Mamarati

I’m really not that much of a holiday person. Truly, I’m not much on celebrations, period. Holiday days feel much like any other day to me, and it’s rare that I put a lot of energy into holiday type activities and I don’t really talk a lot about holidays before they happen.

Now, that doesn’t mean I’m down on those who do enjoy holidays and do lots of preparation to make a day seem special or who really get in the spirit of celebration. That’s all fine, too. Sometimes those folks can drag me in and make me have a good time. But my natural inclination is toward calm, quiet reflection and time spent alone, with family or with a very small group of people I’m close to.

Today, my son went with his father to swim. Yesterday, my boyfriend, son and I watched fireworks from the car one street behind us. It was a serendipitous occurrence; we were driving back from getting something to eat and saw some cars parked looking toward the railroad tracks. Not something that happens around here on a daily basis. Then we remembered that we could see the fireworks at the lake from our back yard last year and we decided to stop. It was a nice show. About 20 minutes.

When my son was leaving, something got into my nose and eyes and turned me into an allergic train wreck. I took some Benadryl and napped for a bit. My boyfriend and I then went to go get some tacos. We drove by the place where we have made a habit of watching fireworks in the years since we bought this house. It was bumpin’. I thought about driving back, but find that my heart is really not in it. I don’t feel like that’s something I have to do in order to celebrate this day.

As I was eating my tacos, rung up by and prepared by a Spanglish crew… I did think about today and what it means, though. About folks coming over here from other countries. Declaring independence. Starting new lives. Struggling. Having fun. Making new ways. Keeping old ways. Fighting wars.

I thought about Texas and the people who lived in Texas before it was a state. The flags that have flown over this piece of the land… I thought about the border fence. I thought about the Alamo. I thought about this High School.

I thought about how my 12-year-old poked fun at some instructions we got with some new purchase recently. Because they were in Spanish and English. And that’s how he’s grown up. With things in two languages… or more. And he doesn’t take issue with that and it’s funny to him that others are so hung up on it and want so badly to make everything in English.

I thought about a book I read in college. And I thought about how many generations it takes for a group of people to forget where they came from for the most part and only remember here and now. One may know how to make tortellini from scratch, but may not be able to speak a word of Italian (unless you count the dirty words…)

I thought about my Native American roots and also the roots from somewhere else that give me my auburn hair, fair skin and freckles.

I thought about how the song God Bless the U.S.A. always fills me with emotion and makes me cry. And then I thought about how the song America, Fuck Yeah always makes me laugh my ass off.

I thought about the last 8 years of life in this country and my pervasive feeling of despair… mostly about things in government or the political scene… but mostly not things in my neighborhood, say. Those things have stayed pretty much the same no matter the party lines… aside from the bitching and moaning about gas prices.

And then I thought about the recent surge of hope. Oh, the audacity. It makes my every day a little brighter thinking about November…

And that’s how today has shaped up for me. Happy Independence Day… to EVERYONE. No matter how you got here or who you had to kill to get your freedom… no matter what side of the fence you’re on or what language you speak. If you’re here, you’re here. That’s the bottom line for me.

So, have a great day!

I mean, can I really be OK with right now?

I feel like I need to be looking over my shoulder for the next stressful event to happen or for my relaxed state of mind to washed away in an instant.

Self-inflicted or not.

Surely this can’t last.

Whatever. I’m going to enjoy it while it does last.

In other news… we’re painting the house.

And we’re about to go on a road trip.

And Jacob is about to go to camp with his dad.

I wish I had something profound to say but really, I’m just enjoying reading for pleasure lately and pulling myself together after what seems like nonstop GO GO GO for the last 20 or so years of my life. I feel like this is my first break from … ? things in as long as I can remember.

It’s really quite nice.

