Oh ROCKY!!!!

Well, look what I’ve found this time!  Yay!  I’ve missed you so much!!!!  Yep, it’s my Rocky Horror Picture Show Motion Picture Soundtrack CD!  I didn’t just come across this though.  No, no, no... this I went actively looking for.  It seems holiday appropriate but in fact when I was in high school between the ages of 15-17 I was at the local theater at midnight EVERY Friday and Saturday for the showing of the Rocky Horror Picture show.  Had nothing to do with Halloween.  It was just as appropriate for me on Thanksgiving, Christmas, Valentine's and St. Patrick's Day.  

Yes, every Friday and Saturday I would get the big 80s mall hair going on and hop in my girlfriend’s old clunker of a sedan (man that thing was a boat!) and we would head off to the “Science Fiction Double Feature”.  She was a year older than me so my grandparents thought she was ‘responsible’ or something.  We had the act down, she would smile and nod and listen to their admonitions and then when we got in the car we would fall out giggling, because of course at the ripe old ages of 15 and 16 we were invincible.  No, really, we were.  Either that or we had guardian angels sitting on our shoulders. 

Oh Rocky Horror, how do I love thee let me count the ways.  

1. You taught me at an impressionable age not to be judgmental.  Whoever you are, what ever you do, as long as it is good for you, then by all means go for it.
2. You taught me how to come out of my painfully shy shell and not be so socially awkward.  Of course learning how to be social at the RHPS sort of makes you not understood by many of your peers....except for the theater kids.  They seemed to get me just fine.  Hmmmm....yes, I became a thesbian.
3. You taught me how to live in the moment.  For the space in time that I was in that theater, nothing else mattered.  I was completely immersed and a full participant in the spectacle. 
4. You taught me the importance of having a best friend and someone that you can share inside jokes with.  My Rocky Horror friend and bestie at the time had elbow sex  and would share movie lines with one another when the situation seemed to fit.  We would explode into peals of laughter while everyone just looked confused, which of course only made it more hilarious. 
5. You taught me though your sexually charged dialogue and visual message that there are many ways to take care of ‘needs’. The point behind this was that I learned around then that I could take care of those teenage hormonal drives myself much better than any of the boys I knew.  

I’m sure if I sat and thought about it I could come up with more.  Oh wait.  I do have one more.  

1. Don’t dream it, be it.  That is the best takeaway from a movie maybe ever.  It doesn’t matter where you find yourself or what your present circumstances are.  If there is something you dream of doing, go for it!  Don’t merely wish you could or waste your time in ‘want to’.  Figure out a path to get you there and work it! 

Yeah, okay, so I didn’t get that lesson right away. That one has taken root as I have gotten older.  But it served me well in high school too even if I didn’t realize it at the time.  Once I decided that I was a theater geek,  nothing held me back from auditioning for every lead that I wanted and more often than not I got them.  Good times....

I’ll give this CD a spin or two and hopefully dig out the DVD while I’m at it.  Audience partici-pation isn’t quite the same when you are at home.  Maybe I’ll call up some friends for tomorrow while the kids are out.  I’ll be not be parting with this particular item as I love it so.  

The Framed Dog Award

Gold Framed Dog Blog Award 

This is received with much humility as I'm not sure what I've done to deserve it but so glad to have it anyway, from The Enigmatic Masked Blogger.

So, without without delay I will pass it on to five other lucky bloggers

StephGas at It's Never Too Late to Save a Hopeless Case
Lettucehead, although she probably already has it
Annah at Red Means Go
Allie at Hyperbole and a Half
and
Amber at Amber LaShell Rants

Stripper Heels

Digging in the junk trunk today reveals a pair of size 8 red stripper heels.  No, Darling Husband didn’t wear them I did.  I don’t think anyone in life sets out to be a stripper.  I’m reasonably sure that when I was 10 I didn’t say to myself, ‘you know, I want to take off my clothes for a living when I’m in my early 20s.‘  But I’ll get to that.

From the first date with Darling Husband, I was one completely smitten kitten.  From the moment we started making out against the hall closet door in full view of the neighbors had they come round and looked in the side light windows, I was gone.  I was completely overtaken by his presence, I allowed him to possess me.  Have I mentioned that it wasn’t a terribly healthy relationship at first and for....well, a while? 

