I'm here

I've just had a rough week and rather than blogging endlessly about it, I've been laying low. I've written several raving insane posts and then NOT published them. Be grateful, you'd wonder if I was the one who should be in the psych ward if you read them. Bad side, cleaning lady never showed up and I've had to do a lot of tidying myself, cleaning any household items lower than three feet from the floor isn't possible with my heartburn and exhaustion. Good side, my cardiologist gave me a clean bill of health and noted that although I've had some episodes of V-Tach they are pretty normal for my pattern and not serious. I'm going back in two months for another check.

Bigger bad side, in the last week, some unfortunate things have happened between my BIL and my husband and my BIL is getting a bit worse, and my husband is really upset, and of course, we've ended up arguing about the best way to handle it. Mostly because we both feel helpless and have no idea what to do. As a result I feel kind of sick, lots of vague pain and cramping and tiredness, but yes the baby is still kicking away. Emotionally, I react one way, and he reacts completely differently.

Funny thing is, we both react the way we did to crisis when we were growing up. We go for the familiar, not for what is best for us or for each other. We both know it, and after years of therapy we both fight it, but really, isn't it weird the way humans just endlessly repeat the patterns of our lives over and over again, knowing it doesn't help us, knowing how incredibly destructive it is for us, and yet----we fly towards the familiar like moths to a flame. Children of alcoholics marry alcoholics or other children of alcoholics, children who grew up being abused pick spouses or partners who have abusive personalities and even abuse them, children who grew up with rigid controlling parents, or emotionally distant ones grow up and become the same kind of parent, and marry the same kind of partner, all without ever recognizing what is happening. (And yes, the good patterns happen too, and sometimes happy accidents where a fucked up person meets and nice person and gets some healing. This is rare, due to fact that everyone on earth is fucked up to some degree. We are all the walking wounded people.)

It's not just DNA or neurochemicals or genes that determine our future, or random chance or luck or what have you, it's the desperate desire to feel like we're at home. Home in this definition, is whatever we grew up with, even if it was poverty or chaos, or adrenaline filled terror. Even the people like me, who spend years in therapy, and grow up vowing to never ever recreate the way we grew up can barely escape it. It takes every ounce of energy to not follow our instincts to fuck up our relationships, our families, our children.

I, for example, am an expert at driving people away. Good people that is. The better they are for me, the more I shit on them. Like my husband? If there is something I can do to piss him off and make him hate me, it will take a superhuman effort on my part NOT to do it. You see, I sincerely believe that I am worthless and in the end will be left all alone and with not a soul to love me or take care of me, just like when I was growing up, so what do I do? I try to make it come true. To my deeply fucked well-trained brain, he's going to leave me someday anyway, so why not get the pain over with now, right? Just rip that band-aid off!!

(As an aside, this is why I'm never surprised when foster kids or kids adopted later in life act up in a safe secure environment for years on end sometimes. Cause, hey, safe isn't normal, right?)

When every person you love ends up abandoning you, or dying, or disappearing, it's the norm, and the norm feels right, and when there are people left milling around in your life and still here, it feels not normal. It feels odd to be loved.

This past couple of weeks it feels odd to have him come back, it feels odd to still be pregnant with a live baby, and it feels odd to have living kids who still love me and aren't leaving me and are healthy and relatively normal. It feels odd to have a clean organized house and it feels odd to have clean laundry, and it feels odd to have food in the fridge and money in the bank.

I feel uncomfortable in my own skin. Quick someone---make something bad happen. I'm not sure how much more I can take.