The Last Straw

This is part 2 of the excerpt "The Last Week" detailing the end of my marriage. Part 1 is available here.

I sat in the bend the huge blue sectional, with mountains of laundry piled up on either side and the baby in bouncer in front of me, and cried. It seemed like I was crying all the time. Ronnie and I fought constantly. He hadn't quit drinking when I had moved in, like he had promised, or when we got married, or after the honeymoon. Now our son was born and I was struggling to find a way to keep our rent and electric bills paid, but there was perpetually a 12-pack of Budweiser in the fridge. When we'd first met, he was drinking Miller High Life and other cheaper beers, but since we got married, he was enjoying the fruits of my better paying job.

I was in pain, with my right ankle propped up in front of me. I had spent the day taking care of Little Man and doing laundry - five loads of the Little Man's cloth diapers, my spit-up and milk stained shirts, and Ronnie's dirty work clothes and aprons - by crawling from the couch to the stacked washer/dryer in our front closet. I'd never wanted a cast so badly in my life.

...

I looked at the clock on the bedside table - 2 am. I was alone in the bed. Little Man was sleeping in a plastic laundry basket lined with blankets beside me and Ronnie was gone. (I'd planned on co=sleeping and we hadn't bought a crib, but then I'd been worried about dropping my son off the bed, or else of Ronnie drunkenly smothering him if I placed him between us.) I sat up in the bed and used the manual breast pump to collect a 6 ounce bottle, then crawled along towards the kitchen to put the bottle in the fridge.

I came out of the room and saw the kitchen light on and heard voices. What the hell was RJ doing over here at 2 in the bleeding morning? I hastily buttoned my pajama top and, using the wall beside me, rose up to standing and started to hobble their way. It wasn't RJ - it was some man I'd never met before. He and Ronnie didn't notice me at first.

*Sniff!* Ronnie straightened up and caught my eye, a rolled up dollar stuck in his nose, making him look utterly stupid and pathetic. It wasn't the worst thing he'd done, by far, it was simply the last. He'd promised to quit drinking, and had lied. He'd spent money we didn't have on things we didn't need. He'd yelled at me and humiliated me and stolen my post-partum Percocet. He'd cashed in Little Man's change jar just the week before for weed money. I didn't have the word for it yet, but he'd raped me too. Doing lines of blow with some guy I didn't know off my kitchen counter at 2 o'clock in the morning wasn't the worst thing Ronnie did in our three-month marriage, but it was the last.

I don't remember if I scolded or screamed or just gave him a look of disgust and crawled back to bed. The next day, with the help of my sister's husband, I moved back home to my mother's.

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"I Resent You"

It was Mother's Day and I had saved up to buy my mom a 1/16th sheet cake with frosting roses on top. I didn't know at the time my mom didn't like cake. Walking up the concrete exterior steps to our apartment, I tripped while coming through the fire door. Splat! The cake was ruined, squashed and malformed, and I started crying and groveling at my mom's feet, freaked out.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry," I cried to my mother with wild eyes full of fear. She looked down at me with disgust in her own eyes.

"Get up," she said. "Don't DO that!" I guess "that" must have meant my sobbing. I've always had a great deal of distress when confronted with broken or ruined things, and holidays have always been occasions of huge social pressure and disappointment. My behavior obviously disturbed her. She opened the apartment door and went inside, closing it behind her. I scraped up the blobs of icing from the concrete landing with my hands, and shoved it back into the smashed box.

My emotions have always scared my mom. She simply could not handle me crying, or having PMS, or being anxious. I felt like it was my job to not have any feelings, and from around the age of 12, when I smashed that cake till after she kicked me and my two year old out of her home for the crime of me having PTSD and telling her I had an eating disorder at 25, I failed at it miserably.

When I was 24, my mom finally began to go to counseling, something she had undoubtedly needed since she was a small girl. One day after about six months of this she came home with a new breakthrough.

"I resent you," she told me, sounding surprised by this information. I was flabbergasted. I said something clever along the lines of "D'uh." How had she not known this all along? It had been obvious to me for years.

Contempt is a hard thing to keep under wraps, and she hadn't done nearly as good a job of hiding this from me as she apparently did hiding it from herself.

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Pregnancy

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As a child, I knew I'd give birth at home. I knew home birth was safer than hospital birth - why go to a hospital, full of germs and disease and people, when I could have my baby at home, delivered by my own grandmother who delivered me and my siblings and cousins? I felt quite a lot of pride at having been born at home myself, although it always bothered me a bit that no one knew exactly when I was born (especially once I hit teen years and became interested in astrology. How on earth was I going to make a star chart when all my mother knew was that I'd been born "sometime in the afternoon, between 2 and 6 probably"?)

When I found at I was pregnant at 22, I had a lot of hard decisions to make. Would I get back together with my exboyfriend I'd broken up with the day before, father of my fetus? Would we just date or would we get married? Where would I get money? How on earth was I going to tell my mother? The extra question I had was, where would my baby be born?

I knew I wasn't healthy. I'd been doing drugs with my boyfriend (which was why I left him) and I'd been suffering a particularly bad bout of anorexia. I also knew there was a good chance I was fairly far along in my pregnancy. While my periods had changed, and for the last two months even stopped, I'd assumed it was amorrhea caused by my low weight. I decided to go see a doctor, to at least see how far along I was and whether or not the fetus was healthy.

I tried applying for Medicaid for Pregnancy, but there was a funny hitch in the process: You had to have "proof of pregnancy" and apparently the stick test I'd peed on didn't count. I had to have something signed by an MD saying I was pregnant in order to get the insurance help and food stamps. Fortunately, a wonderful man by the name of Dr. Arkin was running the Peace of Mind Clinic within the local Catholic Charities office at the time. The sole purpose of that clinic was to help girls and women get their proof of pregnancy and to assist them with the Medicaid application process.

I sat in a terrible waiting room - full of posters reminding me that "When a pregnant woman drinks, she never drinks alone" and copies of What to Expect When You're Expecting. I waited in the ripped leather chair while two girls before me went into the ultrasound room. When it was my turn, Dr. Arkin's wife cum ultrasound technician cheerfully told me, "It's been a twin day today. The last two girls were having twins!* Let's see if you are, too!" This was already a dread and fear. My boyfriend's father had been born a twin (although his twin had died sometime in childhood, and he was now an only child.)

I walked into the exam room, full of trepidation. She bustled around and chatted amiably, as I stripped and put on that horrid paper gown. Her husband came in and asked me to scoot down to the edge of the of the exam table. Feet in stirrups, completely alone, and with this bubbly woman going on about the miracle of twins, I bit my bottom lip and waited.

"Oh, look," Dr. Arkin told me, "You're having a boy." I turned my head and wept for joy, relieved to only be carrying one, and already in love with the tiny life in my womb. Wow. I stared, mesmerized by the ultrasound image. There he was - head and body, limbs and even sex organs. There was nothing obviously wrong with him, and somehow he'd survived the first 4 and a half months of my ignorance and negligence. He was *beautiful*. Dr. Arkin let me know that I was 21 weeks pregnant, and that my boy would be due on August 30th, just five days after his father's birthday.

I put my pants back on and collected the ultrasound pictures, including the one where Mrs. Arkin had rather gleefully circled the image of his penis, with a label "It's a boy!" She told me, "The daddies are always proud of these" which threw me a bit. (Are mothers "proud" of the size of their daughters' labia?) We sat down in a conference room down the hall, and Dr. Arkin helped me fill out my Medicaid and Food Stamp application.

"You need to gain weight," he told me, looking at my 5'3" 104 lbs frame. "You need to gain 50 pounds, and you need to do it yesterday." That was my battle for the next four months, trying to put on and keep on enough weight to make sure the fetus' brain developed properly.

