Scared Bunny

Right now only one thing is keeping me alive. Every time I consider killing myself I can think of all of those pills. I can think of ramming that Lexus in a cement pylon at 100 mph. I can see hanging myself from the attic. I can even see slashing my wrists. But more than that I see the sweet smiling face of that beautiful child I am raising. I can’t even consider doing anything that would erase that smile from his face. I can’t imagine him growing up with just that hint of pain that you see in some people’s eyes when you know something bad happened to them.

I have known people who have that sad look in their eyes that, no matter what is going on around them and how happy they are at that moment, there is a sadness that tells you something dark in their past will always keep them from ever being truly happy. There is someone like that on my mind right now. I can see it in her eyes. Eyes that burn deep in to my soul. And perhaps it is because I know it exists in my eyes that it is impossible for me to let her go.

For she and I I know why there is a sadness that pervades our souls. And in our cases I also know why she has an anger, and why I had an anger, that just erupts at times. I have a sweet little 8 year old son that deserves to grow up without that sadness, and who should never feel that burning anger. And it is because of that face, the most precious face I have ever seen, that I am alive. He has no idea how crucial he is to my survival, and I will never tell him. But that face is the reason there is one more person on their earth than there would be right now.

One of the things I lose in this divorce is the children. I'm not going to be cold and force my way in to their lives, and surely their mom and dad wouldn't allow that.

But I had a dream. I knew and always knew that her father would be the one to walk my daughter down the aisle. But I always dreamt of a moment just as she reached the front of the chapel where she and I would share a smile. A moment where she'd be saying with her eyes "You may not be my father, but you'll always be a dad to me."

Maybe it never would have happened, but I dreamt that dream many times, and every time I do I get a tear in my eye because I know now that dream will never come true.

Labels: kids, marriage, parenting, weddings

"I was raped. What's your excuse."?

What a powerful line from a powerful show. And I can't say I was raped I have no idea what happened to me at many points along the way. I know why I am angry with my mother. That's a phrase I said in therapy for the first time today. I am angry with my mother. I am angry because I was neglected and ignored for much of my early childhood.

Remember when they had those after school specials or "A very special Dif'rent Strokes" where Arnold’s friend ended up drugged and naked naked in a shower with the guy with WKRP? When they felt like we needed to have those warnings on TV I was going home with a door key on a shoelace around my neck. On weekends I went to stay with a man whose house only reminds me of pills, beer and a gun.

What I learned in therapy is really pretty simple. When you are a child you are developing the foundation of what you will be as an adult. If that's done badly and you are going to live a healthy life you are going to eventually have to repair the foundation. No matter how wonderful the house you build on that foundation is, it can’t keep standing until the foundations. Get repaired.

Most of us have that done in our childhood. Nobody has a perfect life, but we usually have things that happen to correct the wrongs. I see now I didn't have that. There's not a single point of my life as a kid where I was the object of love and attention that could have made up for the years where I wasn't given that care and attention we need. My childhood was one crisis after another where I wasn't involved. I was a witness to my life for years rather than a player, but the rebuild that foundation takes work, and observers don't work. Let's be fair, children don't even know how to do that work.

So now I find myself working with professionals to rebuild a 30+ year old foundation. I'm scared to death. At times I believe that a foundation that old can't be rebuilt without tearing down the house it is built on. The house is just so weakened by the damage done by the poor foundation. I've lived in Texas long enough to see how years of bad foundation can ravage a house. But they keep swearing to me that we can repair the foundation, and make the house solid.

It just seems weird to me that I can repair a broken foundation that implements itself in trust tissues and anxiety, without learning how to trust the people that did the damage. At the same time I don't really need to trust them much. My ability to be fed, clothed, housed and kept safe doesn’t depend on them. So maybe I can feel safe and have not wake up scared to death and exhausted from a night sleeping full of fear.

