MFA Mama

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.

titles

Glitter and Pistachio Shells: Who Hurt You? (A Lyft Driver’s Lament)

Ice in My Apron Pocket: Memoirs of a Professional Server

Who Took The Motherfucking Cut Glove, I Swear To God: A Prep-cook’s Tale

neurosurgeon

The neurosurgeon was somewhat reassuring. He said he’s willing but not eager to operate on me: I meet the criteria for surgery in that my discs are dead and dessicated and bulging into my spine (they would go in through the front of my neck and do discectomies at C5-6 & 6-7, a laminectomy to address the bone spurs, cadaver bone grafts between my crumbling vertebrae, fusion of C5-7 with a plate and screws), but the degree of stenosis is not yet endangering function (the measurements on the report are godawful, but on film you can still sort of see where the nerve roots go through). Basically they’ll operate if/when I am desperate enough from the pain and numbness/weakness to go for it (NOPE), but despite having a 70-year-old spine I’m young enough that the 1-2% yearly cumulative risk of re-op over time would eventually bite me in the ass, and they would therefore prefer to wait unless I can’t live with the pain (plus once I have hardware I’d probably be limited to CTs, which carry a highish burden of radiation, and with all the ones I’ve had already plus countless x-rays and floroscopy-assisted procedures...my cancer will have cancer at some point). So I am hearing GOOD news: as long as this doesn’t get worse I can avoid surgery for as long as I remain as stubborn as I am, and I’ve maintained an unrelenting thirty-nine-year streak, so I’m feeling like ain’t nobody slitting my damn throat now or hopefully ever (I know, I know, it’s controlled, surgical throat-slitting with a low risk of death, and that is fine and miraculous if we are talking about someone else’s throat)!

The REALLY good news is he doesn’t think I have ankylwhatchamacallit, just regular old degenerative spinal arthritis exascerbated by the beating in 2/17? This means a better prognosis with surgery, and that staying active is my best shot at preserving function even if it hurts like hell (until the surgeon weighed in no one could say whether exercise was good and necessary or liable to paralyze me for life).

So: damn the torpedoes, yoga time, bitches!

to my littlest

Dear Little Child,

   Buddy, for all I know your father and older brothers have you convinced that I am the bad one, and in the long run you may even come to believe it, but I can’t even be mad at you because for twelve years you kept me from regretting a huge chunk of my life. Heck, you still do when I think of what a sweet baby you were, what a smart kid you’ve turned into, and how your iron will might just allow you to emerge from the crucible of your childhood stronger than steel. If your father and brothers’ cruelty was the price I had to pay to get to meet you, I’ll always wish it could have been different but I’ll never regret having you.

    I miss you, Bubs. I’ll love you forever, and then a little bit more, and I’ll always help you any way I can. 

   All you have to do is ask.

eulogy

RIP “Lefty:” consummate charmer, agile fast-talker, self-described hobo and casualty of the opioid epidemic (also my prodigal stepson). I hope you finally found some peace.