zeptember

I just spent the past 6 hours on and off searching for airfare to Michigan. I’ve been searching on and off for the last few months and I keep dropping the ball.

This year is my 20-year high school reunion. I started off saying I wasn’t going, then I waffled, then I said definitely I wanted to go, then I got in touch with more and more old school buddies through facebook and found out none of them really wanted to go. Then they waffled, then they wanted to go, and now the most important ones to me no longer want to attend the reunion. It’s hilarious because I got an email the other day saying the whole reunion will be canceled soon if more people don’t commit to it and pay the dues for dinner and drinks! What losers our class continues to be.

I’ve been saying for the last couple of years that I want to go back to Michigan to visit friends and family, that it’s been too long, that my family will be mad at me if I don’t visit soon, etc…

And then I remember something - the ONLY family that ever came to see me in California over the last 12 years that I’ve lived here are my father, my aunt, uncle and my cousin (and my aunt, uncle and cousin came here to visit the rest of their immediate family as a present to said cousin who graduated high school back in 2000. I was just an additional bonus to visit as it were).
My mother, my brother, his wife and kids - none of them have ever come to visit me.
Granted, they’re all poor as dirt, living hand to mouth like I am much of the time. They don’t know how to save their pennies for a vacation any more than I do.

Therefore I’ve always felt it my responsibility to be the one to keep in touch, since I so thoughtlessly abandoned them by moving nearly 2,500 miles away.

I’ve had friends and chosen family come to visit over the years - that’s always wonderful of course.

But the family thing…I moved to California in 1997 and went back home for Christmas in 1997 and in 1998. That’s about all I could take, what with all the drama and politics that goes on in families. And well I was still an AngryGoth™ back then, who was going through the teenage rebellion several years later than most people.

I declared after two Christmas trips home never to do that again. And I haven’t. It’s going on 11 years now that I have not gone home for Christmas.

That, combined with just having gotten married last October, and my 20-year high school reunion coming up next month, and the stark fact that we still haven’t gotten out hard copies of wedding photos yet to immediate family - all that has me feeling much more obligated and in debt to the family for an in-person visit than I normally feel.

So I wrestle with the thought - do I want to go back home to visit? Or do I think I have to go back home to visit?

As I went through expedia.com for the umpteenth time this evening, trying to find the perfect schedule and airfare, I finally just growled, tossed aside the laptop and fled the room.
I spent several minutes in the bathroom just staring at myself in the mirror, trying to figure me out.

And that’s when it finally hit me on a conscious level - I don’t want to go back home. I’d much rather spend the $1,500+ it will cost for airfare, rental car, hotel and food for a week on going somewhere special with my husband, or buying stuff we need, or hell even getting some new nice clothes.

I keep trying to rationalise the idea of flying home for Christmastime, during the snow and freezing time, as something that would be enjoyable. I keep thinking we could turn it into a winter lover’s getaway and snuggle near a fireplace.
What a laugh.
We’d spend an entire day traveling, check into the hotel and try to catch some sleep. The next day, we’d need to get a rental car and slog through the snow and ice for 300 miles, which normally takes about 5-6 hours but in snow could take much longer. So that’s another whole day of travel. Then we’d spend two days visiting my father up north. Maybe there’d be some fun and lazing about in that.
Then we’d have to slog back downstate through the snow and freezing weather again and arrive back at a hotel - day 3 of 7 being nothing but travel. Then we’d spend the next couple of days trying to see my ma, any other family, and friends.

I’m twitching just thinking about it.

And I’ve been bitching at my husband to tell me if he has Christmas break off work or not. He finally told me yesterday that yes, they are shut down for one week between Christmas and New Year’s.
I realised while looking at airfare that not only do I still not have my autumn hours for work in place yet, but I don’t even remember if my workplace shuts down for a week or just a few days.

So now I feel sheepish for pestering my husband so much about his time off.

And I realised too that a lot of my mental friction has been just The Point Of The Matter against my husband - I know he despises Michigan and Kentucky where I have family. More than that, he hates flying in airplanes. He’s got severe flying phobia - I call him B.A. Baracus because he’s gotten unruly on flights, and has to be severely drugged to get through the flight.
So anytime I so much as mention missing my family back home, and could we maybe visit soon, he gets all bristly and short with me. This has been going on for the entire time we’ve been together. I then go ahead and make the flight arrangements, and we argue the entire time because his phobia ramps up severely, and I need his input as to dates, times and all that.
Once, I booked flight without telling him in advance, just to save my sanity. It did jack shit cuz once I let him know we’d be flying, he still flipped and hemmed and hawed and then totally backed out.
I flew without him (this was to visit friends in Seattle in 2005). I made him pay me back for the cost of the canceled ticket.

So it’s a lot of stress for both of us to even consider flying anywhere. Doubly so when it’s to a place he doesn’t even care to ever set foot in again, and doesn’t really care much for his in-laws to begin with.

