Old essays from years before husband

  Blog essays

Disruption of life
To dream of dreaming is sometimes the best that I can do. When the sun is shining bright I can dream of getting out of this one stoplight town, I can get away from my mother, fall in love and get married or be a writer in a fabulous SATC apartment with a closet Carrie would die for and an ass that fits the perfect size two. But when it gets dark the truth comes out. I fall asleep and dream every truth that paralyzed me. I am alone. I am a failure that sleeps five feet from my mentally ill mother to watch her through the night. Even in dreams the love of my life isn't mine to have.


Small town crazy lady
Small town crazy lady. Drunk manic depressive, oops bipolar stumbling down the street for one more six pack of the most god awful cat piss beer. Forgetting to get dressed, forgetting to bathe for weeks and wearing a see thru nightgown size 2XL. Other days it was strange combinations of out of place clothing. Sandston in the 1970's was not the place to be fashion forward, but she wasn't trying to be fashion forward, just weird. Psychedelic, hippy, country bumpkin West Virginia general store where she was from, hillbilly, and yard sale out of date combinations that were too strange to gawk at. Sandston 23150 got real good at turning a blind eye at my Mama even in her tie dye Muumuu. Of course it made it easier to ignore the crazy lady so you wouldn't have to address the fact her face was covered in bruises. A black eye here and there, with other bruises everywhere. When no one talked about the black eye on her face, the also didn't talk about the small child that saw it all, every single time it happened. That small child was me. In the 1970's no one talked about mental illness as a disease you couldn't prevent, or spousal abuse as a crime.
So there goes my Mama, she was the crazy lady of small town USA. One stoplight and one small mind in the middle of a shit kicker nothing town 23150. There was no intervention, oh you poor thing do you need a place to stay? Nope it was hush hush, turn your head, don't say a word. Wonder what they thought of the little girl walking with her everywhere? That was me. I was the normal little girl in a bad situation, that everyone ignored. But I couldn't just ignore it, I was right in the middle of it, living it. When she was dressing me just as crazy, I know that what  the kids at elementary school were saying what the grownups were thinking. Just out loud and mean. On nights she was too drunk to even handle my dinner, I had to walk after dark to the little store Trio's. I was just a little girl scared of the dark and I knew no one was looking out for me.
That was and is the stigma of mental illness. My father beat my mother, but he had his own demons. He was a police officer that had been stabbed 60+ times by a drug addict high on PCP. Shooting that man in self defense, and the violence of his attack on my father haunted him the rest of his life. Even when my mother wasn't always crazy she was still the crazy lady. When she was normal she was a hard working and highly functioning registered nurse. Her fashion taste was still bad, that was ingrained. She lost more than one job as soon as a supervisor found out her diagnosis. Even in the hospital setting when she was in critical condition in the ICU she was just the crazy lady. I remember how absolutely rude the doctor was when she was informing me that I should have taken her to the psych hospital forty five minutes further away. After all they weren't equipped to handle a psych patient. To that nasty woman it didn't matter that my mother was critically ill and I brought her to the closest emergency room. My mother had such a strange infection that she was hypothermic with a temperature so low she almost died. To that doctor all that mattered was the one second snapshot picture, that on paper my Momma was just another mentally ill patient. Perhaps she had crazied her way into hypothermia. I was worried that my Mom would die, and here is this doctor chastising me that I had the nerve to pick her emergency room. My Monday-morning quarterback wishes I had cursed that woman every which way I could have. I didn't and she wouldn't have cared anyway.
My mother recieved that stereotype frequently when she was medically ill. No matter how many years of college, or how many degrees, some staff members are either gun shy, scared or just too judgmental to have compassion for the mentally ill. Those are not statistics, random numbers on a page. It was my life from 1988 to 2011 when she died. Out of all the emergency room doctors only one stands out that was kind and treated my mother as a human being. Out of all the General Practitioners, just two. All of the dozens of med surg nurses over the years? One. Just one. And for all of the years my Mom battled mental illness, from her teens until she died in her sixties, she died of cardiac arrest.