The problem with so much of this is that it does take figuring out why you have the problem, and that reason is usually childhood for someone like me. But when you are talking about something like that it sounds like you are placing blame. But I'm not in therapy to retrace my past. I'm trying to learn how to be happy and relaxed.

One thing I do know is that parents like me have to somehow identify when we've let them down in their life and somehow work to repair the damage. Nobody should reach 18 without parents having equipped them for the real word. People like me weren't (and due to my own mistakes still aren't) equipped for this world. We don’t have the foundation to hold up this house through all the rough storms we're going to encounter. And we certainly don't know how to avoid the storms in the first place.

Life can be one storm after another, and right now I have days where I don't feel like I'll be able to keep standing when the storm hits. All I can do is keep on working and find people to be anchors. Yesterday I felt like I had the repairs underway. Today I feel like the walls are tumbling. And not a damn thing has changed but the date.

Labels: childhood, life, parenting, therapy

You know, people that blog tend to write about all kinds of things. You see a whole lot of blogs about knitting or parenting. Everyone with a political opinion, and I think some who only think they do have one, feel the urge to write about it. There are cooking blogs, sex blogs (you know, like this one used to be), and photoblogs.

There are even blogs about emotions. How many blogs a day do you see about how depressed, unhappy, angry or even bored do you see when you hit next blog on that bar on top of most blogs? But, as you know if you read hear much you know that I play a little Blogshares on the side. And in all that play I had never even heard of something called the Freya. That is the artifact for love.

Ive reviewed as many blogs as every player in that game besides one person, and the only "love" blogs that stand out are teenagers talking about their boyfriends or girlfriends, and I swear the only reason those even exist is because kids have curfews. For adults like me, if we are in love we would much rather spend what little time we have doing something for the person we love.

Look at my writing. When I first met Tricia the frequency and quality of my posts dropped. And eventually the posts here ended and the ONLY posts I did were for her. But I would rather spend time talking to her or doing things for her than writing to her. That, for me, is what love is. I have this giant hole in my life trying to come up with something to fill it.

To be healthy I need to fill this hole with friends and healthy activities. I need to find a way to spend my time following the secret to happy life and focus on the things in life I want to make real. My mind can't be focused on loss and pain. It needs to be full of damn near anything else.

Blogs aren't designed for lovers. They may be a way to share with others what you intend for the one you love, but, ultimately, most of us are lonely at heart, and being part of the blogging community makes us part of something, which is more than we get from any of our other appliances when you get right down to it.

Labels: blogging, emotions, love, relationships

If you read this blog you know I have a few screws loose. But all my doctors ever told me I was being treated for was depression and anxiety, with depression the main problem. I kept saying the anxiety was the bigger problem.

When I changed docs I really emphasized that. I made it clear I can survive severe depression, but moderate anxiety could make me wish they didn't have guardrails on tall overpasses. She finally got it and keyed in much more on the anxiety. My meds were changed dramatically and, other than a lot of fatigue, things were getting better. But I still felt off. There was an uncleared hurdle.

So she trots out a couple of new meds and a suggestion. Perhaps, based on my history and that of my father (may he be swarmed with locust) I needed to consider the probability I was bipolar. And when she mention the new meds she said it's clear that at least one, or in this case 2, doctors had had the same idea.

Now, we will set aside the fact that had I known what I was being treated for I might have been able to provide more useful feedback. My diagnosis terrifies me. It's not curable. Periodically your meds just stop working. You will be on pills until you die. and people who would otherwise love you will have nothing to do with you.

I don't want this. I don't need this. I just want all the shit that is not my doing to go away. How about I pay for the damage from 16 on, but the other stuff, and the genetic stuff, that just drifts off. Isn't that a fair trade?

See, in group you have all these bipolar people who either stopped taking their meds, throwing away all they have, or whose meds stop working, causing them to lose everything. Their spouses have the most miserable lives,

I'll be blunt. This one scares me.

Labels: bipolar, crazy, medicine, mental health, psychiatry