I quit smoking pot, and mostly quit smoking cigarettes. (Yeah, I snuck a few here and there, most memorably on my wedding day, early in my third trimester.) I laid off the diet sodas, energy drinks, and diet pills I'd relied on to get me through school, and dropped out of college. I changed everything about my body, from what I put into my body, to how long I kept it there (no bulimia for me, as the electrolyte imbalance that would cause could be extremely damaging to the fetus), to what size I tried to be. I dropped bad habits, bad friends, but regretfully, picked up again the bad relationship I had with my ex-boyfriend. We fought constantly, and he did all he could to punish me. Secretly, I think he was thrilled. What better way to get me back, to trap me for good, than a baby?

I tried to put off the wedding. "Let's wait till he's born and old enough to be our ring-bearer! Then it will be our whole family," I said, knowing in the hidden honest parts of myself that Ronnie was in no way prepared to be a father, and not sure how much I wanted him for a husband. But he pushed. His mother pushed. My family (except my mother) pushed. I caved.

We were married during my 7th month of pregnancy, and I felt like a walrus, waddling down the aisle in my sister's borrowed and altered wedding dress, in one inch heels that were absolutely killing my feet.** We said the vows, tied the knot (literally, the priest's sash), and I threw the bouquet. We took pictures with both our wedding ring hands resting on my domed belly, featuring our future child as an unbodied member of the wedding party.

People have this week how I could feel so differently about these two pregnancies, but really they had nothing in common. If anything, my life conditions were exponentially worse for bringing a child into the world back then than they are today. I was poor, unemployed, single, unhappy, and underweight. Yet I knew I wanted him. Also, frankly, I was so far along by the time I learned I was pregnant, optional abortion wasn't really on the table anymore.

I found out I was pregnant back then because for some reason, my weight loss platued and my goal of getting below 100 pounds suddenly seemed impossible. But the real moment of truth came, not when I took the home pregnancy test, but a day before then, when I felt something odd and firm beneath my skin (that'd be my uterus). Within 48 hours of taking the test, I felt the first kicks. Even still, I knew he wasn't a baby *yet* and that there was a good chance he might never become one.

I struggled to stay healthy, while planning a wedding (on an extremely lean budget), fighting with my fiancee, fighting with my mother, and moving three times. I didn't always win that fight, and I spent days and days in the maternity ward emergency room, on IV drips and supplements. My iron levels were low, but the prenatal vitamins with iron in them made me throw up. I was living off pizza, ice cream, and Subway sandwiches, but I couldn't keep weight on to save my life (or my fetus'). A week after my honeymoon, I went into the ER with a fever and a stomach flu, and over the course of that week I lost 10 pounds through vomit and diarrhea. I wondered if either one of us would make it out alive.

At 41 weeks, 2 days, at 6 o'clock in the morning on a Thursday, I started having contractions. We timed them at about eight minutes apart, and waited till the doctor's office was open to give her a call. Once my Medicaid was approved, I was able to start going to regular prenatal visits, and found a fantastic former-nurse OB/GYN and mother to deliver my baby. We'd picked her because she was near the hospital, and we'd picked that hospital (about half an hour away) because it had the best neonatal intensive care unit in the region. Her nurse told me they couldn't make recommendations on whether or not it was time to go to the hospital until they'd examined me, so I woke up my husband and had him ride with me to the doctor. (He had multiple DUIs from before meeting me, and didn't have a license at any point during our relationship, a secret he had me keep from my family.)

[Okay folks, sorry, but I've gotta go make dinner and do those other mommy things. My total labor took 98 hours, so I imagine writing it will take at least a few pages. I'll try to pick this up tomorrow or on Tuesday. Be sure to keep an eye out for my live appearance on CNN this Monday, 3/8/2010 at 10 am EST.]








*Clearly, HIPPA was not her primary concern that day.

** I routinely wear 4" heels without incident. Heck, I used to have a pair of 7" platforms I only wore when going out with a gay friend who was 6'9".

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First Love

We were finally back in Florida for good, and the weather was just starting to warm up enough to go swimming. The clubhouse at Giggy's trailer park threw a pizza party for the teenagers, with pizza and sodas and the usual leather-skinned crotchety, chain-smoking pool monitors. I had met a few kids the summers earlier, but I didn't know most of the other teenagers. One of my grandmother's followers, Mary had just moved down to the trailer park with her two kids, and the older one was a girl between my age and my sister Esther's.

She was the tallest girl I had ever met, at maybe 5'10", with sheets of long, uncut blonde hair. The first time I had met her a week or two earlier in Giggy's living room, she'd been wearing a prairie dress and Birkenstocks, with a lace kerchief on top of her head. She looked *Amish* and Gig wanted me to introduce her to other kids I didn't even know very well myself. I got to the pool in my new black underwire two-piece suit, and groaned when I saw her in a long green one piece, her lilly white skin contrasting sharply with the green. Within an hour, I'd overheard at least two people call her "the jolly green giant." Still, I had been new plenty of times myself, so I went over and treaded water with her for the first half hour or so. I got up and made the rounds, introducing myself to people.

I would just walk up to someone and stick out my hand, "Hi, I'm Angie. I'm new. How are you?" and within another half hour I felt I'd met enough people, I could spend a little more time playing wallflower with the Amish girl. "You've only been here an hour and you've met more people than I've met all week," she said in something like suspicion mixed with awe. I shrugged.

"You just gotta talk to people," I said, gesturing to the deck where most everyone was congregated around the pizza boxes and coolers, and that's when I saw him. He was short - my height - and thin, and since he didn't have a shirt on, I could see his chest and stomach muscles were beginning to define. But that's not what I noticed first - I saw his eyes. They were gorgeous, and pitch-black. I had never seen anything so beautiful and if there is such a thing as love at first sight, that was it.

I got out of the pool to grab a can of grape soda. As I walked back towards the pool, he turned around and stuck out his hand. "I'm Micah" he said. He was the only person that day to introduce himself to me first, and I was so glad he did. Gosh, he was cute! We started dating almost immediately after, in one of those experiences so seemless, I can hardly remember how exactly we went from meeting to dating.

He was a drummer, but he and a friend had also started a Youth Civic club in the trailer park, and they had petitioned the park management until they'd been able to get us a basketball court. We would go out there and shoot hoops with his friends, or else hang out at the pool. I decided to throw a Makeout Party, because there never seemed to be enough time for those matters. I invited my rather slutty friend Christy to be my cousin Jason's date, and the no-longer-at-all-Amish girl and her surfer boyfriend, and of course, Micah.

The night came and I was so excited. It was before I was allowed to wear makeup, and I didn't want my grandmother to notice anything different before she went to bed, so I used baby paper and Vaseline to do myself up, and sprayed some of the little sample bottle of perfume I found in the back of the drawer. The trailer had a big screened-in porch, almost the full width and length of the trailer, and Gig had several wicker loveseats with pillows out there. It was a beautiful night, and her trailer was on the edge of a greenbelt of protected land, so it felt private in the dark on the porch.

Jason was staying the night already. Chrissy & __ & Charles arrived, and after awhile the two couples began making out. Where was Micah? I had told them midnight, because all of our parents would be asleep then, and I figured everyone could get out clean that way. But Micah didn't come. I was crushed. Didn't he *want* to make out with me? After everyone left, and Jason went inside, I couldn't sleep. I threw on my shoes and slipped out the door and walked across the park towards his trailer.

I stood outside and knocked on his bedroom window. His cousin opened it. "What?" he muttered angrily through the screen.

"Get Micah. It's important." I waited. Micah came to the window. He told me that he hadn't been able to get out, that first his mom had been awake and then his stepdad. We said goodbye and I love you, and I walked home.