We’d been dating for about a year, and all in all I was dealing pretty well with the situation.  I saw him several times a week, we spoke every day on the phone and even had regular sleepovers.  I think I even had a toothbrush in his bathroom.  Maybe.  I was working days in a hotel restaurant and nights as a cocktail waitress.  Oh, to have the energy I had when I was in my 20s again....anyway, one afternoon I was getting ready to go to my night time job and a radio ad started playing for one of the local bar’s ‘Bare as You Dare’ contests.  

*Ladies, let me just stop here for a moment and offer a word to the wise.   Don’t ever say things to your men just to see if you can get a reaction out of them because it doesn’t generally turn out well.  They are not wired the same way we are.  Public Service Annoucement over.*

So, just to see how he would feel about me taking off my clothes for strangers I casually said something to the effect of ‘you know, I was thinking about doing that contest’.  His response, and I will never forget these words, “That’s great.  Just be sure to not go on a night when all the Pretty Girls are there”.  WHAT??  I’m pretty sure that I didn’t hear you properly.  He didn’t think I was a pretty girl?  He kept me around all this time because I was a good lay but I wasn’t pretty enough?  Really?  I was crushed.  

When I confronted him about it, immediately, he tried to explain, but I really wasn’t hearing it.  His explanation was that sure I was pretty but that the stripper girls usually did these contests on their nights off so the competition would be unfair.  When he said Pretty Girls, I capitalize because he was classifying a group as a proper noun.  As in, the girls who get paid to be pretty.  That is all they do and all they are.  Of course, you know all that was lost on me.  From that moment on I had something to prove, dammit. 

I’d say less than a month later I was stripping.  I needed for him to know that I was a Pretty Girl.  Or at least capable of being one.  How it is possible that being a stripper could simultaneously boost my self-esteem and drag it down is a mystery to this day.  But that was the effect that it had.  On the one hand, I had men giving me money to take off my clothes, which bolstered my damaged body image, however I was naive enough to think that I could make them see past the boobs and the curves and realize how SMART I was too.  What the hell was I thinking?  So in that respect it wore my self-esteem down.  

But the wearing down of my mental self-esteem had the unlovely side effect of bitterness.  I didn’t like coming to work, the smell of beer breath made me want to vomit, and essentially I started loathing the men that I was making money from. In defense of men, it wasn’t their fault.  Not really.  You put men together in a dimly lit room with alcohol and nearly naked women...they can’t help but revert to the reptile brain.    

To cope I drank, a lot.  I was a stripper for about 2 1/2 years total and there is a large chunk of that time that is missing from my memory, lost in a haze of drugs and alcohol.  There was usually more drinking and drugs involved when Tony and I were ‘broken up‘ (as if that ever lasted more than a couple of days - a week tops).  I finally realized that working in that environment had an overall negative impact of who I was as a person.  I was jaded and cynical and bitter.  Apparently I wasn't a Pretty Girl after all.  I was much, much more.  I knew that I had more to offer just no idea what at that point.    


You will likely hear more regarding some of my ridiculous and horrifying behaviors as some point in the future because I'm sure that I'll find more items from 'My Strippper Days'  in this silly old trunk of mine that have stories attached to them. Don’t know why I’ve hung onto these old shoes so long.  I think I’ll send them to GoodWill.  There may be a Pretty Girl in need of a pair just like this.    

Milestones

I’m back and after spending 2 1/2 days on the mountain with God and my girlfriends from church I appreciate my family more and yell less.  So far, anyway.  As I expected it was interesting.  Great worship and teaching, plenty of intercession and a generous sprinkling of fun were the recipe for an exhausting but overall joyful weekend.

This is my third year going on the annual retreat and I find that I measure time from retreat to retreat.  I didn’t think about it until one of my friends brought it to my attention how her life changed from year to year.  So often we fail to stop and take stock of how we have changed from one point in time to another.  It’s really useful.  I haven’t always had such mile markers and signposts along the way but find that the older I get the more I like them.  It’s nice to be able to have a time set aside annually where I can take stock of what has happened in the past year where I am in my life, and how things have changed.  

I don’t know about the rest of the world but I have most of my past conveniently categorized in time periods in my mind.  There was my early childhood, my teenage years, my practice husband, which may surprise some to realize happened before the slutting about in my early twenties.  I do have some spillover between categories though, especially since meeting darling husband.  

You know how the ‘right’ one can change everything?  From the time he danced his way into my heart his essence has permeated all areas of my life.  So much for my nice compartmentalized history.  Going back into the ‘junk trunk’ tomorrow I think.  We’ll see what I find this time.  

