I just found this and printed ot on AP as a journal entry
Don't worry about reading this until there is time
Today is Thursday September 27, 2001
It was a warm night. July in the Midwest has evenings that sieve the over you like a breath, sometimes too moist, but more often than not a whisper to be wanted. She was never disappointed in the evenings. Except this one. This one was so unexpected. This evening she didn’t feel the breeze or even remember to feel for it as she did so often. She liked the Midwest summers. The cold of winter that sliced through all the down jackets and sweaters were a long way off in July and she always deluded herself for a few months. No, not really.
Every May first she would say to her husband, “Winter’s coming”. He would always give her a hard time about that. Instead of looking at the beginning of summer as a celebration she always felt it was the beginning of the end. She really didn’t like the cold of winter and the only thing she could do through it was count the days until March 1. That was the Big Day for her. It meant the beginning of the end of the worst part of winter. If it snowed again it wouldn’t stay around long and the below zero wind chills wouldn’t probably happen again until next year. But the Midwest, especially Wisconsin was tricky. April and May could still be cold and wet.
There was a trip she and her husband took to Prairie du Chine for his May 10 birthday and it snowed in Milwaukee. What a ****** that was. So May could still be cold.
The exciting springs were when she could get out to tan as early as April. The feel of the warm sun on her skin and the air spinning softly over her body was the best feeling she had ever known and actually still is to this day. Not that on that July night she expected to ever have this day or any other.
Depression is exacerbated by the music of the 50’s and 60’s. Did you know that? If you are a boomer, depressed, and smoke a lot of cigarettes, drink a Lot of coffee, sweet and milky and wonderful that coffee is, and listen to enough Andy William’s, Jerry Vale, Jack Jones over and over I guarantee you will find yourself in pretty sad shape. When you are young yet, full of mistakes, and sure that life hasn’t a future you want, well whoops, trouble.
That’s the kicker. That future thing. You have had twenty odd years of futures that you watched over your whole life. Every year had it’s own future. When you were a kid and the other kids hated you, you could hear some voice, probably Catholic, telling you it would get better when you grew up. What if when you were a teenager and you knew love as ****, and drinking, and Really Bad choices? What did your future hold for you if you thought about it? What if your parents were so debilitated that your future looked like more of the same of that?
So then it’s July, a time of beautiful flowers. I have for many years now, in my fifties as I am at this time, believed that every flower is the face of an Angel, but when I was in my twenties I only subliminally understood this. July is when the lake is blue every day and covered with diamonds. I took a picture a few years ago of this. The blue lake in the background, a slab from the tunnel project in the foreground, they used these slabs all along the lakefront to help with the erosion problem. In front of this piece of concrete was a beautiful yellow flower. It remains one of “her” favorite flowers.
See I am changing pronouns here, which I promised myself I wouldn’t do. This is a story not autobiography, that vehicle often for the pitiful and beginning prose writers.
She is a poet and was even then. She wrote lots and lots and was just beginning to get a few things published in small literary magazines. She decided to go back to school. She really wanted to be able to talk to very bright people and hold her own. She knew she needed education. There was a whole school full of information and she loved the idea of exploring that. She loved the campus and the quest. She wanted that sooo much. But, alas, money wasn’t really available. She’d married young; she’d been very narcissistic all her life and didn’t realize she had to get a good job.
She had her babies. Her babies were the most amazing and wonderful beings. She sang to them every night. They grew up to the sound of her awful off key voice. But they did grow up listening to her.
That was debatable that night in July. She was going to die. You see her future was one of more bad choices and no way out of them. Her history, her personal history was written across her skin in the tan lines of the bikini she was still able to wear in her yard, but only in her yard, as the *** belly with the stretch marks of two close pregnancies were white even after the rest of her was tan.
