Nathan works on Maggie’s new collar.
Clearly what this puppy needs are some more toys.
I have been working so much that I haven’t had time to write and tell you all that I went and had a facial last week and it was the most incredible experience! I went here. I was so relaxed when she was through that I floated around for hours.
My puppy is coming home on Saturday! I am so excited. Alex brought me some teaser photos home.
I have not been writing much, but for a very important reason. Last week I decided to treat myself to some self loving. No, not that kind of self loving; the kind where I make appointments to have different things done to my body. I had my first manicure and pedicure. I was nervous at first, but the woman was very nice and she brought me wine to drink while I soaked my feet. As she was working on my toes and massaging my legs she mentioned something about a back massage and I thought, holy shit, this really is a full service salon! I then realized that she was prompting me to push the buttons that activated the chair that massages my back and oh my god. Those chairs are wonderful. I am tempted to go back and ask how much to sit in the chair without the manicure/pedicure. I think that it was worth it but I doubt I’ll go back anytime soon. I am far too rough on my hands and feet to keep them polished. I’ve already broken two nails working in the yard.
The next step was a haircut and color. My split ends had been driving me crazy and I had felt constantly inclined to just do the ponytail look. The woman who worked on my hair was young and funny. She too had been through hell, Catholic school, so we traded stories. I had some highlights put in and while I sat she went to Starbucks and bought me a mocha. Then she refused to let me pay for my drink so I kept trying to repeat it in my head so that I could add it to her tip. My hair came out good, and she offered to use a flatiron on it for me. I don’t own a flatiron. I honestly don’t spend that much time on my hair but it was nice being out of the house and having an adult conversation so I told her to go for it. I was amazed at how smooth and silky my hair looked but not nearly amazed enough to believe that I should buy this expensive tool and let it sit in the bathroom collecting dust because hello! It took about an hour for her to do it. Is this normal or do women really spend that much time on their hair in the morning? As I was relaxing in the chair she accidentally tapped my forehead with the flatiron which resulted in a lovely red welt. I didn’t say anything and when she saw it she freaked out. Then she asked why I didn’t say anything and I shrugged. It didn’t hurt that bad. When it was time to pay her the price she gave me was significantly lower than what I was charged the last time I had my hair done. When I questioned the price she said that she was giving me the non-asshole rate. She claimed that she bases her prices on whether or not the client was an asshole and she had to suffer with their presence. I didn’t believe her; I think she had a bit of the guilt over the burn, but I tipped her well (remembering to add the mocha money on there) and she hugged me before I left.
I was so into the whole experience that I decided to walk down the street to a fancy salon spa that I’ve never even considered entering before. As soon as I walked in I felt ridiculous around all of these beautiful women with the fancy hair and clothes. I walked up to the counter and asked if I could possibly get a facial. I had intentionally selected the very gay man behind the counter because I thought that he would be kind and not judge me for wearing the funny paper flip flops I had been given when I had my toenails done because why didn’t anyone tell me that you don’t wear clogs to get a pedicure? He looked at me and said that they were all booked up but he could make me an appointment. I considered running out the door but I stood my ground and we talked dates and times. He suggested the facial for skin with ACNE, which made me feel just great that he had noticed the large pimple that had popped up on my chin earlier that morning.
I took my card with the date and time on it and thought for sure that I would cancel before I went back there again. My paper shoes went whisp whisp on the oh so shiny floors and I headed to the bus stop, homeward bound…
He was thrown out of a car near our house. A neighbor came by and asked if we could keep him until he could be taken somewhere safe. Alex said yes, we would find him a good home. And then Alex and the kids fell in love with him. So I guess he has found his home. I must admit to liking him too, although I had forgotten how mischievous kittens are. Alex named him Connor, but I started calling him “Itty Bitty” and it stuck.
I am getting a puppy in about a week. Someone please tell me stories of how when puppies and kittens grow up together they get along wonderfully.
I picked up my camera today. I asked the man, “What was wrong with it?” He said, “You drop it!” I did not drop it, but English wasn’t his strong point and I just wanted to get out of there.
I just wanted to say Fuck You. And thanks, by the way, for giving me even more ways to answer the inevitable question I get, “Why did you leave the Catholic church?”
Damn, I was so excited too. My big news that I thought that I was going to be able to share with everyone today:
ALEX GOT ME A PUPPY!!!!
