Two Moons

On Tuesday night at 9:54 my mother sent me an email. There was no subject. No text. Just a photo.

After my initial reaction of WTF I realized it was a photo of the moon. So I went outside and looked for mine. I could see the clouds and the sky was a dark blue color, not as black as I’d imagine on a September night. Slowly, from behind the clouds the moon appeared. Standing on my tiptoes on the deck I reached my phone as high as I could to catch the moon as it emerged from behind the clouds and I sent her this picture:

Then silence.

On Wednesday night she left me a very passive aggressive bitchy voicemail.

So much for the moons.

She accepted no responsibility and offered no apology. I apologized for the portion I felt I was wrong in and we left it at that. We reconciled. Because I forgive too easy.

Always the pushover.

I need to grow some balls.

When we arrived in Chicago last night I was immedietly getting ready to meet friends for dinner. As I was getting ready to leave my mother complimented me on my outfit, patted my stomach and told me I’ve gained some weight. Then she told me I was too sensitive.

This weekend is going to be such a blast.

When Your Mother Calls You a Bitch

I’ve been walking through the last few days with a knot deep inside my stomach. A gnawing feeling. That ominous one that travels through your capillaries infecting every inch of your body. Even when distracted, even when blissfully having fun on Saturday night, it was still there. Lurking. Peeking its head above the surface, not to be forgotten.

On Saturday, when I drove home from #mnblogcon my mother called me a bitch repeatedly and hung up on me.

I haven’t spoken to her since.

Initially, I was angry. The rage bubbling deep and viscous like hot lava wanting to spill over. But I did not call her back. I did not say the things I wanted to say. I did not behave like the bitch she accused me of being. Because I’m not.

Now, I am left waiting. For someone to make the first move, to take that very first step. As each day passes without word, it gnaws at me more for I am one of those people that always has to have everyone like me. I hate being unliked. However, I so strongly feel I was not in the wrong in this situation that I’m being stubborn and holding my ground despite the shaking of my legs. I cannot imagine a situation in which I would find it appropriate to call Bella a bitch. I don’t think I would.

We travel to Chicago on Thursday for the MOH’s wedding. I have to spend four days in close proximity at the home of the person who told me I was bitch. If it was anything but this wedding I just wouldn’t go. I would cancel my plans and live in a passive aggressive state filled with contention over what to do. I know I will have to be the bigger person and apologize for how the situation escalated despite biting my tongue the entire time, my palms red from the fingernails gauging the skin.  No tear shall drop or hover on my eyelids. I will not be brought down, deemed again. I’ve lived my life in that state of constantly pleasing others. Of servitude.

I’m better than that.

Written as a part of Just Write by Heather of the E.O.

The More Complicated Ship: Friendship

I have this string of thoughts that has been floating around my head, pulling at me. There was a writer’s workshop at Mama Kat’s that I missed awhile ago that asked the question of what 10 lessons your child would teach you. One came to mind, instantaneously, I wish I could make friends easily. Kids just see someone in a vague age range as themselves and they just start talking, start playing and suddenly they’re friends no questions asked. I can’t do that. I’ve never been able to just do that.

I make friends so easily, in my mind. In my mind I haven’t escalated far beyond an initial childhood reaction of you seem nice, we have something in common, let’s be friends. However, I am acutely aware of the fact that the feeling is almost never mutual. Most people take time to make friends. They are guarded. Unwilling to reveal. Their time is precious and difficult to penetrate.  I hate this.

I make friends by telling. Perhaps, usually, too much. I reveal from the get go. It’s a good thing I never dated because I’m sure this earnestness wouldn’t work well.

Why is it so challenging to be friends as adults? Have we been hurt too much? Scorned by childhood teasing and gossip? Why do we have a limit of how many friends we’ll have? At what point does someone transition from acquaintance to friend?

To me friendships are more complicated than relationships. Much more complicated. In a relationship to an extent you know where you stand. They are milestones that you complete. There are late night whisperings. When was the last time two friends sat together to discuss just what kind of friends they are?

I am loyal. To a fault. I will do anything and everything for my friends.

