Time to post again?

This everyday stuff is tiring! My brain doesn't function well enough to do this. I'm going to try a new tactic today - yesterday was my most embarrassing moment - let's try something different - my saddest moment, depressing, I know, but real all the same.

Just to prove my level of insanity, besides doing this NaBloPoMo thing, I'm also doing that NaNoWriMo thing - why? - no one knows, but below is a small snippet from my writings that may or may not become a novel. The concept is not very original or probably written very well, but I think it's therapeutic (or completely depressing) to see your fucked up childhood on paper.......somehow it keeps it from swimming around in your head and Lord knows, 28 years of that is plenty. Tomorrow will something more chipper, I promise - so stick with me.



We moved in with Dad today. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I thought this whole custody battle we just went through was to keep us from living with dad. In reality, as it turns out, it was a power struggle. Not that this is something a 11 year old really can grasp, but even a kid of 11 can see that now. Was it just a month ago that we had to testify against our mother and say we wanted to live with our dad? God, it seems longer than that. It was pretty obvious today that she was on edge, it was just a matter of time before she blew, but this move came from left field. My little brother, Aaron, is confused. He keeps asking me questions that I can’t really answer. I have become his safety net over the past year, the only real constant he has had. Good thing the kid likes macaroni and cheese as that is pretty much all I know how to make and has been the staple in our diet for the last year.

There has been a wide range of feelings over the past year, fear when being left alone at night, anger when we call her at the bar and ask her to come home, shame when she calls us babies and says she’ll be there when she gets there, sadness when my brother is crying for her and he only has me, loneliness when my brother finally falls asleep and it’s only me in the house – waiting, worry that maybe something has happened to her on the way home and that’s why she is so late or not here at all in the morning, abandonment – this one will prove to be the kicker in my life.

The big question in my mind is always, what did we do? Why is she so mad at us? I’m convinced she hates me because I look so much like my dad and according to her, act just like him too, the ultimate sin. What about Aaron? He looks like her, he is so little, only 5, why is she so angry with him? Maybe it is our fault their marriage didn’t work. Maybe we just aren’t much fun, certainly not as fun as her friends at work or at the bar. They are hard to compete with. These and many other questions will plague me over the next 25 years. These damn questions will determine whether my relationships will work, whether my mother and I can have any kind of a relationship, whether I will be a good mother myself, something I’m very afraid of because if I repeat her mistakes I’m not sure I can live with that.

Dad just pulled in. He comes around the corner and sees us sitting there on the stoop, surrounded by our pitiful pile of belongings. We didn’t bring any of our furniture, blankets, stuffed animals – basically just our clothes and a few small personal items.

“What’s going on?” he says.
“I don’t know, mom just says she couldn’t do it anymore and told us to pack our shit.” I’m not sure if swearing is okay in this house, there certainly was plenty of it in her house. Here I go, testing the boundaries already – a sign of things to come.
Dad just shakes his head and tries to act happy about this, pretending he is ready for us to be here – even though this couldn’t be further from the truth. You can see in his face he is trying to compute the fact that he just spent the last year in court trying to accomplish this very thing, spending God knows how much money and in the end, losing. Not matter how bad mothers are, for some reason judges think that kids should never be separated from them. I beg to differ.

Of course, Dad’s losing has to be my fault too. If I only would have told the judge everything, it’s just that it was scary in his chamber and he was asking me very direct questions, not really giving me much of a chance to add the really bad stuff. Do you think if I would have told him about the time she called my brother a ‘walking abortion’, that would have worked? More feelings I’m not sure what to do with: guilt, if I had only said more, dad would have won. Although, if all the relatives and neighbors couldn’t convince him, how would a 10 year old girl convince him? If the neighbors telling him that a 10 year old was basically raising her 5 year old brother, no sight of their mother for days at a time, excessive drinking and partying, yelling and screaming and name calling, didn’t work – how was I supposed to convince him? Guilt.