Why is it so hard to be me?Pt 1 (anthology)

Though this is not quite the direction I go on this blog, I must admit it had to get here sometime.

So I am sitting here on a Sunday afternoon, raw in my throat and eyes stinging from anger and burning tears of frustration and died down rage and someone offers to try and apologize to me in a half ass manner as if that makes all of this now lingering hurt go away... news flash.. it doesn't.

It's no secret now since I have made a video on the subject and have spoken about it with some but never   truly ALL about  is I have suffered from Depression and anxiety all of my 44 yrs on this planet.

To give you a background, I grew up in a broken home as so many of us have.

 I saw and endured a lot of abuse, violence, sexual abuse from a family friend,  abandonment and loss of most of my childhood. I became an adult before I could learn to read. I took care of my alcoholic parent when she was hungover or wanted to kill herself or just when it became too much for my poor Grandmother to bear not to mention not only did she have one alcoholic child she had 2 with my Uncle also a raging one who worked in a bar and lived with us.

To say I have trust issues now is a vast understatement and I even feel bad for those who try and get close to me as it is a process more than it is a pleasure. I think most of my "skills" in life were self taught not anything that I can truly say I learned from my parents worth any real weight in life till much later  when I learned to appreciate them again and love them the way a child should love her parents,   back then I could NOT for what they instilled in me.   Scratch that. I did love them.. I loved them so much that it hurt, I just didn't understand why they didn't love me back? Not that they didn't but I couldn't understand love the way it was expressed, all I saw was pain and regret and suffering of their own. Not by some debilitating disease or sickness, I saw pain through loss they had endured in their lives. My Mother lost her Dad when she was 5 very young to have a parent taken away and I could not even imagine what that did to her. How lonely and afraid it must have made her feel. So much that she grew into an adult who never felt loved, who destroyed her mind and body with the poison of alcohol and let men less than her worth into her life to take away any spirit she had left, So what was left for me?? Why couldn't my Mom see she WAS needed and WAS loved and all i ever wanted was her to be there for me. I tried to show her as a child many times by dumping the very poison she swallowed down the drain several times. I would make "treatments" of lotions and powders and whatever else I could find to rub her feet or my Grandmothers feet and give them homemade spa treatments so they would be comforted and it would make them laugh and some how take the focus off all the bad that had gone on. See, many a Sunday morning she would be hungover, raw from her throat, eyes bashed in from puffiness and crying and she would smell of vodka and grief. I hated Sundays so much. 

Growing up and becoming my own adult has been a fearsome, tireless place of twists and turns, I wanted to abandon any semblance of who I was by moving on to people who (as I later found out) were just like them. Either of them. Even though my Dad was not around his presence still loomed over me, My Mother would make angry declarations of how I looked like him and made no bones about expressing her disdain for him through me. Growing up without my Dad was hard, so fucking hard because all I wanted was a protector, someone to shield me from the shit storm  my Mother would whip up on a bad night. Someone to take me away when she was screaming her bloody head off or playing "Bohemian Rhapsody" over and over and screaming "Mama... I don't want to die.. sometimes with I'd never been born at all"!!! I still to this day cannot listen to that song without wanting to jump right out of my skin.  Dad didn't come back into my life until I tracked him down and here's the fun part about that.. His parents (My Grandparents) lived a few buildings away... Not another town or state... over a bridge. There it was my Grandparents building. I had been without him for 12 years and no one tracked me down?? NO one went to look at public records?? I was in PUBLIC school for christs sake! I hadn't moved, I hadn't been relocated I was STILL THERE.

On a day, when I had a row with my Mom and couldn't take it anymore I wrote them.