Retreat!!!!!

This isn't really where I'm going, just thought it worked with the theme of 'retreat'

                                                     

I find that I can only spend a short period of time in my metaphorical ‘junk trunk’ at once.    Apparently, I lack stamina for the hard emotional stuff. *sigh*  This weekend marks the annual women’s retreat for our church and I find myself torn between guilt and excitement.  I love the opportunity to get away from my family and spend time with my friends and God.  For fun, I looked up the word retreat at Dictionary.com.  

By far, my favorite definition was “an asylum, as for the insane”.  I have never heard the word retreat used this way.  Hmmm...would you call Arkham Asylum from the Batman comics a retreat? (yes, I just showed my inner geek)   Is it insane to go away with a bunch of women from the church?  Maybe.  Will it lead to craziness?   Perhaps.  That’s like the question, ‘what’s the difference between religion and cult?’ and the answer is ‘it depends on whether you are on the inside or the outside of it’.  It’s sure to be interesting either way. 

We usually hear the word retreat in the sense of the military making a withdrawal, as in “the forced or strategic withdrawal of an army or an armed force before an enemy”.  As women we have a lot of slings and arrows that we deal with in our daily lives.  Some of us are single, some have significant others, families, jobs and other external pressures and stressors.  However, for most of us we don’t retreat because we don’t want to admit defeat or even give in to the fact that these things begin to wear us down.  And some of us have a hard time with the concept that we can go away and our lives and loved ones will be able to cope without us.   

As a mom and wife I have guilt about leaving the family.  Not that Darling Husband can’t take care of them, he’s quite capable.   He was the stay at home parent with our two boys while I worked outside of the home.  I just never want to leave them.  Regardless of how much I may ‘need‘ this little get away they are like air to me.  Being close to them makes me feel like all is right with the world and reminds me how far I’ve come in my evolution as a person.  

The other reason for the guilt is that Sunday is Darling Husband’s birthday.  I wasn’t going to go on the women’s retreat so that I would be with him for his birthday weekend.   But over the last 3 months at least half a dozen different women have asked me, in front of him, if I was going on the retreat.  I explained each time that I was going to pass because of his birthday and finally last week after one last phone call imploring me to attend, Darling Husband gave up and insisted that I go.  His words and I quote “Go!  Damn, I can’t stand up to that female pack mentality any longer!”  

So, now that I have his blessing (insistence) I’m starting to get excited about it.  It usually is a great time.  But I have much to do, packing and baking, and errands..oh my!    

Slutting About

So, guess what I just found?  And old pack of condoms and a flat of birth control pills.  Wow.  Where to begin with this.  I never promised it would be chronologically accurate.   Right, I remember I promised to hold the mirror up to my bad behavior without flinching.  Please, those of you who are still actually reading and following the story, understand that although I’m not flinching, I’m not actually bragging either.  

When I turned 20 I started going through what I like to refer to as my ‘slut phase’.  I was that girl that all the girls hated and all the guys wanted to be around (in case it was their turn).  I was easy, sleazy, and only looking for a good time.  It wasn’t part of what I thought of as ‘normal‘ behavior for me although repetition would suggest that it became that way.  A short history lesson may be in order so you understand.  

Prior to this, I was a church going, Sunday School Teaching, non-drinking, sensible girl.  You see, I got married 10 days after I turned 18 which was 2 months before I graduated high school (and I wasn’t even pregnant!).  So, what were you thinking, you ask?  All I can figure is that I had super low self esteem and when this guy said he loved me, I was terrified that no one else ever would.   Long story short, it lasted 1 year and 11 months.  I was done.  I moved out, and never looked back.    

That isn’t what this blog is about.  From the time I left my husband I was on a quest.  I felt like I was taking control of my sex life.  Not by abstaining, but the opposite.  If it was male and reasonably attractive, I fucked it.  And I kept track of the number for a while and could list them in order by name. (AlthoughI’ve long since forgotten that statistic)  If I found myself in a situation with a guy who was just a friend and we had no better way to pass the time....you see where this is going...sport fucking  It became my favorite pass time.  If it was good, we might have another go sometime, if it wasn’t - eh, not so much.  