The next morning, Micah and his stepdad John came over. I was standing at the top of the three steps from the porch to the trailer, and Gig was in front of me on the porch. John stood filling the screen doorway, with Micah half-hidden behind him. He told me grandmother that some floozy whore had shown up at his house last night, banging on his windows. He said he thought I was an intruder and it would've been in his rights to shoot me, and that if he ever saw me hanging around "his son" again, he would.

I was grounded the rest of the summer - confined to my room, and at my mom's house, where I had no friends. I was allowed to leave my room twice a day to use the bathroom and get food and juice from the fridge, but there was no going outside, no talking on the phone, and no watching TV. I made mixed tapes - dozens of them. I sat hunched over my radio waiting to press the record button when a good song came on.

By the time I made it out of my room and back to the trailer park, Chrissy and the others were telling me he had been planning on breaking up with me anyway. "Oh. Well, yeah, I was gonna break up with him, too" I lied, heartbroken.

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There is a part 2 to this story, and it's both sweeter and sadder. Another six months later we reuinted, found out we'd both been saving face and neither really wanted to break up with the other. We carried on a clandestine, secret relationship for a couple of intense months. Then one night, his mom had had enough or his brother had, and her boyfriend became unconscious somehow, with the three of them in it and gone. He disappeared one day 13 years ago and I never saw or heard from him again.


And this is why I love the internet. Not only did it help me learn my grandmother was a cult leader - and meet all of you. I found him on Facebook. :D We spent about two hours this morning talking and catching up. So, expect more episodes from the trailer years in upcoming weeks on the blog :D

*Yes, I just have a blank for her name. Because I keep meaning to ask her if I can use her real name, or if she has a first choice for psuedonym. I try to give anyone who hasn't started a cult or killed their kid the option of a different name in the book.

She ended up being one of my best friends I've ever had, someone I could tell anything to. She and my sister were, if anything, closer and my sister's best friend in college reminded me of her a lot. She definitely came into herself and got out of the prairie garb and is absolutely gorgeous and a really fun person to boot. (I just feel bad writing my judgmental child thoughts down about someone I find so neat-o now!)

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Trippin'

It was around 6:30 in the morning, and we were sprawled about the room, giggling to ourselves. Heath lay on the couch, chewing on the keychain he'd steadily destroyed throughout the night, and Ron and Amber had flung themselves onto their bed. James and i had made a nest of cushions and pillows and blankets on the floor of Ron &

Image by radiospike photography via Flickr

Amber's efficiency apartment. The light were all out save the fiber optic Christmas tree (or "Hannukah bush as Amber preferred) and we laughed for ten minutes or more at the idea of what a bunch of kids standing outside at their bus stop would think if they could see the five of us. James wrapped his arms around me, and began to nibble at my ears and neck.

Electrical explosions were going off, just beneath my skin, and the soft stroking of his wet tongue along my neck made me think of fireworks. He was testing my resolve. It was early on the morning of January 2nd, and he was hoping to end my New Year's resolution to be celibate for all of 2000. He failed, but I thoroughly enjoyed his attempts to tempt me from my course. Never mind that I was coming down from my first dose of paper acid, in a room with three other people was not how I was going to go. I thought over the previous night.

James was the only one I had known already. Ron & Amber were his friends, and Heath was one of theirs. No one else in the room had a car, and I had been willing to drive Ron to Sarasota, an hour away, to meet the guy who sold it, so my acid trip was free, once they gave me $5 for gas. When we got back to Cookie Cutter Cove Apartments* where he lived with his girlfriend in a one-room apartment, Ron snipped up the tiny slip of paper into little squares and divvied them up between us. Only after they were all in our mouths did we realize that James had been left out of the occassion. Not to worry, Ron was a pot dealer and there were forty-five pounds or so of weed in his closet - he pulled out an ounce and gifted it to James as an apology for the oversight. I smiled, thinking of how the other three had periodically referred to James as "sober guy," I kept pointing out, "He's not actually sober - just more sober than us" which always brought on a new fit of giggles from the room. The giggles! Why hadn't anybody told me how wonderfully giggly you could feel? At the beginning of the night, as the drugs kicked in, we had laughed for over an hour, over nothing, through tears. I wouldn't have been able to stop if I had wanted to, but why would I want to? This felt great.

We had played with the lights and with textures and at my visual peak I had been "walking through the garden on the ceiling." I remember Ron had pulled the bush out of its stand, casting the color changing lights onto the walls and ceiling. I laid back on the couch and saw how the color played across the popcorn above me, which twisted and morphed and became a collage of leaves - every size and shape and color, big tropical ones, tiny oak leaves,palm fronds, and pine needles. I strolled through the garden in my mind, smiling at all the leaves in turn.

At one point in the evening, it had all been too much for me. The tiny apartment grew stifling, the smoke from five people dragging down a cigarette every ten minutes was crazy thick, and I just needed a moment from all the weirdness - the assault of sights and sounds in the room, so I pushed through the curtain into the corner kitchenette and towards the front door announcing, "I'll be right back. I just need to go find the real world for a moment" - breathe some of the cool January night air outside, smoke a clove without having to give away four of them, maybe just listen to the night. From behind me a voice cackled, "There IS no real world - you're tripping!"

Whoa. It was such a profound statement. My back against the wall, I slid down to the floor, thinking. After a minute or so, I became aware of the hum of the fridge, and after a few mintues more, I started to harmonize with the fridge. I wanted to commune with it, be one with it, sing with it. "Hmmmmm" I intoned, sitting on the floor, my face pressed to the fridge door and my arms hugged around it. Eventually, Heath came into the room to refill his glass of water from the tap, and he asked me what I was doing, and I rejoined the room.

I drifted off to sleep that morning, as the rising sun peaked through the bent and broken blinds, and James made my nerves sing.

Uh, drugs are bad kids. Really. This passage is necessary for the book though. I didn't just do drugs to rebel or make Baby Jesus cry - I was actually usually trying very hard not to get caught. The part they never seem to mention in after school specials or rehab is how much fun you can have. Would I do it now? No, probably not. If I was going to, it would certainly have to be planned (like, hotel room and sitter and carton of smokes planned) and frankly, I don't even have those kinds of friends anymore, and doing drugs was always an incredibly social experience for me. I got into XTC because I loved the "PLUR" (peace love unity respect) movement and wanted to be friends with the raver kids, not the other way around. Just be responsible people, okay?

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Prologue

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Anteaters, the book *is* coming along. I went and looked at just how much this morning, and I'm encouraged once again that writing a book is a task I can accomplish. Especially now that we've settled into more of a routine.

I am going to need to pull back on a few things. As fun as they are, I'm probably only going to do one more Messin' with Mormons for the next few months, and I'm going to put a hiatus on counter-apologetics, too. I'll finish up the "E" from woman's role in the home, but I don't know how soon I'll move onto any others.

I think I needed the time to heal my head up a bit. I seem to be doing better now that I've gone back off the meds so fuck it. I'm not gonna kill myself trying to get a doctor to see me only to have to go on and then off meds again, due to a shitty insurance situation. (I got dropped from Medicaid for honestly reporting my unemployment earnings. Apparently in Florida, if your income is above $250/month, you do not qualify.)

So in the spirit of getting back into the book, here's the prologue I wrote a while ago.

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Don't Go Breaking My Heart

My eighth grade boyfriend Chris (the second one - out of an eventual eight) cheated on me with my friend Amy Christian*. Apparently she gave him a blow job. I heard this not from him, and certainly not from her, but seeing as how she had done it during choir class, on her knees while everyone stood around her singing, I heard about it from quite a few people. (This was before everyone had a camera phone, so I was spared at least from seeing it myself.)

