MFA Mama

to my lost boys

   I loved you. I loved you. I loved you.

   I still do, but if I’m going to survive until you are of an age to possibly understand what your father took from us all and want to find me and know me, I have to leave America and go somewhere where I have access to healthcare. 

   It might be a cultural memory, or maybe it’s the Romani blood that runs through all of our veins, but all my life I’ve had dreams and flashbacks of having to gather those I love and flee. After you left I stopped dreaming of taking you with me, or rather you aged in reverse over the months until you were babies again, my beautiful babies, and then one night in a dream when I was fleeing through a forest in the dark, I looked down and what I thought was the two of you in my arms was just the Skins.

   I love those damn cats, but I still woke up crying.

   I will always wonder how it might have been between us without the desperation of being trapped in a sinking democracy by your father and the family court system. Leaving the country costs so much less than leaving your father did. 

   I plan to offer, before I leave, to sign paperwork granting my permission for you to get passports. I hope you’ll ask your father to do that for you, just in case. If we’re ever to find our way back to each other you need to be alive, too.

   The last thing my father ever did for me was leave me a way out. I hope it’s not the last thing I ever do for you, but it will definitely be the last thing I do before I leave America. If your father loves you even a little bit as much as I do, he’ll grab you and flee when the time comes, and if not I’ll know I did everything I was allowed to do.

   I loved you so much. I’ll never not wish I could have taken you with me instead of the cats. Maybe it’s better, if you had to stay, that you do it with someone who can teach you to lie and cheat and steal, I don’t know, nothing makes sense here anymore.

   I hope you remember that before your father taught you anything mean or ugly, I loved you.

sabbatical

   Y’all, I am all the way over America. It was a beautiful and well-intended dream, but it never really wanted me in the first place and there’s nothing here for me anymore.

   A new journey* begins tomorrow! 

* As in, a literal journey. Not like when white ladies** start FB groups*** to document losing ten pounds or having a tummytuck. 
** Remember: Jews are no longer white.
*** But let me know if you want in on the FB group.
  

14

.  Today is the birthday of the kid who is okay with his brother nearly killing me because “people make mistakes,” but not okay with me for being broken after what happened. Until that I did not truly regret meeting my ex-husband because I had my children as a result, but when today’s birthday boy looked me in the eye and said he loved and respected his father and brother but not me, then parroted their insults and slurs at me, it broke me and I didn’t just wish I’d never met their father, I wished I hadn’t been born my own self.

   Pensive Birthday wishes to my Middle Child. You did what even your father and brother failed to do with their fists, kid: you broke me so badly I stopped even trying to put myself back together again, and took your little brother’s mom from him.

   The fucked up part is that if I had the money I still would have bought you Walking Dead and Stranger Things shirts today, because all I ever wanted was for you to be happy, even at the expense of my own wellbeing (I just don’t have any left to give).

   I hope you spend at least a little time today, on the anniversary of the day I gave you birth, thinking about whether what you have instead of me in your life is worth what you did to the only parent who wanted you to be born to get it, because I read something today that reminded me of you:

Figure One: So what about a table with two misogynistic woman-beaters, and more importantly what does that make the guy who sits down every night for dinner with them and drags his little brother along with him? Besides fourteen as of today?

  Do better. Start now.

slosh

My mental health is like a bucket of water I’m trying to carry through life. My ex was a hole in the bottom, and I’d plugged it and traveled a little way before my oldest child punched me in the gut and I dropped it; it landed upright but then my younger children each gave it a kick running toward the bottom-hole that fathered them. The bucket still holds a little water, but it’s sloshing around. If you took a burst of photos of it over a brief period of time and some of them would look almost okay and others would be like “oh damn, there goes another little splash!”

I’d like to keep going, but I have to wait for this sloshing to stop.

PSA

   You know what’s a really GOOD and HELPFUL profile photo for Lyft, Uber, etc.? Get a friend to take a picture of you standing at a curb staring at your phone. Your drivers will thank you and probably laugh.

phobic

   May you live in interesting times: even I will grudgingly concede that this recent breaking wide open of my heart and head has been fascinating. It’s forced a lot of empathy into me sideways in the form of brand-new irrational fears (it’s like stress-induced General Anxiety; I’ve had it once before when Little Child was a baby and inexplicably dying). I have previously been intolerant of what seemed to me like silly fears in others, and everything we mock comes back to bite us is I guess how I came to be a cook at a Mediterranean restaurant with an intense tahini phobia.

dust

   Mother’s Day broke me and I can’t seem to get it together. I’ve heard all the platitudes about how the cracks are what let the light in and filling them with gold to make the vase more beautiful but what do you do with yourself when your spouse makes a stupid joke about how at least it can’t get any worse and you start shrieking so loud and high-pitched that you explode into a cloud of toxic dust? Then what?

364

   What does one do to pamper one’s liver? Because I only have 364 days to prepare mine for next fucking Mother’s Day; this year I did it sober and it sucked.