I think the bulk of this phase lasted about 18 months.  I was nearing the end of it when I met Darling Husband.  I could have easily stopped my slutting about and settled down with him, but did I mention he was a male stripper?  Right.  He wasn’t about stopping his slutting around at that point.  It made for a bit of a rocky relationship.  He maintains that I was always his ‘main squeeze’ but I guess when you have that much pussy to choose from on a nightly basis, it’s like being a kid in a candy store.  You can’t turn it away.  

This put me in a position of spite fucking (which is completely different from sport fucking). Because I’ll be damned if I was going to be the monogamous girlfriend while he had me and all the other he wanted.  I was no longer fucking around with guys just for the fun of it (sport fucking).  I was doing it because I was hoping to hurt him as much as he was hurting me.  I know, it must sound like a terribly destructive relationship to those of you who are well-balanced and completely centered in healthy relationships.  In truth it was destructive and we should have walked away from each other when we realized that we weren’t on the same page with what we wanted from a relationship.  The caveat was that once we were together, we didn’t know how to NOT be together anymore.  So we continued hurting each other for a long time.  But there will be more of that later, for now, it’s enough that I was a slut and so was he.  So glad we came out on the other side of that.  I think I can toss these. *grin*

Bad to the Bone or How I Met Darling Husband and other tales

Yep, I figure break is over.  I feel another one coming on though so I need to strike while the iron is hot.  Before I get started, I need to put one very important thing on the record.  Darling Husband has done more for me and pushed me harder and farther as a person toward achieving my greatest potential and is still pushing today.  This is brought on by the leather chaps and jacket that I’m pulling out of the closet and dusting them off.  

The year was 1992, the Wednesday night before Thanksgiving.  I had been in a funk for a couple of weeks coming off of a bad break up.  Actually the break up wasn’t all that bad and the relationship wasn’t that long, but when you are 21 years old three months is a long time and in 1992 no one was throwing around terms like ‘emotionally unavailable’  so I had no idea.  Even though said ex-boyfriend was.  

I was living with Mother as a rent payer.  She also had two other boarders to help her cover the mortgage.  Anyway, she was concerned about me moping around whenever I wasn’t at work so she suggested that when I got off work that Wednesady evening that we would go to the male strip club that had just opened not far from the house.  I’d never been to a male strip club and being as I was of age, I thought, why not.  It will be a good distraction.  

After being carded, we entered the place.  It was dimly lit with neon and blacklights a plenty.  Mother and I and our other roommate took seats at the stage and waited for the show to begin.  We ordered drinks.  Mom and roommate ordered beer, I ordered a Zima because I was one of the douches who actually drank that silly shit.  

Darling Husband who wasn’t Darling anything at that time was 3rd on stage.  He was truly beautiful to behold.  He was slim but muscular with beautiful curly black hair and olive skin complexion.  All of which belied his Italian descent.  We have to be very clear that he was not to be confused with the Guidos currently enjoying spotlight on reality tv shows now.  He was just like a moving artwork.  He was wearing a thong, studded and airbrushed leather chaps and jacket and dancing to George Thorogood’s Bad to the Bone.  I think I quit breathing for a while.  

When I did start breathing again, I stood up to give him a tip and asked him what I thought was the wittiest thing ever “So....how bad are you really?”  He favored me with the most evil little grin and replied “I can be as bad as you want me to be”.  I sat down heavily and looked at Mother, thinking that I was joking, and told her ‘that is the man I’m going to marry’.  

We flirted the rest of the evening and when he tried to give me his number I refused it.  I told him that I didn’t want to be one of the many calling him that if he was interested he could call me.  Which he did.  The next day. 

 We set up a date for Friday which I almost cancelled.  I was terrified.  I couldn’t believe that I was actually going on a date with this well-spoken Adonis.  In fact, I tried to cancel.  He just said that was too bad and he would have to smoke the joint he just rolled by himself.  Hmmmm...now that was a dilemma.  Pot and handsome date or no pot and stay at home where it was safe.  I choose the less safe route and it has made all the difference. 

He took me to an adult bookstore which for most of us is losely translated to a porn shop!  I had never been in such an establishment in my life.  I walked the aisles with my hands clasped firmly in front of me, clearly uncomfortable.  He was obviously enjoying this, inviting me to stop and look at anything that I found interesting, but my eyes remained firmly fixed ahead.  I think I even heard him chuckle behind me at my innocence.    

Anyway, he’s outgrown those chaps.  All part of my evil plan to make him mine. *grin* I feed him entirely too well so that dancer body has changed but I still love it and him more than I even have words.  But they are a nice memory.  I think I’ll hang them back up and put them away.  

