The year is off to a hard start

Do we really need an excuse to tell people we love them?

Maybe we do. Maybe we need the reminder.

I still miss Nimoy, my honorary grandfather, my beloved Spock Prime. :(

Life in the Trenches. Or something.

A/N: This is not me passively-aggressively begging for money. This is me venting, hardcore.

I had a very bad day yesterday. I woke up mad at GuestDog, because she barked at the mail carrier and woke me up. Which she has done every single day she's been here, except Sunday. I love GuestDog, but I'm getting really cranky about the rude awakenings every day.

I found some decent clothes and went out and mowed the back lawn, then took a long shower. It wasn't what I wanted to do, which was break things or throw furniture, but it was something. The physical worked off some of my prickly energy, and the shower helped ground me some - scrubbing every inch of myself is pretty mindless, but also reminds me where the numb spots are, gives me something specific to think about. And I can listen to a playlist on my Kindle.

I may yet need some Angry Girl music tomorrow (as in Wednesday, because Tuesday hasn't ended for me, yet), but even if I do, I will already be better than today. Listening to Breakfast Club and Blast From the Past and Contact in the background while I did other things helped. A lot.

My depression is very "angry at myself" based. I'm angry at too many things, but not all the time. I get angriest when I get overwhelmed, when I feel like I'm failing, when everything just seems to be coming at once.

I had reached out to a local woman, asking her basically if I could pick her brain about business, since she owns one or two and is successful, and because of my miswired circadian rhythm, I fell asleep yesterday morning instead of staying up for her call. So being awakened by the dog barking at the mail carrier, me looking at my phone and realizing I'd slept through something important, something meant to help make this new direction in my life easier, was just that little bit too much.

Money is a thing for me. I grew up in a household where we never talked about money. That was Mom and Dad stuff, and none of our business. I knew we were poor, though things got easier by the time I got to high school, but I had no idea how my parents made ends meet, or if they didn't. I seriously wish my school had taught some kind of budgeting or living on your own for real class, because reality was a big surprise. I was one of those, "But I still have checks left, what the hell do you mean, I don't have money?" And I'm good with numbers. Gah.

Anyway, money's always a sore spot for me. Even if everything else in my life is going relatively well, not being able to take care of my own basic needs makes me feel like a huge failure. That is where I am - too many things coming down at once, with little income in the foreseeable future. Everything costs money that I need now, not in two months - my meds, food, a storage unit I'm desperate to get out of (we've even made room in the garage), bus rides, EVERYthing. And the bank decided my "extended" overdraft (all $30 of which is fees, which is completely asinine) was extended enough to close my account. So I'm in a really hurty "What kind of fifty-year-old woman can't take care of herself? How can you be such a failure?" place. My worst critic truly is myself.

Money failure always hurts more, pokes harder at my self-esteem, and sometimes, like yesterday, it makes me very angry. At myself. At my brain that refuses to go to sleep at anything approaching a reasonable hour, and equally refuses to awaken early enough for me to get anything done with requires leaving the house. If I want to leave the house, I have to simply stay up. Going to sleep isn't an option.

I honestly have no clue how I functioned all the years I was a single parent, except that it involved three or four hours of sleep a night and about five alarms in different places in the room. And out of the room, sometimes. And a kid who didn't get to school on time, sometimes.

Anyway, this one was especially dark because over the last week, I have come up with a fantastic idea for taking my editing to a new level, and it WILL change my life. I have absolutely zero doubt. I can feel it, deep inside my soul. The energy is changing. And I was am so excited about it.

And then, I get a day like yesterday, and it makes my usual depression feel like a stubbed toe.

I think of all the things I "have" to have money for, and it just seems hopeless. How do I go to my doctor appointment in two weeks, and pay a $5 copay, when I don't have the $5 to get on the bus to even get there? How do I send in my med mail order when I no longer have a bank account to give them the debit card number for? How do I find a way to pay for that storage unit, and for a way to get those belongings here, when I have neither the money for the storage place, or a vehicle with which to move the stuff? How do I buy the things I'm going to run out of tomorrow, which are part of my fairly strict diet, when I don't even have a frakkin' quarter to put in the buggy at Aldi, even if I had a way to get there.

I'm just so frustrated and angry and when my brain does this, it sucks the energy out of me and makes everything I do that much harder, that much more painful.

I think in my next life, I want to be a butterfly. I'd start out as a worm, hibernate, then get pretty for a few weeks, help flowers and trees have sex, and move on to whatever's after that. Yeah. Helping flowers and trees have sex. Sounds perfect.

Easy, no. Necessary, yes.

Once again, theferrett puts my thoughts into words, so much more articulately than I usually can.

I am not normal (frankly, I don't think anybody is, but that's just my personal opinion). I am okay with my abnormality. Some days I hate my brain because some days it feels like it hates me. But I also love my brain, because I see/perceive things in ways other people don't or can't.

Sometimes, I wish depression were a monster I could just slay and be done with it. Unfortunately, it is more like a Goa'uld, which has wound its way around my spine and brain stem, and which can never be separated from me without killing me.

But because it is so intrinsically a part of me, I learn things from it, I arrive at insights I wouldn't normally get within ten miles of. Thus is the curse also a gift, and if the world is a balancing act, then I have it so someone else doesn't have to.

Basically, instead of killing my demon, or railing against it, I've learned (am still learning) to live with it. Key word being live.

Love Letter

Even though I consider myself a skilled word-user, I'm not entirely certain I can express just how much you mean to me. Hopefully, I can get some of it across without sounding like some crazed lunatic who believes we are destined to be together or some ridiculous crap. Ugh. It'll probably ramble a bit more than I'd like, but hopefully it'll make sense in the end.

There's a lot of backstory, which may or may not be interesting to you, but perhaps will help set the stage for why exactly you had such an impact on my life.

When you came into my life, in September of 2012, I was forty-seven. Alone. Sad. Searching for meaning.

I'd been a single mom for about fifteen years, and I'd taken my job seriously. I did everything I could conceive of to make my daughter's life a good one. I wanted her to grow up healthy and happy, someone I could be proud of, someone who could be proud of me, someone who would consider me a friend when the time came.

Though I didn't date, or have any other kind of "dating" relationships (read sexual, lol) during that time, it was more because I wanted to model healthy relationships for my daughter than for any other reason. I didn't go out of my way to find a romantic relationship - I considered finding a new partner pretty low on the priority list - and she had a life full of people who loved me and who loved her. Those were good relationships, ones I wanted her to learn from, to emulate.

