Bad Headspace Period

I fancy I am a strong person.  I've been through crises and tragedies and near death experiences and come out the other side.  I have never been a 'bitter' person but have always been 'better'.  But right now I am not in a good headspace.  I am struggling with anxiety.  I've succumbed to the need to sleep by resorting to a mild anxiety pill nightly.  Thankfully sensitive to medications I can take a ridiculously tiny dose and be asleep within minutes.  I don't dare take the stuff during the day to fight off anxiety because I am too groggy on even the tiny dose to appear anything less than doped up.

That said, I find that so many triggers are popping me into a nasty angry flashback type thing.  Do I need mental health help?  Probably but having been through counseling too many times I just don't feel up to finding the right sort of person to help me.  Can I just say that too often they have their own agendas they are working out and tend not to 'hear' what is going on?  Truth.  And some are keen to form co-dependent relationships and frankly I've had enough of those without paying someone to join myself too!

But yes, triggers.  We were talking yesterday, my husband and I, about a documentary he'd seen on Pearl Harbor and how this couple had gone there rather by accident on their way to another destination (he was military) but were put off there due to her extreme motion sickness which the sea voyage had triggered.  It was really an interesting story he was telling me but immediately at the mention of motion sickness my mind reeled back to a trip I took with Mama, my youngest daughter, my niece to go to a B&B in the mountains and ride a train across the state line and back again. 

The trip was a fiasco.  For one thing, my niece is 'golden child' (or was at that time...) and did no wrong and was catered too endlessly.  I can handle Mama spoiling someone as I've watched her do that my whole life long.  I didn't even resent that it wasn't my child being spoiled.  Again accustomed to it and all that.  But, BUT my niece had motion sickness.  She had always had it.  Her mom used to make long trips to take her to see her other grandmother and would always give her medication before the trip so that they could manage the trip.  

So this place was in the mountains, a four/five hour drive away and my niece was miserable the whole trip up, with nausea etc. I felt sorry for her, truly.  There is nothing worse than a five hour journey when you feel genuinely ill. However, Mama refused to give her any medication for motion sickness.  I'd suggested we buy dramamine and give her, but no.

The day we returned home, for reasons known only to herself, Mama insisted we take a long ride up and over a mountain instead of the rather straight roadways we'd taken up to the destination.  I suggested she give niece dramamine.  She refused.  "I don't want her doped up!"  Well as we went around dozens of hairpin and 'S' curves, the little girl got well and truly sick and threw up.  At which point my daughter immediately also got sick, mostly out of sympathy than being ill.  Mama was livid.

  We found a fast food place, got the girls and car cleaned up and I demanded that Mama give niece a dose of dramamine right away.  Yes, she went to sleep and slept part of the way home but for heavens sake she missed NOTHING but being horribly nauseous for a couple of hours and made the last leg of the trip home just fine.  

The truth is this too is typical of a narcissist.  They are so determined they are going to be in control and MAKE someone do as they want them to do rather than allow anything outside help.  And then when things don't go as they want them to it's every one else's fault.  In this instance she'd blamed my daughter for being sick and me because the girls had both wanted breakfast at the B&B.

So why the angst attached to something that admittedly occurred 20 years ago?  Why the deep visceral anger that rose up?  I don't know...I really don't.  

Having read and listened to others say how their own narcissistic parents spoke to them, having heard the EXACT same words spoken as to what was said and what was done, you'd think we'd all look at each other, shrug and say, "I guess I just had a normal childhood."  But we didn't.  I didn't.  I was invalidated at every turn.  I wasn't allowed an opinion or a choice that wasn't hers.  I was treated differently than the boys.  I had a load of responsibilities and expectations dumped on my shoulders.  I was told constantly how horrible a person I was, how ugly I was, how disappointing I was.  And in the end, I felt I was unwanted, unloved, unlovable, stupid, selfish, hateful and worth nothing except the labor of my hands and even so I was bone lazy for all that I worked constantly and had no life to call my own at all.   I wasn't even allowed privacy.  I couldn't lock my bedroom door when getting dressed.  I couldn't keep my journals safe from prying eyes.  I'd hide them in deep dark recesses that were damned near impossible to get to and have my own words quoted to me at the dining table...That was my childhood. 

In the end, it's not just what happened twenty years ago.  It's a lifetime of being ill treated and   

I know that everyone comes out of childhood with some tragedy and some angst.  It's all part of the separation thing that is so necessary but in my case there was separation at a very very young age.   There was a message, not covert nor subtle that something was wrong with ME.  And it took me forever to get to the point to see how deeply she affected my life with her rules and regulations and control and how she affected my relationships with everyone about me.

I haven't seen her since the party.  I haven't been to visit.   I've struggled with this, I really have.  This week she texted me.  It's always the same.  "Hope you are well. Love you."   Had I called her I'd have gotten an earful of her complaints and a screamfest.  I know this because that is how it always works.  So I ignored it.  But I resented her breaking into my day.  Truth.  I resented it.  

