Clipped Wings

Backstory

I was born on a cold Sunday in June of 1999.

My mother probably shouldn't have been a mother. My father was absent all the time. Which lead to the revolving door of boyfriends and my mother choosing her bed mate over her children.

And children yes. I have siblings but I don't really speak to either of them. One of the sibling relationships is catatonic, the other catastrophic.

And when I get around either of those people, I tend to feel the happiness I've built up over time seeping out of me. But with the ease of a knife in butter. You almost can't detect that anything has changed, but then oh wait, I'm sad again. Thanks.

That temporary happiness didn't take a boatload of effort or anything. And now you've knocked it down and away like a kid who destroys Lego brick towers.

But I digressed. My bad. It's fairly simple to slip into negative loops. I don't mean to do that, it just happens. And then I'm looking around because suddenly it got dark. And I just noticed that it's getting darker and I have no flashlight. Time to find a distraction or a fixation.

So my parents had no business having kids but they did. And then my dad skedaddled. But not when he was supposed to be buying milk. No, he disappeared after my grandparents sent all of us a check for Christmas. He was supposed to cash it and split the money as she had requested. But he just disappeared. And he pops back into my life when I happen to see his mugshot on that website I check periodically. Or when he claims to be clean.

I used to think I'd go to bed and wake up to find him all cleaned up and sober in the kitchen. And he'd smile, greet me, and he'd ask to make me breakfast. And he'd make me exactly what I like even though he knows absolutely nothing about me now. There would just be some kind of internal sense of being that he'd possess and reflect on the outside. And I would have my dad back. Fingers crossed.

But then you wake up cold. And there's no waft of smells. No sizzle of the pan. Nothing to replace the warmth you've lost through the night. And for fun, you've awoken with a headache. But you used the last Aspirin a week ago for something else and you didn't replace the bottle in time. And for some reason you kept the empty bottle. So hope was swelling and then instantly crushed.

My mother is a completely different genre. My dad is the tiny illustrated children's book that was misplaced. But the longing to find it was hard to kill.

My mother looked like a cute little fiction novel and ended up being a psychological horror. She could be so charming on the outside but you had no idea what was waiting on the inside. What was lurking underneath the surface? 'Fuck around and find out,' is basically her greeting card. And then add mental illness, drugs, and a painful past with traumatic memories. And a severe victim mentality. My mother is the most complex character of my life. I wanted her in my life until I didn't.

There are people who might trigger you and then there are people who are standing on your buttons and hesitating to move away from you.

And for extra credit, they project on you. Inject you with their problems and troubles and still ask you to do more and more. "Oh! You're bleeding. That's too bad I need the bandaid more."

And then you find out that they've 'accidentally' broke you stuff. Or sold it. Or anything else disrespectful that you could imagine.

How do you stay calm or sane in that kind of environment?

Truth is I don't know. Am I sane? Maybe. I'm still here. That's what I know. That's all I know.