Lab values in crazy pants land

Lab values in crazy pants land

               Friday morning I woke up without an alarm clock at 5:30 in the morning. I finished listening to  The Fault in Our Stars and thought about my own tumor surgery. Listening to an audio book makes me miss paperbacks. The tangible feeling in your hands. The sound of turning one page at a time is so much better than a hundred pages turning to fast because you hit the wrong computer land do-whatsy. It felt better to cry over Hazel losing Augustus than crying over losing Allan. I have cried in every stupid place imaginable. A friend took me to Bass Pro Shop and a horror movie, and I was the dork crying sitting on a parked party boat.
               I rode the bus all the way from Sandston Va to Chesterfield Va to the hospital that kept me for four days, even though my husband doesn't believe I was sick. I cried in the the business office while asking to get copies of my hospital stay, because in my current situation, I need a lawyer.
               The lab work, concrete in black and white hasn't made me feel any better. My first blood pressure was 188/105. Stroke range and the doctor didn't care enough to call my husband, she didn't call a medical doctor either. I was in crazy pants land. My blood was taken, my GGT was 244 when it was supposed to be 5-55, my ALK Phos was 159 (45-117 normal range). I thought I was drunk as hell from the rum and tequila earlier in the night, but I was negative for alcohol and all drugs. The doctor didn't call for those lab values either. Instead she sat me down with a stern face and said I need to tell the truth for real now. I have been called a liar a lot in all of this. These lab values showed I had been a bad alcoholic for years and I had to own up to it to get the help I needed. The Doctor said in thirty years of treating alcoholics these were the worst GGT numbers she had ever seen. It took days for my husband to finally tell a nurse that I hardly ever drank. When my husband finally called the doctor (he didn't move out until 10/6/14, my hospital stay was 9/15-9/18/14) he told her about my erratic behavior and asked could these lab values have caused it. She said absolutely not. Nail in coffin, marriage over. I miss having the tumors. That pain was a million times easier than this.

Just Scream

It is six o'clock in the morning and the house is quiet and still. If September had never happened this would be peaceful. Before this, I had always jokes I should run away every September, dodge the bullet, and just not be here for the bickering that always happened in September. One of the perks of loving a combat vet that was in the army when  9/11 happened. Those ugly purple glasses he wears? He was one of the soldiers at the burning oil fields you saw on the news from the safety of your couch eating greasy leftovers. The glasses are purple to try and help keep his horrific migraines away. September will always be a sad memory here, the divorce I never wanted, but couldn't run away from.
                Can there be something positive from even this? There has to be. I'm not talking about go girl power, you trade up for a better man. He wasn't a bad guy. He was tough enough for 9/11, strong enough for my tumor surgery. But every camel's back has that one straw that is just too much. One more emergency too many. Four days in the hospital for me and a divorce for him. So where do you find something good? Someone learning from my mistakes. Keeping a secret is never good, especially when it involves a rape or any other act of sexual violence. Holding it in is going to kill you, and trash everything around you. You can put on all the weight you want, to desperately hide in. A cocoon so you don't think your attractive enough, and it will never happen again. What if what I have to say is trigger for someone else instead?  For that I am sorry. But instead of my choices, and ending up alone in a house, you fight. You get up, you make that therapy appointment. You can't tell the person that hurt you, well trust me that sh doesn't pan out anyway, but tell the therapist. You have to tell someone, or it's going to hurt you way worse than the way they hurt you. When it gets too be too much, do not self medicate. Work out at the gym, walk around the block a million times until your too tired to think. Volunteer with homeless dogs or anything, just to have some stillness in your mind. Learn everything that can get lost, from me. Twenty years ago, I should have just screamed, I should have fought, hit the guy with anything I could put my hands on. When I got home and my mom was too passed out to take care of me, I should have just screamed then too. Just screamed at her "wake up, be my Mom just effing once". But she was dulling her pain away in alcohol and I was too selfish to care. Then the day after and every single day tell something to someone to fix my own self. All this insight now is just cliche Monday-morning quarterback. But if you do the same thing I did for twenty years, you will be sitting in the same place I am now. Please get the help that I didn't, you really deserve it. You could be so much more happy if you just take care of your self first. Thank you for listening.

Love lost and a LLBean handbag

Love lost and a LLBean handbag

                 I still see Sam, the rescue dog from SPCA, flinch in his sleep. I haven't seen that since the months after we got him. He had been abused and was found on the the side of a country road almost starved to death. It took months for him overcome the abuse. Now all the stress is back. His skin is rashy red and a patch of hair is missing where he can bite the same spot over and over, even though I can't see any fleas through his white fur. The breakup that so many people in my husbands life find amusing or justified, is more than just the gossip to giggle about over the water cooler. I am a human being that was in the hospital while my husband was trying to get a date from two co workers in the same hospital that he married me in, in the chapel. It was a sweet emotional small service, I cried and I watched him tear up when the reverend said in sickness and in health. It was two days before my hysterectomy by a cancer specialist. I married him with my Mothers wedding ring, I thought it would last forever and I used her ring. Now what? I have a nasty break up, so nasty that the big screen tv was smashed on the back porch just so I could not keep it. I have bills that didn't get paid way before I was rude to his best friend. I have a LLBean handbag monogrammed with "Mrs Sidell"; I wanted to carry my love for him, out there, huge, in big letters. I wanted in sickness and in health, until death due us part. Not marry me when I have tumors then try to get a date while I'm in the hospital, still thinking he is my husband and reading the intent to divorce on Facebook when I finally get released. Everybody has problems, why can't therapy be a solution instead of hate and gossip. Therapy is cheaper than divorce. I know all the fix it solutions are gone, but I still have a broken tv to clean up, a handbag with a name I don't get to keep, and my Moms wedding ring for a marriage that died as abruptly as a tornado. Now what?