   But then hot fire touches and my scalp begins to burn.  I smell the burning flesh and hair and know that another circle will be hidden by my thick brown hair.

A single tear slips out as the madness of the speeding car rocks me to sleep.

I wake up in the dark with the stickiness of the ice cream still on my hands.  I'm still in the car.  My mom is gone.  I don't know where we are.  The windows are cracked but I can't get the door open.

I'm not worried about where she is.  I'm just scared of what will happen next.  I count my fingers to twenty over and over.  It's really dark now.

I open up the glove box but remember that I already drank the silver bottle.  I shut it.  I'm hungry.

I open my bag and find my Weekly Reader.  Half of the back page gone; that was a good day.  I start to tear pieces off and one by one I feel the tiny papers melt on my tongue.  I tear until there's nothing left to tear. 

It's a really bad day when I have the time to eat all my Weekly Reader.  Madness.

Brown

As far as colors go, brown ranks pretty low in terms of beauty.  It is drab.  It blends in.  It is a non-color.  It is certainly not in the rainbow.

Dead plants are brown.  Rotten bananas turn brown.  Brown is what comes of all the colors when they collide together.  Paper bags are brown.  And these bags are meant to disguise a secret.  An embarrassment.  The guy on the corner who drinks all day... he hides his bottle in a obviously discreet paper bag.

I carried a brown paper bag today.  It didn't contain my lunch.  And no, it didn't carry beer, wine, or liquor either.  It's the see-you-in-six-weeks kind of day.  The day where I go sit in my shrink's waiting room and pray that I don't look as crazy as I feel.  Today is the day that I rate my mental state by the bag I carry.  Am I carrying my favorite handbag or am I carrying a loud and awkward paper bag stuffed with meds?

My psychiatrist is a nice man.  He is fairly intelligent as well.  He is the first of his profession to treat me with kindness and respect.  It's refreshing.  I don't say a lot.  I smile at least once so I do not present flat.  I answer his questions with single words if at all possible.  I am not having a good time of it and that must show.  When he starts his shrink talk with "I'd like to talk to you today about..." I know that my meds are being tweaked or changed.  Yippee.

Thirty minutes later I've paid my bill and I walk the twenty five feet across the waiting room full of people and I'm holding that damn brown bag.  Any chance of appearing normal is wiped away when people see that crinkly bag full of she's-not-quite-right samples.

I skip the elevator to avoid riding in a closed space with someone who would clearly know they were confined, for a one floor descent, with a crazy girl.  I make it to my car and I dump the bag out and cram the samples into my black leather handbag.  Much more presentable because crazy people don't carry professional messenger bags, right?

The snarky humor is here but beneath that is my anger.  I'm angry that I have to do this charade every six weeks.  I'm angry that I'm a walking stigma.  I'm angry that I pay good money for appointments and medication to help me function and unfuck what they did to me.  I'm angry that I have side effects from the cocktail of meds that I take.  I'm angry that the medicated me is better than the can't-get-out-of-bed me. 

I'm still struggling over the events with my mother in law for reasons that some may not understand.  I will try to put that into words shortly because I need to find a way to express in words what is churning in my mind.  My husband's advice has been, "just be yourself", which I always inwardly smirk at because the thought of an un-medicated "me" attending a family dinner is something I'm almost certain he never wants to encounter.

Sick

Broken babies everywhere.  Fraught with shredded suffering, nothing soothes or makes them calm.  I am so afraid that I have a very sick mind. 

They scream.  They hurt.  My head throbs with psychic suffering and torment.  I am so very tired of having this twisted space of devastation within me.  Normal is relative but with simple confidence I can say that normal people do not have these images of pain.

Most memories are ones that I can endure but bleeding babies push me towards capacity.  Common people smile at me while daily acquaintances are kind and complimentary. 

If they only knew... 

If they only knew the poison that has washed over my mind.  If only they knew the images that I can never shake.  The oily suds of sin that froth and foam, they will never wash completely clean. 

I wrestle and I twist with these faces until I am overcome with the fear.  My bitter stomach churns as I reach for a familiar metal.  My hands shake with forward reaching regret until the warmth of release stings when mixed with salty tears.

My mind lurches forward as the flashbacks of the past find me unsuspecting.  The mental whiplash leaves me lost as the jarring shock brings me to my knees.  I am begging for an end; a present firmly rooted that is able to withstand the forces of his latent life. 

I am begging for relief before I am sick like him.

C-r-a-z-y

Sometimes the case of the letter makes all the difference.  God or god.  An important personal I or a misplaced letter i.  Summer the girl or summer the season.  The uppercase letter delineates between importance and the ordinary.

Perfectionism is a haunt of mine.  It is a ghost that follows me and does not stop no matter what I'm doing.   It kills a day in a blink.  It turns anxiety inside/out.  It takes away my care for something good; even the smallest of outcomes.

Fuck it.

That is perfectionism in two simple words.  If I cannot do it right then I refuse to do it at all.  How dangerous is that?  Or rather... how stupid is that?

I see my world in black and white.  Absolutes.  You are either right or wrong.  Good or bad.  Smart or stupid.  I have a ridiculously logical brain.  Logic is the glue that holds the shards of me together.  Without this reason, I probably would have landed in the crazy house a long time ago.  Logic is my reality.  If I can reason it; it exists.  If I cannot; it must not be.

And there is the problem.  There is nothing logical about my past.  Although it seems that abusers have a handbook; the logic chapter is always found to be ripped out, shredded, and burned.   They left that part of it up to us to figure out; to understand their evil.  That is what makes us crazy in the first place.

So the harder I try to understand; the crazier I get.  Literally.  I cannot reason what was done to me and so sets in denial.  I can't understand it; I can't make it right.  So fuck it.

The abundance of fuck its has really slowed me down.  Nearly to a halt and I'm not just talking about my mental healing.  This is my real life too.  Housekeeping, taking care of myself, dieting, exercise, blah blah blah... you get the picture.  If I can't do it right and perfect; then I won't do it at all. 

All great thoughts to live by.

This thinking is not something easy to change.  It is a deep part of who I am.   It is also something that makes me feel normal.  Normal exactly long enough until I realize that normal people don't do math and physics problems for fun.  But I digress because my weirdness belongs in a whole other post. 

I have steps to take.  One at a time.  Crying just one time worked for me.  And then I did it again.  Getting up early once led to me getting up early again AND working out.  It doesn't have to be all or nothing and sometimes it's alright to be somewhere and in between.   I don't have to be completely healed or entirely wounded. 

I'm still crazy; even with the steps towards tears and feeling.  But I have progress now because I have downgraded letters; even if it is just one.  Now I'm just crazy.

crazy with a little "c"...