Hormones, already?

I have an awesome daughter.  She's smart, she's funny, she's beautiful, she's got the world by the short and curlys...and she's in 5th grade.  So surely I can't chald up her weepiness for no apparent reason and her quick to snap someone's head off retorts to hormones yes.  Right?

She is in the ‘Talent Development’ program at her school.  It’s like what most people call ‘Academically Gifted’ and feeds into the nationally recognized International Baccalaureate program in Jr. High and High School.  She participates in extra-curricular activites and generally kicks ass all the way around. I had to put that plug in so you would all know how proud I really am of her.  

However, I find myself increasingly dismayed when I have conversations with her.  Yesterday, for example, I picked her up from her extra-curricular activity and was simply inquiring about what they did and talked about and she muttered something unintelligible so I asked instead how her day was.  And she turns to me, glaring and says “I SAID I don’t want to talk about it!  I have a ton of homework and my teacher gave us assigned seats today!  And I didn’t even DO anything wrong!”  After reminding her that I didn’t do it either and to mind her tone with me, she apologized and looked slightly weepy. Apparently the idea of corporate punishment and rewards is not something that she is okay with. 

She is usually quite responsible to get her homework done....with only slight prodding from me.  Every day after she completes her work she tells me so and I say, without fail, “It’s ALL done?” and she says “yes, mama”.  Okay, bril.  This morning I was going through her planner and folders making sure that I had signed everything I was supposed to send back to school and found unfinished assignments.  When I inquired, gently - because being around her is like walking on eggshells lately, why she told me she had completed it and how long ago it was due, she couldn’t remember.  *sigh*  Her father and I are pretty strict about homework and it getting completed, so I took a deep breath and punted the conversation over to her father.  

When he inquired as to what was up, her eyes welled up with huge tears and started spilling over and running down her face.  You would think we’d been browbeating her for hours.   And darling husband, precious, protective dad, wraps his arms around her and says “Hey, where is all this coming from?” and her answer....”This morning....h-h-h-aaasss just b-b-b-been so HARD!”  At this point he and I make eye contact and shrug.  This morning has been no different from any other getting ready for school and we’re now a mere 2 minutes from the bus arriving.  So doting daddy helped her dry her tears and told her to shake it off and have a good day.  I guess we’ll broach the homework subject again this afternoon.  

The question that I keep asking myself is can she really not help it, or has she at the ripe old age of 10 learned to manipulate us so easily?  I don’t recall everything being a crisis in my world when I was 10.  Has everything changed so dramatically since then? 

And for those of you wondering...yep...still on break.  Not vodka this time.  Just coffee.

Vodka Break

Everyone knows during any heavy duty cleaning project breaks must be taken.  Allworkandnoplaymakesjackadullboy...allworkandnoplaymakesjackadullboy...allworkandnoplaymakesjackadullboy...but I digress.  It is essential therefore to catch one’s breath, get out of the dust, into the daylight again, and pour a lovely chilled vodka drink to reflect on the progress thus far.  Or maybe to ignore what’s still there for a while.  

My job, the one I get paid to do, is to provide customer service solutions and direct sales support for consumer electronics from home via chat.  And I’m actually quite good at what I do.  However it often makes me want to scream.  Sometimes I actually do scream, and sometimes its quite profane. This doesn’t go over well with darling husband who works beside me on the phones. Its fine to talk back to ridiculous chatters as long as you don’t type it, but not when his clients can hear you.  Bad, bad, bad.  I have wondered aloud things like “WHEN MY FUCKING HEAD EXPLODES, WHO IS GOING TO CLEAN UP THE MESS?!?”  He tries to brush it off  as if I am an unstable co-worker with Turrets (because his client company is very progressive and believes in employing the handicapped) but he’s gotten reprimanded for background noise before.  Can you imagine?  

I’m pretty even tempered, but I have a very low tolerance for stupid, because as the Blue Collar Comedy Team have shown us over and over, “you cannot fix stupid”.  There are lots of things that you can overlook in a relationship or in life, but stupid, for me, is rarely one of them.  I’m not talking about developmentally delayed individuals, but the fully functioning idiots out there.  I think the Darwin awards are brilliant.  That people can take themselves out of the gene pool on their own, hopefully without propagating, is genius.  Thank you God for natural selection.  