Austin was a good time. Makes me wish I’d made it to guide events past. It was really amazing meeting the folks I work with. We’re all sort of isolated not working in an office together…

Clothingwise, I’m glad I decided to just say screw it and wear jeans. Haha. Everyone else did, too, for the most part. One of the editors did have on one of those cute, tie-in-the-front shirts though, but it was very casual and I felt comfortable. I have a real deficiency in the area of personal fashion. I’m a bit like Gilda Radner who said:

“I base most of my fashion taste on what doesn’t itch.”

Boyfriend actually had to Google once about the apparent (to everyone else in the world but me) faux pas of wearing black and brown together. See, to me, those two colors look great together. It’s very soothing to me, in fact. Much better than say, black and white. That makes me think you’re a Mormon doing your door-to-door mission work or that you’re going to refresh my tea and ask me if I “saved any room for dessert.” Yet, there’s a whole store devoted to that color combo.

Whatever.

Gilda said something else, too:

“While we have the gift of life, it seems to me the only tragedy is to allow part of us to die — whether it is our spirit, our creativity or our glorious uniqueness.”

Black and brown. That is my gloriously unique gift to the world.

Maybe not, but screw it. It’s just how I am and I’m not going to let it die just because I’m being forced to leave the house and play with my peers.

More later, time for school.

I’ve got to get up earlier.

I’ve got to stop being so tired.

I’ve got to stop consuming caffeine.

I need to be more productive.

I need to exercise more.

Teecini… looking into that (mental note to self)

I told you it was coming together… all those pieces of me.

OK, so I was going through some old entries, and as I read it, I thought… wow.

WOW.

I sound like I was completely nuts. I mean, chock full o’. It was during some of the depression phase and some of the postpartum phase… the divorce was finalizing. I was embarking on a new era in my life. And I ain’t talkin’ ’bout no laundry detergent. My adoptive mom had died and I was finally getting around to dealing with some of that.

But really, you would have thought that I was standing in my kitchen with a razor blade at my throat, ready to bid the world farewell.

And that is my problem. That is the problem I’ve been having since I left the behind-the-scenes world of working on the Internet and moved into more of a public position dealing with a topic that many times leaves little room for imperfection. And so it’s been hard for me to express myself. The parts of me that aren’t perfect. The parts of me that are severely flawed.

In truth, I’m very OK with all those parts of myself, and in the last 5 or so years I’ve really started to embrace all those parts of everyone else. But I’m not OK with judgy people coming along and… well, sometimes I have a thin skin. Less so professionally, and more so personally. But you know, when both pieces of you are out there on the Internet, people will get mad at the professional you and start dragging the personal stuff in. I’ve never wanted that, but you know what… if it happens, so be it.

Because I’m tired of not being able to play around with all my random thoughts and emotions in the chock full o’ nuts way that I always have. Those of you who have known me for a long time, read me for a long time have seen bits and pieces of this journey. Me working out my childhood and my pain and all the mistakes of my youth and all the experiments in life and know that when I say something it’s just me arguing with myself or trying to convince myself of something one way or the other.

(“A major concern for INTPs is the haunting sense of impending failure. They spend considerable time second-guessing themselves. The open-endedness (from Perceiving) conjoined with the need for competence (NT) is expressed in a sense that one’s conclusion may well be met by an equally plausible alternative solution, and that, after all, one may very well have overlooked some critical bit of data. An INTP arguing a point may very well be trying to convince himself as much as his opposition.”)

I’ve talked about it before… that everything I write here in my personal sphere, all this emotional hemming and hawing is like trying on bathing suits. Does this one fit? What about this one? How does this make me look? I’m not sure… Let me try on another. I thought I liked this one, but now I hate it.

And this is just how I am. This is how I operate. And when I put it together with my personality… INTP people are like a slim 1 percent of the world or so. Not only do we do things differently, but most people don’t ever really witness the way we interact with the world. You’re used to the way you do it or your other ESTJ or ENFP buddies. Which is fine, just don’t rag on my way of doing things because I’m in the minority. Let me have my storm inside and my calm outside.

