Mamarati

and I ain’t gonna off myself. So don’t ask. Trust me. I’m just working it all out.

and I don’t want your cheery words. Not that cheery words are bad.

but I don’t want to hear it. It doesn’t help me work it out. I’m not looking for a solution.

I have to write it down so I can feel it here. All the stuff I bottled up. I do it here because it’s safe.

And if you start acting all judgmental and start calling the authorities because you think I’m going to do something that might harm myself or others, then the police or whoever will just laugh when they show up and see my life. They will laugh at you. Because this is only going on inside my head. On the outside I’m as together as the next guy. Not perfect, but good enough. On the inside is where I deal with my scars.

And if you don’t like it, then don’t be here.

I am ungrateful for your uplifting, happy words.

And that sucks, and I’m sorry.

I just don’t need that stuff because it makes me want to die for spite. Haha.

All I need is to just write it. Because I feel it.

I don’t necessarily need to do it. It’s all part of the therapy.

And I really really really have this hard core urge to go private, but like, I ain’t gonna. Because this is my space to do this.

Deal with it, and know that I am OK. And that I’ll be grateful again later on another day when I’m in love with life again. A day when I’m happy to know that a world exists out there outside myself.

Just let me have my habit. and not break it or change it.

Tomorrow or next year or in a minute, I will be OK, I don’t even know when the mood will strike me.

But it seems to come around, right?

once upon a time… there was this girl…

well, you know, there was me. And I was young. And I was stupid. And I needed… something.

I do not even know if it is possible to even begin to tell the story of who I was then, what was really going on.

All I know is that, like many crossroads I have come to in my life… nothing was right. Nothing was right. Nothing felt right or good. My future seemed bleak. And when your future seems bleak, you don’t live for it. You live for whatever needs you have to meet right at that moment, and screw what the consequences are later on.

I was such a different person then. What was going through my head? Why was I so weak then?

As always in my life, I had no one. And I met a someone who wanted to be somebody in my life. This was nice. To have someone who wanted me. I was 17 at the time and he was 21. That may not seem like a huge age difference, just a few years… but think about it, you’re talking about a teenager and an adult. Someone who can’t even vote and then someone who can already buy beer.

I had absolutely no idea where I was going in life. I had already been without parental supervision for 6 years. From what I could tell, there wasn’t much more for me than that.

I was pretty innocent. Or maybe naive is the better word. Gullible is a good one, too. I didn’t know the first thing about what sex really was all about.

My God, I can hardly remember what that was like. I can’t remember what it was like when my body was basically untouched. I can’t remember what it was like to never have given birth, never have had a stretch mark, never have known what it was like to gain 80 pounds in nine months and then shed it all in 4 weeks. I had never known the pain of labor then… Imagine that. It’s so hard to do. How tender my skin must have been. How pink my nipples must have been. What a different outlook I must have had about life.

Anyway… I met this boy, and pretty soon, he became the center of my world. He was the only person who paid any attention to me at all. And he wanted it that way. I saw this slow development, but didn’t know really what it meant or how to stop it. He imagined all these things, that other guys were looking at me, that I was talking or flirting with them. He was possessive and didn’t like any of the people who I hung out with. So… I stopped hanging out with them. This was OK, because he gave me a lot of things in return. He made me feel like he was all I ever needed in the world. And then there came the point where he wanted to have sex with me, and I was pretty scared… so I held out as long as it seemed I could, and then he started pressuring me, saying that he would get it from someone else, that he would leave me, that… just lots of things. It was a different thing every time he wanted it.

I knew… or thought… or had some notion, of how I thought that it was supposed to be. Like… slow and special and all those things you see in movies with love scenes.

But it wasn’t at all. And I didn’t feel good at all.

And we didn’t use anything at all. No protection. It never even crossed my mind… I mean, I’d never had a reason to even think of it before.

And I got pregnant that very night. But a very long and hard month and a half went by before I ever even knew it.

Then he became rather violent. Manipulative and very controlling. Nearly every time that we saw eachother after that, something happened. After the sex, I wanted to leave him, but, he wouldn’t let me, and really, he was all I had, so where was I going to go? And he just… much like my father, he just broke me down and broke me down till I gave up trying to get away. He would hit me and choke me and tell me he was going to kill me. He would choke me till I felt like I was going to pass out and he’d tell me to promise that I would never leave him or he wasn’t going to let go. So I would.

Sometimes it was almost like a game. Sometimes it felt normal to me. Sometimes I felt like I just needed to be really submissive and deal with it. It makes sense to me now, because that is the role model I had of most of the women in my life.

Then he found out I was pregnant, and then he hit me and kicked me and basically left me alone behind a building’s dumpster where we were staying. I left to stay with my sister and he moved to Texas, back home with his mother. Left me completely.