I forgive. Always. Often when I shouldn’t.

I am compassionate. My empathy is endless.

Perhaps because I give so much, always, that I never feel like I get what I give. I never feel equal. Like in a relationship where one loves more, deeper, stronger, there is that endless imbalance in my friendships. That endless doubt in my mind of where we stand.

On some level I’m always surprised when my friends are there for me. I am expecting them to disappoint me. I never feel worthy of their friendships, so I never trust it completely. So I give more and more to compensate for these feelings of inadequacy.

I have an arsenal of fear.

I’m often so disappointed in myself. Disappointed that I care so much, try so hard, and feel so terribly alone at the end of the day. I miss my friends from Chicago with a tremor that shakes my core. I know I idealize them, idealize a childhood friendship we once had for in reality the friends I’ve known the longest know me the least. They know my past though; they know what has shaped me. Molded me, broke me, put me back together. So I carry them with me. I find that the internet makes it all the more harder. These virtual relationships you’re building with people you’ve never met.

I miss the days when we all wore friendship bracelets and hearts torn in two.

 

 

 

Linked up with Shell’s Pour Your Heart Out and Mama Kat’s Writer’s Workshop: Disappointed

    

Let’s Talk About the Serious Stuff: Cheating

One of my favorite feelings is that slight boozy walk. When you first stand and your toes feel leaden with cement, but your legs are oozing with jelly. I felt that as I stood and walked to my computer, the remnants of my margarita in my glass from dinner. Liquor always goes straight to my feet. As I had eaten my dinner drowning out the sound of Bakugan playing On Demand around me I kept thinking about Sellabit Mum‘s post from this morning.

What would my worst memory be?

The obvious comes to mind, but I’m saving that for a special occasion.

My mind jumps flipping through years of images, cataloged in increasing suppression to downright disassociation and I stumble upon one and linger. You see I remember in photos. I see events unfold like a movie reel and capture them as a series of often blurry Polaroids. Makes it hard to remember details, but if I can see it I can usual feel it.

I came home from school one day, it was high school. My junior year. As I walked through my parent’s door I heard crying coming from their bedroom. I walked in to see my mother sobbing, holding scissors and cutting holes through all of my father’s boxers. Upon his desk was hundreds of shredded pieces of papers, of photos, of boxer shorts with a hole haphazardly cut in a strategic spot.

My mother sat there, red faced and tear stained, wielding these scissors. I can still see her in perfect clarity. See the desk. The mess. I was able to quickly surmise the situation as this was hardly the first time my father had cheated on my mother, nor was it the last.

In 1993 I had come home from the third grade to a similar scene except that time my father had moved out. Gotten an apartment I never saw, purchased furniture that now lives in their home as a constant reminder of those months. Those months my mother didn’t go to work, but cried. I would go to the dollar store and purchase her plastic magnetic picture frames and glossy dollar store cards of cats to cheer her up. I had no idea what was wrong. Where he was, why she was so sad. This time I knew. I knew so well, what was happening.

Most of my friends had divorced parents. A fact that constantly shocks my husband who grew up knowing no one. For me divorce was common place. Weekend fathers, absent fathers, sad mothers, step parents. I had seen the whole lot through my friends, but I never could imagine that these things could unfold in my life. As I watched her cry I thought only selfish thoughts. How this would affect me. If truly this has been my fault as he so frequently threatened in their arguments. And worst of all I blamed her. For not being good enough to keep him. For some how being faulty, for being leavable, cheatable, weak.

You see it had to be her fault. He wouldn’t leave if she was enough.

When I cheated on my boyfriend Matt, the first time, I tried to explain myself to him. He had found out while I was cross-country in Germany writing long tear stained emails and chain smoking cigarettes at 17 trying pleading begging him to forgive me. To understand me. I cited my father’s treatment of my mother. Clearly, it was genetic. Clearly, I had been taught wrong. I was taught love was arguments, and sex was something you did for lust and never, not ever love. I thought that for many reasons. I never mentioned that he was not enough. That he couldn’t keep up with me, sustain me, interest me.