That has left me thinking two things simultaneously:
1) FINE, I’ll go without you, then. I don’t know why I didn’t do this before. Wait yes I do - I still have a bit of that co-dependent streak in me.
2) You’re my HUSBAND now, you HAVE to come with me, otherwise you shame me and my family for being absent from my side.

While staring at myself in the mirror tonight, trying to get a grip on my brain meats, it occurred to me that I - ZEPT - do not want to spend all that money in cold and snow to be running around trying to please parental units by being physically present for them. My father continually treats me like a 15-year-old, and my mother continuously wants me to try becoming Christian - for her.

I wouldn’t even have time to visit the extended maternal family - and ma says they don’t even gather at the holidays anymore, anyway. All this I have in my head is just romanticised childhood memories of extended family holiday gatherings that ceased to exist 23 years ago. Going back now and trying to make that a reality would fail on all levels - families have split up, grandparents, an uncle and a cousin have died, other cousins have abandoned the family and/or the family has abandoned them, and let’s not forget that several cousins have gone on to have their own children and broken homes at young ages.

Then there’s my childhood homes - my ma still lives in the one I grew up in during the week, and it’s still as gross and disheveled and legally condemnable as it ever was when I lived there. My father’s childhood home, which then was my childhood home on weekends, and then full time during the last two years of college - that house was sold a decade ago and got a second floor added onto it. And development has claimed much of the wetlands forest surrounding the property.

Then there’s my friends and chosen family. Many of them have grown up and now have families of their own. They work full time and/or cannot afford to go out anymore. They certainly don’t party or go out on weeknights anymore. Others moved out of state like I did.

We can still have an awesome Cabal Ball - I can declare that I want one and we can set a date. If not that then a nice dinner somewhere - people usually are able to make it to a dinner.

The friends thing is not a loss - just an adjustment.

So other than that, what am I chasing?

What do I NEED from going back there?

It’s ghosts, now. It’s swirling dust. It’s the past haunting my mind. I don’t want to go back to Michigan, I need to go back to put my life there to rest. But haven’t I done that already? I thought every time I go back there, I declare, “I’m SO glad I moved away!”
Don’t I find out the hard way every time that my Michigan vacation is not a vacation? It’s actually rushed and complicated and frustrating due to family dramas and cycles I can’t break free of.

The only thing I NEED from that place is genealogical and geographical historical research.
That’s what I want.

And knowing that, I can then declare that it is Not Worth It to put my husband through hell for the false notion that he must be at my side to represent our marriage. I realise I have been trying to prove to my family that I have somehow MADE IT away from the nest. I’m not sure I have - I need their validation that I have. In my head, I don’t know if I’m actually away from home or if I’m still there in my bedroom writing in my diary, wishing I was grown up and had moved away.

I think that not until I have cleaned out my mother’s house of every last scrap of my childhood will I feel a sense of closure on my past, and finally begin to grow up on my own.

There has been recent talk on my brother’s part of retiring my mother, selling off her house, and getting her settled into an apartment near his place three hours to the south.

Therefore I need to just WAIT, and when I find out for sure when my ma will be moving, THEN I can fly back home with or without my husband, and help ma move, and box up or throw out the rest of my crap, and bid a final farewell to that despicable old house we had to live in for so long - the house that contributed towards my low self-esteem and self-loathing just by its very nature of being so run down and smelly and flea infested and in a shitty neighborhood and looking so obviously inhabited by people living below poverty level.

There.
Now I guess I know what I want.

Back in high school, I was that kid who listened to the propaganda that drinking alcohol and/or doing drugs would always result in fatal car accidents, miscarriages, murder and retardation.

Growing up, I got to see my aunts and uncles in action at all the family gatherings. They drank until they were drunk and looked and sounded goofy. They always got red-faced from the drinking. Some of my aunts and uncles smoked pot and got even more stupid. Then there was this cousin of mine, who was doing hard drugs of some sort. He was downright scary and the family shunned him. But one time he came to our house to “borrow” my VCR and pissed himself right there on the porch when my Ma started lecturing him.

I lived in the poor part of town. I grew up dirt poor with my Ma during the week, and upper middle class with my father for one day on the weekends.

My dad was always a social drinker. He’d work 50+ hours per week at Ford, then go with his work buddies after work to the bar across the street and get hammered. He’d come home from work, get about five hours of sleep, get up and do it all over again. For about 35 years. And on the weekends during the summer when we were on the boat with him and his best friend, he’d drink kahlua and coffee for the first part of the day, and then move on to rum and coke or vodka and cranberry in the mid afternoon.
Now in his retirement, he just drinks. Bugger the fact that he’s on all kinds of meds for heart, blood pressure, anxiety and who knows what else. That doesn’t stop him from drinking.