And then on Thursday she texted and called twice.  I didn't answer the phone nor return her calls but did reply to her text.  Her tv was out, had gone out the night before.  She wanted to get Netflix since she hated her cable.  I told her honestly "You won't like Netflix."  That was all I said.  Now she's paying $200 a month for the cable/phone/internet that she doesn't use (only uses cable)...Had she called cable company and reported the outage?  Likely not.  This is part of her way of not dealing with things and demanding that others do it while proclaiming that she wants to 'stay independent' when in fact she's leaning on others for the most basic things.  I don't know who she has her service with.  I don't know their phone number.  I don't have her account information. If asked for any of this, or asked if she'd called to report it I know the answer would have been no.   But had I taken it on and done all of this, she'd have thanked me in one breath and immediately complained about every factor of the solution and at some point would say...'because you chose..." , "because you told them..." etc.   

Case in point a few months ago she wanted a new lipstick.  We stood before the counter and I held out several.  She INSISTED on a horrible purple color.  I told her, "No Mama.  Not with your complexion.  It's all wrong." "It's what I want!  You don't know what you're talking about!"  So she bought it.  And each time she's put it on, she's looked perfectly horrid.  And each time she's said "That lipstick you chose is all wrong for me!  I hate it!  I wish we'd gotten something else."   And I simply said to her, "That lipstick YOU chose is indeed horrible."  Until I recognized that she has to make it my choice, my mistake because she can't admit she's made one.

In February when her W-2 and 1095 hadn't arrived she decided that she just wouldn't pay taxes this year since they hadn't sent her stuff.  When I told her she needed to call, she said that the queue required her to wait 20 minutes and she had better things to do with her time!  And she'd cussed out someone who had returned her call when she'd left her number.  Is this new behavior?  No.  She's been doing this for years, for as long as I've known her.  She NEVER has any patience for things that are perfectly normal.  

My daughter went over in April, and  hearing that she hadn't done these things to insure she had information required, did it all and filed her taxes in under an hour.  But in the meantime, Mama had continued to refuse to do anything at all about it, even though only she knows information that was required to get these documents.

And so I didn't suggest I'd take care of her tv woes.  

Am I in a negative space because of Mama?  Not entirely.  Some of it is just frustration and irritation and the current news and trying to cope with life period.  

Part of what I'm doing to cope is allowing myself to sleep at night.  I've had sleep issues forever.  Taking that tiny little half dosage of a small anti-anxiety tablet lets me slide off into sleep and I sleep most of the night and go back to sleep.   And I'm sleeping in of a morning if I find it's possible.  Most days it is.

I'm also not letting things slide when others cross a boundary or try to shut me down.  I'm standing up for what I want in some important matters.  I'm going back to writing in my journal to clear my brain.  I don't know why I've been so resistant to this of late.  I need that space to dump things out.  Out they do less harm than in.  And I'm going to work on making other changes.

I've been reading more.  Fiction.  The sort you can lose yourself in which is much needed.  I just finished a book and am well begun on another.

I'm reminding my husband that we can DO things.  We can go for a ride.  We can picnic.  We don't have to run an errand or shop or eat out.  But we can do things, just he and I.

And I'm doing the little things I've put off doing which are tasks just not necessarily the projects I want to be working on at this time.  Yesterday I gathered fallen branches to make tomato cages and to shore up the lilies that had bent to the ground with the rains we've had.  I bought more flower seeds when I found a supply and I mean to get them planted.  I've rearranged two walls of pictures/objects in my home that were nagging at me because they were 'off' somehow.     

Changes to help ease my sense of frustration and "Ican'titis" that has plagued me for several months just now.  That's the sorts of things I'm doing to try to get over this hump of irritation and frustration.  

And I'm trying hard to take time to dump out these toxic anger causing memories that I have apparently buried and which keep popping up through the surface like a very nasty creature that makes me recoil at the depth of emotion attached to them.  So I might be writing more here.  I said I didn't want to make my mother out to be the bandit and myself the victim, and I don't.  But if I don't dump these things which I've kept tucked inside without ever saying them out loud (which for me is writing) I'm going to die from the poison within.  And it must be got out.  It has to be got out.   This has to be my safe zone.  I may get comments but they don't come to my email.  I don't even want to promote this particular blog in anyway.  It's meant for me, not for anyone else.

But most of all, I'm giving myself some grace.  I was so weepy yesterday and in thinking why can't I just be a happy joyful person I remembered that in June, we not only have a plethora of family birthdays we have a plethora of loss.  I have a plethora of loss.   I lost my grandfather and my dearly loved father in law in June.  I lost a dear friend and a brother to suicide in June.  And tagging along at the very beginning of July, I lost my grandmother in July.  And my season of illness in which I had so many things go terribly wrong occurred five years ago in June.   So, yeah.  A little grace for the tragedy of life in June.