(i think i made you up inside my head)

for even a shorter moment than the last.

part of your letter was redacted. she could not say why other than they were being overly cautious. i am wondering what it meant. no, not wondering. i’m dying to know what it said under that black box. it was after you congratulated me on having another child.

in my letter to you i mentioned my poor choices in relationships stating i was married after i said i had another baby.

it must have been something in response to my relationship, or perhaps something about yours.

she mentioned she would be visiting your family and partner next. i felt a twinge of pain. of course you still have a partner. the news has done well to protect her identity, only mentioning you lived with an unknown partner.

i can’t imagine how she feels.

but selfishly, i felt that twang. i know my letters are not important to you when you have actual family and loved ones, but yours are incredibly important to me.

i gave her the yearbook i just received.

i asked facebook friends if anyone had pictures of me as a child. funny enough, my sister’s old friend had an extra yearbook from when we graduated 8th grade that she mailed to me.

i hadn’t seen those pictures in years. i was so happy to see them. especially now. we were in clubs together and there i was next to you. of course.

i showed her the pictures at the starbucks and said she could take it back with her. she will bring it when she comes back or will mail it to me.

i let go of those pictures i just got back, for you.

i hope you see them to me and know how much i care for you. that i did then and still do now.

how barbaric it is that we have the death penalty. i have been against it for a while now. prior to forming my opinion, i just didn’t have one.

but when i read that new yorker article trial by fire, it really sealed in that i don’t support capital punishment. but i never thought i would know someone facing it.

i think of the movie the green mile now and just start crying . i don’t watch a lot of movies involving prison, so that is just what jumps out to me. the cruelty of death sentences. the frailty and individual personalities, humbleness, humanity of each prisoner.

she asked me if i keep up with the news surrounding you. i said not really because it is all so one sided. i knew you. i know that you are more than what everyone sees. more than all the opinions they can put together about you. it is jarring to see the language used about someone i have admired for most of my life now.

it was touching to read you say you wish we had stayed connected that time. i really really wish that too. i wanted to keep the connection, but knew i had bothered you so often before that i just wanted to show i could leave you alone for once.

and here i am now writing you letters and waiting for her to come back to town. so the jail doesn’t intercept them and read them and put me on a list i’m probably already on.

i don’t know how much help i can possible be in recounting memories i have of you for so long ago. i can only hope a jury will see in you what i have always seen. i can only hope they have a heart and say you do not deserve to die, not now, tomorrow, 10 years, or ever. i know you won’t ever be free, but god whatever i can do to help you i would

i pointed out friends you had and hope they can speak to your gentleness and good nature as well, even tho i have no idea where they are now. and i know the will likely be just like me, people who haven’t seen you in a long time.

i saw a man who killed his wife in my city and is getting 40 years. not life. not death. someone who no doubt has always been violent and still would be in 40 years if he is still alive.

and yet, here you are, facing worse. what a joke of a world. a good gentle person. who wouldn’t hurt an innocent person.

i married someone who has shown me he is not gentle and can be dangerous, even inadvertently. what a joke on me.

she asked if we ever dated, i told her no. we hardly knew each other in our adult life and when we did, it was ever platonic. not a kiss, not a hand hold.

i wanted to hold your hand that night you drove me home. i don’t remember how it was that you ended up taking me home. why you didn’t just leave and let me take the bus or go with my friend. if our friend suggested it. if i asked. if you offered. i dont remember how it was i ended up in your car, just that i did and i wished the road would go on forever.

and how i wanted to touch your hand. how i wished that this was the moment our ships would finally stay put. that fate had to have put us in the same place all those years later for a reason. of course i wanted to kiss you. i don’t remember leaving your car. if you just paused on the street and let me out or if you parked and we talked for another minute. i wish i could remember every word, every mile, every look.

ive learned it wasn’t fate. just that the world is so damn small.

i will think of you for the rest of my life. and someday i will ask you if i can visit. i am grateful enough to be able to write letters to you. i am counting down the days til i get to see her and see a letter back. i keep hoping she will text that she’s coming back to town.

i have always thought of you often. i have never known why. we have been strangers for most of our lives and passed each other like ships. always just a moment. and then i would wonder again where you were.

