pray you never

I'm sitting at a cafe waiting to pick up Roi. He spent the weekend in New York and then extended his stay by two nights. Without asking. Certainly without respect to my schedule, or my triggers. He was decidedly unapologetic about it. Heck, he went so far as to guilt me. 

But then, I know this. This is Roi, and this is how he does life. It's good to no longer be surprised by his absurd behaviors. Better still to be focusing on what I want to do, where I want to go next, and how I'm going to get there. Sometimes I wonder if Roi was sensing my movement away from him and felt compelled to buy a house, not JUST because the market was right, but because unconsciously he may have thought I would never leave if there was a house.

I'll admit. I had a brief few weeks of worry about this - that I wouldn't want to leave for love of a house. 

As my last post indicates, I no longer worry about that. 

Right now the only thing I'm worried about is Kyd. Those worries could fill three volumes, but in the best summary I can give. Kyd is facing 90 days if he doesn't come up with a pretty large sum of money between now and next Thursday. This is for the DUI and accident he was in 3 and a half years ago. He's not been able to find work, nor be stable enough to look properly or present himself as a desirable employee. 

I don't talk about Kyd much. I'm not sure why this is. It seems to be wrapped in fierce motherly protection, denial wrapped in clutching hope, bottomless feelings of helplessness that don't like to be poked, the brain-crunching juxtaposition of feeling no empathy for Roi and wanting desperately for Kyd to not hurt others the way Roi has, and god knows what else.

In fact, I find I can't really talk much more about him even now when I set out to do that. 

Neurofeedback is saving my life, keeping me sane amidst what would bring the best of us to our knees. I'll just say that. And ask that whatever form of prayer or good energy you practice, if you could send some toward this corner of the world it would be much appreciated. 

Dear Blog

It's me again. 

Here we are at the new house. And it's lovely. More than lovely. It's solid, and grounded, and peaceful, and grand. It holds a gentle energy within its walls. It sits on a hill on a quiet street, meeting squarely the mountains across the way. 

Kitten has found all the best nooks for naps, including nestled in beside me in my office chair as I work. 

All of my friends and family are agog and gushing with congratulations and wishes for long happiness in our new house. 

I take it in stride. This house, for me, represents the place where I will transition to whatever comes next. No matter how we try, Roi and I cannot seem to fall into any kind of harmony with one another. Verbally he pronounces it is all he wants, and yet strife follows nonetheless. It is now clear how exhausting of any good energy this relationship has for me, and if Roi weren't in a perpetual state of denial (is denial a personality trait?) he would probably feel the same. 

And despite how much I love this house, because I really do, I feel no pain at the thought of leaving it. Only that it seems wrong that Roi should live in it, that he may in the future have someone else live in it with him. 

I've explored this feeling thoroughly, rooting around in its soil, looking for any trace of jealousy or resentment. I do still have resentment, but it's not there regarding him living in the house. It just feels...wrong. As though the house wouldn't want him, would never belong to him no matter how much money he laid down. 

I only want to know that where I go next will be me, will be mine wholly, and that what this house gifts me will come with me. 

a room of her own

Kitten 2 is still alive so far. An hour ago we found her quivering under the bed again, breathing in short raspy breaths. The landlord had come over and frightened her into hiding with his deep baritones. 

Now she sits up against me cleaning herself, her fear forgotten. 

I am thinking about the new house and the extra bedroom. It's tiny and yellow and full of sun and I've claimed it for myself as my "writing room".  Which sounds heavenly under most any circumstances, but more so because I haven't had even a bedroom in over a year, never mind another room all to myself. Roi and I simply can't sleep in the same bed because he's such a light sleeper that even a small snore from me will set his teeth on edge the whole night, and while I'm a heavy sleeper he has such severe restless leg syndrome that he rattles the windows with his kicking. Only a corpse could sleep through that.

Now I will have a separate bedroom and the writing room. 

For however long I'm there. 

It was not my decision to buy this house. Despite what Roi thinks are good intentions it doesn't seem within his realm of abilities to think of us as an us. He thinks he thinks this way, but in reality he operates as though I'm along for the ride. He wants my approval on things, but that approval always has limited options created by him. 

