Help Me! My Baby Has Fallen Down a Well!!!!

It is pretty obvious, in the gently process of deduction, that my mother was a kind, sweet and nurturing soul to her children, when not whiplashed by the interspatial wicked nature of the madness that nature and nurture bestowed upon her.  I say this, this surety of her good nature, even as memory fails, as I am all those things with my children and I had to have gotten it somewhere.  My father was never those things, nor is he today in most respects, but I am pretty sure my mother was at some point.  

As best I can recollect, piece together and generally speculate, she began to slip into the warm clothes of generalized madness sometime after my first two siblings were born.  I know she was in and out of mental facilities and other inpatient hospitals for severe depression and delusional behavior.  My only real source for information is my father, and he is extremely protective of my thoughts towards my mother.  He would never want me to think that my mother was nearly as crazy as she obviously has become. He means well, but it bothers me to some degree.  My feelings about my mother in the years when she was around vacillate between an manufactured memory of sweetness and goodness and the rolling, creeping snippets of my real memory, where insanity ruled the roost.  I don't trust my memories any longer, and more try to breathe in an acceptance that I will never truly know more than a guttural feeling that its was rampant craziness, and that I got spun up in it.  The simple truth of the fact is that my mother didn't suddenly become a full blown toxic Borderline Personality after she left my childhood home.  


In the years that followed, BPD ran her over, and everyone else around her.  She married a couple of times, joined many New Age and Holistic/Homeopathic groups, never staying long in any single one, but all and each having the underlying characteristics of paranoia, delusional thinking and a lack of logic and common sense to them.  Crystals, blue algae, ethers...  who the hell knows what other crocks she bought into.  I know that it was very likely the ready made communities of the weak and the vulnerable that she could infect with the poison of her BPD that made it truly attractive to flit from one nut group to the next.  :(


As for me, she played out the same routine.  Blame me for the fact that we didn't have a relationship.  Manipulate me into defending why I didn't call/write/send telegrams, and then infect me with her poison.  I wish there was a nicer way to put that, but it never, ever changed.  She attacked, and infected.  Manipulated and toxified.  I finally gave up on it 5 years ago, where I flew out west to see her, told her that if she didn't stop that pattern I would not talk to her any more and then came back to my hotel the next morning to an email playing it all out again.  I replied in that email that I wouldn't talk to her any more.  I am at peace with that, I really am, because I can't let myself be infected.  It made my life so hard and it would wreck me for months.  Accepting that she was who I knew she was, a full on, raging BPD is peace, but it still sucks.


Being manipulated, or having my emotions manipulated is a core trigger for me.  It makes me rage beyond all measure and fires the full force of my limbic cannon.  I can close my eyes and realize that I can call upon being a very young child and having felt the tug of disbelief of being used as an emotional pin cushion.  I know that, and it makes me sad now and sad that I still act that out as an adult.  I want that to be better.   I've been cursed and abused by some wicked crazy people and it pisses me off.  Maybe I am just admitting my anger at the raw deal I've been handed.  I have a tendency to pragmatize these things and just sorta gloss it over with the "what can you do" look, and I don't think that is the healthy approach.  But I am deciding to be consciously pissed about that fact in this moment.  I find that I don't stay angry once I am angry.  I would like some real peace about my loss and grief, maybe being outwardly pissed off is a progressive step in getting through the gates of mourning. 

Standing in the Doorway Just Killin' Time

I am coming up on my birthday.  Not that one, the other one.  See, four years ago, roughly about this time I was struggling like a mofo with some pain in my groin.  Longest story possible short, it was testicular cancer.  Turns out that there was a stage 1a tumor in there that was causing blood flow issues and causing my right testicle to go necrotic.  It hurt just a bit.  Just a little bit, like more than anything ever.  For all those with Y chromosomes, I am sorry I made you squirm.  February 18th is my new birthday.  I was born again, from the land of the emotional suffering delusionally.  Every year, we've had a cake with the kids to celebrate Daddy overcoming "Penis Cancer".  It is just easier to let it ride than try to explain to them.  :)

I mention it, and it will come up again as we aproach the date, but it comes with some very bittersweet news.  A person I'd worked with at "that place" who I liked very much and had kept in touch with over the last 3 years lost his battle with bone cancer last night.  At the risk of narcissism, I wanted to share how I feel, and how his passing is a real kick in the nut for me.  His wife blogged all the way through their ordeal, of his brief remission and their life together.  They were obviously very happy people and as I knew him, he was a wonderful person.  They had two small kids and she is a very successful artist.  When I found out he'd been diagnosed, I reached out to him and gave him some support from someone who'd had some of the experiences he was about to go through.  They both replied and thanked me, and it was sweet as can be.  But now, I am devastated and feeling like rat shit on the bottom of a dung beetle's shoe.  I survived where he didn't.  I have broken the one person who's always stood by me's trust and I am the one here.  It might sound like self-pity, but it is more my only known expression of my guilt and my grief.  

In the midst of all of this, I am better.  Depression, in its most devastating form has overrun my life and I appear to have lived to tell the tale.  I've turned the corner, but am still far from home.  I have rotten thought patterns, a self-esteem rotted with abuse and self-abuse, a skewed perspective on my place in this world and a thousand billion amends to make.  But I am breathing.   And that's a lot.