I was 16 or 17 and I wrote a letter to my Grandparents practically begging to see my Father or 

at least know where he was. I had heard enough stories to fill my head for a lifetime, I just wanted the truth!! Several days after that letter was sent my Aunt shows up on my doorstep, I guess representing my Grandparents and the rest was surreal to say the least. That year I was reunited with a family I barely knew and a Dad who tried to get in my good graces as he had a lot of explaining to do and God knows I had questions. My Dad took me out on his boat thinking the environment was right but it never was. He introduced me to his new wife (a third) and now my new Stepmother who i grew to really love, He exposed me to his childish friends who loved music and smoking and playing darts and love was spread like the 60's flower children.. so much fun and so much sad rejoicing in what was obvious to me they all didn't want to grow up in their own lives.. I didn't judge I celebrated with them, with ALL of them. My "new" family, my current family I hadn't known and his friends. I embraced his suburban life in Howard Beach Queens and loved to spend the time away from my hell hole in the Northern part of the Bronx. That only put a temporary band-aid on everything. I wasn't getting all the pieces put back together in fact they came apart more. The more my Dad talked to me about my Mother and his being married to her and how I was as a baby and all the fights and problems they had, the angrier and more resentful I became.  I furthered this with a gaggle of years I hated his guts on behalf of my Mom and now me for running out and becoming something while I was left behind to suffer and lose out on a potential good life, He left me with her. 

Years went on of this until I couldn't take anymore and as in only my way of dealing with pain, I go big. I dragged everyone down with me, I fought and kicked and screamed with everyone. Then when that didn't do it, finally I took the poison and swallowed it whole. Afterwards I begged to be put somewhere,, someone to HELP ME!! Here is where the wonderful world of hospitals, clinics, meds and talking...talking...talking...talking and more talking went on.  Want to know the irony in all of this?? My Dad's profession at the time was an administrator at a college, He orchestrated and directed kids MY AGE on their paths and futures through a young cadets program, he was an accomplished writer, He taught, He counseled!!! Suicidal teens..... Yet here is his only daughter in a hospital with older adults bouncing off the walls and have histories of psychotic behavior and here is me making friends and having group sessions with them.. Finally fitting in I suppose.

Yeah, that had to have burned him deep down. Help the world but your own?? Not so much.

I got out of those hospitals, I went home again, Only to have my Mother afraid of me and when she became afraid she became angry and when she became angry I was the target. See, I wasn't going to live in "her" house with that "face" or that "attitude" and they certainly were not going to walk on eggshells for me. That day I came home from the hospital.. That afternoon I left to go stay with my Dad. I guess you can say either place was no place for me but at least at my Dad's I had a room to myself and a better environment.. until we fought that is. He was good at trying to psychologize me, or try to get into my muddled mind..so much that he would ruin things for me.. 

This one time I LOVED the NY Mets ( something my mom inflicted on me)// I loved the 1986 team and the years that would follow and I got into it with baseball card collecting and knowing about all the players and learned about the game and fantasized I could be on that field someday as a ballgirl. 

So I wrote them. YES! I wrote the New York Mets and I told them of my dream.. How I wanted to be a part, How I wanted to try out and be a NY Met ballgirl.  I was answered within a week or two. I was so excited because they gave me an opportunity I will never forget. Though you must know even though my Dad lived in Queens he HATED the NY Mets and I use that term loosely. So much so that when we would drive by Shea Stadium he would spit out the window at them as if they could care that he hated their organization. Anyway, I went to the tryouts,,, I was nervous and exhilarated! I was there among the players and the very place they practiced and played some of the most unforgettable baseball in history, I tried out. I wasn't very good but I did make a diving catch to end my try out and I thought it was pretty impressive. My Dad was annoyed and bored and by this time was flirting with the director of operations which appalled me but that was who I was with. That afternoon on the way home my Dad was grilling me about why I went to do this in the first place. "You did this for attention", and his psychoanalysis on why. It infuriated me and again the wall went right back up.

That was just one instance that stands out but I find that over the years BOTH of them had ways
of making me feel bad about doing things I loved as if that would take away from the dutiful daughter and kick bucket I had become. No wonder I had ZERO self-esteem going into my 20's what was there left??

END PT 1.