I came to school the next day, filled with righteous indignation and wearing my sexiest dress. I had only just started wearing dresses again that year. I stopped as soon as I quit going to Christian school, and quit being required to wear one on Wednesdays for Chapel.

He knew I knew. How could I not? He stood there in front of me on the courtyard where we had sat together with our friends, where he had felt me up under the table while we laughed and joked and talked about music and how much our parents sucked. Chris stood there begging an apology with his face, and trying to foist a small white teddy bear holding a red plush heart on me. He squeezed it and it let out a high and tinny sound, like a singing birthday card or the music in a Japanese Nintendo game.

I didn't even have words. My rage was primal, animal. It wasn't the kind of rage that spoke; it was the kind that growled. I snatched the bear and snarled at him, then flounced off to my locker. Did he seriously think I would forgive him if he bought me some gas station teddy bear with his cigarette money? Not only was that totally insulting, almost more than the blow job even, but the damn thing sounded annoying. Somehow I made it through that day, and onto the bus home from school. I kept myself busy, watching TRL and talking on the phone or else chatting with people on AIM.

My mom was out of town then. She has gone to at least two conferences a year for as long as I can remember. Even as a grad student, my mom missed Easter every single year, because an annual conference is held that week, and it's cheapest to fly on Easter Sunday. My sister Esther and I weren't very close at that point, and we each sort of kept to our rooms (mine a 10' by 10' office and hers a 10' x 16' bedroom the same size as our mom's.)

Esther and I made and ate our meals separately, like always. We hadn't been forced to do family dinners since I was ten, and we both knew how to use the microwave. It wouldn't have occurred to me that eating the meal with someone would be better in some way. (I still get very impatient after I'm done eating, when people want to loiter at the restaurant. The inner diner waitress in me is screaming, "What are you - French?!?")

At bedtime I started looking for some scissors. I found the rusty orange handled ones we kept for opening boxes in the junk drawer. I took them to my small square bedroom, decorated with letters from my friends, taped open, in a desperate subconscious attempt to get my mother to notice me, and notice the danger I was in.

I set up everything I would need on the bed - scissors, a lighter, a hammer, a cutting board, a box of love letters, a trash can, a mix tape, and the bear. I climbed over the pile to the head of my bed by my dresser, and began.

I ripped open the right side of the bear and yanked the small plastic voice box out. I tossed the bear aside momentarily to focus on the white circle in front of me. I placed it on the cutting board and smashed it with the hammer over and over, till the music stopped and it resembled a squashed bug more than a piece of electronic equipment. I leaned over and put the hammer, cutting board, and carcass at the foot of the bed, and settled back into my spot, cross-legged on my pillows in the corner of my room.

I pulled out all the cotton stuffing, throwing it on the floor off to one side. I had to flip the arms and legs practically inside out to get all of it. Having an idea, I reversed the bear. Looking at it, I suddenly felt much calmer. "Huh," I said aloud. "I invertedted it." I thought my stutter was really funny for some reason and I enjoyed for a moment the sensation of actually being as weird as I felt. I calmly and methodically clipped all the hairs coming through the inside-out bear, and when I got tired of that, I used the scissors to stab and snip the limp and hairless remains. I wasn't sure if voodoo was real or not. I certainly believed in sorcery being both real and demonic. Right then I didn't care. I wanted voodoo to be real. I wanted him to know how much he had betrayed me, but I didn't want to have to tell him. I didn't ever wanna speak to him again.

Once there was really no more bear left to destroy, I moved on to the mix tape. For some strange reason, Chris really liked Phil Collins and the song "Groovy Kind of Love" was on the tape. I hadn't heard it before and that it was uncomfortably cheesy. The only other song I remember being on there was "Sweet Child of Mine" by Guns N Roses. I pulled the thin, gossamer strand of audio tape, out and out, unrolling it from the spools. Into the trash can it went.

Now it was time for the night's major attraction - the grand finale. I set my small green plastic garbage can, now half full of cotton stuffing, in front of me on the bed, and took his love letters - his painfully misspelled and written in a childish scrawl love letters. He wasn't exactly a wordsmith and I remember not being that impressed even when I felt all gooey about him, before my supposed friend put her mouth on his cock in front of thirty other kids, and before he didn't stop her at any point in all of this, until after he had come and she had swallowed.

I unfolded the first letter, from the origami-like shape everyone seemed to pass notes in at school.** I held it by one corner and flicked the lighter with my other hand. I let the flame climb onto the paper, and twisted it this way and that, getting the ashes to fly into the trash can. I burned it down till just the one corner remained, and blew it out before the fire could singe me. I did it again. And again. On the fourth letter, I couldn't keep the flame moving the way I wanted it to, and it burned my fingers. I dropped the letter and the fire into the trash can.

Whoosh! The teddy bear stuffing might as well have been made out of lighter fluid or pure oxygen. And suddenly, in a moment of crystal clarity, I realized the exact stupidity of what I was doing. Trapped in on all sides, with a fire in front of me on the bed, I started screaming. "Help! Fire! Water!"

My sister yanked open my door and threw an old plastic yogurt cup filled with water in my general direction. Looking exasperated, she stalked off and slammed the door to her room, to try to go back to sleep. I grabbed the sodden, charred, smoldering remains of the trash can out to the yard, and let it continue melting and warping out there, then set about airing out the house.

My sister never told my mom, or if she did, mom didn't act on the information. I set another fire a year later, trying to perform a magic spell and letting the candles catch my drapes. I had to use the fire extinguisher on that one, and the clean up was a pain, but mom didn't know about that one either. It wasn't until she went to check the extinguisher, six or seven years later, that she realized it was actually near empty.

Maybe my mom should have invaded my privacy, just a little. I certainly shouldn't have gotten away with as much as I did, and she's said herself that she knew about a lot more than she's told me. I had my secrets written on my walls, if only she had looked. I could scarcely have made it more plain to her how very not-okay I was.






Disclaimer: No actual animals were harmed in the making of this memory.





* Yes, her name really was Christian.
** Is this a lost art form now that kids have texting?

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Bible Study

One summer when Esther and I were at the trail park and mom was up in Iowa, Gig left us with our Aunt Sharon for two weeks while she went on a speaking tour in Australia. I had so wanted to go with her, to be the one who sold her books and teaching tapes and carry the suitcases. But I was nine and I had no passport (or ticket) so I stayed.

Our cousin Jason would spent the night with us often for sleepers or just so his mom wouldn't be driving him back and forth. School was out and the trailer park held diversions: the woods, the creek, the pool, the basketball hoop, and even a pool table. Esther and I were close enough in age that we frequently had mutual friends. This was a source of great antipathy between us, and we fought often over which of us had "stolen" the friend of the other.

Sharon had just come back from a year in France, teaching English in a prestigious secondary school. At the moment she didn't have an apartment of her own, so she was staying in the front bedroom of the trailer. Gig was in the back bedroom, so Jason, Esther, and I shared the living room floor. On one of her first days in the country, a week or so earlier, she gave each of the three of us a chocolate liquor. They were disgusting! We liked chocolate but that middle stuff just tasted bad. No one asked for seconds, and none were offered.

Sharon was the epitome of "not a morning person". I believe her exact salutation was, "I haven't had my coffee yet. Don't talk to me." We were young and hyper and allowed to eat whatever we wanted, so we had diets mainly consisting of flavored sugar. Strawberry was my favorite flavor, and I would drink strawberry Juicy-Juice and bagels with strawberry cream cheese, or else strawberry toaster strudels. Esther ate a lot of microwave baked potatoes loaded with cheese and ice cream. Jason went for the ice cream, the popcorn, and the potato chips. We all drank as much soda as we wanted from the stash of 2-liters in the kitchen island.