So, that was some of my epiphany. Just that I’m afraid that my smooshy interior will be exposed… The funniest thing, truly, is that this part of me is not the most genuine part of me. It’s not the most representative. And yet, it is. I am the sum of my parts and this is just one of them. That’s what I’m saying.

And so I guess that’s what it’s taking to make me feel like continuing to write out the personal side of me.

There is no anonymity any more, is there? I guess when you grew up on the Internet and it was like that starting out… the transparency is hard to get used to. People used to come online to be someone else, and really, more and more people are just being themselves.

It’s hard for me to do that, but it’s all I’ve wanted to do since I got here.

This will mostly be an entry to myself.

(Aren’t they all?)

So, I’m almost ready to address some things that I have been suppressing. And you know how I’m always bitching and moaning about how I can’t seem to pull it together. This part of me. That part of me. All the parts of me. As if I live in different worlds. Here and there. Online. Offline. With my family. With my kid. With my work. Everywhere I am it’s a different me.

And today, it almost clicked for me. What this all means. And what I have to do about it.

I think mostly it means I have to be unapologetic about me and who I am. All of me.

Because everyone’s a critic.

–

In other news, remind me to write about my kid’s personality. I always knew he was a bit like me, but I had no idea just how much. More clarity there.

Just got home yesterday. What a trip it was. Will have to write more about it later…

J is still doing great after his surgery, as if nothing ever happened and he’s breathing great and feeling outstanding. Yay.

I finished my classes, though grades haven’t been posted yet. Am waiting… But they’re done and next semester doesn’t start till January 14th so I have a bit of a breather here to catch up on work and get the house and my desk organized. It needs it, after the accident I just let everything go to hell in a handbasket, basically. So my desk is just out of control.

I am cleaning out my email as well. What a joy that is, to see emails I haven’t answered or dealt with in months. Whatever. It was a hard year, so everyone can kiss my ass.

Meanwhile, for the first time in a long time, I feel almost normal. Sane. Relaxed. On track. All those things that had been stripped from me for a while.

I feel like myself again. I don’t feel like I’m being driven by strange outside forces that are foreign to me. I feel like I’m behind the wheel again.

I’ll end with some humor from cleaning my email out. One I received recently from my boyfriend while he was at work:

Subject: ultra nerd

Oh yeah. Sweet relief.”

Depression.

I haven’t talked about it in a long time, right?

I haven’t been there in a long time.

I talk about it like it’s a destination. A place I once visited.

“Oh, depression. Yeah, I remember that place. I think I have some pictures in a box somewhere.”

Like a vacation.

But it wasn’t so much a place as it was…

?

Not me. When I was depressed, I was not me. Which is really strange to think about. Because for most of my life I was depressed. Which means that for most of my life, I was not myself.

And so much of what I did during those years, was… also not me. I mean, it was the me that everyone around me knew. But there was so much going on underneath that nobody really knew about. There were so many thoughts inside my head that were just… so black. So dark. So disturbing. So desperate. So painful.

And now, I can hardly even remember the pain. But I know it was there. Because I do have pictures in a box somewhere. All the words I used to spill forth here in this space… I have that.

And like the snapshots you take on vacation, a story is told… but it’s not the whole story. Just a glimpse of what was going on. Just a moment in time. And who knows what all the other moments were like?

It’s so odd for me now to read some of those words. I read them and I think… Was that really me? Did I really reach that point? Was I really that sad? It’s like reading a stranger’s words.

Like I said — I can hardly remember the pain now.

It reminds me of childbirth. How tremendous is that pain? How overpowering? Those out of control moments… I had moments during childbirth where I wanted to give up. I had moments during childbirth where I wanted to get up and leave and not go through with what my body had every intention of going through. I had moments of feeling like a madwoman. Insanity. Wrestling with my mind and my body. Screaming at the top of my lungs. Intense focus and then I’d completely lose it. I would feel a rush of power within me like I could destroy the entire world with my bare hands. And then it would be gone and I would be cowering like a frightened animal.

