It's probably pretty juvenile for me to leave this paper trail, but yesterday I started reading for the first time in a long time, and a year ago everything was empty, but now every single thing is bottomless. Every aspect of life can be trapped within a narrative of words. I can create some semblance of life.
I'm supposed to be upset and complain about things...to self deprecate and make fun of myself. That was the point of this blog when I started: I am ridiculous.
Only, I'm not ridiculous. I'm perfectly sane. I make perfect sense, and it's the influence of other people rather than me myself which has made me think otherwise.
I've read in several great works of fiction that life hurts so much that we have to laugh. That's how I've felt for so long. There's no other response unless I'm going to break down and start crying instead. Crying isn't breaking either, but it makes people uncomfortable. It makes me uncomfortable when other people cry and like I have to hold them and bury their faces until they stop, but why is crying scary? I don't want the baby to think that because she's seen me cry so much.
Remember when Kyle left, and I cried all the time?
"Mommy, I get scared when you cry. I get scared you won't be able to take care of me."
I could be indulgent then, and just cry and cry and be sad, and wear my inside on my outside, but I can't now because...
The truth is, I never was going to break or give up. Yesterday I would have said differently, but then today I was yelled at for forty minutes by baby's father, and was filled with righteous anger.
I tried to figure out visitation with him, and instead of trying to figure it out with me he made personal attacks.
"You're a bad mother. You send her to our house with rotten crotch, and bug bites and bruises all over her body. We have pictures"
"It's not your place to talk to my family"
"You're lazy and living off of student loans. You don't work for a living and have mommy and daddy to pay for everything."
EXCUSE ME????
NEITHER OF MY PARENTS HAVE REAL JOBS
"You're just using me for the money. You use Talin as a weapon against me because you want my money"
"You make me drive all over the state for her. You've moved 4 times in the past 5 years and this time to Maryland. I'm done chasing you around"
I moved 15 minutes further from your house. Before I was living in Arlington, and staying with friends who lived closer to you on the weekends, and it helped you out.
"You're coaching Talin and telling her I dont want to see her"
I let Talin call you whenever she wants and you don't answer. She just asks to spend special time with you.
"I can't spend 10 hours every other weekend in the car just to see her for a day"
Your daughter isn't worth it?
"Yeah, we do talk bad about you all the time. You're a terrible mother."
If you think I'm so terrible, then it's your goddamned responsibility to get off your ass and try to get custody away from me. If you think I'm not raising our daughter right, then you are being irresponsible by not trying to get her away from me, and I can't take you seriously because you aren't doing anything.
"You're always pawning talin off on other people. You put her in a daycare all day, make my family babysit her, and you put her in ballet so you won't have to take care of her."
So god damn ridiculous. I hung up on him. I told him it was his responsibility to contact me when he wanted to see his daughter and I can't do this anymore because I wanted to help him figure out visitation, not have a battle about why I was a terrible mother. I'm so tired of being bullied.
Arghhh anger anger anger.
I cried to my mom afterwards and she said all the wrong things like she always does. I don't want anyone to tell me what to do. I can figure that out on my own. I just want to know and to feel like I'm cared about. I just want a hug and to be allowed to be upset for a while. I want to be entitled to my negative feelings and trusted not to dwell too long in them.
I went back to class with red rimmed eyes and could feel tears threatening again. I pulled them back and they fell out my nose and I sniffed loudly, trying to read words on the handout but they blurred and I couldn't see anything, but then I remembered what happened last night, and I had to pretend like I wasn't bothered and force myself to be happy, because otherwise J might think it was because of what he said, and it might stress him out and make him unhappy, and I don't want to do that, especially since he already looked a bit unhappy.
i was an impassioned speaker during class and it was as if all this latent emotion and desire for things to be a certain way came up out of me, and even though I couldn't always pay attention to all the words being said or get it completely right, the emotion was there and I put all my feelings into class, and it felt really good.