When I was in high school, I was militantly against drugs and alcohol. I was somewhat angry towards but mostly afraid of people who drank and/or did drugs. I remember I had a pin for Students Against Drunk Driving.

Which is funny, cuz when I’d get really stressed out, I’d swipe a swig of mouthwash because I knew it had alcohol in it.
Then one day, I found my Ma’s stashed bottle of Johnny Walker Red. So I started taking swigs of that when I got really stressed out. In high school, stress for me consisted of being one of the most picked on kids of the entire high school. Kids two grades younger than me were taught to throw stuff and shout obscenities at me by kids in my class. People called me Carrie, after the Stephen King character. It’s because I had long straight red hair that I didn’t style. I also had braces, wore Salvation Army clothing because my Ma was too poor to afford the latest in-style clothes, and I had huge “welfare glasses”.

As we got older, the other kids in my neighborhood, one by one, sank to the embarrassment of poverty and dysfunctional families. By the time I graduated high school, people my age were getting knocked up, already looking like they were 40 years old from all the cigarette smoking and drinking they did from gawd knows what age, and in some cases, were ending up dead.

I think it was my senior year of high school when I got drunk for the first time. I didn’t know what was coming. I was at a friend’s house in her bedroom and she and a male friend were giggling. They handed me a glass of orange juice. They said it was a screwdriver. They told me flat out that we’d get in trouble if we were too loud, so I knew booze was involved. I took a drink of it. It tasted good. I drank some more. Pretty soon, my friends were laughing hysterically at me, because I couldn’t get up off my friend’s bed without falling down. I was so dizzy. I laughed a lot. I cannot remember if I was afraid or if I puked. I just remember the happy and dizzy.

There goes the militant “booze is evil” mentality.

In Michigan, when you turn 19 years old, it’s party time for real. That’s the legal drinking age in Canada, which is about an hour’s drive away. My friends and I were drunk every weekend. Rum and coke was our friend.

I didn’t drink through the week because I was too afraid to steal from the drugstore I worked at, like some of my former classmates who also worked there would do. And I was afraid my Ma would find out and kick my ass.

I began dating my neighbor in 1991 when I was 20 years old. His mom and uncle smoked pot every single day. I found out the neighbor on the other side of us did, too, and she would buy from my boyfriend’s mom. My boyfriend’s entire family were also hardcore alcoholics.

Within a year and a half of us dating, my brother fell in with a drug dealer, and together they started dealing pot. My brother was friends with my boyfriend. For about a year, behind my back, my boyfriend and my brother would go to parties where pot AND cocaine and speed were sold and used. They were doing all these drugs.

Despite the fact that I was now a drinker, I was still militantly against drugs.

Until my boyfriend thought I was onto him one night - I guess the drugs made him too paranoid or something - I really was too dense and too naïve to have suspected my own boyfriend of doing drugs.
Anyway, he broke down in tears and confessed to me what drugs he and my brother had been doing. I recall punching the fuck out of him while screaming in rage at the betrayal.

He sobbed and promised to quit it all so I wouldn’t leave him.

I trusted him.

Then a few months later, I found out he was still doing the drugs, AND also fucking the neighbor. AND he’d fucked some of our mutual female friends, too. And they all did drugs together. Isn’t that nice?

He told me that because I was so against drugs, and everyone else he knew was doing drugs, that I isolated myself from the group. He felt lonely without me at these parties I never knew about. He wanted physical affection. He wanted me, but I wasn’t there you see… how could I be … I’d only get mad at him … etc etc etc.

This was the point in my life that I woke the fuck up and took a look around me. And all around me I saw people doing drugs, drinking until drunk, and joining gangs. I’d been oblivious to it. I’d been blissfully ignorant to it all. I’d still been a child in my head. The world had been rainbows and unicorns. And then I was smacked awake, and the world around me turned dark and repulsive.

I tried violence. I used to actually beat the shit out of my boyfriend. He wouldn’t just sit there and take it, oh no. We beat each other when we fought. But he never allowed himself to fuck me up. He allowed himself to take the beatings I gave because he knew I wasn’t strong enough to fuck him up, but he felt so guilty for all the lies. And he knew that I’d always come back to him. And I did. For four years we did that.

I tried sobbing. Begging. Please change. Please stop. For me. etc etc… That never works.

I tried the ‘getting even’ route. I fucked one of his good friends. Found out he was dirtier than my boyfriend. I got tested for STDs and AIDS after that one. Jesus.

Every time I broke up with that boyfriend, I’d find another boy to date. And without fail, the boy would be into doing drugs or drinking until drunk or both.

So one day, I gave up on the little world around me. I declared to my boyfriend and our friends that I wanted in. I told them that if they were going to fuck up their lives like this, that I wanted to join them. I told them they weren’t allowed to leave me alone to be the only sober person alive, watching in horror as the world spun around me with everyone riding this fucked up lifestyle. I didn’t want to be like a survivor of some big storm that wiped everyone around me off the map. I wanted to go with them.

