Intro To Dysfunction

 I suppose I will begin at the beginning. I was born to two alcoholic parents. My father came from a very poor family. His mother gave birth to him when she was sixteen years old. She was married to his father who was about forty years old (Pedophilia much?), but apparently, they split soon after his birth. My paternal grandmother was a hoochie coochie dancer in a traveling Irish circus. (A hoochie coochie dancer is like an old-fashioned stripper.) The circus was owned by her father, and she met my paternal grandfather in the course of their travels. The family had immigrated from County Cork, Ireland. I’m not sure what year that happened, though. Probably sometime in the early 1900s. I know virtually nothing about my paternal grandfather. I know his name and that he died soon after he split with my father's mother. 

My mother’s parents came from very poor families as well. I have a vivid memory of being in my maternal grandmother’s pantry and being astonished at how much food she had stored in there. Her pantry was the size of a small bedroom. I can remember her telling me that she lived through the Great Depression and how often she went hungry during that time. So, when she could afford it, she stocked up on years of canned food. I don’t know much about my mother’s parents except their families came to the United States so long ago that I regularly get invitations to the groups The Daughters of the American Revolution and The Daughters of the Confederacy, both of which I decline every year. I know that my paternal grandmother’s family is Irish and that my maternal grandfather’s family is Scottish. I know that my maternal grandmother was abused in every kind of way by her parents. She was another in the generational cycle of familial violence and incest. I don’t know much about my maternal grandfather’s background. I know he was a WWII vet. I know that he and another man were stranded on a deserted island in the Pacific for months after some kind of accident in the water or above the water. My mother told me that he nearly died and lost a good amount of his teeth as well.

Alcoholism and drug use runs rampant in both sides of my family. Both sets of my grandparents were hard drinkers. My mother’s parents added a side of physical violence to that lovely addiction. My mother told me so many stories about them beating on each other. 

Her father was a salesman for a company which sold granite and other kinds of stones for large construction projects. So, he was on the road for most of the time during which he would be mostly drunk. He would come home, and it would be sweet for a while, but after a couple of weeks it would start to go downhill. My grandmother would accuse him of cheating, and he would accuse her of cheating and then they would beat on each other. 

My mother related one story to me that happened when she was about nine or ten years old in which they were both completely drunk and had gone a few rounds with each other, Then, my grandmother got a knife and cut one of my grandfather’s fingers off. It was then that my mother had to drive them to the hospital. She said that was one of the scariest nights of her life.

My mother had two sisters. She was the eldest. When she and her first sister were children, she told me that they were so afraid of their parents that they would sleep nightly underneath their bed so that they would not get beaten or molested by one or both of them. Apparently, the youngest sister was an “accident” and happened many years after their childhood and after my grandfather had made his fortune (He became very wealthy.) so she didn’t get as much or the same kind of abuse as the first two sisters did.

The majority of the abuse that happened to me was inflicted by my mother and her parents. My father was abusive, for sure, but he was completely different. I’m not making excuses for him, but I believe that his physical and mental abuse of me was mostly because he did not know how to deal with me being the product of systematic and traumatic abuse inflicted on me by my mother and family. The abuse from my mother and maternal grandparents was by far worse, began in toddlerhood and lasted for most of my young life.

Things I've Never Said To Anyone

 I think about suicide every day. I think about it several times a day every day. I have been doing this since my first suicide attempt at seven years old. I would never attempt it again. Mainly because of my daughter. What would happen to her if I died? I have no will because I can’t afford to a lawyer to get one made, so if I die, she goes into foster care. This is something I would never want for her. I have never told anyone, even my many therapists over the years, that I think about suicide every day. Suicide is a trigger word and people have automatic knee-jerk reactions to it. I can understand why, which is why I have never told anyone. Some mornings, like yesterday, I wake up and the first and only thing I think is, “I’m so done with this world, this life. I’m so done.”

I get hard mood swings. I never go very high, but I definitely go very low. Last night, I was sitting at my computer doing something fairly routine for me and all of the sudden, my heart dropped and I had visions of myself slitting my arms open from wrist to elbow. Intrusive thoughts and more intrusive feelings. When I was in my twenties, the intrusive thoughts were so bad that I thought I was losing my mind at times. So, I learned, for the sake of my own sanity, to visualize pushing those types of thoughts away. Now, I’ve become very adept at it as was the case last night. It’s exhausting, though, to have to constantly monitor your thoughts and to actively push away some of them and replace them with more positive ones. There have been several points in my life where I was so exhausted that I just stopped doing it and let those thoughts run wild. As a result, I nearly went over that emotional cliff that I’ve always been terrified of. 

Involuntary. 

Psychiatric. 

Hold. 

Ever since I’ve had my daughter, though, I’ve given that particular cliff a very wide berth. I’m the Champion of Mental Monitoring. Even though, being a single mother is very hard, I suppose this is one benefit for me. I love her so much that I have, for the last ten years, kept myself from falling in the hole.