Roi decided the market was right to buy a house and suddenly "we" were house-hunting. And what a roller-coaster that was for me, the ups and downs of which Roi seemed oblivious to. I had say in what I wanted, and the house we finally chose makes us both happy. And because he's buying it with his money and credit I'm not taking on any financial risk (I couldn't anyway even if I wanted to) but this makes it feel like it's "his" house and not ours. And given the ever present relationship problems, particularly around trust, it's created an emotional landscape of fluctuating hope and despair. I'm trying to ride the waves of these emotions with some amount of grace - trying to let a cool head prevail and look at only the logic of it. 

(to be continued...I have a neurofeedback appointment to run off to - let's see what funhouse of emotions this session leaves me with.)

character defects

Let's talk about my character defects for a moment. 

I'm stubborn to a fault. My mother used to tell me I would cut of my nose to spite my own face. Granted, I would shoot a venomous look her way and say, "what does that even mean?!" I wasn't big on reflection. It is difficult to label this only as a character defect since my stubbornness has also gotten me through very tough times when someone else might have given up. It got me into the college I wanted, and it ensured that I was able to do original research at an undergrad level. But there's no doubt, my stubbornness gets me into a lot of trouble too. 

Then there's my temper. On a scale of 1-10, I'd rate it at a 7. I don't throw things, break things, hit people, and most of the time I don't say really mean things that I regret later. Sometimes I kick things - things that can take it and won't break, but that's happened all of 3-4 times in my life. But I do yell, and I too often tear out of the house yelling things over my shoulder. Usually petty, childish things like, "you don't care", or "I hope the roads are slippery". Essentially, I act like a 10 year old who's running away from home because my parents said no to a new pony. 

I've had this temper, as far as I can remember, since I was a teenager. But it is specific. I've never "lost" it at work (not counting working for Roi, because, well...), or in a public place, and I don't blow up over people leaving their laundry around, or forgetting to pick up the milk, or things not going my way/according to plan on a superficial level. I lose it when I feel I'm being attacked, when I'm trying to talk about something that's bothering me and I'm not getting the response I think I need, when people in my life are doing things that I feel are affecting my right and ability to make decisions for myself or otherwise affecting my life in a damaging way. Or when I've had a calm conversation about something that bothered me and the other person agrees it was wrong, and then they do it again. And again.

I can't quite figure out how to handle this and where exactly my responsibility is. I guess it's in the walking away, but that still leaves me with no solution to come to resolution about the things I need. 

Then there are the bigger and more complex character defects that come together to glue me to addicts. We'll just label that codependency for now, for lack of a better term, even though y'all know how I feel about that label. 

And finally, there are the "character defects" that I'm not sure are defects so much as a response to trauma and sadness and living with other crazy people.  For example, my utter lack of planning or taking care of business. Instead curling up into a ball in my bed and hoping that "tomorrow is another day" and I'll get it right then, but not now. My lack of self-care. My waiting for something to be a crisis before I start dealing, and then grasping to other people to, "please help". These things are relatively newish (the last few years). 

I'm thinking about this because Roi and I are fighting a lot lately. Moving is a stressor, Kyd is a stressor, losing a kitten to an ugly disease is a stressor. I get that. We're all stressed. I'm just trying to figure out what's what, who's who, and how I can keep my side of the street clean before I'm living on that street with a garbage bag of my clothes and Lexie sitting next to me with a black cloud of "you fucked up Mom" hovering over her head.

neurofeedback and brain states

My post of the other day reflected a somber mood. Not long after that post I descended into a blubbering mess over a restaurant getting my order wrong and Roi feeling accused when I wasn't, in fact, accusing him of anything. 

I was in a bad brain state because I had just started a new Neurofeedback protocol, and even though I had given Roi fair warning that the new treatment could set me "off" for a couple weeks, he forgot when faced with the actuality of it. 

Neurofeedback had been tremendously helpful to my c-PTSD but I was still struggling some, particularly given new events with Kyd and the ongoing struggle to repair a relationship devastated by Roi's sex, opiate, and alcohol addictions (and all the wonderful isms that go along with those). All exacerbated by the stress of moving and the tragic death of a lovely, sweet, beautiful little kitten - because really, kittens dying is 500 kinds of wrong.