now i know exactly where you are. and i wish that i didnt. i wish you weren’t where you are. i understand why you did it, but i wish you hadn’t if only for my own selfish reasons that i wish you were safe. that i dont want to see the news talk about you and make wrong assumptions. i dont want you to die. nor do i want you to live there the rest of your life.

i think about you every day now. i look at the picture we took, one of the times our ships passed. i look at things i once wrote about you.

i wish that i could see you. not that you’d care to see me. i am sure you had someone in your life, maybe you still do. you have more important people to write letters to than me, i know that.

i miss you. how can i miss you when you have not been in my life. how can i miss you when i have snippets of memories of you. when most of those memories are from nearly 20 years ago.

i googled if i could hug you where you are. the answer is no, and i wouldn’t be able to drive there anyway and leave my kids. just to hug a person i last hugged 10 years ago. did we even hug? i wanted to say so much to you, ask so much of you. but i told myself the ship was leaving, don’t drown in a harbor for a ship that accidentally sailed here.

if only i could have steered. if only we’d ever been on the same boat. i would have navigated you somewhere i deemed safe, where no one could form opinions about you. where no one knew what you looked like. where you were free.

but i know that’s not what you would have wanted. that much i know. a man of conviction. there’s a reason i was always drawn to you.

i asked her if you regretted it. she said she could not answer those kinds of questions. for one hour i had a small piece of you through her. i hope she comes back so i have another piece.

and then i remember the likelihood that anything has changed

i remember that i keep seeing new accounts of hers suggested to me on instagram, even tho i have blocked several of her accounts by now.

but she apparently deletes her accounts and makes new ones when she breaks up with her boyfriend i guess. so i get a suggestion and then when she gets back with him it’s a joint account. i am going to block this one again but damn if i see another pop up…..

because what 55 year old uses social media like that to announce break ups every 6 months. nothing has changed lol.

but anyway, he was telling me about an AA meeting he went to. the stories people were telling and how he’s heard things he’s done himself and then other things that sound extreme that he hasn’t done. And I had to remind him, he hasn’t done them yet. That alcoholism is a progressive disease. He says he knows. A psychiatrist at the program he’s doing prescribed him something and he didn’t know what it was, I said it’s probably naltrexone. And it was.

Progressive disease. Naltrexone. I’m so tired of alcoholism. I just know too much about it. I’m not an alcoholic so why do I have to have all this information in my head about it all the time. It’s so taxing. I have my own shit that I’m still trying to deal with and then on top of it. I have years of trying to understand alcoholics in my head. and really it has given me nothing to show for it because I don’t talk to my alcoholic parents who are not going to change and I am married to an alcoholic who I don’t think can change. All the information I have gathered over the years and tried to apply has done nothing for me.

But anyway, he’s in this program and it has me thinking of all the people that I’ve met in programming that are not with us anymore. It is quite sad. Some of them I don’t know how their life ended, but there are a few I knew did it themselves. It makes me so sad.

I probably would have liked my husband if I met him in programming and after parting ways, I would probably think of him like I think of everyone else I’ve met. It’s so easy to meet someone and understand them and empathize with them when you don’t have to go home with them . As a family member of an addict it’s just so hard to empathize with them and see them as a flawed human when they’re endangering your children.

I think that’s also what’s hard for me is that I know I’m capable of being understanding. I am completely capable of educating myself on somebody’s illness. But it’s so hard when you don’t like the person anymore. when they’ve done so many things that you can’t really forgive, especially when you don’t believe change is possible.

I think the hardest part for me of sitting in that room with my therapist as I told her that I think my husband is drunk and he is going to pick up my son was that it felt like I was out of control again it felt like I was a child who couldn’t do anything. It felt like when my daughter was a toddler, and I was with my parents at their friends house and they were both drunk and I didn’t want them to drive but I couldn’t drive myself yet and got into a fight with them in the parking lot because I was insisting that they were drunk and shouldn’t drive with my baby in the car, and there was nothing I could do. It felt like that again and that sucks.