So much in the world I didn’t know about life. Myself. How things are supposed to work, how people think they should work and then how they really do work. So much of my reality so different than the rest of the world I was living in. Not much in common with… anyone or anything. At least not much in common with anyone I’d want it to be with… if that makes any sense.

All of this seemed to be impossibly happening to me, and yet, there I was down in it.

And I had this whole pregnancy to deal with.

Everyone wanted me to deal with it, too. Suddenly all the people, like family, came out of the woodwork and started trying to make decisions for me. Abortion and such. I was young, after all. It’s OK when you’re young, right?

And no one would hire me to work.

And I was miserable and tired and emotionally wrecked and not finished with school.

And no one wanted me to live with them, no one wanted to help me because I wouldn’t have an abortion. No one wanted to help me raise this child. And I knew there was no way I could do it alone. I didn’t even have a place to live. I was alternating between staying some nights with my sister when I could, sleeping in my car, crashing with a friend when I could find one. I signed up for assistance and I was able to get prenatal care, free vitamins and all, and food stamps, which didn’t help me too much because I had no place to put food. My brother talked me into putting the baby up for adoption, basically, because he was an attorney and his wife a social worker and they said they would get me a place to stay while I was pregnant. And they did. Roach infested, tiny, cold apartment on the south side of town where it wasn’t safe to be outside after dark and where I had to wait in front of the mailboxes on food stamp day or someone would steal them. With a phone that I could only make local calls on. And in my quad there was a very judgemental woman with five million cats, 2 lesbian biker girls who did lots of partying and a guy, his common law wife and his two babies and he beat them all three incessantly.

This was how I lived. And I sat in that apartment and ate my $99 worth of tax-free food and watched my 14-inch black and white TV that picked up three channels and read whatever books I could scavenge. And I wrote. (unfortunately, in a fit of anger and disgust, I burned everything I wrote some months after she was born thinking I would never want to remember those days, thinking I could somehow forget it all.)

And I had a cat. And a lot of roaches. And I washed my clothes in the tub and hung them to dry. And I got my maternity clothes at a thrift shop with the change that I had leftover from when there was a dollar I didn’t fully spend of my food stamps. My brother’s girlfriend brought me a big box of maternity clothes one day and I thought I was in heaven!

I’m pretty sure that my brother made a significant amount of money dealing with the “legal side” of giving up my baby. In looking back, I think I would have liked being taken care of during that time a little better. Some counseling would have been nice. In fact, this was one of the agreements that we made. I specifically told him that if I ever felt like I needed to go to the shrink, that I wanted help paying for that. That never happened.

Anyway… Six months or so of my life… every day. Just like that. Just me, my cat (fly he was named, because he thought he could) and my mangled up body and the baby inside me that was making it all so. And the drunk phone calls from David telling me how he loved me and wanted to be with me (and then five minutes later telling me how he bet I was screwing entire city blocks of men in my spare time just to spite him and how he was gonna kill me and cut the baby out of me and take it home if he ever got back to Oklahoma) and that was about it.

I was three weeks overdue when I finally lost my plug and went to the doctor to get checked. I was dilated to a four when I got there. He told me to drive to the hospital. I did. Alone. I had my first hard contraction on the way. In 7-11. (elevens?) In spite of the fact that I’d been neglected, forgotten, belittled, beaten, and bruised at the hands of others throughout my life… nothing was like this pain. And I arrived at the hospital. Alone. And I checked in and I was dilated to a seven. And my contractions started coming hard. And I called my sister, and later my entire family showed up and made me miserable throughout the next two hours. They gave me demoral for the pain but it made me sick and out of control and didn’t relieve the pain at all. And I got my head stuck between the bars of the bed and they had to slather my head with vaseline to get it out. And finally they gave me an epidural. And I was so high from the demoral, and so numb and couldn’t move. Trapped like an animal. And everyone was talking and I could hear them… talking about how I wasn’t keeping the baby. Everyone was wondering if I would chang my mind. (She won’t. She doesn’t even want it. She can’t raise a baby on her own. I’m not helping her, that’s for damn sure. Do the parents know she’s in labor? She wants to see the baby, can’t we stop her? I know she’s 18 and they have to let her do what she wants, but can’t we do something? Maybe they could keep it in the nursery, just let her see it for a few minutes. She’s so high now maybe she won’t remember it. Are they gonna let you take the baby before she gets released? Talk to the doctor and see if you can. How long are you gonna pay for that apartment for her? You think she’ll be able to work pretty soon?) I just laid there, I guess everyone thinking I was asleep… just listening to it all.