They looked at me in shock. They had sorrowful looks on their faces.
What? Did I ruin their fun of being able to have someone’s back to go behind? Was it that they’d be forced to tamp down their carousing with each other with me around as the newbie fiend?

I tried buying pot from people I knew had it. They always told me they were out, sorry. Out of frustration one day, I screamed at people to just GIVE me SOMETHING, that I was tired of this bullshit hiding and secrecy. My boyfriend told me that my brother informed the surrounding three counties’ worth of people he ‘worked’ with that if they dared sell me any drugs of any kind, they’d wake up dead. Apparently this threat worked. My brother was pretty intimidating and violent back then. Maybe had something to do with the fact that he was doing steroids on top of the pot and cocaine.

So, flash forward many years - zooom - and here we are - I have stopped drinking again. I go through sobriety phases every year, now. This phase is firstly because of my history of getting blacked out drunk and pissing off B when I do so, and secondly because it makes the endometriosis pain worse when I drink around ‘that time’, which is right now.

But what is significant - what is a major breakthrough for me - is that I have realised consciously that when I see other people drinking when I can’t, I get bitter and jealous because I go back to that time when I really saw my peers around me for the first time, fucked out of their heads on one or more substances, and I got mad - REALLY FUCKING MAD, and then scared - scared that they’d all leave me behind because I wasn’t doing what they were doing. And scared because I couldn’t relate - I wasn’t on the same trip with them, and it was obvious to them as well as to me.

…

Around 4pm this afternoon, our neighbor had a BBQ in the backyard. We went back to join them for a bit. Once I started really noticing the drunkening, I excused myself, because I don’t like being around intoxicated or drugged people when I’m sober, because to be honest, people get kind of lame when drunk or high. And so if I can’t dull my brain along with them, I don’t want to be around them.

I excused myself probably around 6pm. But B stayed at the party.

He came in a couple hours later, noticably intoxicated. I admitted I was upset that I couldn’t drink. He gave me the sad pouty face, and went right back out to join the party.

Bad move, dude.

It’s now going on 10:30pm and B is still out there, drinking and having fun. And I’m in here, stewing with rabid jealousy. What tons of fun has he had all night that I couldn’t be there to join in with? Will he suddenly not want to be with me anymore because he can’t stand ME when I drink but he wants someone he loves with him when HE drinks? Will he turn into my ex? Do you see the previous psychological scarring at work?

Don’t worry though, I am NOT going to forbid him from having any fun just because I can’t. I am smarter than that. I did learn from past relationships. That’s why this relationship has been strong for 8 years and counting.

HAY! B’s home! Gotta go hug my man tight.

Today I’ve been sober for 77 Days.

That’s two milestones in AA! I need to start making my own little medals.

I was thinking last night that the first 50 days were the hardest ever to bear, but now that I get further and further out, it seems easier on me.

Last weekend, I went to a bar with my man, and I had an alright time. I still have social anxiety, but every time I think “maybe one drink, that will relax me”, my body automatically goes into a mode of feeling poisoned - my body remembers the effects of the first gulp of alcohol on its esophogus, its gut, on the kidneys, on the liver… and it doesn’t feel good.

So I’m glad about that - I’m glad my body remembers the poison instead of the craving. I’m succeeding at sobriety, but only from an alcoholic standpoint.

My next hurdle will to be to get over self-medicating with my pain medication. I only do this when I’ve had a rough go with family-related issues, or if the depression gets real bad. It’s not often. But it’s still a problem. I’m still an addictive personality in that regard. I still need a crutch in that regard.

I will learn to face all emotional blackness without the aid of pills, just like I am learning to do so without the use of alcohol.

I can do this.

I’ve been plugging away all night trying to bend WordPress to my will for pages on educating the masses about Endometriosis, and now I’m officially giving up. I’m cranky, I don’t care, people can friggin search for info themselves, and I don’t care to keep educating myself. I’m miserable, I’m bleeding like a stuck pig, I don’t want to go on with this life …

and… radio nigel just started playing Enigma’s Return to Innocence.

Love - Devotion - Feeling - Emotion
Don’t be afraid to be weak
Don’t be too proud to be strong
Just look into your heart my friend
That will be the return to yourself
The return to innocence.
A return to innocence.
If you want, then start to laugh
If you must, then start to cry
Be yourself don’t hide
Just believe in destiny.
Don’t care what people say
Just follow your own way
Don’t give up and use the chance
To return to innocence.
That’s not the beginning of the end
That’s the return to yourself
The return to innocence.
That’s the return to innocence.

Ok, ok.

And now, some invigoration:

I need more Native American warrior music in the house.