My daughter and I had our hardships - money was always tight, I was lonely, I struggled constantly with depression, she was stubborn as hell, something she clearly got from my side of the family. We lost loved ones - a beloved dog, a special cat, a favorite cousin, my mother, and my daughter's best friend. That one was especially tough. Twelve year old girls shouldn't die.

I raised my daughter to think, to stand up for herself, to stand up for other people, to be independent. I also sometimes made things too easy. I went too far the wrong way to ensure she didn't have to suffer the same childhood issues I'd had, and she grew up more than a wee bit spoiled.

I was raised an Air Force brat, and I periodically get itchy feet, figuratively speaking. My solution when she was in school was to move from one apartment to another, always staying in the same school zone. I wanted her to have friends from kindergarten all the way through high school, something I'd never had. It didn't work quite the way I wanted, but it worked.

When she was still a teenager, we moved one more time. She'd just finished her freshman year of high school, gotten involved in dance, which she LOVED, had a gay boyfriend who was a marvelous dance partner and friend, and though she'd never loved school, that year was as close as she came to it. She didn't want to move. I didn't, either, this time, but there were mitigating circumstances.

Though we moved into a situation which was much better for us, that next year was the most difficult she and I had ever had - emotionally, behaviorally, financially - and I thought we weren't going to survive it intact, still loving each other. It was the first time I seriously considered giving up, believed I was a bad mom.

Though she hated the new school, and frankly, I did too, she slowly over the course of that year made friends. She got involved in drama, something she'd enjoyed in middle school, and while she was never truly happy that year, she got better. I got her into counseling again, an on and off thing since she was about four, and we worked at being honest with each other, communicating openly, being loving.

During her junior year, she met a boy. Actually, she'd met him during the prior year, but she'd had a mad crush on someone else, and this guy had only been a friend. That changed. He was charming and goofy and smart, loved my daughter, and was respectful to me, didn't ridicule my brand of weird. His life wasn't perfect, either, but he had a good family, a support system of friends, both peers and mentors, and he and my daughter became serious.

My daughter finally used her "sneak-out" rule - she could ask if she could go out after dark, and I could say no. If she felt like it was important enough to override me, she could, but only if she came and told me she was sneaking out of the house, so I could keep my phone on and come get her if I needed to, no questions asked. She didn't use it often, but she did use it.

She also had sex for the first time. I'd always told her that when it was right for her, she would know better than I would, and I only asked that she use condoms, and tell me when it happened, so that we could talk about it afterward if she wanted. She did wake me up one night, and I asked her if it had been enjoyable, and she said yes, and I said good and asked her if she wanted to talk about it and she said no, and I went back to sleep.

I don't know what kind of parent that makes me sound like, but our system worked for us. She knew there was absolutely NOTHING on Earth she couldn't talk to me about. Nothing was going to turn into judgement or a big screaming match.

Anyway, she and this young man continued to get more serious. He spent a lot of time at our house, and she spent a lot of time with his family, and they got pregnant. On purpose. And I have to tell you, I was livid. Not because she was too young to have a baby, which was true, but because she'd done this when I was already stretching our food stamps to feed one adult and two teenagers, because yes, I was feeding him too. I expressed my anger, and got it all out of the way, then I decided if I was going to be a gramma, I was going to buckle down and be happy about it. Carpe diem, because grandbabies!

My grandson is a wonderful boy - charming and supersmart and caring and strong and a handful and a half. I wouldn't trade him for anything. I absolutely adore babies of all kinds, but the love I have for him is something fiercer, deeper.

So, a year into their relationship, they had my grandson. My son-in-law's family were moving back to Florida from Texas, and he wanted to stay here in Texas for his senior year, after which he planned to go into the Air Force, to do something with his life, to provide for his new family, for many reasons. Mr. Potatohead (son-in-law) stayed behind, with one of his family's close friends, and due to financial circumstances beyond my control, we moved one more time.

Before Mr. Potatohead could enlist, he had to either sign away his parental rights or marry my daughter (AF rules). They got married. It was a beautiful day in a local park, and the story of how it happened is boring and entailed a lot of intense discussions with the man who provided it for them. Suffice it to say I did not get to plan any part of my only daughter's wedding, with the exception of her godmother walking her across the bridge aka down the aisle. I might still be a little miffed about that.

This time when we moved, my parents were footing the bill for a year. We moved into an apartment they chose, and we got the bare minimum - no cable, no phone, no extras of any kind. I even had to stop my meds because I could no longer pay for quarterly visits to the doctor. Things got really tight. But worse, Mr and Mrs Potatohead were separated by more than just a couple of miles of walking. It was difficult for all of us, but especially for them - being newly married and not able to live together and experience the pregnancy together sucked.

In the new school system, there was a separate special school for pregnant girls (and other high-dropout-risk kids), where they could work at their own pace and complete their education in a more relaxed environment. This was the first time my daughter actually surprised me in a good way. She finished her entire senior year by the end of October. This woman, my daughter who had always all but hated school, applied herself and managed to finish everything so that when she walked down the halls of that school with their every Friday graduation, in her purple cap and gown, she was accompanied by her newborn son, in his own purple cap and gown. It was an amazing moment for her, and I couldn't have been prouder if she'd been strolling the stage at MIT.

Mr Potatohead got through Basic Training. We went to his graduation at Lackland AFB. He finished Tech School and got his first duty station, in Italy. I didn't know the Air Force sent people OCONUS on their first duty station. Mr Potatohead went first, when Baby Potatohead was ten months old, and several months later, my daughter followed him to Italy, her first move as an Air Force wife.

Once Mr Potatohead had finished high school, he'd moved to our apartment, and after Baby Potatohead was born, he was there, too. So when they all left, I was alone, for the first time in nearly fifteen years, missing my daughter, missing my grandson, missing my son-in-love.

I had no idea what to do with myself. What I'd always considered my life's purpose, raising Mrs Potatohead to happy, healthy adulthood, was accomplished, and I was completely undone by the hole she'd left behind.

I have always struggled with severe depression, and that first year without my daughter left me lower than I could remember ever being. At the same time, I was dealing with packing up that apartment, finding a new place to live, reaching out to people when I could, and hibernating the rest of the time - I'm not good at asking for help. Things got bad; I knew they were bad, though I didn't really understand the extent of my emotional state until I was climbing out of it.