My own family saying all this…

So casually they discussed what was my misery, my misfortune, my bad situation…

What about me?

And then I felt like I needed to push, and I did for a long time it seemed, but it couldn’t have been, because from the time I checked in to the time she was born was only 5 hours.

She ripped through me so completely. I couldn’t even hold her because they were so busy sewing me up. Forever and ever it seemed he worked on me. Left me in stirrups with a lamp on me to dry and tighten my stitches. 45 or so of them, inside and out. Muscle that had to be reconstructed… groups of students coming in and out to look at the job he’d done while I just laid there, drugged, alone.

And then my family left. And I slept. And they brought her to me in her little glass bassinet and I held her and told her she was Victoria Nicole. And that I was sorry. And that I would miss her. And that I loved her. And…

I’ve never told a soul this in my entire life… In fact I’ve even denied it outright to anyone who has ever asked… but I nursed her that first night, just for a moment. And I soaked her little gown with my tears while I did. And I felt like her mommy. And I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to stop it all. So I didn’t.

I bucked up and smooshed it all down inside me, and outwardly became so cold and detached. This changed me forever. It changed who I had been. More of an INFP, really, but now I had to stop with all that F. It was time to trade that in for a mechanical, hardened T if I was ever going to survive this.

The drugs helped with that a lot. And they gave me a phenomenal amount of them.

And then I stayed with my brother for a while, while I was “healing.” Physically I guess. I wanted to talk to someone, a shrink or something, but he wouldn’t pay for it and I couldn’t afford it, and my medicaid was gone since I was no longer pregnant, only my postnatal check-up would be covered.

And then.

Some things happened (one of eleven) that I can’t talk about. It’s the thing that I’ve never been able to talk about. That I’ve never told a soul. Except that I wrote it down one time, recently, when I had to fill out questionnaires to see the shrinks this last time I felt like I needed something for my depression.

And it was the first time ever. and since.

But I find myself wanting to talk about it all. But it just reinforces all the badness that is my life. And I don’t know if it’s part of what keeps me like this. And I don’t know if it’s not. And I don’t know if it’s better in or if it would be better out.

And I’m scared to even say it. And I think, if I never do, then maybe I can pretend it’s not even real.

And sometimes I feel absolutely crazy, and it’s no damn wonder. What a mess. What a mess it all is. And what a mess followed it all. preceded it all.

Why would I think that things would ever be different for me?

And the adoptive parents of Alex just wrote me to tell me that his adoption was just finalized. And while that was a different situation, a different thing… it feels bad, too.

I’m just so so damaged. Some days I feel like I will just never be OK. And because I will never be okay, I can never… have anyone for me. Have anything for me. Have any rest. Have any peace.

I’m just so so flawed and damaged.

Some days I feel like I’m too tired to go on with it any more. I’m too tired to wonder how to stop hurting.

I have this big long book of an entry that I’ve started, that I started long ago, that I’m not done with… mostly trying to find the years from 14 on. Starting with this very feeling I feel now. Wanting to die. Having something bug me so bad and so often that I felt like that was the only way to get away from it.

The gist of it is this… I tried to end my life because of a swooshing noise.

I am really crazy. I really really am. There is no other way to explain something like that. How could a swooshing noise drive someone to that? It couldn’t. Unless they were fucking certifiably insane.

I feel so weird right now. This is not normal. This. This. This.

This is not how I normally feel when I feel like this.

How very sad is it that I have a “normal” feeling of wanting to die and an “abnormal” feeling of wanting to die.

This is like, where they say there are signs, and I suddenly feel myself acting on them like I have no control over it. As if I’m watching myself play the part of a character in another person’s life.

This is what I get for being all psychologically aware and cognizant of everything. I can see myself doing things and I can know what they are but I feel powerless to stop them. Impulsive or something. Reactive or instinctive or like… a reflex.

I suddenly feel like writing letters and making plans and cleaning up and saying all the things I’ve wanted to say to a million different people and I feel like giving all my things away.

I know what that means.

I fucking know what that means. I fucking know what that means. I fucking know.

I know that it means I don’t think I’ll need things where I’m going. I know that it means I’m a step closer to this than I have been in a very long time.

Why is it when I think like this I suddenly feel calm? As if I’ve found this magical solution to all my problems… How is it that I can think this way? I don’t understand. As if after doing this there will still be a me to enjoy the benefits of a solution. There won’t be.

I don’t understand.

I’m really really really sick. I really really am. I don’t know how to fix this.

And I’m… to the point where I’m actually… asking God to help me. But I don’t even think he’s out there, I have so little faith in that, but I just need anything right now. I just need anything.

that’s what I have. just like today…

you can see the sun. In theory, it should warm you, but it doesn’t. It just sits there in the sky. bright. but no warmth comes from it.