And then one last push…

And you don’t feel it any more after that one last push. The pain is gone. You’re in control once again, calm yet excited. Exhuasted yet renewed. And look what you did.

I feel like… all my life up to a point was an incubation period. A gestation of myself. And then I had a long, hard labor. And a very difficult transition. And every step of the way was some complication in the process. Posterior? Oh sure. Low heart rate? Absolutely. Too many drugs slowing things down? Most definitely.

I think that my transition started in about 2000. After my adoptive mom died. After giving birth to Alex. Leaving my job. Dealing with my brother and sister and all that crisis. My dress rehearsal wedding finally ending. The pseudorelationship with Chris being revealed for what it really was. Making realizations about my family. My Friends. Myself. It was like a clash between all the things I engaged in to try to be normal and all the things I couldn’t control that completely weren’t normal. It was like a Claritin commercial:

You know the part where it’s all foggy and then the fog lifts and everything is so crystal clear and vivid? That’s what it’s like.

And I think that my one last push happened about the time I decided that against all the odds, I was going to press on and stop wallowing in unhappiness. It was about 2003. And I decided that even when sad days were to come, I was still going to just let it be a sad day and not be a sad year. Or a sad life. I was not going to hold onto the familiarity of sadness. I was not going to take comfort in the darkness just because it was the only thing I knew. I was not going to let it be like the allegory of the cave or something.

And so that brings me to this year.

During this year, the year I finally decided to follow my dream of becoming a librarian. The year I decided to turn it all around and come clean with myself… The year I decided to really get the fuck on with my life… all these things happen. All these bad things. Surgeries and allergies and everything I know about food being turned on end and falls of ladders and funguseses people moving away and friends turning away from me and difficulty and trauma and drama and deaths and illnesses and family and relationships and difficulties and irritations and politics with public schools and barriers and realizations and feeling like shit and bedrest and falling behind with work, with school, with life…

And so much more.

And yet here I am. Me. Being myself. Struggling to deal with it, but dealing with it. Finding some of it very difficult, but managing.

And I’m not unhappy. And I’m not depressed. And I do not wish to die or to escape or to end it all if I could only make the pain go away.

I have always been a survivor. People who know me say this. But it means so much more to me now. I am in the midst of all this stuff and I am not just surviving. As if surviving was ever really *a choice* or something. But I am here in the middle of it all and I am happy.

Tired, bitchy, whiny. Sure, I can be that way. But that’s just a snapshot of this vacation. Wanting to die? Yes, there was a time. But again, just a snapshot. Just a thought.

There are hundreds of rolls of this trip that haven’t been developed yet… and they tell a different story. A much happier one. One that is real.

It seems like I just wrote that title, or thought it or something. Maybe it was just me saying to myself, “You are about to implode.”

I am going to my bathtub now where there is peace. Do you know what peace is? Do you really know or do you just pretend to know?

At any rate, I know. I really know. Deep down inside. It’s there.

And when I’m done letting it surface again, I’m going to come back and write about the walk that Jacob and I took today.

So, I need to write about this more, because it’s been pretty consuming for a long time. And off and on throughout my life since the first time I heard about dolphins swimming into six-pack rings as a child or watched the commercial of the Native American dude crying about the litter. I grew up in Oklahoma… Trail of Tears, y’all. Making Indians cry is not farkin’ cool.

Living more green. And stuff. Not just green, because that’s the fun, crazy buzzword of the day. But other stuff, too. Stuff that may or may not be green or good for the planet, depending on how you look at it. Stuff that people who know me say is just part of me being a hippie. But I was born in the ’70s, so technically no. But yeah, OK, a little bit. Read the rest of this entry »

Today, for whatever reason… I had focus all day long. I mean, from start to finish, even though I was doing things that pulled me in different directions, I still had my wits about me. I never once found myself looking around the room saying, “How did I get here?” or “Why am I here?” And I did not ever find something in my hand and think, “What was I going to do with this?”