Fast forward (too late, I know) about two years, and I was watching Dollhouse, with Eliza Dushku and Tahmoh Penikett. I adored Tahmoh's character in Dollhouse and wanted more of whatever he'd been in. When I looked him up, there was Battlestar Galactica, and I had vague memories of more than one friend telling me I would enjoy it. I think I'd resisted because what I remembered of the original series was pretty campy and cheesy, and not really to my taste.

I watched it anyway, and before the mini-series was over, I was in love. Absolutely head over heels in love with Kara Thrace. I love Karl Agathon, too, don't get me wrong, but Kara Thrace is a once in a lifetime character, and I can never thank you enough for taking that part.

I was on a serious downward spiral, flailing about without the least notion why the hell I was still here on this planet, and not really caring much if I left, so when you came into my life, I was broken and hurting and aimless and lost.

Thanks to BSG, I got out of my head, cared about something so much I went to the internet to find other people who liked BSG, to find fanfiction, to commune with other BSG lovers. I started writing. I've never written fiction in my entire life, unless it was related to school, and had in fact always felt a little envious that everyone else in my family wrote, and my thing was polishing words instead of producing them. Suddenly I was writing stories, sad and funny and sexy and heartbreaking and wonderful stories. And not only were they helping me cope, people sometimes told me they'd needed that reminder at that precise moment. People liked my stories. My mind was blown.

I am never going to ask you to read any of my stuff (oh my fucking gods, no, Katee), though if you ever accidentally do, I hope you find a deep love and respect for Kara Thrace in it.

Like I said, I started writing. It was my shiny new boyfriend, and writing got me through another really rough year without my kid, and I was still alive at the other end. I met some fantastic women, made friends, learned I had something to offer others, something they needed, got better at writing, and in among all that, I finally figured out what I wanted to be when I grew up. Took me long enough.

I'm an editor, aka a beta reader. I take people's words and make them better. I especially help writers whose first language isn't English to become more comfortable with their words. I seem to have created a niche for German writers. That's fandom, anyway.

I'm also an editor in real life - YA fiction, murder mysteries, LBGT works. I have a small but growing stable of writers who have trusted me with their work, and I'm slowly getting my name out there. I'm not with a big name publishing house. I'm the girl the indie authors can come to, the one they can afford. I LOVE my work, so much that if I could afford to do it for nothing, I truly would.

My first word-love is still writing, though, and Kara Thrace plays a huge part in that. Through her, I've explored birth and death and loss and depression and love and hate and so many other facets of human emotion. She's a fascinating and complex woman, and exploring her, I explore myself. Loving her, I love myself. All those ugly bits from my past found a mirror in Kara Thrace, and if she's lovable despite those "flaws," then so am I. Those old tapes have lost their power over me. I like myself, and that's something I haven't always been able to say.

Kara Thrace had a hard life, and she was one messed up woman, but no matter what, she never stopped loving. Sure, she hid behind sarcasm and cigars and sex and alcohol, but she loved, deeply, even if she pretended she didn't.

I've heard you say in interviews that if you played Kara now, you probably wouldn't be so fearless, that you were young and didn't know any better.

All I can say is, thank you for being fearless, for going ninety to nothing, for putting so much work into Kara Thrace. Because the bottom line is, Kara Thrace saved my life. You saved my life. And I am so fucking grateful for it.

I fell in love with Kara Thrace. And through Kara, I fell in love with you.

Even if you never impacted anyone else's life (which isn't true, anyway), you crashed into mine and pulled me out of some dark place that had almost succeeded in swallowing me whole. I can't truly put into words what you did for me.

But you weren't done.

Last year, my dad and his wife split up. They'd been married nearly forty-two years, since I was eight. They were doing the divorce dance of dividing assets and selling houses and keeping lawyers in expensive cars. My dad and I had been estranged, but he called me, invited me to meet him for lunch, and we had a good talk. He talked about how things had been for him, about falling in love with someone new, about the hold my stepmother had had on all our lives, and we continued to get close again.

He asked me to be his emergency contact at his apartment, asked me to manage the movers, asked me to come take care of him after he had his eye surgery, asked me to be his next-of-kin for medical stuff. We connected again, and had some quality clear-the-air conversations, learned new and surprising things about each other.

Then he started having heart attacks. I was cadging rides in the middle of the night to get to a hospital forty minutes away, terrified every time that he'd die before I could get there, and spending weeks at a time at his place to take care of him when he got out, and even though it was scary as hell, we kept talking. We kept saying the words. We made sure we didn't waste a moment on impatience or negativity.

His final heart attack was on August fifth, a year ago, when he was seventy-two, and though I miss him desperately, I'm beyond thrilled that I got seven fantastic months with him before he went.

Kara Thrace stayed in my head, helping me heal by sharing her many lives with me, and Victoria Moretti showed up, and reminded me family appears in the strangest places, and through those two magnificent women, you helped me through the loss of someone I had just found again, and gave me strength not to break this time.

I have absolutely adored watching you over the last three years. Battlestar Galactica, Longmire, Oculus, even The Last Sentinel (which we will mostly pretend never happened), Haunting in Connecticut, Riddick, cons and interviews and Ask Katee and motorcycle rides with Tricia. Your zest for life, and your unflinchingly raunchy sense of humor, and the obvious love you shower on your friends and family, both two- and four-legged, are not just encouraging, they're life-affirming.

I won't say never change, because hell, we all change. But keep being you, Katee, keep being the woman who makes lives better without really thinking about it. Keep. Being. You. Keep loving hard and living out loud and making the world a better place with your sparkle and shine and your infectious laugh (I LOVE your laugh).

And know, deep inside, there is at least one person on this planet, someone you've never met, who is grateful beyond words for all of who you are, one person who would pick up the phone, day or night, if you ever needed a listening ear yourself. One person who might be the reason you got out of swimming and into acting. The universe works in mysterious ways, right?

Because of my dad falling in love in his sixties, I know that fifty is not too late to find the kind of love I've wanted all of my life.

Because of Victoria Moretti, I'm open to possibilities. My image of who might be out there for me is much more flexible now.

Because of Kara Thrace, I'm ready to fall in love again. Really ready.

Because of you, I have friends I would never have met any other way than through fandom, women who helped keep me afloat during those long months at the hospital and the agonizing weeks after my dad's death.