I'm fine about the J thing in a way. It makes me sad, but its okay for now because I need to do school, and because it's not that he doesn't care. It's the opposite, and the irony of that juxtaposed to every situation I've been in where I thought the person cared and was wrong is hilarious.
I don't think he cares about me. I know it with certainty. I feel entitled to my strong emotions even though I'm not ready to speak them publicly and am not allowed to act on them. It's super fast and that's the problem. He's got issues and that's the problem. I have a baby and that's the problem, but for once-- the feelings not being there or not feeling right-- is not the problem, and he's enough of a man to at least try to stay away from me, and it's because he actually cares versus not caring. I'm not analyzing his actions to mean this while he is silent. He is not saying one thing and meaning another. How is it possible that I have such clarity about this???
Life Lessons of the Week:
1.The things that I question are the things that are not true. If I feel the need to analyze an action then I'm probably over analyzing and I think strongly enough that my first reaction has the most likelihood of being correct, rather than a lengthy analysis that makes everything into nothing and nothing into everything.
2. Other people have someone to go to. Other people are crying to someone, and I'm not crying to anyone. I did cry to someone today, I did cry last night, but I don't get what the others get. I don't get a parent who can listen and understand and be supportive, and it's not that she's a bad person or doesn't love me, but that she's trapped, and its sad not bad. This is why I've always made really strong intense friendships with people that don't last very long. No one can handle it because they're not my mother.
3. I'm so jealous that I don't get the life that everyone else gets, and that my days of fun are done because I have to do the right thing by my daughter, and those times when I do get to go out and do what I want are going to be so few and far between that it's going to hurt. Those times when I have a close friend aren't going to last long because I DONT like other people in my situation. I've known quite a few single mothers and I find it hard to have respect for them because I see everything they are doing wrong. This is wrong of me because I do wrong too. I can't be a martyr and sometimes I wish I did. What's the point of this? I guess... I'm never going to have very much of what I want and I have to fight for what I get.
"How did you survive all that without a religious background?" Monica asked over Jenny's shoulder in Looney's. Jenny looked at me expectantly too.
I've been thinking about that a lot. I'm hedonistic, I do believe in some sort of higher power etc...
But, what it really is, is my education, my passion, the fact that even when I say i give up it's only for a moment and then once I realize I can't accept that reality either I start fighting again.
If they had seen me fighting back with Brian...him dragging me, me trying to kick him, him trying to pin my hands behind my back, and me spitting in his face and him spitting in mine, and I kept writhing and kicking until I was exhausted, but I couldn't accept defeat, so I'd lay there a minute before fighting again and do it over and over again until I was so tired that I couldn't think anymore and I felt empty, but then I'd fight him some more until I knew I'd be sore and there was nothing I could do, and nobody cared and then he'd finally get off of me and talk to me about how terrible he was-- terrible like I was terrible now-- for hours and hours outside in the grass while I got bitten by mosquitoes and just wanted to go to bed because it was 10, 11, 12... later and later.
He chased me when i ran away. Maybe I'd know what to do when I'm alone if I'd ever been allowed to be-- and I guess I have the chance to do that now.
How am I ever going to fill the long hours between 25 and death?
If I didn't have clarity, and if I were allowed to go crazy, then I'm sure I would, but I'm not allowed to, and I know what's going on with that. I know the present, I know the past, so I can be all right with the future because I'll know what's going on when I get there.
"I've waited a long time without hope of happiness. Sure and I can wait a bit longer now." ---A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
So many quotes from that book ring true, and it's like all the characters are me-- but at the same time-- every character has a flaw, a limited level of knowing, and I get something different from it every time because I can analyze it within new contexts because of the experiences with life I've gained in my personal narrative, but it still is true, even though now I see that Katie Nolan is wrong about many of her ideas even though she is strong and good with a lot of things, and Francie is naive, but has the ability to see beauty in the worst of situations. If I had a female friend we would read female coming of age books and then discuss them, but beyond that surface level and delve into deep abstract ideas bouncing off one another until the ideas become uncomfortable and meaningless.
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