This has brought up so much reflection of my own childhood. I am an adult child of alcoholics. My mom would say otherwise, but that is the truth. I am the way I am now because of how I grew up. I have made the choices I’ve made because of how I grew up and I have to reconcile with that every single day. I have to challenge my thinking every single day because of how my brain has been wired.

I told my therapist that I lack skills because I grew up with an emotionally immature parent and because of it, I myself can be emotionally immature as a parent. My therapist denied that, “because I have the ability to self reflect,” but I really don’t think that it absolves me. I think I still can be emotionally immature because I did not grow up with the skills necessary. It affects my parenting. It affects my daughter. It’s something I work very hard to correct and to step back with.

I find myself revisiting things my mother said to me or things that she did to me, the way she expected me to behave or proces things..the way she talked to me at my daughter‘s age. It was clear that she did not see me as a child. I see my 14 year-old daughter as a child. She’s not an adult. She does not have a fully developed brain. She does not understand the world yet.

I think of all the things that my daughter is going through and has gone through in the last five years and even before that. and I think of how when my grandpa passed away and it was hard on my mom, I was in summer school and she and my aunt were planning for the funeral and dropped me off at summer school.

my aunt yelled at me for them having to drop me off and how their father died and they have to waste their time taking me to summer school because I wasn’t a good student. she wasn’t even in my life and my mom didn’t say anything to her when she said that to me. I was a child. I would never let somebody put that on my child. to add their grief to a child like that and blame them for something like that. I was self harming at the time and my mom didn’t know yet. I just can’t imagine talking to my child that way. granted I make plenty of mistakes, but my frustration comes from the fact that she is a child and it is quite hard raising one. It just felt like my mom‘s frustration came from her inconsistency in viewing me as older than I was or responsible for more than a child should’ve been. I sometimes wonder if she had been different if I would not have had a child so young. it doesn’t make sense to me now, but at the time I thought having a child would get me out of that house sooner. instead, it trapped me for much much longer. it doesn’t make sense to me, but somehow at the time I thought it would work out the way I wanted it to.

Anyway, my husband is an alcoholic and for years I let it affect me. For years, I hoped he would change. But he never got help and I suffered anxiety, betrayals, so many things. and because I am of my least concern, I kept putting up with it.

He was sober for a year and a half. He relapsed shortly before my son turned one and now I had to draw the line when it affects my children. It is a completely different story when it is my kids who could be harmed.

My husband has relapsed several times in the last few months and each time I have kicked him out. But he comes back and his enabling parents tell him that I will be safe at the shelter if I leave when I’ve threatened to do that if he comes back so they fucking suck and so he’s kept coming back and the cycle has been repeating itself.

Well, when you drive drunk with my son, then I go to the courthouse and get a restraining order so now he cannot come back for a few weeks and for the first time in the eight years that I’ve known him, he has enrolled himself in an alcohol treatment program and he has gone to AA without me asking or demanding or finding meetings for him. He’s also going to a new therapist because the one he had sucked and I’ve been saying for months he needed a new one.

so I am working and taking my kids to school, picking them up doing dinner, letting dishes, pile up and suffering from ocular migraines that leave a giant Blindspot in my vision. I am beyond stressed whether the alcoholic gets help or not everything is always on me. it is so unfair.

I can’t process the idea of a divorce right now, and my husband wants me to believe that he will change this time, but I have no faith in him.

it is so unfair that I have to endure all this shit with him for years, listen to lies, listen to insults, be abandoned by him in the streets, be locked out of an apartment by him, he punched in the face by him, a slew of shit that I should not have put up with. Drive him around because he couldn’t even drive when we met because of his DUIs.

just all the shit that I’ve had to deal with and yes, it was my choice. Of course it was my choice and I should’ve left a long time ago, but it’s just funny that I have to go through all this shit and then still be expected to be supportive and hopeful for him. after he has involved my children in his addiction. How am I supposed to have any trust ever again?

He is a good dad when he’s sober obviously. But he isn’t really a good husband, and I hate his parents, who he constantly defends. I feel very lonely. I feel very regretful. I feel very stressed. I feel overwhelmed. I feel scared. I am always so scared.

it is a very sad feeling to be married and still feel so lonely.

to go to bed next to someone and still feel like you’re miles away from another body

it is quite a loud loneliness to live with someone you don’t love

i used to hate being alone, i hated being in my apartment with no one else there, hated to be in my bed alone. i thought that was loneliness.