This is how I am.

cold. cold. cold.

My life is falling apart. I am in the single most unhappy place that I have ever been in.

Truly.

cold.

What is making me this way?

Nothing. That’s the point. This is just the way I am.

My eyelid is starting to twitch again.

I am stressed out.

I want to drink more. I want to take a sleeping pill every night. I want to take a million sleeping pills and never wake up.

I don’t care who I will never see or talk to again. I don’t care who I will leave behind. I don’t care about the mess I will leave for others to clean up.

But I won’t.

I must care somewhere. Maybe just seeing the sun is enough.

I have more to say, but I can’t get it out right now.

(cold)

my fingers are.

my heart is.

my mind is.

my spirit is.

my everything is.

I want to make a private entry, because I feel like I could say it all there. I feel pitiful and pathetic and I don’t want to be that. not here. I don’t want to be angry and sad and suicidal and depressed. not here.

Even when I’m miserable, I can’t just take the time to be miserable. I still have to pretend to be happy at some point. Pretend nothing is wrong. Act like nothing is bothering me. Put aside my desire to weep and moan and cry and clutch myself tightly like no one has ever done to me. I have to get out of bed, where I am at least warm… pretend to get on with the day. Smile at my son and pretend that the world is a wonderful place and that I’m happy to be in it. Watch tv shows with friends and laugh and make commentary when I’m really a million miles away. Have phone conversations with people and not just scream that I’m falling apart in ways no one can really see, and why can’t anyone see?

Because I’m invisible. No one sees me. No one knows me. No one can figure me out. No one can help me.

I can’t help me. I don’t know where the first step out of this place is. A hundred outlets around me and I’ve tried them all and none of them lead anywhere but right back here.

I’m tired of trying. I want to go away. I want to be… away. If I’m going to be invisible and nothing I just want to really be invisible and nothing. I want to have never been born. I want to not exist. I don’t care about some ‘it’s a wonderful life’ scenario… because I know what mine would be. Mine would not be that people are sad I’m not around, it would not be that I’m somehow missed on this earth. It would not be that things are somehow better with me. It would not be that I made a difference somehow, that I changed anything. That I mattered at all.

I don’t.

A handful of things keep me here. A very small handful. And I know how to stop them. I feel the need to do that. To let myself sink and be abandoned. If I am at the lowest point instead of this one… if I am at the bottom of the lake, weighted down, instead of where I am now… bobbing in and out of the water fighting for a breath when I can gather the strength to stay up long enough to grab one… But if I just go under, if I just eliminate those things that make me hold on and keep me existing in this state… If I sell or get rid of everything I own. If I leave Kim here in this lease high and dry. If I give up custody of Jacob… If I get rid of my computer, thereby eliminating the way I communicate with the other thing that keeps me afloat on a day to day basis… If I just get rid of it all… everyone would be so mad at me they wouldn’t care why or how or question where I was going or what I was going to do.

I could just disappear. Go to a place where I don’t have to maintain or pretend I’m happy or making it, where things don’t have to be all right.

I could really be invisible.

I am some kind of freaking out. I am paranoid, I can’t sleep for fear of being raped and robbed, or the house will burn down or carbon monoxide will kill us. I feel so crazy right now… I don’t think I would ever do that, but I sure wish I could just disappear for a while, or just make everything stop or even just slow down for a while so I can catch my breath and think straight.

I think I need some counseling. Things are just not right with me. I am so scared and confused.

I am awake and it is 1:30am. I haven’t gotten to sleep before 3am in about a week. And then Jacob has been waking up at about 7am, so I have been running on virtually no sleep. I am just so scared that I can’t sleep. I turn all the lights on in the house, and I just lay there with my eyes open wide, listening to every sound outside, and I keep my eyes on the baseball bat, and I keep a pocket knife by the clock in case I have to stab someone. I have been wondering if this has anything to do with the postpartum depression stuff, or if it is just because Darrin has been out of town for so long, and I am alone. I would write it all off to Darrin’s absence, but I think it is more than that. I am not right. Something isn’t kosher with me. I am losing my grip on….. ??? I don’t really know what. My thoughts aren’t well. I am sad, and angry and confused and paranoid and tired and sometimes I just think who cares?

J has to have surgery on his eye again. Probably in the next week or two. They want to do it as soon as possible. Great. One more thing. All I do is worry. I can’t stop thinking about all the things that could go wrong. I don’t know what to do. I just don’t know what to do. And what about aspiration, or SIDS? I mean, it just won’t stop, as soon as I get one thought to leave, I have another that is even more disturbing.

I need to try to sleep.