I don't know what's in store for my next fifty years, but I'm ready for whatever it is, and I have you to thank for it.

I love you.

Thank you.

Depression as a way of life.

Apologies for the extremely long period of radio silence. Dad's death was hard and I just haven't wanted to deal with writing a post, not that I'm usually a post-every-day girl anyway.

Link to article with more information.

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I'm sharing this as more of a PSA or even a glimpse into my soul rather than any grab for pity or whatever. My depression is something I live with, always have. I cannot remember ever having a period of happiness that lasted more than a few weeks, though from pictures, I was brilliantly happy for the first four or five years. My baseline is below normal, and it's both the way my brain is wired, and long-term effects of a childhood gone way wrong. But my ultimate takeaway is this: I'm still alive. I survived my childhood and if I can survive that, I can survive anything life throws at me. It's gotten harder the last few years, I'll admit that, and suicidal ideation comes up more frequently, but it's not gonna get me. I may not be kicking depression's ass, but it's not kicking mine, either.

I've had to make adjustments to how I live my life. Things that are easy for other people aren't for me. I will gladly spend hours walking through IKEA with someone I love, but I'll pay for it later, and that's a choice I make. These are things I deal with on a daily basis, exacerbated by chronic pain from a body that started to break down in my twenties.

Some of these have been worse than usual since my dad died. The grief hit me much harder than I expected it to, and is compounded by the fact that we'd reconciled some old hurts and were getting to know each other again after half a lifetime of semi-estrangement. Seven months with my dad wasn't nearly enough, but I'm so very glad I had them.

The two glaring exceptions for me are guilt and sensitivity.

I carried around guilt for something big for a long time, but during counseling about eight years ago, the therapist worded his response to my confession in such a way that I was finally able to see, clearly, that what happened to me was NOT my fault. It was like magic! It made an enormous difference in my life. I mean sure, I sometimes wonder if I could have handled any number of things differently, but letting go of the guilt for that thing helped me let go of the guilt for so much more. I'm not ashamed of who I am anymore. I still hold people off, and I'm hard to get to know, but I'm me and I'm cool with that.

I'm not as thin-skinned as I used to be, either. Maybe it's age, maybe it's becoming comfortable in my own skin. Who knows? But I don't care what people think about me anymore. It's none of my business. So when people are intentionally or accidentally hurtful, I no longer take it personally. There are exceptions, of course. Nobody's perfect, for frak's sake, but I tend to respond now, if I respond at all, with a simple, "Thank you." It freaks people the frak out, and is such a state-interruptor they have to think about what they just said, and sometimes, it makes a difference for that person. Do I value people's opinions? Yes. I can use even hurtful words to examine myself and make changes if necessary. But I don't live my life in fear that someone doesn't like me.

Hopelessness comes and goes. Sometimes, things seem absolutely bleak and I can't see a way out, but I still hope, and I keep going, and eventually, things get better enough.

Am I Pollyanna? Not in a million years. Am I happy? Not very often. But I'm alive, and every day above ground is a good day.

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Indifference: Things that used to matter or were once felt to be important fade into the background. You lose enthusiasm and interest.

Energy Loss: It's very common to feel you've done a full day of heavy labor when in fact the day hasn't even begun. Energy loss and fatigue are common symptoms of depression.

Enjoyment bypass: For some reason things don't smell or taste as good as they once used to. Your senses lose their edge and the pleasures once enjoyed diminish.

Guilt: The most human of errors are judged disproportionately. Minor mistakes or indiscretions, even distant memories, may be thought of with shame or guilt.

Tears or Torpor: Some people with depression feel great despondency and sadness and cry a great deal. Others go emotionally flat. They feel flat and hollow inside as though their emotions have been drained.

Aches and Pains: There is often an increase in physical symptoms when people become depressed. They may complain of back pain, headaches or stomach upsets or just a vague sense of feeling generally unwell.

Hopelessness: When people are depressed the world and their future in it seems an altogether bleak prospect. There's often a sense that no matter what you say or do nothing will ever change except perhaps for the worse.

Anxiety: When depression strikes it is invariably accompanied by worry and anxiety and, not uncommonly, one or more stressful experiences is the culprit. The way we respond and adapt to stressful situations can have an important bearing on our vulnerability to depression.

Moodiness: Irritability and general moodiness are common ingredients in the depression mix. You may find yourself becoming impatient, tetchy, argumentative and intolerant.

Sensitivity: People with depression are on high alert for anything that fuels their vulnerabilities. Implied or direct criticism or rejection aren't received well and reinforce a state of worthlessness and hopelessness.

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If reading this resonates strongly for anybody, remember one thing. YOU ARE NOT ALONE.

Change is...change

Sometimes bad things happen for no reason. Sometimes, though...

Seven years ago, I had a decent job and a great boss, and then my life fell apart in a pretty spectacular way. I made a mistake, a big one (not job-related), and I've spent the last seven years paying for it. I'm not quite finished yet, legally speaking.

And here's the thing: I can't regret what I did. It served a greater purpose. My life was drifting along. I knew that my work was something I did because I was good at it, not because I enjoyed it. I longed for the satisfaction of doing work I loved, but didn't know what that might be. I wanted my life to mean something, to me and to the people with whom I might come into contact.

I had glimpses of this better life from time to time, and I wanted what I saw, but I was cozy, unwilling to step outside the safety of my comfort zone for long. What I was doing kept a roof over my kid's head, and food on the table, and responsible adults sometimes do work they don't like in order to fulfill their obligations. That's what I'd been taught as a kid, what I'd always believed. The universe knew that in order for me to find that extra something I was looking for, I needed to be shoved forcibly out of my cocoon.

The change has been painful and humiliating and the personal shame of making that choice has estranged me from both family and friends. My kid stuck by me. She was adult enough to tell me that she didn't like what I did, but understood why I did it. I withdrew and isolated myself from people I cared about out of the fear that if they knew what I'd done, they wouldn't like me anymore. Some of them have surprised me.  I've had friends who learn the whole story, from me or from someone else, and still welcome me into their lives and their homes. I'm grateful for those people, people who see me as a person who made a mistake, rather than a person who is that mistake.

Was it a bad thing I did? Sure. Did anybody besides me and my daughter get hurt? For the most part, that answer's no.

Did it need to happen?

I believe it did. The emotional, spiritual, and financial struggles of the past seven years have been critical to my growth as a human being.