My most recent struggles that I am putting my energy toward are being a mom. Not to my newborn, like one might think - starting motherhood over 13 years after my first child - but with that 13, almost 14 year old.

Being a teenager is tough, kind of.. I remember. Being a mom to a teenager is also tough! And I have never done it before. I have been my daughter's age, but I have never been a mom to someone my daughter's age before.

So, with my first child, I am still learning.

And I am still processing being her age. Because naturally, your instinct is to do whatever you experienced as a child. But I do not want to parent like my mother did.

I told my therapist, when it comes to the hard stuff, I know what I DON'T want to do.. and that's essentially anything my mom did with me. And because that is the only thing I know, and I am rejecting it, I am left with absolutely no roadmap. No guide on how to parent. So I sometimes make new mistakes that I regret. Or something I say will come out of me, and later I think, "That sounds like something my mother would have told me." And I feel guilty.

I don't want to create a copy of myself in my daughter, who exists with fear, shame, and disconnection. Who feels like a walking disappointment or a stranger.

My daughter recently shared something with me about my mother that she had not shared before. In the last 5 years since we left, she does not say much about my mom or sister, about leaving in the middle of the night, about choosing not to see them anymore, which was her decision. After I moved out, my daughter continued to see my family for a few weeks, until she decided she did not want to visit anymore because they would ask her questions about me. She was 8 at the time. Since then, she has said it doesn't bother her that she doesn't see them, and her disconnect with that is half the reason I put her in therapy.

But what she shared with me was about the last time she saw my mother before deciding she didn't want to go there anymore. My mother asked her, "Do you want to be like grandma or mommy when you are older?" And my daughter said she told her she wanted to be like her, because she was nervous and scared.

Hearing that my mother asked my then 8 year old that.. I was just incredulous and angry all over again. I cannot fathom asking a child such a question, OR thinking she should be like either of us. I do not want my daughter to be like my mother OR myself! I want so much better for her!

I had so many things I had to unlearn, feelings about myself, feelings about others, ignorance, judgment, impulsivity. I made so many mistakes, and I wish that I had done so many things differently. I don't want anything remotely close for her. What an odd thing for a 50 year old woman to ask a child whose life had just been upended.

Over the past 5 years I have cycled through so many emotions, on what is essentially a grieving journey for my living parents. There are plenty of times that I have missed my mother, or maybe momentarily thought I would need her. I never do "need" her, it seems. I don't know that I handle all my difficulties with grace, but I handle them nonetheless.

Many emotions. But lately, we are circling back on anger. Because parenting my daughter is bringing up all the things I don't want my daughter to experience. I am trying to do things differently.

My daughter has seen several therapists in the last few years. We have found one that is working best for her. I ignored therapy for myself the last 5 years - I couldn't prioritize it, until this new one for her, when I realized prioritizing it for myself IS prioritizing it for my children. Because I need to be a better mom. So we both are in therapy. At the same practice. The one I see now is older, and I think that is what I need. I always saw young women, not much older than me. This one specializes in motherhood.

But anyway, we both go every other week. And sometimes we both see hers together to discuss a conflict.

This is where my anger toward my mother is coming back up.

When I was a teen, only a year and a half older than my daughter is, I was in an outpatient program. When the assigned therapist had a family session with us, my mother was calm and collected, and I had no indication she was upset. The therapist might not have either. I also don't remember him saying anything incredibly pointed, though that was his style.

But when I got home, I was hit by my mother, who yelled about the therapist telling her "my problems were her fault" which I don't recall, and told me I wouldn't be going back there.

I cannot imagine doing that to my daughter.

After our recent session together after a conflict my daughter's therapist tried to resolve unsuccessfully, I called my best friend. My daughter was in the shower, and I told my best friend, this is what happened, and we had a session together, it did not help, and I want to get over this before she is out of the shower, am I overreacting about the conflict?