My bullshit meter is almost always on.  Whether you are a customer, an acquaintance, a co-worker (just because I work from home, doesn’t mean I don’t have co-workers) or my own children.  Don’t try to tell me anything but the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.  I come from a long line of liars and storytellers and there is nothing you can tell me that I haven’t already tried.  If you are my child don’t try to tell me that the dog ate your homework unless you are prepared to bring me scraps of it in her poo.  I’m telling you been there, done that.  Hmmmm...does that make me a cynic too?  

For now the break is over dearest ones who are following my crap.  Don’t know that I’ll dive back into the depths of cleaning by next time or not.  We’ll have to see where next time finds me.  Hell, I may still be on vodka break. 

Nudists

So, how many of you are aware that there are degrees of Nudism?  Is that even the right term?  For now it is.  Anyway, really there are.  There are those who are clothing optional only within the home and some who go out and spend weekenders with the family at nudist camps and there are those who live at the nudist camps and only get dressed ever to go to town and get supplies and groceries.   

Between the ages of about 3 and 10, I guess that’s about right, we were both clothing optional in home and would take weekenders to the nudist camps.  The camps were mostly family environments not so different from most other campgrounds that you can go to.  They have a pool, volleyball, horse shoes, playground, cabins, campers and tents.  The stuff you’d expect, except everyone was running around naked as the day they were born.  For many of them this was a very long time ago.  Like when dinosaurs roamed the Earth.  Imagine your grandparents....just saying is all. 

Given my former post about mother and husband number 3 being swingers, I’m not sure how this applied to the nudists if at all.  Because mostly that isn’t why Nudists are Nudists.  During the day people make use of the pools and outside activities at night the kids would gather in someone’s trailer and play board games or watch tv if you could get reception (recall this was the 70s).  The adults would play cards, strip poker was always popular although I never really go that.  You spend all day naked where is the penalty or added pleasure of having someone take off an item of clothing when they lose a hand. Which brings me to my next observation, from what I remember most of the folks who were nudists were not really people whose bodies you would imagine wanting to see naked.  They come from all walks of life.  Some are skinny, some are fat, some are wrinkly and some have parts that gravity has gotten the better of.  Most are perfectly lovely people who are comfortable in their own skin.  Which is an awesome thing.  I wish I had managed to grow up that comfortable in my own skin.  

To an extent during this time I was that comfortable.  To the point that I would think nothing of running out the door of our apartment when I was about 7 years old, yell to mom that I was going to play, and have no shirt on.  I never thought a thing about it.  It all ended one day when one of my friend’s parents called my mom and said 

“Do you realize that your daughter is outside wearing shorts?” 

“Okay, it’s warm outside”

“No, I mean ONLY shorts”

“Oh”

So we had to have the talk about appropriateness.   

Mostly I liked the nudist camp.  Actually mostly I liked the pool.  I could care less if I were clothed or not.  No one else was wearing any clothes so I didn’t feel any different.  Perhaps I should mention that I am so white that I am nearly blue so I burn easily and I think I have previously mentioned that Mother was not always super diligent about making sure that I wore sunscreen properly.  I’m sure you see where this is going. One weekend, I was probably in Kindergarten, or maybe even still pre-K.  My bottom (and the rest of me) got burned so badly that I couldn’t wear panties or anything else for 3 days because the pain would make me throw up.  Mom couldn’t work for those days because who could she get to babysit that she could explain why I couldn’t have any clothes on? Or how the entire real estate of my body got scorched? She didn’t really like me that much, so spending 3 extra days of the week with me was not something she wanted to repeat.  So, I spent the rest of the summer being the strange kid in the pool who had to wear panties and a t-shirt so she wouldn’t burn.  

Pink Elephants

***WARNING****  This is sort of long and really not much fun, but, I believe a necessary part of my journey.

While I am clear on the fact that I don’t want this to turn into an ‘I hate mom’ thing, when you start looking at your earliest memories mom is a prevalent figure in most of our lives.  One of my few constants anyway (constantly inattentive, constantly drunk, constantly abusive....you get the idea).  I cannot begin to address my own emotional junk without addressing my relationship with her.  That would be like leaving the giant pink elephant in the room and pretending it isn’t there.  Besides, until I address the elephant and thus relocate it or with any luck remove it completely I won’t be able to get at the other stuff.  

This won’t be pretty, it rarely is. I am insanely jealous of those who actually do have good relationships with their moms but also very happy for them.  Everyone deserves a good relationship with their mom.  Unfortunately there are a great number of walking wounded on this planet and so many of those wounds were caused by our moms.  