Therapist is very committed to Neurofeedback and attends a lot of training. She had just started a new protocol that works on a deeper level to "reset" and stabilize and wanted to try it with me. While there are standards, it is still trial and error just like medication. There's no way to know what the right frequency is for a given person, so there's an exploration period. The wrong frequency, just like the wrong medication or the wrong dosage, can put a person in a bad way. 

That happened to me for a few days. My last session was much better and I'm feeling like I have my feet under me again. 

I have more I want to say about the move, the new house, and how I wish I was Julia Child (at least the movie version). But more on that later. 

some things change you forever

That was my reply to a comment on one of my last posts. Which?

It's been a while. You probably thought I was gone from this blog forever.

No. Just positively overwhelmed by life in these last few months. I've been trying to swim in the great tidal wave of life folks. Probably just like you but, funny, I manage to always convince myself that my problems are more complex, my feelings wider and deeper and more fragile, and this my friends is exactly how we get into too deep waters alone without a lifeline.

The sixish month old kitten I adopted is sitting quietly blinking at me with her night-time black eyes by the firelight. I can't tell if she's grieving over her lost sister who we buried just yesterday. I am. Grieving particularly hard that I couldn't stop her illness, couldn't find the right alchemy of love and medicine and herbs and such, had to watch her die rapidly, helplessly and hopelessly holding her tiny head to feed her useless concoctions written by our last-hope-vet. Grieving (absurdly, I know, I get this) that I failed her.

And perhaps my mind uses this grief a little too much because at least it's grief I can handle, instead of letting sink in all the way to my marrow just how messy Kyd's life is, how I have so little control over that, how I failed him too (yes, again, absurdly brow-beating myself -- it's what we mothers do). Though it is in my marrow. I never escape that swirl of guilt, sadness, hope, frustration, anger, and love. I am driven to an awful distraction.

The fire is waning and I'm mostly here to purge. I have work left undone that must be done by morning and instead of doing it I have slipped into that familiar paralysis that accompanies self-pity. This is a predictable formula. Self-pity = paralysis + procrastination = more self-pity. I don't need to check the math on this one. 

I got an email a couple days ago from a Buddhist list-serv asking for tonglen practice for this woman's sister-in-law who in the last year was foreclosed on, ended her 15 year marriage, witnessed a drug/alcohol induced suicide off her own balcony, and then just recently was beaten to within inches of her life by two robbers who stole away with a measly $150. She will need facial reconstruction surgery and may lose her sight, at least in one eye.

And it knocked me into perspective for a moment. My god the suffering life can heave upon one person's shoulders in such a short amount of time. It hardly seems accidental, does it? 

My own life rushed back in, as our lives are wont to do, in short order. The sick kitten who needed tending, the grief and rage over her life being stolen no matter how fiercely we wanted her to live. Kyd shifting from helpful and pleasant to raging and toxic without warning, without clues. And the packing up house to move, something that is supposed to be joyful. We, or rather Roi, bought a new house and it's beautiful.

I have so many feelings about this house, about moving, that I can hardly keep up with them. Instead, I become mute, fold in on myself, find comfort in the physical activity of packing boxes, and then lay sleepless on my bed wondering if I will ever feel ok again, or if indeed as my comment suggested I have been changed forever. 

an armless man

There are these moments when I see clearly how hard Roi is trying to learn to live with the new him, the new me, the clattering and discordant us. 

The new him is disbelieving that he was ever that man who once set to work seducing the bookkeeper of one of his clients. Who made plans with her to meet at a resort in upstate New York. Who sent her a photo of himself petting the face of a horse because he knew she was an animal lover. He laughs like an adult remembering childhood antics that are so distant they are more like memories of storybook tales rather than events experienced firsthand. 

The new me is a tattered assortment of vague elements. A moth-eaten sweater. Stuttered attempts to reclaim things that used to flow without effort. Hope, motivation, progression toward things, curiosity. The official depression has lifted, but I feel as substantial as a ghost. 

I've lost all patience, all empathy with Roi and it seems at least weekly I tear him down for being who he is. And yet each time, after his initial arrogant defense, he tries harder, tells me he loves me, and gives more. I wonder now if I'm the cruel one. If what I'm asking is as absurd as asking an armless man to will himself to grow new limbs.