She was full of rationalizations about “the kids”. At that moment they were “the kids”, but she knew they would be all right. “A million mothers die every day and their kids grew up okay”. Besides, this was about her. She was incapable of distinguishing her pain from anything else. Only the wretched who have traveled that path understand that. Panic was her master. She just didn’t know it was panic. It was many years later when the panic attacks hit that she knew what they were and got some kind of treatment. Oddly the same psychiatrist was able to help her then, with the panic attacks when she was in her fifties, the same psychiatrist that couldn’t help her that Wednesday night in July.
She was at the end of all her bad choices and lost opportunities. School had just begun. She was to take a midterm in her Anthropology 101 class the next morning. That didn’t matter. She knew she was going to get an A anyway. She knew the material inside and out. She loved this stuff so much she’d spent a long time, years, reading about this. Getting accepted into college was not easy. She graduated in the lower 10% of her graduating class from high school in 1965. More bad choices, but she really hated studying, hated everything about school except getting done with it. She had to graduate or her mother would be so humiliated, she would be humiliated too because in 1965 you had to have a high school diploma to get a job. She just wanted out of school then. She wanted to work in an office. The thought of further education was not possible. Not for her. Not for any of her friends although she dated mostly Notre Dame students, that was not for her grades. They liked her fun side shall we say. Some of them found her bright. Ace, whose name was Gary Heck, remains unforgettable as a force for her self-esteem. He really believed she was smart.
Namaste………………..
L
ake Michigan with diamonds and yellow flower
Thursday September 27, 2001 8:00 pm
There was one time she remembers with amazement and still a little humor. She was used to blind dates with Notre Dame students. She didn’t mind them. Her girlfriend ^^^ would usually fix her up with someone her boyfriend ^^^^^ knew. One of the fun things they did on Sunday afternoon’s was to go to the cemeteries around ND and look, (yea, right) for Knute Rockne’s grave. But she thought the fall afternoon’s in the quiet, cement-aged, leaf strewn place was pleasant and it was cheap. Notre Dame students had No Money, Ever. So one time she was fixed up with this freshman.
Whatever his name was is gone now but he was kind of cute. The car was packed. For once she wasn’t driving. Who was? Hell, who remembers? This guy was young, about a year older that she was. The other guys had beer of course and plied her with it. It was a riot to get her drunk. It was an ambition several of the males she knew aspired to. Oh well, she drank and got a lot of attention. This guy was really kind of shy. She knew she could bring out the fun side of him. She’d seen shy guys before and she had a knack with them. It was like making honey. She settled her personality over them and just squeezed. (She’d learned a lot since her youth in that rotten New York suburb) and found out how to be liked. Not *** exactly, but funny drunk kind of cuteness.
Well, this poor guy never did call her again. It seemed she overwhelmed him although he did seem to find her fun. Who was it that fixed her up with him? Hell, it was so long ago, and there were so many. But this was kind of mean. It seems this guy had just gotten out of a Catholic seminary and had never had a date before. She had no idea he was a social ******, but everyone else did and it was unanimous that the perfect person for this guy to break open his little piece of innocence was her. Oh boy. When she found this out she was flattered I think. ****, she would have been flattered by any attention that was evenly remotely fond. These people basically liked her and that was new and marvelous in her life.
And so it went on for a couple of years until she met * and found God at the same time and by twenty years and nine months old she was married. She was secure. She could stop working and be a vegetable. Which of course happened for a while. Poor *, he was sort of socked between the walls of his cells with her neurosis. But it seems he loved her. He still does for some reason.
This July night in question. July 10, 1974, she knew that there was no way to stop. No way in Hell she was ever going to not need attention. She was young, she was not pretty, but had nice legs and skirts were very short at the time. Very Short.