I am so excited. Alex was supposed to pick the puppy up today after its vet appointment but the vet determined that the puppies are not quite ready to leave their Mommy yet. Maybe another week or so. I have longed for a dog for so many years and I can’t wait to meet this one. I am still not sure whether he is getting me a boy or a girl. I still can’t believe that he set this up. I have only been telling him that I want a dog for 20 years now.
The conclusion to my search for answers regarding Brett Reider can be found at Brett Reider Is Alive and Doing Well.
I had an entry all planned out for today, complete with photos that I took on Alex’s camera, but he was too tired when he got home from work and I don’t know how to upload them, so this will have to suffice for now. Speaking of cameras, I called the shop that’s had mine since May and the woman who answered the phone acted all shocked when I said, “Uh, yeah, I am calling to check the status of my camera that I dropped off a long time ago”
“Oh my God!” she responded, after typing my name into the computer, “You should have had your camera back a long time ago!” No shit. Apparently the part they need is on backorder and it should be ready by next week. I am so excited, because I will actually be able to take pictures and put them up by myself without asking my husband to do it for me.
As I’ve mentioned, I have two older sisters, Monica and Maria. I have detailed the closeness of my relationship with Maria here, but I don’t think I’ve talked much about Monica. When we were growing up we didn’t get along. Even as adults we have had huge arguments that have involved yelling and then not speaking to each other for months. Today though, she did me a huge favor and took Polly to see the new Harry Potter movie. She has two daughters, ages 13 and 12, and they get along well with my daughter, so for the sake of the girls I have tried not to fight with their mother. I really do appreciate her taking them to the movies because me, I wasn’t looking forward to it so much. I wanted to wait until the hoopla died down a bit before we went. Monica bought tickets online in advance. So today has been quiet, with Alex sleeping and Nathan just hanging out and talking on the phone or watching TV.
My medication has been upped even more than it was, so I am now taking three times the amount. Every doctor I’ve seen has tried this with my antidepressants to see if they can eliminate the panic attacks and anxiety and reduce my reliance on benzodiazepines. The side effect is more panic, a constant state of anxiety and insomnia. Last night I was up until 6:30 this morning. I had a quick nap on the couch and then woke at ten. These side effects do go away in time; you just have to ride them out.
When dealing with insomnia I usually try very hard to go to sleep before I just say fuck it and either get up or watch TV or something. This morning I was flipping through the channels and I came across a documentary on HBO titled “Brett Killed Mom”. I was totally sucked in. The lives that my siblings, my mom and I lived in the years before my father’s suicide are not ones that I have ever been able to convey to anyone. A psychiatrist once asked me how bad the abuse was, and I told her that it was bad. Really bad. She asked me if my father had ever broken any bones. I said yes, and she explained that the abuse scale put physical abuse into two categories; one with broken bones and a less severe form with no broken bones. I never knew there was a scale, and I personally think that the emotional abuse has left the most crippling scars. I have spent many years in therapy and I am frankly tired of trying to make sense of my past. I want to deal with now. I know, I know, I can’t move on until I deal with what happened.
One aspect of being an abused child that I’ve had trouble coming to grips with is the fact that as the years moved on and the abuse grew worse and my self esteem was nonexistent I used to spend a lot of time thinking about killing my father. I honestly felt that someone was going to have to do it or we would never be safe. I imagined how I would do it and I knew that I would go to prison for it. I felt that it would be a fair exchange; my freedom gone, my father’s life taken and my mom and siblings would be free. I never acted on those plans because I physically was not strong enough to fight back in self defense and I knew on some level that if I did I would only manage to make things much worse. After my dad died it was years before I admitted this dark secret of mine. When I told my psychiatrist she said that it was a normal reaction, a matter of self-preservation. She said that it wasn’t uncommon for the abused to contemplate killing their abusers. On different occasions I spoke with my mom, my brother, and both of my sisters about it. They admitted that they too had thought about killing him. My mom went so far as to say that she felt that it was her duty to protect her children by any means necessary. She too felt as if she would one day have to kill or watch her children die. Somehow none of this makes it any easier, or maybe it does, I don’t know.
When I was watching “Brett Killed Mom: A Sister’ Story” I literally felt as if it could have been me there on the screen being interviewed from prison. I wanted to hug him; to tell him that I understand how it had happened. Brett Reider’s story is one that I feel everyone involved in the system should see; whether it is police officers, social workers, teachers or just people who can’t understand the results of a life where the one who should love and nurture you becomes the one who you have to get away from to save you.
Tomorrow: A deep longing that I have had for years will be fulfilled by my husband. I’ll have to get pictures of tomorrow to share with you. Hopefully I’ll be able to sleep tonight.