My life is different now. I've learned and unlearned things about myself. I've forgiven myself for ancient transgressions that weren't even mine to begin with. I've fallen in like with new parts of myself, acquired and refined new skills, and have work I love to do. It's not enough work yet, but it's something that had I the means, I would happily do without pay. I do in fact do it regularly for nothing but the sheer joy of it.

Good things are happening now, small things here and there. It started slowly and is gaining momentum. I've been taking the shattered puzzle pieces of a boring, uninspired life and putting them back together into a new picture, somebody who can do what I've always wanted to do - help people. In as many ways as possible.

If I had it to do over again....

I wouldn't.

This month, a question meme made its way through livejournal.  Many of the questions posed to me were fandom questions, because most of my friends there are fandom friends: BSG, XF, BtVS, Farscape.  

One of the non-fandom questions this month was:  You have one real-life do-over.  Do you use it?  And when?

In fiction, I'm a fan of a character saying something to the effect of, "We got off on the wrong foot, so let's start over.  Hi, I'm x."

In real life, not so much.  Not because I've never done anything I regret, but because everything I've done or not done has brought me here today.  I may not be terribly enamored of where my life is at the moment, but I like myself, and each and every choice I made along the way had something to do with molding me into this particular me.  And my life being where it is at the moment is an opportunity for change and growth.  Neither growth nor change has been something I handled particularly gracefully in the past, but that's the joy of aging, I suppose, is the ability to look back and see that even the bad things have good consequences sometimes, and that the good things I worked so hard to achieve didn't always get me where I thought they would.  So growth and change.

I might like to have made more responsible choices with the money I had after selling the land I inherited (I'm sure Mrs. Potatohead would have appreciated us being less hand-to-mouth for those years.), but I did the best I could with the budgeting skills I had at the time (facility with math does not equate to understanding the concept of budgeting, parents).  It was so many small choices leading up to "Oh, wow.  Where did all that money go?"  (not that it was a lot, but more than I'd ever had at any one time before)  When I win the lottery, oh, the things I know now...

I'd rather go forward, using the things I've learned, sometimes at great expense, to make the future better.  I can't change the past, no matter how much I might wish to.

Yeah, sometimes families suck, too.

My little sister asked me a couple of weeks ago to pick her up at the airport tomorrow - she's coming into town early to spend a couple of days with our parents because she has to work over christmas.  I agreed to pick her up, knowing that I would have to figure out the gas situation and such.

Last week, my stepmother called me to find out if I *needed* my gift/check early.  I declined.  She said she hoped it didn't bother me that she'd called.  She also mentioned my sister.  So I texted my sister to ask if I was still going to pick her up at the airport.  She never texted me back, but messaged me on FB a couple of days later to say that mom & dad were picking her up, to save me the trip.

How kind of them.  And they probably think they're being nice, too.  Except that I haven't seen my sister in two years (oh, wait, I did see her for about ten minutes last year when she dropped off my "christmas presents" on her way back out of town), and I was looking forward to having thirty or forty-five minutes with her in the car on the way to our parents' house.  Now I won't get to see her at all.

And I'm feeling angry and resentful about it.  And sad.

All I can do is remind myself that I'm different. I'm not that kind of parent.

There is nothing, not one single solitary thing I can imagine, that my kid could ever do that would make me shun her.  Nothing.  I might not like her behavior, and I won't hesitate to tell her so, but I won't turn my back on her, ever.  It's definitely one of the things I learned about parenting from my own parents, and resolved never to do.

Those of you who have loving families, however dysfunctional or weird, cherish them.  Some of us aren't so lucky.

Twenty Years Ago

Twenty years ago today, on a Friday night, I was as big as a house, and my father-in-law reminded me of that fact frequently.  It was all in fun on his end, but I hated it every single time he said that out loud.

OK.  I wasn't as big as a house, but I FELT that way.

Mrs. Potatohead was due today, and what did I choose to do?  I went camping.  Uh-huh.  It was the annual Celebration of Summer that my mom put on, and even due any damn minute, I went camping.  In the summer.  In Texas.

I think my mother made sure every pagan medical professional she knew would be on hand just in case I went into labor - we had record attendance that year.  Luckily Mrs Potatohead didn't make her appearance until Tuesday morning, after over twenty-four hours of labor.  But my mom made sure that if her grandchild was going to arrive out at Lake Tawakoni, she was going to arrive in style.

So I camped, and nearly everyone waited on me hand and foot, and I judged a Sun King competition, and my husband ran around the whole place naked as a jaybird and got sunburned in some interesting places.  I have to admit that remembering that gives me warm fuzzies.  He deserved it later.

Been too long, so a little fun

I have OCD.  I am (?) OCD.  Whatever.  Anyway, this manifests in my life in some odds ways.

When I drink from something that has writing on it, the writing has to face me.  If there's writing all the way around, I have to pick something and that has to stay facing me until I'm done with that cup.

When I tear my Sweet N Low packets (or whatever the store/restaurant equivalent is), they all have to be facing the same direction - right side up, facing me - and I tear the right ends off.

As a matter of fact, while I'm sitting at a restaurant, it would be very unusual for me NOT to face all the packets in the little condiment rack.

I sit with my back against a wall.  If trouble's coming, I want to see it coming and maybe do something about it.  I've been told that this is something I learned from my dad, though I don't recall that at all.  I just know I can't eat with my back to a room full of strange people.  Or a door.

I alphabetize to destress.  Give me a stack, pile, room full of anything, and I can work off my stress by putting whatever it is into alphabetical order.  I also bake and throw furniture around, but I think those are more normal destressing activities.  lol

Cans, boxes, jars, etc., in my pantry all face front.  If there's more than one of something, the labels all have to line up with each other.

If I'm eating at a restaurant, when I'm done, I start stacking stuff and cleaning off the detritus.  Some of my dining companions find this amusing, some find it annoying, but the waitstaff?  They love it.  This is something my stepmother does, too, so maybe it's a learned behavior, rather than related to my OCD.

I do my stuff in the shower in a certain order.  Whenever I've tried to shake myself out of that, I always forget something important and have to get back in to take care of it.  Having to do that irritates me more than just keeping to my routine and being weird.

What a wonderful world this would be...

I went to the CVS this evening to return my redbox and take the landlord to get his McDeath for dinner.  As I was driving away from the CVS, my car started acting funny.  Thanks be to my misadventurous youth, I know what a car feels like when it's running out of gas, so I maneuvered to a blank spot in the parking lot and had myself a little think.