Nice.

Maybe my mind is coming back to me.

I started keeping track of my food again. I’m sure that will last all of about 3 days. Read the rest of this entry »

My back didn’t hurt when I was a little bit meaner.

My neck didn’t hurt when I spoke my mind.

I didn’t have headaches every day when I was unafraid to say whatever I needed to say.

I think I have this.

So, on that note, I will say this…

I am too tired to boycott Nestle any more.

I am tired of trying to be perfect.

I am tired of caring what kind of mother others perceive me to be.

I am tired of trying not to be angry.

I am tired of trying to control thoughts that I cannot control. They are coming. I cannot stop them.

And generally, as I’ve been saying for a few years now, I am just tired.

tired.

tired.

And I’m tired of feeling guilty about it.

all of it.

It’s officially my spring break.

I don’t feel like it is really, but, whatever.

I’m waiting on a couple of books to arrive from Amazon. One of them I need for class… I was at my “renewal limit” at the library so had to break down and buy it… and the other I need to do a term paper.

They’re about slow as Christmas.

I should have cooked dinner tonight, but I didn’t. I did a bunch of work and Christina came over. She’s asleep on the couch now. I’ve heard her thing go off several times now. Thing being alarm in this case.

I’ve really been losing words lately. I may have mentioned this before. If I did, I don’t remember.

And that’s the whole damn point.

I think I’m trying to think of so many things at once and I’m so distracted all the time… preoccupied. See, I had to stop and take nearly a full minute to think of that word, even. What the ?

There goes her alarm again.

She’s notoriously awful at waking up.

I think I might have lead poisoning. Perhaps that’s the problem with my memory. I’m losing my vocabulary small bits at a time. Pretty soon I won’t be able to tie my shoes or drive a car.

It’s those dishes from Mexico, I just know it.

–

Speaking of which, I’ve decided not to garden this year. I’m wanting to save the money for our trip to Mexico in December. The water bills were so high last year and for a whole lot of nothing. Once it got hot I didn’t want to be out there weeding and tending the garden. When I’m ready for it again, I’m going to have square foot garden beds closer to the house. Less work. Less water. Less space. More food. All that sounds good to me.

Plus, I really just want to focus on getting all the damn stickers out of an area of the yard so we can walk on it, and I want to get the areas around the house looking less trashy. I want to plant perennials and bulbs and things like that in beds around the house that I don’t have to mess with so much every year. Native plants and such that can tolerate 60+ days over 100 degrees with no rain.

–

I think my vagina is broken again. The last week or so I’ve really just been feeling very asexual. I have no idea what it is, either. I’m not on Claritin, which is a hard core sex drive killer, btw. I think it may just be that I’m not taking very good care of myself. You know, I don’t feel good about me right now, because I’m doling myself out to so much other stuff. School and work and Jacob and everything is just in such a limbo state. I’m really inbetween everything. Not done with school. Work’s never done and never where I really want it to be. Jacob’s got so much going on and I’m fighting the school once again. He’s not where I want him to be. My relationship with my boyfriend is in a permanent state of limbo. And that shouldn’t bother me, I mean, because I am very happy and know that taking that last step isn’t going to change the way we are… but it’s still like suspended animation or something.

I guess I just hate having so many things open. I’m ready for the part in my life where I rest. I’m ready to be where I’m going. I’m ready to stop all the going. It’s like that feeling of never being caught up.

And when I get in that rut, I’m never taking care of me. I’m never really eating right or sleeping right or expending energy in a balanced way. I’m never able to just read a book for pleasure or take an afternoon nap on a weekend just because I want to. I’m never able to turn my thoughts off and relax. Because something is always pending.

I just don’t feel right overall.