One afternoon about a week into Gig's trip, Sharon strode out to the living room, angrily yielding her box of French chocolates. "One of you stole candy. Who did it?" Bewildered, my cousin, sister, and I each professed we did not know what had happened to her foul-tasting boozy chocolate. For whatever reason, Sharon believed Jason when he said he didn't do it. But she was convinced my sister or I had. So she punished us for not coming forward and admitting who had done it.

"Esther, I want you to look up verses on gluttony and write them down for me. Angie, I want you to look up verses on being a liar and a thief, and write those down, too." Then she locked us up - me in my grandmother's bathroom with a KJV, notebook, and a pen, and my sister in my grandmother's adjoining bedroom, with the same equipment. After a while, she took Jason down to the clubhouse to shoot pool, and left us locked in. It was but the work of a moment for me to at least open the bathroom door, and come into the bedroom where Esther sat. We questioned each other seriously, but also believed each other readily. To this day, we still both deny it.

We were both horribly offended by the punishment, both that it was done without evidence of either of us having done anything wrong, and that it was tailored to insult each of us in specific ways. I did not yet have trouble with kleptomania or shoplifting, but I have wondered since if her actions that day didn't contribute to my perception of myself as a thief. My mom was already telling me on a near daily basis that I was a liar and couldn't be trusted. My sister was an emotional eater, and had just begun to fill out that year. Sharon could scarcely have picked greater weaknesses to exploit, but she held is in contempt, and we had no motivation to please her.

So we carefully went through the Bible and found times where banquets or feasts were praised, and wrote those down for Esther. Then we found times when "thief" was used poetically or metaphorically, and wrote those down for me. We found verses where "lie" referred to sex, not dishonesty. It was legalism at its finest. We followed the absolute letter of the law, and wrote out our 75 assigned verses each, while intentionally not learning any sort of moral lesson from the experience. We won.

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Gig's Stroke

Found this while sifting through old diaries and blog posts.


May 7th, 2006 (community post) "life & death"
So, a bunch of family went to my grandmother's this morning, to do some home repair and other chores for a Mother's Day gift. When my Aunt B and Uncle D got there this morning, however, my Giggy was barely coherent, couldn't get out of bed, and had soiled herself. We think she had a stroke. It took a lot to get her to the hospital (she hates doctors), but she's there now getting a CT scan and a spinal tap.

Now, here's the scary (to me) part: All the responsible people can't help. My Aunt S, brother, and mom are all in Mossouri, where my grandfather is dying (in the next day or so) of Stage 4 Lung Cancer. My sister is at work. My Aunt Z, oldest of my grandmother's children and usually the one to do these things, is bringing home her newly adopted baby boy today, who was born Friday. So, she's a bit busy. Uncle D has to leave town for a week-long business trip. That leaves my Aunt B, who is a lot like me in that we pretty much suck at being the people to make the decisions. We call our older siblings and leave them with the burden of responsibility, of choice. This sucks.

Please pray. Love you all.

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White Wedding

I was seperated but trying to work things out with my then-husband for twice as long as we lived together as man and wife. We'd gotten married for one of the worst reasons: I was pregnant. I didn't want to get married; I tried to put it off. I said, "It'll be great if we wait till the kid is old enough to be ring bearer. Won't they be cute?" What it really meant was "You need more time to sober up before I want to be tied down to you." The combination of pressure from him and my family got to me, and I realized i was going to have to get married. Still, I tried to minimize the wedding. "Let's just go to a courthouse. Or even better, you're mom could marry us. She's a notary." But no - he wanted it all, the big ludicrously white church wedding.

I was seven and a half months pregnant when I waddled down the aisle, my feet killing me in off-white low heels and a slightly-used wedding dress. Shopping for a second-hand maternity wedding dress on Ebay was hell, and it was one of the most depressing things I have ever tried to do. In the end, I was wore my plus-sized sister's wedding dress, with a big silver ribbon tied empire-waist style, above the mound of my belly.

The wedding itself was pretty, on a shockingly small budget ($1,200 for everything, including both rings), but I was far more nervous than happy, and my sense of unease wasn't lifted when I heard from his brother that my now-husband had started drinking at 6 am, before making his way to the church. I had put my foot down very firmly on not serving alcohol at the wedding. His family were all a bunch of lushes who would have drunk us out of rent and electric, and since I was pregnant, I sure as hell wasn't footing the bill for a lot of them to get drunk if I had to be sober. (I think any woman that doesn't get to drink champagne at her wedding should have a bottle to celebrate her divorce.)

We held the reception in the big cafeteria Fellowship Hall in the church, and served pizza and chicken wings from Westshore Pizza, where he worked as a cook. The California style cheesecake my brother-in-law made was the high point of the day, in everyone's mind looking back. (That cake was amazing, and he lost the recipe. *facepalm*) The groom spent far too much talking talking to his old friend Tiffany or "Tiff" as he called her, with a baby voice that made me hate them both. I just wanted to go home and have a guilty cigarette in solitude, but it was a wedding and you're supposed to be happy at weddings. We said our vows in front of our families, God, and an Episcopal priest on July 16th, 2005. My son was born in September, and by Halloween the two of us were living at my mom's.

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Prodigal Daughter

My suicide attempts were never about me being in so much pain, or so miserable. They were about me being dirty, disgusting; it being unbearable that someone as worthless as I dared to breathe and complain, and wouldn't the world be better off without me?

And then of course I felt ashamed for feeling that way. I'd heard that suicide was the single most selfish action a person could ever take, that it was "a permanent solution to a temporary problem", and that it was short-sighted. I'm glad my suicide attempts failed, but I don't think anyone was really trying to help me with the underlying pain and mental abuse that led me to take such extremes.

I rebelled as much as I could. I was the prodigal daughter, only instead of moving out ,I just snuck out the window.I couldn't figure out the balance between the Law and Grace, legalism and hedonism, being washed clean from my sins, and just using my salvation as a "get outta jail free" card. I wanted God to like me, and I wanted to make him happy, but I'd been told time and time again that I could never be good enough. "All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God."

I was a stealth perfectionist. I knew that failing - coming in second - was pathetic. Gig treated consolation prizes and self-esteem with equal measures of scorn and disdain. You only got credit for winning; trying my best wasn't good enough if it still meant I was a loser. So why bother trying? There was no way I could be the pious Christian teen to perfection. For one thing, I had started smoking cigarettes, occassionally at 12 and regularly by 14. Then there was the matter of my long-gone virginity. Hell, I hadn't thought of myself as a virgin since I'd been molested as a little girl. And I was told I could never have children, so clearly I was a failure as a Christian woman.

So I quit. If I couldn't be perfect, I wouldn't play the game. Which kept me safe from teenaged legalism, but also kept me from growing, from changing, from learning, taking risks, or trying anything new. When I did take risks, it was usually in poorly conceived reactionary ways. I still felt spiritually convicted about taking Midol for cramps, but I ate xtc and smoked weed with my friends and lovers. There was this huge disconnection. No one had told me how to be moderate in secular life.

The only picture I had of the world outside my narrow religious upbringing was the parable of the prodigal son. I could either stay in the home, in the family, in obedience to my elders and working in the fields OR I could run out and party for a few years, then when times got rough, crawl back home to my family and be cared for. Fecklessness clearly resulted in greater rewards for the prodigal son than for his steadfast brother. It was a combination of teen lust, rebellion, curiosity, and fear of failure that made my teen years so rocky. A lack of a stable home didn't help.

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Glitter Girl

Great-aunt Katherine was small-boned and petite. She radiated sweetness, and when she had something to add to a conversation, she'd get so excited about it she would bounce on the balls of her feet till it was her turn to speak. She was Giggy's older sister, and to this day I think Gig is still jealous of her for receiving so much of their mother's affection.