   In fairness, I have hated Mother’s Day since about sixth grade.

   Patterns repeat, like fractals, down generations, and I was so certain and tried so hard in my own broken way not to repeat my parents’ mistakes. My mother was a mean drunk, and my father was too caught up in his anger about her shitting all over his Advanced Directive when he had his stroke and doing CPR and calling an ambulance to protect me (all of the fucked up shit that awful woman did to him, and the one time he wasn’t cowed by her pouty-face it was over her doing something semi-appropriate).

   

   The mean drunk thing is fixable (don’t drink, durr) but it is almost enough to make me believe in a higher power that smites you for hating your mother the way I found myself rage-crying at my husband when it got late enough that my children definitely weren’t going to call that I would never forgive him for stopping my oldest from beating me to death, because no one should survive that.

   

   A Nigerian fellow at work tried to convert me to the faith the missionaries taught his family the other day though, and a son of Africa embracing blue-eyed Jesus THERE and then coming HERE of his own volition to proselytize a Jew who has survived the unfathomable...well. People have been trying to convert me since I learned to talk and I thought I’d seen it all. “This is so fucked up. You didn’t sell out, you fucking gave it away. I don’t need Jesus, you need INTENSE PSYCHOTHERAPY,” I sputtered. “You are COLONIZED!” (it’s like this guy is the only man in America who didn’t watch Black Panther FFS) “Well it’s either that or be like my grandfathers and believe in trees. And water. Air and birds. I go to church every week and wash my sins away!” he said cheerfully, in the manner of a man who cheats on his wife as often as he possibly can but thinks he’s found a loophole.

   Nurture over nature. Read to the baby. Eat the wafer (but don’t drink the wine). 

   We all try to be better than the generation before us, and every time we just fail a little harder.

 

   My children don’t call or text on Mother’s Day, but at least one of them reads the blog. You want to hear a story, kid? My paternal grandfather (your bubbe Julius, who died in a mental hospital before I was born) was crazy before there were meds that could do anything besides drug you into a stupor. He decided your great-Granny M was cheating on him (I have no idea if he was correct but as the story goes the whole thing was just a paranoid delusion of his), so he filled a burlap sack with bricks and hit her over the head, then slit her throat. He didn’t press hard enough though, and she lived with an ugly scar from ear to ear. Always referred to it as “the night I was murdered.” And that is talking the LESS mentally-ill side of the LEAST mentally-ill one of your parents (don’t take MY word for it—there was a court reporter present at our divorce hearing where both of our mental health was addressed in detail; the judge didn’t just flip a coin in deciding who y’all would live with).

   Your father made your bubbe Julius look like a fantastic husband; at least Julius only wanted to KILL his wife. Living through what you and your father have done to me is so much worse.

   Have yourself sterilized for the good of society. Because if the prettiest quadrant in your personal Punnet square is spattered with that much blood, the rest isn’t fit for the innernet.

rebound

   Well hey there!

   I’ve been mired in a two-month spell of awful (my physical health went even further to shit and was like “HOW BOUT DAT” and my mental health smirked and said “CASH ME OUTSIDE”), and things still aren’t great but I’m back to...well, hell, I don’t even really know what my normal looks like anymore. Like, I’m probably not ever going to be as happy as I didn’t even know I was before 2/13/17, but after being down enough to honestly contemplate suicide (I’d love to say I had some great epiphany and I think things will be okay and not be lying, but honestly y’all owe the continuing joy of my presence to apathy and the passage of time and maybe Daylight Savings?) AND a medical clusterfuck, JUST being a medical clusterfuck is...surprisingly tolerable. A very dear and longsuffering friend asked me how I was yesterday and I said “I’m...okay I guess” and she was like “wow, that is the least-negative response you’ve given to that question in weeks! Are you feeling better painwise, how is your hip?” I said “the hip I dislocated yesterday is still pretty sore but today I dislocated the other one and at least now I’m like, more symmetrical? I don’t even know.” And she was like “you said you were okay. Two dislocated hips is NOT OKAY.” I said “they’re back IN, pal, they’re just sore because they aren’t supposed to come OUT. Lay off my damn hips, they aren’t out there clobbering anyone’s mother or anything! THIS IS FINE.”

   So I’m still not sure I’m what you’d call sane, but I’m back to giving a shit about food and money and getting to the point where I laugh instead of crying after I make jokes about motherbeaters. I’m safe, but not okay, but I think maybe I’m almost there. Hotter is still trying to make helpful suggestions, and said he thought the outlet of blogging was good for me and maybe I should start again, and just write what I feel the way I used to before I had to worry about my ex trying to leverage some admission of humanity into my children being taken from me. I said “they’ll read it. My ex. The Sociopath I brought into the world. Maybe even the younger two who chose them over me. If I write what I feel and they read it then I’ve given them my pain to celebrate.”