We ended up walking over to McD to get his food, since he's insulin-dependent, and I don't want to deal with blood sugar issues.  He did not have the dog or the cane, so he couldn't walk home.

We get back to the car, and we're trying to brainstorm who to call.  His father, the obvious choice because he lives five minutes away, has already turned his phone off for the night.  His brother, on a rare in-town weekend, is actually camping with his kid.   I could walk to the gas station, but I have no gas can and no money to buy one.  He's willing to spring for gas, but doesn't have enough to buy a gas can, too.  What happened to the days when gas stations would have a gas can on hand and let you borrow it?

I'm scrolling through my phone and it's all Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, Colorado, Washington, Oregon, DC, New York, Texas!  Oh, wait, he lives two hours away.  Oklahoma, Oklahoma, Oklahoma, damn I know a lot of people in OK.   I finally found someone and managed to get hold of her after three unanswered calls, and so a ten-minute trip to get food turned into a three-hour sit in the car.  She got there, had already procured a gas can and had filled it, and a random guy that she just happened to know was there and offered to come help.

Anyway, car started right up, I got a tank full of gas (I asked for it last week, but this is not the way I anticipated it happening, lol), and I even got my Fossil Felix the Cat watch back, because my friend had found it a week or so ago, and remembered it was mine.

While we were sitting there, I commented that the one time I leave the house without my Kindle is the one time I needed something to occupy my time.  After I declared that I was never leaving the house again without my entire purse, including my Kindle, we had a good ten minutes riffing on what would be in the magical backpack in the trunk from now on (included a tent, a camp stove, chainsaw (wtf) and various other goodies).

We also talked about energy exchanges and how he'd come to understand them.  

I've never been comfortable asking for help.  The last five years have been an exercise in curing myself of that in a big way.  Anyway, I've reframed the help thing in my head, because someone once explained to me that everyone likes to feel useful or needed or just have the warm fuzzies, so when I refuse to ask for help, I am depriving other people of an opportunity to do something that makes them feel good.  I have to tell myself this a lot sometimes, but it works.  Sometimes.

Tonight, though, he talked about it in physics terms - you know, the universe is energy and everything is energy and it flows around and through everything.  When I try to be self-sufficient, I'm frakking up the energy flow - I can't put energy out if I'm not taking any in.  I'm not explaining it very well, but it hit me that by trying to be all I need no one and can do everything myself, I'm mucking up the flow and that makes things worse for everyone, including the people around me.  So I've got some thinking to do and more reframing of the crap in my head.

And on that note, what stopped me from calling any of a dozen people was the idea behind saying, "Hey, I ran out of gas, will you come rescue me?" which is, "Hey, I'm a loser who doesn't even have enough money to put gas in my own car, and I ran out of gas five minutes from my own house, and won't your Saturday night suck if you come help me."  Gah!  I complain that no one ever calls me for help, even though I would, gladly, even at my own inconvenience.  So what makes me think that others don't want the same opportunity?  My head is a frakked up place.  I'm blaming the 60s.

But.  Full tank of gas.  Felix the Cat. I bow to the universe.

Moms and other mysterious creatures, part two

Now for my stepmother.  Again a woman I did and do love.  I don't like her much most of the time.

When she got me and my sister, I had been the head of our little family unit.  Even at eight.  I was the one who went to the store for food and milk.  I was the one who bought cigarettes for my mother.  Obviously this was before there were age restrictions on buying cigarettes and alcohol.  I sometimes picked up my little sister from daycare, and sometimes made dinner for the two of us.

Immediately upon integrating us into her household, CC made it known that that behavior was not welcome. I was an eight-year-old girl and she didn't want me parenting or protecting my three-year-old sister.  I think of all the changes she made to my life during that first year, I hated that the most.  I wasn't needed anymore.  I felt superfluous and useless.

I was allowed to call her by her given name for a couple of weeks, until my sister and CC's own daughter began doing it, too, and then she made me call her Mom.  Oh, did I rebel against that, but being the eldest-perfect-child-hero stereotype, that rebellion came out sideways, never head-on.

I was nasty to her.  I disliked her intensely - hated that she had married my father, and hated that she was trying to be my mother when I already had a perfectly good one (not so much from an adult perspective, but it was what it was), hated that because of her, I had been taken from my mother and was no longer allowed to see her.

On the other hand, she had five brothers and five sisters, so I had aunts and uncles galore.  My youngest uncle was twelve, and the next youngest was sixteen.  I simply adored the two of them, to the point of hero-worship, and they put up with me and my sudden constant presence at family gatherings.  In those days, nearly all of the original eleven were still located in and around Denver, so a family dinner on Sunday was a mammoth affair to my previously one-aunt, two cousins mind.  Though CC resented my place in her life, her family accepted me immediately and with open arms.  I am no longer close to many of them (I mean, it's nearly forty years later, after all), but I love them all, without exception.

I was the eldest of the grandchildren.  CC was only 22 at the time, and most of the other originals were not yet married, and none of those who were had children older than two or three.

As fractious as our relationship was, we came to some kind of detente, because she was the only mother I had for seven years.  She fed me, clothed me, taught me how to set a table regardless of who was coming to dinner, enforced manners and proper behavior, let it slide when I'd rather read than go outside, and put up with my bad attitude with questionable grace.

She also regularly beat me, slapped me, berated me verbally and emotionally, and took all her resentments out on my physical and emotional person.  From this distant perspective, I know that she did the best she could with what coping tools she had, but my inner child says it wasn't good enough.

There were moments, though.  When I came home devastated in the sixth grade because I'd gotten my first B, she put her arms around me and let me cry, and made sure I understood that a B was plenty good enough.  Perfectionist me didn't believe her, but not through lack of trying.  When she caught me sneak-reading the Playboys, she didn't berate me, but sat me down at the dinner table, made me look at them from cover to cover and asked me if I had any questions, reassured me that those women in the pictures didn't look that good in real life, that real women had hair on their legs and didn't have to wear makeup to look pretty enough.  When my sixth grade teacher (ah, Mr. McCormack!) spanked me for some transgression, she stormed to the school and made sure he knew that it was NOT acceptable for the school to spank me for any reason whatsoever.  After that, I had to run laps.  I'd rather have been spanked, frankly.  When I got my first period, she was matter-of-fact about showing me how to use the sanitary belt and how to attach the pads to it (yes, I am that old), and calmed me down when I was sure that everybody could smell that I was on my period.