I received my first hate email from this site two days ago. I guess it is to be expected; I have been doing this for about a year now without any. This particular email made me very angry, and I logged out of my email account without responding. I wanted more time to think it over first and to decide if I should respond. This particular person didn’t attack my writing, they attacked my character. When Alex woke up and began to get ready for work I told him about this woman and what she had said about me. Hey broke into a huge grin and said, “Your first hate mail! That’s great. You should create a page on your site just for hate mail and post it there.” His idea was intriguing; I have seen other journals with hate mail and responses that have been quite humorous. It wasn’t the course of action I really wanted to take though. Instead I waited until I had calmed down enough to respond, and I did so with kindness. I did not hear back from her. This got me to thinking about email. My former best friend used to tell me that email gave people false muscles, like alcohol. He was of course commenting on the fact that there were things that I would never have said to him in person that I confided via email. An even more dangerous combination is email or the phone with the addition of alcohol. Obviously I am not the only one who has used a computer screen to hide behind while communicating. I do try, however, to ask myself if I would feel comfortable saying whatever it is I am trying to convey via email directly to the person’s face.
My Mother recently sent me an email with the subject line “Your Cousin”. I currently have a cousin who is in the Army stationed in Afghanistan. One might think that he would have popped into my head first, but before I opened the email I already knew who the subject matter would be.
Back in 1983 my mom took her four children to her homeland of Australia. There I spent an idyllic summer surrounded by aunts and uncles, grandparents and countless cousins. It was the first time in my life that I felt free. My father stayed here in America; without him nearby I blossomed. I wasn’t so afraid. I didn’t feel the need to constantly walk on eggshells. I felt a sense of belonging, a feeling of being home for the first time, and more than anything I was surrounded by so much love that my heart threatened to burst.
During that time I met my cousin Steve. We hit it off immediately and spent hours together talking, walking around the abandoned railroad tracks of the sleepy little town my mom had grown up in, sneaking cigarettes and making plans for the future. We were both dreamers, you could say. We made plans to be famous musicians (him) and highly successful writers (me). We built each other up. Youth gave us the belief that anything was within our grasp. When I left that summer I ended up crying my eyes out at the airport, begging my mom not to take us back to America, back to a place where daily beatings at the hands of my father were the norm for us all, back to the place where we slept with one foot on the floor always ready to jump up and run at the first noise in the night.
The next trip to Australia took place under very different circumstances in 1985. My father had died. I had decided to take my inner rebel and run with her. I was shaving parts of my head, wearing tons of makeup and smoking a pack a day. I was nervous about seeing Steve again, afraid that the connection would be lost. We ended up discovering that although we had had zero contact since our last visit we were now wearing our hair the same, dressing in a similar way, and listening to the same bands. He had fulfilled his promise of learning to play the guitar, and was now quite good at it. We picked up where we had left off. When it was time for us to leave the country this time I tried to beg my mom to let us stay there. I felt that there was no life for me in America. My mom informed me that Steve and his mom and sister would be returning to America to live with us. I was so excited.
We spent the next several months spending all of our spare time together. He knew that at times I would gab on like a maniac and at other times I would sit in silence. Sometimes I would cry for seemingly no reason and he made it clear that was O.K. too. He tried to teach me to play guitar and we practiced together. We wrote music together, me working on the lyrics mostly, him carefully jotting down the notes. We agreed to meet in NYC when I turned 18. There we would start our own band, become famous, and live happily ever after, rich and free. Ah, to be young again.
When the time came for him to leave we considered running away. It seemed like the only solution until the reality of us having less than two dollars in coins and a half pack of smokes between us kicked in. We promised to keep in touch through letters. That promise lasted about 18 months, not bad considering our ages at the time.
My 18th birthday came and went. I remembered the young woman who had been so naive to have thought that everything would be O.K. if only I could make it to NYC on this date. I had children; he had children. He married; I didn’t, until later. In 1993 I flew with Nathan to see my family once again. I saw Steve twice during that trip. I met his wife and kids. I had heard from family members that he had become successful as a guitarist; I wasn’t surprised. We didn’t have much time to talk during our visits, but he did ask me if I was still writing. I said no. He told me that I had a good head on my shoulders and a story to tell. “You should do it, kid” and he smiled. He asked me if I was still practicing the guitar chords he had taught me. I had to tell him that I had tried to, for a long time I tried, but without him there to guide me as to the finger placement I had given up. “It’s O.K. I can teach you again!” I laughed. It was too late. It was ridiculous. We parted, promising to write, although I think we both knew we wouldn’t.
