I was just laying here on my fiancé's bed in his bedroom at his parents' house while he plays Ben Folds on his keyboard, and tears came to my eyes. "This is what I've come to...I don't recognize my life any more."
The life I recognized was with my dysfunctional family growing up, and my fervent educational pursuits as my escape. Then I recognized being in love with an alcoholic, who made me laugh and kept me up all night long, telling me stories, but with whom I also fought belligerently. Then, I recognized being a mother. All that other crap that came before...blech. But that last thing...that was what life was worth living for.
I wasn't a bad one, either. I use to take my son out every day to mommy-and-me classes, the ones where you sit around a circle with a bunch of other mothers (and a few fathers) with their babies and toddlers to sing songs for half an hour until you took your kid(s) out to the playground for a couple more hours. Those were the days of glory, where in my memory the sun shines bright like the mythical gate of some holy place and bounces off the glittering sand that I would scoop into buckets for my little guy to pour out all over the toys in the sandbox. Real-life toddler heaven, it was. Of course, home was hell. But, as they say...better the Devil you know. (Not really...I'm not being sarcastic or cynical at all in this post.)
These days, my son is four - five in August - and I only see him on weekends, sometimes only every other weekend. Any time his dad asks if he can keep him again "this" weekend, I act like I'm hurt, or sad, or pissed, or I react in some way that hides the fact that deep down I'm relieved as hell to be left to my own selfish, albeit failing pursuits. When I do get my son - when I'm not offered an "out" - I try my best to act like a mother for a couple of days until I "get" to drop him back off with the guy I never thought would be a fitter parent than I. But so it is.
So, yeah. I don't recognize my life. Somehow I'm actually worse a mother than my own was. She didn't pay much attention to us, but she was there, physically. Behind a closed door most of the time, but she was just a knock away.
No, what I've become is my father. Like his, my dedication is to an other on whom I place monumental significance, an other who isn't the parent of my child but who satisfies my need for "love" in a way only a "significant other" can. And I don't have to do all that much to take care of him, except be with him...all the time.
I stood by him during his pyschotic break last week after he'd decided to stop taking all his bipolar/anxiety/OCD/sleep/etc. meds (that's what all the stretching was, a couple posts ago, a precursor to absolute unrecognizable madness that I can't even begin to describe at the moment). Sure, he "loves" me more than anyone has since my husband, #1, and #20 (the other two boyfriends who at least said they loved me). But, I remember when I left my husband, and, when it didn't work with #1, I "knew" that "love just doesn't conquer all" (and that's why I settled with #20 for awhile, because I didn't love him, at all - but my son did, and that's the only reason it lasted as long as it did, until I just couldn't do it any more).
I'm not sure why I've put myself in this position again. I put "loves" in quotations marks, knowing full well that the true word that belongs in its place is "needs". I'm with someone who would completely lose it if I left him. (Hey, that's a song..."As long as he needs me...I know where I must be...I'll hang on steadfastly...as long as he needs me." It's from the musical Oliver! and so says Wikipedia, "It is a love ballad expressing Nancy's love for her criminal boyfriend Bill Sikes, despite his mistreatment of her.")
As a matter of fact, Jason's mental breakdown came on the heels of me packing up because I wanted to go home, just for a night or two, to get away from his all-night manic cleaning episodes. There was shit all over his room, and he was up day and night bringing more shit into it from all over the house, obsessively. Yes, it was part of his disorder gone haywire, and somewhat beyond his control (although, did I mention he's decided to stop seeing his psychiatrist, and just smoke weed from now on?). A good fiancée would stand by her man in his time of need, I guess. But not I. I had tried to get away at least three other times over the course of the week, but he begged me to stay each time. So I did, reluctantly. And so here I still am...miserable.
I just want to get back to my life. I want to open my mail. I want to clean my own room. I want to take care of my cats, instead of just buying bags of catfood and dropping them off for my aunt, with whom I (used to) live. Not only that, I want to pet my cats. And I want to have space, alone time. I want to write my memoir. This blog is just a gathering of ideas. I want to write the real thing. This isn't it. This blog is like a little girl's diary, really. It's just...there's been so much wreckage in the present that it's been hard to just write about the wreckage of the past. It started with Margaret's suicide. Then I dated again - damnit - and that's the irony - this blog was supposed to prevent me from creating any more present wreckage. At least, that was the idea, if you go back and read my first post. I keep acting like getting engaged to be married is the ultimate redemption. I find Jesus, get baptized, start dating a guy in church, have a slip and kiss someone else, so ooh, I know, I'll ask the guy I'm dating to marry me, that'll fix everything - game, set, match!