Mom was only 20 when she had me and she informed me that she never wanted me but abortions were illegal when when she got pregnant and she was scared to go to one of the ‘back alley butchers’.  Funny thing is, she didn’t spit it out when we were having one of our epic mother-daughter showdowns, we were just having conversation. Nope, not even kidding, she actually told me that.  Wow, mom, so nice to know that I have always been a reminder of something you never wanted. 

Anyway, it was the early 70s, love was free, she fucked around and was stuck with me.  It is my understanding that we lived with my grandparents while she was pregnant and for a while thereafter.  I’ve never met my father although I have a name and he lives in the same city as me (as far as I know), I sort of figure if he wanted something to do with me, he would have come around long before now.  Who am I to show up on his doorstep some 40 years later?  I’m sure he has a life and has moved on.  The name on my original birth certificate is the name of her first husband, but she was separated from him and he’s not my father.  Anyway she finalized her divorce and started hopping around from man to man moving from city to city and toting me with her like I was just another piece of luggage.  

I know this is starting to sound a lot like poor me, but that isn’t my intent at all.  In fact, these early years, I don’t remember at all.  Funny thing, I find that there is a LOT of my childhood that I don’t remember.  I don’t remember much at all until my mom married husband number 3 and we moved to Kansas. He was 19 years older than her and financially secure.  She was his trophy wife, before the phrase had ever been coined. That marriage lasted nearly 10 years though, I guess.  But even it had a fatal flaw.  

Anyone who remembers the 70s, even dimly, probably is familiar with the term ‘swinging’ or ‘wife swapping’.  They were swingers.  Except she didn’t have the decency to hide it from me. Rather than getting a sitter for me (I was an exceptionally sweet and easy to manage child  - no, really I was, stop laughing) they would take me with them, stick me in a bedroom with a tv and some oreo cookies (I was amazingly self winding) and I’d stay there until they were done or I fell asleep whichever came first. It only really left scars when I would wake up in a strange place and start wandering around.  Ooops!  I mean, when you’re a child you don’t want to see your mom and dad, ‘doing it’ much less your mom and someone else’s dad.   

I’m not sure she was really into the swinging thing though, because she stayed drunk most of the time.  I’m guessing it was her coping mechanism.  You see, as a trophy wife she was offered up to all of husband number 3’s friends like a party favor. Pretty sad for her actually.  I just mostly tried to stay out of her way.  Unfortunately that isn’t always possible.  

On top of being amazingly self-winding (as an only child), I was also astonishingly lazy and preferred to spend my time daydreaming than doing my chores or schoolwork.  I would pretend things like I actually belonged to another mother altogether.  They gave me to the wrong mom at the hospital.  My ‘real’ mom was wonderful and attentive and baked cookies. Not really sure why the baking of cookies was a pre-requisite for my fantasy mom, but she always baked.  

There were many times when I failed to clean my room and even more times when I decided that I had better things to do than homework.  No one was interested enough in what was going on with me to make sure it was getting done so mom never knew that I was falling down academically until report cards came out.  Those were usually particularly bad nights.  She was already angry with me because of my grades which led her into my bedroom (which was NEVER tidy).  A lot of yelling would ensue along with throwing things and beating me with whatever was handy.  Again that sounds a lot like poor me, but it is essential to understanding.  

Once, I was having a sleepover with a girlfriend and she saw me changing clothes.  I had large angry purple welts all over my legs.  She was horrified and said that we had to tell someone.  I begged her to let it go that it was fine and I deserved it.  I know now that I didn’t and do much better by my own children.  I refuse to continue the cycle of abuse.

The upshot of the whole thing? Mom’s neglectfulness, abuse, drunken, swinging, ways didn’t change the fact that I loved her dearly.  Or maybe its just that the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t know?  I did, and do, love my mother but I was terrified by the prospect of not having her even though she often terrorized me.

I have a feeling there will be a lot more about the pink elephant as I proceed on my trek to the truth.  But for now, lets fast forward.  When I was 13 she separated from husband number 3 because she found someone new.  Once again, I was just along for the ride.  All total she’s been married 7 times.  I think the 6th was the worst.  The 7th was actually a remarriage to husband number one.  I do appreciate your efforts to keep up as this seems very convoluted even to me sometimes. 

The truth can be a bit elusive, but we’ll get there.