We functioned on an uneven keel until the year my dad had a solitary tour in Korea, and was gone for an entire year.  Our little family had to learn how to function without daddy around, and my relationship with CC changed and was sometimes less antagonistic.  When he came back, we all had to learn to deal with that again.  Anybody who says it's only the active duty member who really sacrifices is full of shit.

Anyway, during what we now call the tween years, particularly while my dad was gone, beatings and threats to send me back to my mother (for some reason, I was terrified of this) were the norm.  Anything that went wrong, I got punished for it.  Any chore that needed to be done, I was assigned to do it.  Basically, anything that made her life easier was my responsibility.

Things happened when I was fourteen, outside the immediate family, and things came to a head with CC the summer I was fifteen, when I was walking from the bathroom to my bedroom, and CC randomly reached up and slapped me as I was walking past her.  I got completely still and silent (people who know me well tend to disappear on the exceedingly rare occasion this happens now), then shoved her into the sliding glass door and very calmly told her, "Don't. Ever. Touch. Me. Again."  She didn't ever beat me again, though she still yelled at me plenty.

I got through high school, nearly always on restriction or grounded from something (or everything), moved out as soon as I turned 18 in the middle of my senior year, and graduated.  Fiddled around, continuing to live a directionless life for a few years, then moved completely away, to another state, and got into therapy as a result of my aunt's inpatient treatment for something.  Learned a lot about myself during those five years, grew up a lot.  Came back to Texas and stayed in Dallas.  Since I left for Missouri in 1987, I've never lived full-time in San Antonio, though I have always considered it home and hope to return there in the very near future.

When I came to Dallas, I met and married my ex-husband, had Mrs. Potatohead ten months later (on our ten monthiversary, as a matter of fact) and CC all of a sudden got nice.  She bought the wedding announcements when we told her we'd gotten married, invited us to visit for the holidays and was generally a much nicer person to be around.  This lasted a while, I guess, but eventually she reverted to form.  She'd badmouth me to my daughter, talked about me to my sisters behind my back.  Again, I was the scapegoat for pretty much everything wrong in her life, though she was nice as pie to my face.  All kinds of lovey-dovey.

When Mrs. Potatohead  was old enough to spend time with my family on her own, CC was always happy to have her visit, creative with activities to keep her occupied, and generous with her time and material things.  We lived in an uneasy peace for years, with her being supportive on the surface, and ugly when I wasn't there to hear it.

CC kept up the surface support, even during some of my most trying emotional times, and I continued to accept this dichotomous behavior from her.  I've made my peace with it, and kinda figure she's given me what she's capable of giving, all things considered.  It's not good enough, but it never will be, and yet, it has to be.  It's all there ever will be.

Three and a half years ago, we had to move out of the house we'd been living in, and she offered to pay for an apartment for a year, if we'd move into the apartment she chose for us (that is, Miss Not-Yet-Potatohead and myself).  We made the move, Miss became Mrs, Mr and Mrs had Baby Potatohead, and Mrs graduated from high school in spite of everything.  My kid is something special.  Anyway, the year of financial support became six months, and with a fifteen-month lease, we struggled to stay in that place and pay all the bills, until Mr Potatohead went into the USAF.  He got out of basic training, started getting paid, and Mrs Potatohead started paying all the bills.  The child had become the parent to some degree, and I'm willing to bet part of her resented it.

During the last part of this, my truck started needing more repairs than it was worth, and I sold it.  We went without a car for quite a while, dependent on others to get us around for anything.  Nearly two years ago now, CC told me that if I could find a car I liked, she would pay for it, with one stipulation.  She was done with me.  I was to stay out of her life for good.

At last, after almost forty years, the gloves came off and she was honest about what she wanted.  I have to recognize the powerful moment for what it was, and I admire her for finally saying what she actually felt instead of catering to the party line that family is family and we should all be happyhappy together.  What a crock that is.

Last year, CC let me know via email that if I wanted to come over, I'd have to find a way to get there (remember I didn't have my car for a year because of that horrid mechanic).  My sister insisted this would be considered an invitation, but I found it less than gracious, and insincere, so I didn't bother making any effort to find a way over there.  I live half an hour away.  If she really wanted me there to any degree whatsoever, someone could have come and got me.

On the other hand, she sent bits and pieces of xmas dinner with said sister when she drove to see me on her way out of town.  I did enjoy the traditional family fare, even a day late and cold.  lol

I'm OK with not seeing her.  However, staying out of her life means that I don't get to see my dad, and I miss him something awful.  He last spoke to me at xmas, the month before she bought me the car I have now.  He sent me an email for my birthday that year, but didn't actually speak to me, and last year, I got nothing at all from him, not even a text message.  I'm trying to get to my happy place with that, but man it is difficult to do.  I'll admit that I had myself a little pity party over my birthday last year.  Staying out of her life also means that I don't get to see the rest of the family at Thanksgiving and Christmas, though Thanksgiving is usually spent with my girlfriend in SA.

As painful as it is to have my dad be out of my life, I prefer this honest-to-herself CC over the previous two-faced one.  If she doesn't like me, she shouldn't have to pretend that she does.  Much as I love her, I don't have to pretend to like her anymore, either.  I can live with that.

None of this should be construed as meaning that I am blameless and perfect.  I so am not.  I, too, am doing the best I can with the coping tools I have.  It's a wonder I'm still sane after all I've been through, as a great man once said.  :D  Actually, I don't think I am sane, but don't tell anybody.

Moms and other mysterious creatures, part one

I loved my mother always.  Sometimes I didn't like her much, though.

My mother and I had a strange relationship.  I lived with her for the first eight years of my life, and from all accounts, I was a happy child, content to be left to my own devices.  Then my dad got custody of us, he was PCSed to Thailand with the USAF, and I didn't see her for another seven years.  By that time, I was deep into the teenage years, and did not feel the need for nor enjoy having another mother figure, particularly not one with strange ideas about how I should behave toward her or in general.  I had things going on in my personal life that were traumatic and that summer was probably not the best timing to rekindle our relationship.