It's all wrong. I feel like a prisoner. Getting engaged to someone just so he'll "know" you aren't going to leave him and he'll therefore hopefully "let" you leave his house, without freaking the fuck out, is clearly - how shall I put it? - fucking dumb.
I should have been writing throughout the course of our relationship so I could have gotten honest with myself. I was on a roll before this one. I over-analyzed the shit out of the last guy I dated (#29).
(And sorry, I just have to take a moment to laugh about Jesus being #28. A lot of good that did me, lol.)
(Oh! PS, #29 just got married, actually. I saw it on facebook. I wouldn't have been happy with that one, either, so I'm glad it was someone else and not me.)
"Love" - I've made such a joke of the word that I can't even take it seriously any more. And yet I say "I love you so much" every day to...what's the fake name I assigned #30? Oh, Jason, I think. But when I say "I love you" to him, what I mean is, "I don't want you to freak out if I don't say it back, so I'm going to say it back and act like I believe it, so that maybe you believe it, too."
But then...when I'm away from him - when I do GET to go home - first, I feel utter bliss. But then I feel so alone that I can hardly bear it. Even with my son with me at my house, I feel empty. Like something's missing.
I guess that's that "need" again. It's apropos to say that Jason and I "need" each other.
But my son needs me, too, and that one doesn't belong in quotation marks. I'm sorry, but I need to get my shit together. Watching Californication has changed my life. I just finished Season 3. Hank Moody is a better father than I am mother, a better writer than I, too, and, he fucks a shitload of women...which makes me not feel so bad. But it's not cool what he does, and he's has frequent downfalls. His daughter is currently pissed at him, in the episodes I'm watching, for sleeping with her 16 year-old almost-step-sister. But he didn't know she was 16, and he's got a good lawyer that he's fucking, so it'll probably all turn out fine (sarcasm).
Any way, Hank is a fictional construct. But...watching him fuck so many women and and still pick his daughter up from school and out for ice cream makes me feel like a total shitbag. I haven't even fucked that many guys - many of the guys on my list, atleast #20 and forward, are guys with whom I was legitimately trying to get into the relationship to end all relationships.
But it's still fucking lame, putting relationships with men above being a mother to my now four-and-a-half year old boy. This past weekend my son told Jason he hated him, and told me that Daddy loves him more than I do, because Daddy takes more responsibility for him. Those were pretty much his exact words. I hate to say that the kid is right. After four rehabs, his dad is finally doing really well. I'm the fuck-up now. I'm sober, sure, but that hardly means shit any more. I'm not going to go drink or use, because that would make this whole thing so much worse, and there's no need for that. But I wish I could. And why wouldn't he hate Jason? I give Jason way more attention than I give to my son. Goddamnit.
I'm still holding onto the hope that I can get my act together. I started the outline for my memoir. I still don't know if I should write it as a novel, or, "truly". I feel like I'd be completely damning myself in every circle of which I am a part if I write it as a true story. But maybe that's what I deserve.
But I'm not thinking of that yet. What I'm doing now is, I'm just writing facts. I'm writing a summary of things I've done and putting them into little chapters to be expanded upon later. Not how I felt, or what I thought. (For the record, I know that's a sentence fragment, I just don't care. And know that's a comma splice. Again, I don't care.)
In my outline, there are no motives. No self-justifications or rationalizations or painting pictures of people that make me look like the victim (because I'm pretty sure I've done a shitload of that). There's no answer to "why". What is, just is.
Jason was saying, as we were watching the show together, "Poor Hank. He just gets shit on, all the time."
"No. I don't agree with that," I said. "He does it to himself. He can't just fuck everything that has a vagina and a pulse and not expect his daughter and her mom to just be cool with it. It's not about him, in the end. It's about them."
"No, it is about him," Jason argued. Jason doesn't know how much I identify with Hank. I was crying today at Albertson's and Jason asked me what was wrong. "If I told you, it would probably end our relationship."
"I'll never stop loving you, sweetheart. Nothing's that bad," he said.
I still couldn't tell him. I couldn't say, "Do you know you're number 29 (not counting Jesus) in a long line of guys I've been with in some capacity since I left my husband? Do you know I don't even truly know if I love you or if I'm just with you to numb my pain? I don't even know if I'm capable of loving anything. I don't even love myself."
Cheating on him and breaking up with him in the beginning didn't work. So I'm not going there again. But I'm in fucking deep, here. We go to the same church; the pastor announced our engagement to the whole congregation a few weeks ago, at both the 9 am and 10:45 am services.
So now what?
"I believe in you, baby," he just said to me. He knows I'm writing, but he doesn't really know what about. I did tell him I'm writing my memoir. I told him earlier, at Albertson's, that he may not love me so much when I'm done.
The truth will set you free, they say. We'll see.
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