Our church, New Creation, was participating in an inter-church festival, and Katherine was in charge of preperations. My aunt Brenda and family-friend Christy Hall were both in the women's dance troupe that would be performing. They wore white dresses with big, inch-high colored jewels on the fronts, representing the twelve tribes of Israel and the priestly robes of Levi. My brother and sister and all their Sunday School classmates were in the flag twirlers troupe that Katherine led and choreographed, and their big red flags furled in the air as they practiced. In a big, busy, and poor family, it was easy for a youngest child to get left out. But Katherine thought of me, and she gave me the most important role in the entire New Creation procession: I was to be the Glitter Girl.

Like the flower girl at a wedding, as glitter girl I would lead the column of flag twirlers and dancers. Instead of scattering petals before me, I would shower the aisle with flecks of gold. Two weeks before the big day Katherine came to the house with a basket full of silver glitter. She told me that we would practice with silver, and work our way up to gold for the night of the performance. I put on my lavender bathing suit with silver flecks sewn in, so that any glitter that stuck to me during practice would be camoflouged by my outfit (until the next time I went swimming when, I'm sure, the glitter got sucked into the pool filter). We stood in the backyard and she taught me how to sprinkle the glitter in wide and sparkling arcs.

"You want the glitter to reach all the way to the first person sitting on either side of the aisle," she told me, and I stretched my arm as wide and high as I could as I carefully slipped the glitter pieces between my forefinger and thumb. The week of the festival, Gig took me to K-Mart for my first-ever brand new dress. I remember that she was feeling harried that day; Gig was always running late or running behind, so most days she was short-tempered and quick-tongued. But this day I didn't care if I was taking too long; I wanted to look at every dress they had and choose the one that was just right. I settled on a navy blue dress with white polka dots and a white lace collar with a single rose sewn in the center.

The big night came and I put on my brand new dress, stockings, and black Mary Janes. We loaded up into the station wagon and headed for the festival. I remember the practie and anticipation better than I remember the actual event. My memory of going their or coming home is fuzzy, but the memories of walking down the aisle, of stretching my limbs to get glitter to the farthest edges of my path, and of my pride in wearing that brand new dress - those memories are crystal clear.

Image credit goes to =Fallen-Stock of Deviant Art. That's not me, but it's pretty close to what I looked like at the time.

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Salvation's Kiss

Michael had long dark hair and shockingly blue eyes, and he looked like a colder version of Jesus. I sat on the bench with him, on the side of the mountain in Tennessee, and I told him everything, without once crying. I was 15 and a half and already the stories I told awed and amazed him. He had no idea life could hurt so much.

I think that naivete was part of what made him so beautiful to me. Originally I approached him because, in the whole lame Bible camp I was gonna be stuck in for the next 5 days, he was the kid that looked the most like my friends. "He looks like he listens to Marilyn Manson" I thought, and approached him. He was my best friend from that day until five years later when his new wife told him he couldn't ever talk to me again. That still hurts, and it was years and years ago.

He told me once that talking to me was like getting hit by a Mac truck - my feelings were just too strong, too negative, too much for him. Too much for everyone, I kept being told. I told him my life's story over four hours the day we met, before sloppy joes off trays in the camp's cafeteria. We went whitewater rafting together, splashed in a swimming hole together, and read the Bible together. Over the course of the week I felt more and more the quickened emotional intensity that I'd come to associate with a moving of the Holy Spirit, during each night's worship service - a three hour mini-concert of talented guitarists, pianists, drummers, and singers; each song glorifying God.

That last night, I broke down completely. Standing in the midst of the music hall - a building with wood floors, roof, stage, and wrap-around benches, but open to the starry expanse and the mountain view on two sides - I was brought to my knees with an overwhelming sense of shame and a desperate need for repentance. I cried my heart out into the floor, as my fellow youth group members - a group of teenagers who had barely tolerated each other a week ago - laid hands on me, to comfort me and pray for me.

I asked Jesus to come back into my heart. It was the last of my series of altar call conversions, on July 28, 1998, and it is still the one I take most seriously. I knew then that I was a Christian in my own right, and not just as the child of Christians. This was when I picked Jesus for myself, when I decided I wanted nothing more in this world than to be close to Him. I had always felt a certain sense of inferiority to other Christians, like Michael, who had two-parent homes. Because so much of Christianity is based on the metaphor of a fatherly god, and because I was 15 and had only met my father a handful of times, I felt like verses about "God the Father" were almost an attack on my bastard child state.

That night Michael, and a few others from his North Carolina youth group joined mine to pray for me that I would feel God's love in my life, like a father. I never really did, but less than two years after that my dad took me in when my mom kicked me out, and I got to feel my real dad's love, such as he knew how to give. And how it came about that my mom told me I had to find somewhere else to live, midway through my junior of high school, all ties back to Michael and that night.

That night worship lasted not three hours, but five, and I was still one of the last to be there, sobbing on the wood floor. On the walk back to my cabin with Michael after, I was on the greatest endorphin high of my life. The closest I've felt to it in the years since was the amazing rush of love and joy that came over me at the birth of my son, after four solid days of labor. Michael and I knew we probably wouldn't see each other again - we lived 1200 miles away and were both 15. He had already told me he was going to save his first real kiss for the altar - a kind of supreme premarital celibacy. I was about equal parts impressed and incredulous. I was already having sex.

But that night, standing outside my cabin, my white shoes scuffed with the red clay earth, Michael kissed my cheek. It planted an instaneous and almost insatiable need for him to actually kiss me. It was like a spell, that kiss. and I think some part of me thought that if I could earn the kiss of someone so pure, maybe I wasn't all bad.


... (I'm gonna write stuff here some other day! Thanks for bearing with me, Anteaters. Writing a book is hard.)...


I tortured myself with a false image of Michael for years. He was supposed to be this perfect, passionate, evangelical, beautiful poet, who never sinned or looked at other girls. But of course he wasn't perfect. Although he was a beautiful, passionate, and evangelical poet, he also looked at other girls. He got girlfriends. He kissed a girl named Venus and I felt hollow inside.

Nineteen months after I met him, I hopped in the red '88 Ford Escort hatchback and drove twelve hours to see Michael, and to get him to kiss me. He did, but it wasn't enough to save me. By the time I arrived, my mom had already torn through my phone book and figured out where I was heading. Michael's mom knew I was coming before he did. I didn't understand how my mom knew where I was going, since I hadn't even come up with the idea myself. My ex-boyfriend Ron had suggested it, because I told him I had to get away from my mom and my life, I was going absolutely crazy.

....(on the way back my car broke and i hitch hiked with all my stuff the rest of the way home, including a night spent in a 7-11 bathroom because it was indoors and i could lock it to sleep for a couple hours)...

By the time I made it home, it wasn't home anymore. Mom had gone past livid in the days I'd been gone, and moved on to an almost austere serenity. She was not touched by my plight; it was the consequence of my actions. I had brought this on myself, and she'd now say she never even kicked me out, that I left voluntarily. (Yeah, right.)

---
This is all really rough, y'all. I'll fill it in and smooth it out. Damn, I forgot how "in love" with that boy I really was. Huh. In the end he married a preacher's daughter, one who fell into the "good preacher's kid" model, instead of the bad one I fell into.

I am (really) glad it didn't work out though, because I'd be very surprised if he's not still evangelical, and I love being an atheist. (Love it, you hear?!)

The picture at the top is of the actual swimming hole in Ducktown, Tennessee where I spent a fun afternoon with my youth group. :) I have pictures of all us girls wearing our one-piece bathing suits with shorts over them. Ah, Bible camp.