There was the time when she was eighteen and she and her friend @@@@@ were chaperoning dances for the local YMCA where @@@@@ worked. It was co-chaperoned by the local cops. There were a couple in particular who liked her a lot. One she was really nuts about. He drove a motorcycle at work and was pretty cool. But there was one who kept telling her he only came to the dances to watch her legs. He thought she had the most amazingly beautiful legs he had ever seen. So did a lot of people. She wasn’t pretty, but to some guys that wasn’t IT. She had little chest to appeal, her face was odd and quirky looking, her brown ratted hair was OK but she did have those dancer legs. And she loved to dance. When the skirts went up thigh high she was really in trouble. It was several years before she realized how much trouble.
So she left work that night, a filled thermos bottle of water, and a new prescription for Fiorinol in her purse and headed for the lake. She figured she wanted her last view of this life to be over the water.
Packed into the wooded hillside with her blanket she was like the last cigarette in the pack. She was utterly disposable and probably easily overlooked. She counted on that. She knew she needed time.
All those pills, then a last cigarette and then her “Babies” came into her head. Not “the kids” but her “babies”. Her sweet wonderful barely older than toddlers babies. NO. So she ran.
Namaste……………
May 2, 2006
I haven’t written in here in two years it seems. Or should I say “she” hasn’t written in here.
She was watching Oprah today and Terri Hatcher was on talking about her abuse and the results of that treatment. It is de rigueur these days to talk about our abuse and recovery. It occurred to her that “abuse” was the only thing she ever knew as acceptance. She craved abuse. The terrible part was when no one was abusing her. Then she knew she was trash, something to be left at the curb and picked up by the trucks with the rest of the garbage. She laid out herself in the paths of all the trashmen she could find, one after another.
It is no longer relevant what her mother taught her or didn’t teach her. She knew from her mother’s knee (or as Dr. Robin would put it her mother’s womb) that to be wanted, to be **** was the be all and end all of everything, even when her mother was calling her a *****, over and over again, it was still all I knew, all I understood. Her mother was crazy and out of control but still crying for her lost ****** self. Always to her death, drugged and calling for more and her mother.
She remembers telling her shrink of maybe 21 years that she was after all only trash. It seemed he really didn’t understand. That was a ****** only many years later, that part about him not understanding. He was a good man. He just wanted her to change her behaviour and didn’t feel like any kind of information about why she was the way she was, was at all relevant. So many lost hours, free, but essentially lost.
He had asked her when she was in Intensive Care that July afternoon after she had regained consciousness why she hadn’t called him. Frankly it never occurred to her. She just figured, she told him, that he would tell her to take 5 mgs of ****** and go back to work. He’d done that only the Sunday before the Wednesday that was to be the last day of her life. Crying she left work with her thermos and was off to the beach, perhaps to finally fertilize the ground beneath her blanket.
She had many years with this shrink. Years when just the knowledge that he was still setting her up with the next appointment that she clung to like a cat in heat clings to carpet and pulls herself along. He was my carpet and everyday I would get up and pull myself to my next appointment. Once a month. We would have pretzels from Auntie Anne’s in the mall, which I would bring along with coffee and literally shoot the **** for 45 minutes. He knew she wasn’t getting any help but he never left her. He never left her.
She was thinking today during the Oprah show that so many girls feel bad about themselves when they are abused. Not me. I felt bad about myself when the abuse stopped. It was through the abuse she found that “validation” that seemed to be the raison d’etre for her life.
She sought it, begged for it, cried for it, and panicked when it didn’t happen. When no one wanted to knead her and ply her and pull her to their own greedy selves that she felt like a failure. No, abuse was what she craved. Abuse was love, no abuse left her with only garbage to look at in the mirror.
She came running back to the one who trusted her and the two babies who were her only badges of anything resembling an attempt to do something that actually mattered. Her husband and children saved her as she crashed her car in her drug induced coma.
She got over it so slowly. She had two friends who walked her through the volumes of her narcissism and out the other end. She understands so much now. She understands, at last why *** is so awful and the trust is when the *** is not an issue. *** is the disease. *** is the end of life. It was coming back to trust that saved her that night. Running as fast as she could to the only person she knew who loved her and would save her.
Still does. Thank God!
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