I’ve never been diagnosed as Bipolar, but I have been diagnosed with chronic depression. Sometimes, I wonder if I have Borderline Personality Disorder, but then a part of me thinks, “What good are labels?” I mean, don’t labels just limit us in terms of what we think about ourselves and what we can do with our lives? Isn’t living with a label somewhat akin to living in a box-shaped life? On the other hand, I don’t have very much hope for my life as it is now. I can only imagine just living one monotonous, miserable day after another until I die. For a couple of years in my thirties, I was in a serious relationship with a guy in his early twenties. (I remember telling a good friend about this and she said, “I had one of those once. They’re fun.”) I can remember his constant hopefulness about his future, which was in hard contrast to what I felt about mine. His unflagging optimism about his life was so unfamiliar to me that I looked at him in my mind sometimes like a strange being from another dimension. Like a unicorn. We were so different in so many ways, that now I think the only thing that kept us together for as long as we were was the sex.

First Impressions and The Handsome Neighbor

It was the beginning of Spring. She had had to move from Arkansas to New York City, with her eight-year-old daughter, for her new job. She was in her early thirties, petite, with long, extraordinarily white, hair which was as thick as her wrist in a ponytail and which hung down to the back of her knees. With her large sky blue eyes and pale skin, some people from her home town had taken to calling her Fae after the fairies they believed inhabited certain places. She had a dark wine stain birthmark right in the middle of her eyebrows which looked, for all the world, like a diamond. This day at the beginning of spring, she was standing on the sidewalk in front of her new flat in Brooklyn Heights overseeing, as best she could, the removal of hers and her daughter's belongings from the moving van into their new building.

She was frustrated and so had climbed into the moving van herself and was attempting to arrange things at the edge of the van for the movers to grab. They charged by the hour, you know, and this was getting a bit expensive. It seemed that the movers today had not had their breakfast or coffee, she thought, because they were moving slower than molasses in winter. Temporarily satisfied with her work, she jumped down from the moving van to see a tall, rather handsome, man walk out of her new building. Their eyes connected and he walked toward her.

"Are you moving in?" he asked.
"Yeah, I'm in, ah, 3C," she stammered with her drawling southern twang.
"Oh, then you're my new neighbor," he replied, "My wife and I live just across the hall from you in 3B."

He was so handsome and brawny that she felt she was having to really concentrate on what to say. She was nervous, as she usually was, talking to those whom she found attractive. There was an extended silence in which she realized eventually that she must say something, but thankfully, the handsome neighbor broke the awkwardness for her.

"You need some help with that stuff?" he asked, while peering into the interior of the moving van.
"Well, yeah, kinda." she said nervously, "The movers are going at a snail's pace today, but I don't want to put you out or anything."

To her complete surprise, the handsome neighbor took off his jacket and began to pull several things down from the van and walk towards the entrance of the building. She sized him up covertly and thought to herself,"Good God he's built like a brick shit house." Of course, she'd never say that out loud. Her churchified southern upbringing would never have allowed it and her mother would have blushed ten shades of red if she ever heard anything like that coming out of her daughter's mouth.

The handsome neighbor paused a second on the last stair and turned to look at her. She was still standing agog watching him when she realized that he wanted her to open the door for him since his arms were quite full. Embarrassed, she danced up the steps quickly and showed him to her apartment.

Passing through the doorway to her apartment, the handsome neighbor, who introduced himself as Adam on the way up the three flights of stairs to their floor, sat her belongings near the pile in the living room area where the movers had been depositing most of her things. He looked around at the nearly empty apartment unabashedly curious.

"Your apartment is set up differently than ours," he mentioned as he walked towards the back wall where a row of floor-to-ceiling windows offered a stunning view of the back of the next building over.

She walked into the kitchen and turned to ask him if he wanted some iced tea, the house wine of the south you know, when she noticed Adam was perusing through her collection of books which were still laying around the dining table in random places. He seemed lost in concentration. She took this moment to really study Adam's features and the way he moved. He had shoulder-length jet black hair which took on a subtle blue sheen when the light hit it just the right way. It was parted in the middle of his forehead and hung in loose, thick waves. His eyes were fairly large, but not overly so, and were the most amazing shade of green. Well, shades of green actually, Fae thought to herself. For when he turned his face toward the sunlight coming in from the windows she thought his eyes were the shade of the amber you find sometimes with little fossils stuck inside. He was tall, about six-foot-two or three, she guessed. His frame was proportional. She figured he weighed about one-eighty or two hundred pounds give or take. His skin was the most marvelous color of light coffee. His lips were full, which was a bit unusual for most men Fae thought, but nice nonetheless. The rest of his face was all angles and planes. He had a very aquiline nose and cheekbones so sharp that it almost made his face look severe. He had a broody sense about him, but Fae did notice that he smiled easily and that when he did, it lit up his whole person. It was as if there were a heavy cloak he deliberately pulled around himself either to keep other people away or to protect himself somehow.

Fae thought to herself, "He must have been through some bad times if he feels he has to cloak his light like that," but she kept all of her curious questions to herself. He was married after all and she had no intention of being a home-wrecker even if he was outrageously handsome.