My best friend laughed, jokingly said I was crazy, confirmed I was overreacting, and told me to apologize to her. And that is what I did once she was out.

I told my therapist it is just so hard for me to get out of those moods, it is so hard to take a step back.. and why would it be easy? I could watch my mom give us the silent treatment for days.

My daughter's therapist suggested her and I talk one on one this week, so we did. And I told her to please just tell me next time if I am overreacting. That I just don't know what to do sometimes.

Both my daughter's therapist and my therapist recommended Dr. Becky podcasts and her website and book. My therapist recommended it last time I saw her so I started listening. I find that it has been helpful and really touches on these hard feelings about maybe not liking your own kid sometimes.

And that's another angry part.

Here I am telling my therapist that I don't know what to do, I don't want to do xyz, and that my daughter drives me crazy. She gives me resources. And they are my priority.

My mother would leave therapy and tell me her therapist said I am the problem in the family, and I must have this disorder, etc.

I cannot imagine doing that to my daughter.

I can't imagine what I would have to say about my daughter to elicit such claims from a professional. You would think I was the worst kid in the world.

So... parenting is bringing on lots of feelings about my own childhood.

I want a happy child. I want my daughter to look back, see my mistakes, and not have the answer just be "She did the best she could with what she had."

I want her to be able to say, "She did her best, and kept trying until she got it right."

My mother may have done her best. She may have done her best in spite of the way she grew up, which I would say was worse than my own childhood. And I can understand that. Why she did some of the things she did, said the things she did. I can't understand not wanting more from herself.

As a mother, I want more out of myself for my children. I want change, I want to foster happiness, creativity, and fun in them. I want to make up for my mistakes. I want forgiveness for my mistakes, that I intend to earn. It's not enough to say I did this and I'm sorry - but you were a bad child. Or apologize, but retract the apology later or justify your actions as a parent later.

but i do want to choose. i dont know what choice i want to make. i think i would like to have another child.

but i want to be able to choose.

i have a dull ache on my left side. i am terribly frightened that once again i will not be given a choice. my remaining tube is on my left side. i have had the ache all day, on and off. i will be so incredibly angry and saddened if i do not get the chance to make my own decision. if once again i dont have a viable pregnancy. if that is taken from me, i will be so hurt. i am nearly 30 years old and this is what my body is supposed to be able to do.

i have a phone appointment on friday. i am on the waitlist to be called sooner. my ultrasound will likely be next week. my hcg levels need to have multiplied significantly and i need to see SOMETHING in my uterus. i cannot go through this again, not when it means so much more to me this time. i need to be able to make my decision from there.

please let this be viable. please don’t let it be stuck again. i think that’s what’s happening. i knew it would be likely. but how unfair is that. i just want to make my own decision. i want to feel fear and excitement. not this kind of fear that my body is just sabotaging it for me.

it’s monday. i had an appointment scheduled to talk to my doctor about my ongoing bladder issues and about my recent weight gain.

last night before bed i said i should probably take a pregnancy test just because i know the doctor will ask if there’s any way i could be pregnant, and my periods come every 6ish weeks so they always raise their eyebrow when i tell them the date of my last period.

so i go to my car where i let this pack of pregnancy tests sit in for a week even though i meant to bring them in. i bought them right before our trip to cleveland, just because i had planned to make this appointment and wanted to rule out pregnancy even tho i felt it was very unlikely. i had taken one thursday the 22nd and it was negative.

my boyfriend and i are about to shower and i tell him i’m taking a test. i pee, dip the stick in and set it on the toilet flat, as it says. i get in the shower and i count to 3 minutes in my head. we are showering and i pick it up and look at it, and strain my eyes because i see a very faint line. i am kicking myself for leaving those tests in the car, exposed to the cold, knowing i probably fucked them all up and i can’t go to sleep until i take a proper test. it’s a big bag of single dip strips for $15. maybe they just aren’t very accurate. my boyfriend looks at it and says it looks fine, right? he obviously doesn’t know what a faint line means. so i explain it but he’s not buying it. either way it’s my fault i left them in the car. i take 4 more of these little dip tests and they all have the faint line. the whole bag is full of duds now, i think! well, we have to go to walgreens tonight before they close. let’s finish the last 20 minutes of the movie we are watching. the swiss army man with paul dano and daniel radcliffe. it was hilarious until i took this test before we showered. now it’s much harder to focus on when i’m the one who knows what a faint line could mean.