This was the first time I ever went to camp. My brother and sister both went with our choir before he got sent away and we moved to Iowa, but mom says I was too young to go. Oh, and I originally didn't want to go to camp, because I was pretty much convinced that church and Christians were lame at this point, but Giggy told me that she would pay for it and that there was whitewater rafting. Yes, I got sucked back into Christianity for another ten years over whitewater rafting.

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God of the Gas Tank

I remember the night I Googled "Carol Balizet" and found cults. I read about the Attleboro sect, and this one strange incident where they ran out of gas and spent three days "laying hands" on the car, praying the Lord would fill their tank. This was at the beginning of my process, and I was still in a lot of denial about how bad my grandma's teachings really were. Then a couple weeks ago, during my first bout of "no internet", I read this in her book "Born in Zion":

There was really no gas at all. The needle was way down past the "E" and even with the great milage the van gets, there was no way we could make it to Lakeland. Bertha closed her eyes and put her hand on the dashboard.

"We're your servants, Lord, and we want to go where you send us, but we can't make it without a miracle. We ask you to meet our need now. In the name of Jesus, let there be gas," she prayed and the needle on the gas gauge jumped up past the quarter-full mark. Glory! Then she put a paper napkin over the gauge so we couldn't see it, and we started out. We drove all the way, singing and laughing, both of us absolutely positive we'd make it to Lakeland without a problem. We did.

The Attleboro followers were no crazier than my grandma, and in fact they were basing most of their lives on her teachings. I just hadn't realized she'd taught "God will fill your gas tank" so explicitly. She also promises that labor will be painless (throughout the book, she refuses to refer to a laboring woman as in "pain"; she prefers the word "discomfort"), that having a homebirth will strengthen your marriage (despite half the people mentioned in the book going through divorces by the time the second and third editions were printed), and that - as long as you are in a "blessable" position - God will give you absolutely everything you need, right down to gas in your tank.

In many ways, fictional god was the most loving parent I had, or thought I had. My mother was extremely detached during my early childhood, and I barely have any memories of her at all prior to moving away from Gig when I was 9. She swears she was around more, but I don't remember it. I remember her being busy writing her dissertation, and I remember standing outside her bedroom, staring at the closed door.

Gig was insane. She was also a lot of fun, and I enjoyed running errands with her and just sort of basking in her presence. She was so charming and disarming, she could insult you and get you to laugh right along with her.* She would hold me in her rocking chair and sing "Peace, Peace" to me when I had nightmares or was upset. Yet I know she didn't love me, or anyone else. She made a deal with God to kill my mother during her labor with my brother (he reneged). Just as my mom watched me struggle to walk with a limp and a cane, so did she. Just as my mother ignored all my emotional, mental health, and physical needs, so did Gig. The difference was that Gig drank her own Koolaid, but my mother didn't; she just served it to us.

No one made sure my teeth had been brushed, or my homework had been done. I could scarcely get the adults to notice me, but they told me that God loved me, that he was always with me, and that he knew me intimately. The illusion of god was more loving than the reality of either of the women raising me. God was supposed to do everything for me that they didn't - care for me, heal me, comfort me, love me. I can't be the only one that held onto God because he was better than the alternatives I'd been given.

A lot of times people make comments about religion being for the poor, but for me religion was for the poor in spirit.** "A broken heart and a contrite spirit, you have yet to deny" I sang in church and "He's got the whole world in his hands". So I believed and I prayed for the things I needed, instead of finding them some other way. I prayed for money, for a boyfriend, for a better car and better job. I prayed for my hip to get better, for my suicidalism to fade, for god to take my freewill away from me, so I wouldn't offend or disappoint him further. And when god failed to do those things for me, I turned the blame inward and sought out - How am I not blessable? What am I doing wrong that is preventing God from moving in my life?

I thought if I just got right with God, I'd have enough gas to make it home.

* Example: Gig told an African-American nurse she worked with during the 60s "Well, they say black is beautiful but you're kind of brown, so I guess you're just pretty."

**There are atheists in foxholes and below the poverty line.

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Meat, Flesh, Bag of Bones

Excerpt from my book up ahead. It's in a very different writing style, but since it sounds all "present tense" and I'm not presently starving myself, I thought I'd get that clearly stated from the outset.

Warning: This post contains glamorizations of eating disorders (which will be destroyed later in the book). If you believe reading this may trigger unhealthy thoughts or actions in your life, please refrain from reading and enjoy a post from the archives to the right instead. Have a safe and healthy day.

I'm feeling hungry now, but it's a detached thing - far away. I can sit back and clinically observe how the acid makes a pinched feeling here, or how it bubbles there. It doesn't seem natural to me that I should eat something at this point - I can make the bubbles go away without resorting to that. A tums, a teaspoon of toothpaste, or baking soda from the box in the fridge - any one of those will make the bubbles go away if I want them to, but I don't really want them to. On some level, some part of me realizes that I am killing myself. I am eating away at my own flesh, like some kind of masturbatory cannibalism. On another level, I am disassociated from my flesh, my meat, my bag of bones, and the detached, out-of-body, accutely analytical thinking in my head isn't touched by the pain in my belly. The pain is merely a reminder, "Most people eat" not an injunction that I should eat myself (or rather I, myself, should eat. I'm eating myself right now.)

The spiritual and religious go on fasts to feel closer to god, and there are known nuerological reactions to food depirvation. I suppose for me, it's more about what I don't feel than what I do. Numb is a kind of solace after pain. There is a certain muzzy clarity that seems to come after long enough without food. Lines are sharper, lights are brighter, cold is so much colder. Yet all that is part of the meat, the flesh, the bag of bones I carry around with me. None of it touches me, the ephimeral bodiless entity of the brain. I feel as if one strong gust of wind could pick me up and take me far, far, far away from here and all my troubles. If I am weightless, maybe I'll be free.

The granwing sensation in my belly, of acid teeth on weak flesh, ebbs and flows in nearly rhythmic contractions of the stomach lining. I feel it, but it doesn't feel like pain, only like some sharper kind of pleasure. An acid belch rises in my chest, and my heart burns with bile. Maybe I had too many energy drinks today. I'll have to find some toothpaste or a tums, quickly. I scour through my purse, empty soda straw wrappers and a crushed pack of cigarettes, a tin of mints and a water bottle, a diary full of someone else's words. Pieces of gum coming out of their paper robes, sullied by loose tobacco in the lining of my purse. Damn. No tums or toothpaste.

I stand up - I have my body back now, and the meat, the flesh, the bag of bones wants my attention. My cocyx is sore from sitting on the stone bench outside one of my university classes for too long, smoking too many menthol cigarettes and pretending I'm not human. I pull the layers of sweaters I'm wearing closer to my skin, my flesh, my bag of bones. There's a pinprick of pain stabbing right behind my eyes, and for a moment everything swims in my vision, while I wait for my flesh to adjust to the shock of standing up again. I put out my cigarette, pick up the cold metal can of an energy drink, in my cold bony hands, and walk towards my next class. On the way, I stop at a vending machine and buy a Milky Way. I hadn't meant to do that - It just happened. I was only planning to buy some peanuts or crackers or something somewhat healthy, but as if on autopilot, my fingers fumbled the coins into the slot and pushed the code for a rush of sugar. The sloshing acid in my chest is still burning, and I'm shivering against a cold no one else seems to feel.