She tried to be a mother to me at first, and that just really didn't gel, so we eventually created a friendship that mostly worked for us.  She shared things with me that she might discuss with another peer, and I talked to her about things, even private things, comfortably, because that mother/daughter vibe just wasn't there for me.  I think she missed that, since I never stopped being her elder daughter in her mind, but I just couldn't make the transition back to being her daughter.

One of the things about her though, was that she talked about me a lot.  She'd praise me to the mountains, to anybody who'd listen, when other people were around.  However, she never made a point to say any of those things privately, and I kind of felt that she was proud of the idea of me, but not necessarily proud of the me that existed right in front of her.  I resented that she only seemed proud of me when there was someone to listen to her saying it.

By the summer I started seeing her again, she was fairly well-known in the local and regional pagan and Wiccan community and many, many people called her Mom.  I have to admit that I also resented the time she seemed to have for everyone but me.  I'll stipulate that it was my perception as a selfish teenager, and probably not the reality, though there were certainly times that I wanted to do something with her and she couldn't because she'd already committed the time elsewhere.  I guess I just thought that if I was going to go to all the trouble to come see her in the summer, she'd be available for me to see.

At some point, I got into therapy and started to grow up, intellectually and emotionally, and began to see my mother's behaviors from a more detached perspective.  This both helped and hurt our relationship, as I was able to see and accept her for what she was as a mother, and at the same time, I saw that she was stuck in a victim mentality.

I grew to hate that she couldn't take responsibility for anything in her life.  In her mind, everything happened TO her.  If something bad happened, she could (and did) always lay the blame on someone else.  Most of us know someone like this, I think.  I sometimes thought myself better than her, because she couldn't or wouldn't rise above this mental place and be her own person, and I had struggled through years of talk therapy to become a better, more emotionally mature me.

In the end, she was pretty determined that she was going to die relatively early, like her mother did, though my grandmother died from breast cancer.  My mother accomplished this through heavy wine consumption and chain-smoking and basically not eating much at all.  At the very end, when she was being taken to the hospital in an ambulance, she sent someone back inside the house for her cigarettes.  I always kind of laugh at that.

All of us kids saw her a couple of months before she died, and I was stunned to see how emaciated she looked, though in the pictures of that day, it doesn't show much.  By the time she died, my 5' 10" mother weighed less than eighty pounds, and she looked horrible.

During the last year or two, I struggled mightily with letting go of her and detaching myself from her negativity, because I could just get sucked down into that morass and never climb out, so I didn't spend a whole lot of time with her.  That was what I needed at the time, to keep my sanity, and I don't regret the decision I made to spend as little time with her as humanly possible.

I do miss her, though, these ten years later.  She always had good stories, from her own childhood and from mine.  She loved people and people loved her.  One of the things I tried to do in the wake of her death was to compliment random strangers, as my own strange way of honoring her memory (This was something she did that I always admired and wanted to do).  For an introvert like myself, it was difficult, sometimes to the point of tears, but it made me feel a little more connected to the woman I had adored when she was at her best.

Ramblings and stuff

Since the death last month of one of my daughter's classmates, and his memorial service, I've been in a heightened (deepened?) state of nostalgic melancholy.  I saw the classmate she'd been closest to at her freshman year, and that was almost as hard as being at Trey's memorial service, in some strange way.  G was a wonderful boy and he loved my daughter practically from the moment they met.  They became dance partners and oh, my kid was happy when she was dancing!

Then we moved, had to, leaving all her friends, including G, behind, and she really disliked me for a while.  I didn't have the money to drive back to C-Town very often, even if it was only twenty minutes away.  What?  I was unemployed.  I managed to keep the stupid cell phones turned on most of the time, and we had a place to live, so I kinda figured we were ahead of the game.  Driving back and forth so she could see her friends in person didn't seem like a necessity.

Anyway, I guess seeing G and remembering that one happy year of high school settled in and made some part of me wish that she could have stayed as happy as she was her freshman year, and that we could have continued to function as well together as we always had (with a few exceptions - no parent/child relationship is without tension).

Maybe it  mixed in with some belated empty-nest syndrome.  It's been a little over a year since she moved out completely, and all but stopped talking to me for a while.  Those first couple of months, while I was still packing and moving, weren't too bad, but I missed my grandson and talking to my girl every day something awful.  Then I couch-surfed for a few months, and being on my best behavior sort of meant not moping around about my kid or my dysfunctional family.

November was harder, because I was unable to make my annual trip to San Antonio to see my friend from high school and do Thanksgiving with her and host our Airmen and just in general be "home" with antiquing and breakfast tacos and Sonic drinks every day and all the Mexican food I could manage to eat.  I look forward to that recharge all year long, and though I understand her situation, I selfishly hated that it got in the way of my needs and wants.  I did my damnedest to sleep through Thanksgiving, since I had nowhere to go.

Having nowhere else to go was stupid, considering that my parents live half an hour away.  Last January, after my stepmother bought me a car (one cannot really effectively job search or work without a car in DFW), she came out and said that she wanted me out of her life and except for sending her birthday cards I've completely respected that.  Last Thanksgiving, it wasn't a big deal, because of my annual trip to SA.  But I was not invited to their house at Christmas, not even for dinner.  Unfortunately, her need to see me gone means that I don't see or speak to my dad, either, and it hurts that he's made no effort to contact me.  This year was the first time in my entire life that I didn't get even an email or text message from my dad on my birthday.  I cried about that, you can believe it.  Yes, I'm 47, but I don't think a girl ever grows out of needing her dad to call her on her birthday.

I wished pointlessly that I had my own place, so that I could put a Thanksgiving dinner together and make it an open house or something, so that I could see other people and not be stuck in my own dark and dreary head/heartspace.  Don't get me wrong, I am grateful to have a place to live that is not a box under a bridge, but it is just a roof over my head, and though he says I'm welcome to invite people over, I rarely do because this place has never felt like home to me.  I also hate the kitchen.  I mean, I don't like to cook anyway, but this kitchen in particular is definitely a relic from a bygone era.

I think I had a point to make, but if I did, I don't recall what it was, and I think I've rambled depressingly for quite long enough.  Gah!

On a more positive note, I am still madly in love with Battlestar Galactica 2003 and Katee Sackhoff's Starbuck.  I managed to get my hands on the first two seasons of DVDs and am really looking forward to seeing all those deleted scenes and other extras.  I'm trying to ration myself, though.  The distraction's gotta last through Christmas, because I just don't wanna think about another one without my family.

And on another bright note, my grandson, he is adorable!