we make our trip to walgreens. i buy 3 different walgreens brand tests. i want 3 clear answers. on the way back home i say why didn’t i think of him taking my dip stick tests as a control to see if my tests were all duds now. i make him pee in a cup and dip 4 of the left in the car tests in. well, now he can see what a negative test looks like. his don’t have the faint line. so i guess the cold didn’t mess them up after all.

i take my 3 different walgreens tests. one has the 2 lines in one window, another has two windows, both with a line in them, and the last one says in plain english “pregnant”

the ones with the lines were faint. but you can’t deny the one that says the word on it. that is the one he was struggling to process. i said i would take them in the morning and those answers he won’t be able to deny.

this morning i wake before my alarm and i can feel the urge to go potty, i know i have to get up and do it. this morning there were no faint lines, they were dark and prominent, and the word again in clear, perfect english. i am pregnant.

or i have a tumor or cancer or menopause or something else.

because i had to google, well what if i have elevated hcg levels but am not pregnant? it is possible…

my boyfriend and i have a dysfunctional sex life. we have been together over 5 years and a lot has happened between us. we both stress, both fight, struggle to connect. we are together all the time, sleep in the same bed multiple times a week, but we hardly make an effort for intimacy lately. sometimes even if we start to, one of us just isn’t feeling it and we just end up stopping and calling it a night. so to end up pregnant when we don’t even have an exciting sex life… i have to laugh. i can’t fathom it. i know once is all it takes but jeez, kind of sad.

well it changed the whole dynamic of my doctors appointment today. now i have things to do. do i know what to do ? no…

as i told the nurse and doctor my news today, i was surprised they weren’t treating me like i should be ashamed. i forgot that i’m turning 30 this year.. my only real experience of pregnancy is from when i was 16 and it was a bad thing. i was not allowed to feel happy or proud or excited. i did end up pregnant 7 years ago when i was not in a relationship. the night that happened i was not expecting it to, so i didn’t bother to check my ovulation calendar until it was too late. that pregnancy ended at 6 weeks when i lost my tube. i didn’t have a lot of time to process being pregnant. and because i lived with my parents and was not in a relationship and was unemployed it was once again a bad thing and i didn’t feel good about it.

but now i am almost 30. i am pregnant by someone i have been with for years. i live on my own with my daughter. i have a full time job. it’s supposed to be a normal thing that happens. but ive never experienced this being “normal”. so i am frightened.

i did not think this would happen. i don’t know where to begin on my pro and con list. do i want to start all over raising a child when ive just started to get a sense of freedom back? my daughter is now 12 and while preteens are stress in new ways, it can be relieving to know she can feed herself and dress herself and be a little independent. do i want to reset my clock when i’m 5 years away from having an 18 year old and being able to do the things i want to do without worrying about children? i know i can’t have a child when i don’t even live with my boyfriend. he owns his one bedroom condo. how would that work? how is he going to sell it. he can’t just buy another one with his ever plummeting debt. he also works part time due to his reduced hours. how is that going to work

i got into it with him because he had nothing to really say other than he is here for me. i said i don’t know what that means. we went back and forth as i kept saying you are 40 years old how do you have nothing to say or do or plan. nothing to offer me right now when this is a big fucking deal. i also said he should have gotten a vasectomy a long time ago

well he went on my laptop to finish his resume and then he started crying. saying he is trying so hard not to upset me or say the wrong thing and that he doesn’t want me to feel alone and how he wants to be with me and do things together and how he would have gone to my appointment with me today if he didn’t have to watch my daughter. it helped some.. i just think at his age he should have more to say.

i put one of the english word tests in his pocket for him to take home. really think about.

i have a lot to think about. i bought my prenatals. i scheduled my appointment with my psych. scared about that one. scheduled an ob appt for friday.

you’re the pouring thundering storm

and the rainbow arching across a bright blue sky when it’s over