I'm so unbeleivably tired and yet uncomfortably energetic. No rest for the wicked. There's too much to do, and it's never really safe to sleep. As I approach the social science building, I am winded. I put my hand to my chest and feel the drumbeat pulse of my overworked heart. The tempo is far too fast, but this is not unusual. There are always problems with the meat. The flesh is weak and the bag on these bones is still too large. I have another twenty minutes before class starts. I duck into a computer lab, and log onto my Livejournal. There I enter the safe and welcoming world of my proanorexic sisters and brothers. They're cold, too. Their hearts are burning and beating too fast, just like mine. And they know the rush and high and thrill starvation can bring. Most of them have fasted for longer than I have; some have never fasted at all. Whether they've used diet pills, energy drinks, laxatives, purgatives, exercise, thinspiration or reverse thinspiration, they understand my quest for something pure. A body unmarred by curve or dimple; a plate, white and clean, untouched by something so lowly and mortal as food. They understand why I despise this meat, this flesh, this pathetic bag of bones. They know just what it feels like to have a voice in the back of their head telling them it will never,ever, ever be good enough. They know the release that comes from believing that voice, the letting-go feeling when you stop trying to fight your insecurities and simply embrace them. They feel my pain. Before I met them, I didn't even know how to confess I felt any.
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My grandmother taught that there were worlds or realms - the spirit realm and the flesh realm. Flesh was always bad. I can't help feeling like that has to mean something in the origin of my eating disorder. Starving was a way of making myself less about my body - that evil, human, sinful natured, Adam and Eve descended, recently molested and victimized body - and more about my thoughts, and the voices in my head. After all, that's what I was taught to do.

Fortune cookie I just opened from last night's Chinese take-out:

"You constantly struggle for self-improvement." Heh, coincidence and one-size-fits-all platitudes. In the old days, I would have thought God was communicating with me through deserts.

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Thanksgiving is for Turkeys

Do I want to be thin or do I want to be healthy? It's an important question, and I wish the answer came to me easily. I think just thinking about my mother makes me want to starve myself. (Look at me, damnit! I'm passing out in school and we've had the plumber out three times this year.*) Maybe more of my food issues are related to her than I originally thought. That almost makes sense; they didn't start till Iowa, when it was just us girls, and mom started dieting. And it was her mishandling of my sister's binge-eating and weight gain that made me realize being skinny earned approval. (I was 11. My mother should have approved of me without me having to earn a damn thing.) It's so obvious to me that my sister, grandmother, and I all have eating disorders - why do I think she's exempt? She's the only obese vegetarian I've ever even heard of.**

And it's November - start of the holiday season and my biannual starvation diet. Only this year, I don't wanna play. I'm tired of that game and I'm scared of dying young. I hate Thanksgiving. I remember loving it as a kid, but I remember loving Gig and the cult, too. And since I was 12 at least, National Binge Eating Day hasn't exactly been my favorite holiday. St. Paddy's is more my style: green beer, Flogging Molly songs, and no one expects me to eat a giant meal with my family.



Seriously, if you can truly lurk and stop yourself from commenting, you should go look at a pro-ana community forum on Thanksgiving. (Warning: Images on that site will be triggering as hell if you have an eating disorder or body dysmorphia, so please respect your own limits.) It's almost entirely, "you can make it!" and "forgive yourself - start over tomorrow" messages of encouragement, or else it's girls freaking out because the combined pressures of extended family and public eating prove too much for them to handle. I think for five years in a row, I'd find some excuse to leave after the meal - to pick up eggnog or ice or cigarettes or something - so I could throw up in the privacy of a 7-11 bathroom. Before that I used to just take a walk around the neighborhood and throw up in some neighbor's bushes***

I wanna be 10 pounds overweight just once in my life, to know what it's like. I wanna feel safe enough to eat as much as I want, and then stop. I want to never see my mom again. I want to trust myself and trust humanity to be better to me than my family was. Little Man is going to Thanksgiving this year with my mom, and then he's spending the weekend with his old nanny. (Ah, the days of 70+ work weeks, before I discovered unemployment checks, laughing at eviction notices, and blogging.) Where will I be spending this holiday? In Puerto Rico with Boyfriend Dave, *miles* away from my crazy family and their crazy drama and their table full of lard and calories. Shit, I had the best Thanksgiving ever last year splitting a Boston Market dinner with Little Man and watching the Grinch on TV. I'm hoping this year is even better.

And now a song to remind me of my grandma Carol Balizet and the rest of my mean, mean family.



I'd take the seasick crocodile, too. Fortunately, I don't have to. I can seek geographic solutions to deep-seated emotional problems :)



* Freshman year
** Healthy Eating: You're Doing It Wrong
*** Angie the Anti-Theist: Sober-vomitting in public since 1995. (Come on, it's a little funny.)

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Gazelles for the Slaughter

Anyone have $2500 to spare for my dentistry? Fifteen years of bulimia combined with 18 years of parental neglect (and a complete lack of insurance or money the past several years) has left me with more teeth that have cavities than don't, and four more that just plain need to get pulled out (in addition to the ones I had pulled four years ago.)

I am coming to the painful realization, yet again, as I seem to have to do every year or so, that what my mother means when she says she loves me isn't the same as what other mothers mean. Other moms take their kid to the dentist. Other moms figure out their kids have eating disorders. In the pro-ana movement, I was the only person I knew who had an eating disorder for more than three years as a minor without my parents figuring out something was wrong. At the time I thought I was just so clever, but in reality it was just easier for her to ignore my suffering than to do anything about it. Like my teeth - if I ignore them long enough, they'll all just rot away. She ignored me right into a series of high school suicide attempts, but somehow I survived that.

Today I hate my mother. I hate that she seriously considered spending $1500 to keep an elderly cat alive, yet I know if I call her and ask her to help with my dental bills, she won't do it. (In fact, she'll blame me for it, or tell me why I'm not trustworthy with money, or why I somehow deserve to not have teeth.) And it's not like she ever believed in faith healing for teeth. My whole childhood, she would take herself to the dentist, and have extensive (expensive) bridgework and fillings and crowns put in. I think she might have taken me in for cleanings and check ups three times my entire childhood. She didn't think God was going to protect my teeth, and she's known for years that I needed pretty extensive work to save the teeth I still have. She just doesn't give a damn.

My mother doesn't love me. My mother never loved me. My boyfriend* is gonna help me figure out how to pay for this, and he's not actually gonna let me go several more years watching my teeth rot away. It's baffling to me that someone I've known less than six months can care about my well-being. My family's known me my whole life, and they never did.

No real point to this post except to cry, and to remind myself later, next time I act like a battered spouse and want to "work things out" with her again. I just have to accept the fact that she was a *terrible* mother. She doesn't love me. And as much as I want to impress her or deconvert her or somehow get her to notice and love me, she won't do it. So it's probably not healthy for me to keep trying.

I've got an appointment with my therapist this afternoon - the therapist that my boyfriend willingly pays for, because he thinks it's important for me to not be overtaken with symptoms of mental illness all the time. Unlike my mom, who just tells me to control myself and quit being dramatic, and who I have told as recently as month ago how hard it is for me to be a good mother when I don't have my medication, and she said, "Oh, that sucks" and then continued to spend money like water on her own therapy, and trip to the cult survivors retreat (that I didn't get to go to.)

Crazy how finally having someone love me hurts so much. I guess I was still in denial about how bad of a parent my *mother* was, because it's so easy to blame everything on my grandmother, or my absent father. I think she broke me, too. I don't think it was just Gig. I don't think it was just my ex-husband. I think my mom was probably the first person who ever taught me that I don't matter and that my pain isn't real and shouldn't be addressed.

I want to go kick her in the teeth.



*Oh yeah. I guess I hadn't mentioned him on ATAT yet? Name's Dave. Sweetheart, awesome, funny, and a total dweeb (just my style). I wanted to wait a while, and get his okay before blogging him here.

**My Christian and former super-Christian readers probably realized this post's title was a (not very clever) take off of some Song of Solomons verses about his lady's sexy teeth. Clever comes after the novacaine wears off, okay?

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