Three years later a letter arrived in my mailbox from him. He was congratulating me on the birth of my daughter. We wrote back and forth for a while and then moved on to phone calls from time to time. Sometimes long stretches of time would go by without a word and then one of us would reach out. The time never seemed to matter; we picked up right where we had left off. During the period of time when his father was terminally ill and his marriage was headed for divorce we spoke frequently. When he met and fell in love with his second wife I didn’t hear from him often. I was admittedly the same with him. We were the opposite of fair weather friends in many ways. When I was in the darkest hour of depression it was him I called late one night, collect, no less. He accepted the charges and chatted with me until he had me laughing. He once calmed me down from a severe panic attack over the phone by going through his cupboards and fridge and naming everything he had that I, a vegetarian, could eat at his house. It worked for some strange reason.
More time passed with no contact. Last year his name popped up in my email inbox. I was surprised and pleased. We had never done the email thing. We started out with daily emails. In time they became weekly, and then monthly, then they stopped. I wasn’t sad or confused or surprised. I understood now that this was the way it had been since 1983 and that was O.K.
My mom’s email titled “Your Cousin” was about him, just as I had known it would be. While on vacation in Thailand he was riding a motorbike and was hit by a truck, which ran over his body and then fled the scene. He survived. He is now in the hospital in Thailand with too many broken bones to fly home. I ran through a whole series of emotions and ideas after I read the news. I went from wondering if I should call him at the hospital, wondering if I should send a card to him in Thailand or have one waiting for him when he returns home to Australia, to one crazy moment where I felt as if I should fly there and sit by his bedside to make sure he is O.K.
Right now I realize that no matter what I do, even if I decided to skip even the simplest gesture of a get well card, it would be alright. He would understand. Some relationships can transcend the restrictions of whatever means of communication are available to us at any given time. In a nutshell, I know it in my heart that I don’t have to say or do anything at all. He knows. He already knows what I would say.
I finished Polly’s room. Of course I wasn’t done when she came back from the beach, despite having stayed up until 4 a.m. to paint, and she cried when she walked through the door. I underestimated the length of time it would take me to do the room. Just the spackling alone took hours. She went a little crazy in there with the staple gun, and the thumb tacks, and the good old fashioned hammer and nails. It looks so much nicer now. I even bought her new carpet, as hers had met its match in a red kool-aid spill. She seemed to have fun decorating once it was time for her to move back in, and we were all glad to get her things out of the living room. She is a little pack rat.
Last night, after my kids recommended it to me, I watched Freedom Writers. I didn’t expect to like it, even though I definitely liked Hilary Swank in Boys Don’t Cry and Million Dollar Baby. It was pretty much exactly what I expected it to be, not too horrible, not too good. It did however open up the lines of communication regarding race issues with my kids. I thought the depiction of the separation between the teens of different races was a bit extreme. After telling my kids what I’d thought, Polly stated that I was right; the kids in her junior high school were not divided by race. Nathan assured me that at the first school that he attended last year it was exactly as it had been in the movie, all of the kids divided up according to ethnicity; White, Black, Latino, and Asian.
My husband happens to be half Hispanic. It hasn’t been something that we’ve given much thought, to be honest. When we first moved in together he asked why I didn’t buy tortillas, beans, salsa and hot sauce and so I bought all of those things and he was happy. Maybe he is only Mexican at dinner time. When we had children Nathan came out dark like his father, and much to our surprise Polly is fair skinned and blond, like me. I have had numerous people ask me if my children have different fathers. Nathan went through a bit of an identity crisis in high school, unsure of which group he fit into. He ended up with the Latino kids. He once told me in anger that he wished his dad had married a Mexican woman. I was both amazed and confused. I had hoped that we had as a society had gone beyond voluntary segregation. I underestimated the need for my son to fit in, to feel as if he had a proper place within a group.
When I was growing up I felt more of a division in the schools based on socioeconomic status. Of course I went to private schools and what I was experiencing might have been based on my own struggle to pretend that I didn’t care that I had old, hand me down underwear and ill fitting shoes. I struggled to be “cool”. I tried very hard to pretend that I didn’t care. I am learning that the struggles my son faces are different than anything I have ever been through. Even his father is a bit baffled, as he never gave any thought to the fact that he had friends of many different races in high school. He didn’t feel the pressure to chose between Hispanic and white and stay within the confines of a group. I sincerely hope that in time Nathan feels at home within himself, and the world.