I still claim, like Ross, that we had been on a break when I slept with Jesse while my friends were in the next room. One of which would be the one to inevitably tell him what happened. Perhaps he too mentioned how I slept with Conall and Piet on multiple separate occasions. My best friend at the time cited this time in my life as a “downward spiral.” I remember it as an awakening.

Matt and I got back together after much begging and we went to prom as a happy couple, but he never forgave me. And he made me know it. He was mean to me. Spiteful. Pushed me against a wall when we fought. Called me a slut and a whore in front of our friends, in public. I stayed with him – in guilt. As punishment for how I treated him. Because I loved how he loved me. So much more than I ever loved him despite moving to a state I had never even visited to go to college with him.

And I cheated on him again. I came home from college with him for his grandmother’s funeral and slept with a good friend of mine I had always loved. Will always love.

He never fulfilled me. Completed me.

But I wonder often, as I imagine my mother with the shears ripping through cotton prints of snowmen and red plaid, if perhaps it was more than just being enough. If perhaps there was something ingrain in our nature that made us capable of something others found so repulsive. If I can’t truly ever hate my father, for I am more like him than he will ever know.

A Part of the Series: Let’s Talk about the Serious Stuff

Written for Write on Edge: Remembered and Pour Your Heart Out

                       

Unspoken, a Story.

Written for the red dress club. Topic: write about sex without writing about the actual act. Because you always want to leave a little to the imagination.

 

“What is it that you said that one night, that you care about me. What the fuck was that?” Her body slides down the wall and she lands on his cold wooden floors.

She brings her knees to her chest, bows her head down and sobs.

He pushes the wooden chair out of the way, leans against the wall and slides down with her. Stretches his long legs under the table and closes his eyes.

They sit there, for what seems like hours, like eternity passing. She cries and whimpers. “Can I have a tissue?” she finally asks.

He gets up, knees cracking. Walks to the bathroom, pulls from the toilet paper roll and rips off the sheets. He stands at her feet, their toes touching. She looks up. Her face red, swollen, the tears crusted to cheeks, her nose running down into her lips. She’s so beautiful, he thinks. She takes the tissue, “more please.”

He hands her the tissue, still standing. She pulls herself up and walks to her purse on the floor and pulls out her cigarette and lighter. Tosses the Kleenex in the trash, opens the back door and breathes the fresh air. She quivers.

He watches her. His phone vibrates. He reaches his long arms into his jeans. Looks at the screen, the name flashing on the screen, the vibration in his palm. Puts it back in his pocket and walks into the kitchen.

He sees her back through the window. The sun is reflecting off her dark hair and he can see the specks of red throughout it. Sees the way a slight wave occurs at the nape of her neck and some hairs go in and some go out. Her tan shoulders shake, she inhales and exhales.

“Do you want something to drink?”

She turns, her green eyes rimmed with tears, her face and chest splotchy and red. “Some water, please” the tears slip off her eyes and glide down her cheeks. One stays stuck at the edge, desperately clinging to the skin, not wanting to fall.

He turns and opens the refrigerator. His mind completely blank. His fingertips cold. He walks the water out to her, leaning against the door to keep it open.

“Thank you,” she says.

He looks at her. He knows he needs to say something. He knows it’s his cue, but he just watches her. The tear is still on her cheek.

“I guess I should probably go,” she says.

She walks past him. Places her dirty glass next to the multitude on the counter, next to the bottles of beer and wine. She wants to stay and clean. She walks into his bedroom. Sits upon his bed and reaches out for her shoes. Steadying herself in her high heels, in last night’s clothes. She scans the room for whatever small reminders of her may linger, her scent on his sheets, the indent of her head on the pillow. She stands in the doorway.

“You’re just going to let me leave aren’t you?”

He looks up at her. His eyes run from her face down to her body past the waist he held, the legs he spread, onto the floor. “We knew this could never be anything else.” He finally says.

“But there was always a chance, that’s what you can’t seem to understand.” She wipes the dangling tear off her face and it absorbs into her fingertips.

Silence covers the room. Light flickers through the blinds. At an impasse neither of them speaks. Their breaths align.