   It took twenty-four hours for me to realize that if they are reading and reveling in this, they’re trash. And I really don’t care what trash thinks about my life.

   My ex-husband is probably too busy trying to get everyone to all their appointments and rehearsals and find a silly hat for Silly Hat Day and the materials for a model of a cell and a spare $50 for a field trip by tomorrow as well as doing some sort of wage-earning thing to do something he finds as difficult and unpleasant as reading anyway. 
   
   And the kid is probably too wrapped up in his little girlfriend, although if he’s reading this and they’re having sex then the rest of y’all cover your virtual ears because FOR FUCKSAKE DO NOT IMPREGNATE HER YOU FUCKING ASSHOLE. REMEMBER ALL THAT SHIT YOU WERE SPOUTING AT ME ABOUT THANKS FOR THE UNFORGIVABLY BAD GENES? WALK YOUR TALK. GET A VASECTOMY AND WEAR CONDOMS UNTIL A FOLLOW-UP SAMPLE TESTS CLEAN. GIVE THE FOLLOW-UP SAMPLE. ASK YOUR FATHER WHAT HAPPENS IF YOU DON’T, OR BETTER YET ASK YOUR LITTLE BROTHER. ALSO I AM DOING GENETIC TESTING SPECIFICALLY SO THAT YOU ARE EASIER TO CATCH IF YOU RAPE ANYONE JUST IN CASE THAT SHIT IS GENETIC TOO, AND YOU TOTALLY LEAVE DNA EVEN IF YOU WEAR A CONDOM, SO DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT.

   Aaaaaanyhoo. I’m back.

missing

   I am really missing my boys today.

   I haven’t lost hope that when they grow up and start to see things for what they are, they’ll want to know me again or at least be curious. If they do, I hope I’m still around.

   By then my youngest’s voice will have changed though, which is bullshit. I love his little baby voice! I feel the worst for that one, because I think at some point he’ll realize that refusing to see me at my house and insisting on eating out or not seeing me at all was just so ridiculous and sad and forced by his father and brothers’ manipulation. I mean, come on. Hotter is a former chef and I currently cook restaurant food that people pay good money to come and eat! There is nothing wrong with the food here, and he was raised in this house (which the Dept of Social Services certified as safe and suitable when my ex involved CPS in our divorce out of spite). Nobody here has ever laid a hand on him. But his father has convinced him that he can’t set foot in my home or something bad will happen, and I don’t currently have “taking four people out to eat once a week” kind of money. And even if I did, I don’t know that I could sit there once a week knowing I wasn’t paying a utility bill so that my baby who is only alive because I re-argued Roe v. Wade with his father and learned to do unspeakable medical things once he was born so sick can look at me like I’m garbage. The last time I spoke to him all he’d do was talk about how great my ex was, how he “buys us things and takes us to do stuff like a normal parent should.” I asked him what I was, then, an ABnormal parent? The remark was parroted straight from my ex, and by normal he means “affluent.” I can’t compete with my ex’s money, and even if I could I don’t see outspending as a valid parenting method. If my baby doesn’t want to know me because I am poor, I can see it as him being childishly self-centered, I can even on some level hope he finds a little happiness in the things his father can give him because I want him to be happy and enjoy his one hard-earned life. But I can’t bear to see the scorn on his face.

   I hope Middle Child comes around, too, although I have a little less sympathy there. Where we left things, he had forgiven his brother for beating me crippled, but would not, could not forgive me for being so sad and angry about it. I told him that forgiving a man for almost killing a woman, but holding a grudge against the woman for having inconvenient feelings about the whole thing was something a trash person who hates women would do, and if that was honestly his stance then he was my greatest failure next to his Sociopath of a brother and I didn’t want to be part of his life and watch him go about applying a false double standard like that. I feel so awful about that. Not for saying it, because fuck, it’s TRUE, but he’s still my kid. I don’t want him to hurt like that, even if it’s because of something I said that he needed to hear. Really I just wish that somehow he was able to see me as a human being, but I think his father has convinced him that I don’t deserve that kind of consideration and I wish I knew how so I could borrow his tactics and somehow brainwash the kid back into being the kind and compassionate child I once knew. 

   I wish my health was better and I could work more so we could move out of this state. I already know from The Narcissist and The Sociopath that any time I see someone similar-looking in a crowd I’ll do that flinch-pause-doubletake, I did it for years until The Narcissist died. I still do it thinking I see The Sociopath. I didn’t think there was anything worse than that feeling, but I was wrong.

Yesterday I was pulling out of a business across from the middle school and the bell rang and kids came pouring out of the building. I sat there blocking a driveway and watched them all get on the buses, trying to catch a glimpse of my boys. I just wanted to see them and see if they seemed happy, but I quickly realized I had no idea what their hair or jackets or backpacks look like anymore and in the end I wasn’t even sure if I’d seen them or not.

   I don’t know how to do this.