cormorancy

i called my sister and she showed me her new apartment and its soo perfect!! she has a private bathroom and the kitchen is beautiful and theres a balcony with a little bench, just a gorgeous first apartment and im so happy for her. its killing me that i cant be there to help her unpack and decorate and get situated, but i think shes feeling motivated to get the place comfortable for when her roommate moves in (sometime in august because of the timeline of his surgery recovery); im confident she can handle the move in of it all.

i am feeling so angry with my parents for more or less kicking her out—which is a good thing all told, but they just dont care about her, they dont like her, they want to be done with her so badly they are willing to pay her rent but again not because they want to support her but because they do not want to deal with her. they let her move in with about three days worth of food and zero pantry staples, and have left her to sort groceries and cooking out completely on her own—when she has never had to feed herself and does not know how to cook or how to shop for herself as head of household. just deplorable neglect on their part, but we talked about it and i sent her with a list that should cover the most basic of basics (salt, pasta, oats, rice, eggs, frozen veg, onions, cooking oils, condiments, etc). i dont mind doing this kind of stuff for her & i never will but g-d it boils my blood that i am doing this parenting for her when i know my parents are fully capable of doing it because they did it (more or less) for my brother and me.

i cant bring myself to actually be surprised by the way they behave to her; it has been like this for as long as it has been obvious that her experience of disability would require actual ongoing care and support, but there is a part of me that feels so confused by it—where has the image of a functional family gone, and where too have all the real skills that underpinned it gone? i want to take them by the shoulders and shake them—what are they doing? they are downsizing to a much smaller home, which is a decision that makes sense but i also know will mean them getting rid of basically everything they own; they are not eating “because they dont think they are human;” they are not working; what are they doing?

this is my first father’s day since breaking off my relationship with my parents—it is not a holiday that has ever held particular meaning for me, but it is a convenient time to reflect on my feelings about my father. overall i continue to feel deep satisfaction and peace because he (and my mother) are not in my life. i grieved for him and our relationship for so long before cutting him off that it did feel very final; telling him that our relationship was over was the last step in a long series of steps i took to free myself from him.

when he was still in my life, i was preserving an image of him that weighted his positive qualities more heavily than his others (weighted my positive experiences of him more heavily than the extremes of violation he subjected me to, perhaps). its not that i think that image was completely inaccurate but i feel more balanced now. i no longer need to see him in any particular way which thankfully allows more clarity—my love for him does not negate how he was abusive in truly every act and deed, how it was all an optimization game for him—balance violence with enough loving presence to confuse me beyond my ability to untangle it, always leaving himself back doors and side exits out of any accusation. having grieved him and his violence so deeply, too, i feel i can locate, without minimization, his violence as lesser than J’s. it was and is devastating but it is also true that it was less painful, less physically damaging, less humiliating, less destructive, less lasting. being so separate from my father is helping me to take stock of my relationship with J when my father was not present, which is something i still feel very confused about. the longer i look at it the stranger their relationship seems to me.

its hard to square the ways my father both put me in great danger & made choices to protect me, too, i think. there was a time when he was trying very hard to be a good father. i wonder if we had not moved back into our house where everything happened, if he would have been able to hold out on himself a little longer; there was a peculiar quality of shame & mutual recognition of that shame in his abuse of me as a 15-17 year-old that my early childhood lacked.

holding in one hand the promises i have made to parts that we are not going back there, and holding in the other hand the overwhelming grief that it will never be that much again, that all actions undertaken in its place are unsatisfying miniatures.

i think if kc is going to try to use our therapy time for herself (this is good, i am onboard with it), then i need to use this blog more to offload some of the organized abuse horror that i am navigating mostly on my own. michael [part] is of course always a huge help (ha—i could not have imagined writing that 2 years, 3 years, 5 years, etc. ago), and my girlfriend helps so much when young parts need help in the physical world, but the burdens of disclosure are mine to hold and to manage. i am the one who weaves what mica or fern or marie or any other young part tells me into the narrative of our life.

it is so persistently difficult to notice and be with mica; there is another part, a fogging, stopping, redirecting part with a lot of influence internally, but with whom i do not speak. i know the interlocking mechanisms of our system spin apart and show me the workings when i can support mica, so why is it so difficult to keep choosing that? there are two corridors and my mother is at the end of one of them and the blank room is at the end of the other.

some things i am thinking about in my life that i just need to say the words of somewhere: hypnosis, bloodletting, the ingestion of blood and feces, needles (always), “dog stuff,” ritual preparation, sexual murder, being a living corpse, the difference between being a doll and being dead, symbolic deaths, knives, catheters.

everything is in some state of disarray internally. i/we am/are under a constant barrage of cruel remarks and criticism; mica got to the point of beginning to physically harm the body before michael and i’s joint presence could redirect him (and then he said some truly disturbing things to [barbie doll he vents on], which were not new but its never not disconcerting to have these things that really were said to us come out of our mouth). so its bad.