Talk dirty to me..

It's finally spring and finally time to play in the dirt a little bit.
I planted up my window boxes and planters on Friday, made a plan and bought some more petunias on Sunday and stuck them in the dirt this morning after pulling a huge yard waste bag full of weeds. I still have several beds that desperately need weeding but I don't think there will really be much more to plant this year, unless I score a sweet deal on some perennials. I may need to hack up the lamb's ear I have growing in the front, it has taken over and doesn't look like it can be stopped.

I have forty-eleven craploads of rhubarb in the back, too. I need to rhubarb all the things. And my husband needs to trim the hedges that are totally out of control.

need to bring the rest of the bricks up to use as the border, it's coming along!

cannot wait till these fill out in a few weeks

that green crap in the front planter? It just showed up, it's cute. I left it.

my lavenders lived through the brutal cold!

Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

I have a second blog that I ignore slightly less than this one.
It's all TMI, all the time over there though.

I mainly started it to just kind of keep track of my thoughts as I continue on this journey and I am narcissistic enough to think someone else might want to behold my navel gazing.
Or read about bodily misadventures of a TMI nature.

I mentioned the TMI, right? Because it is there.

You have been warned.

Confessions of a Mama Wannabe

Yep. My hat is tossed in the ring. Which, now that I think about it, reeeeeeeally sounds like a euphemism.

This day

This day is like a minefield for me. And I feel selfish even saying that. My mother is still alive and I choose to keep my distance. No, it's more than choice. I have to keep my distance. I have to. Because I have worked far too hard at putting myself back together again to let her come in and pull out my still healing stitches. And she would.

She sent me a letter a while ago. A handwritten note. I handed it to my therapist who read it with arched brow. And then went to photocopy it for my file and instructed me to go home and put it away and just not think about it anymore. Which is hilarious since a large part of my work now is to stay present in the moment and to feel my feelings when they happen. Because I learned to not be present on her watch. I learned that when someone was hurting me that the best thing was to just not feel it. I learned that I wasn't safe and that there was nothing I could do about it. There was no parent who was going to protect me. So I got very good at not feeling it. I got good at acting normal. I would crack a joke to hide my pain. I didn't dare show a vulnerability to be turned against me later. I learned that she could really give me something to cry about if she wanted, and sometimes she wanted. 

I had a nearly full on panic attack in session a few weeks ago and my therapist had no idea until I confessed the next week. We sat, 5 feet apart while I fell apart inside with my heart trying to race, the room spinning, my stomach churning, my mind racing. And I couldn't pipe up and say that I was not OK. To someone who is there to help me. Who isn't going to hurt me. And who is a clinician who deals with trauma and knows how to spot these things a mile away.

And that's why I have cut ties. I can see no version of my life at this time that includes being well and having a relationship with her. I can have one of those things. I picked me.

This year there is a new layer to the day. An emptiness that I haven't quite felt before. The kind that catches in my throat and makes it hurt to swallow a little bit. Because I am not a mother. And before I found out that was even remotely possible I was OK with it and I accepted it was part of the hand I was dealt. Sure getting wished a happy mother's day just because you look old enough to have kids has sucked pretty much every year for a decade. But by not being a mother I was also not going to risk becoming her, I was in control. It was my choice and now, it's not.

This year I am no longer childfree. For the first time in my life I am childless and so aware of it that sometimes it hurts. It hurts to breathe. My eyes sting with tears. My belly aches. I press on with the work I do in therapy, because forward has become the only acceptable direction for me to go. If the time comes, I cannot allow myself to be her. I don't want any child of mine to feel unsafe. To feel frightened of me. To feel so alone that it hurts. To be afraid to cry in front of me. To feel like I did.

If it were that easy....

Something that is not helpful whatsoever to say to someone with OCD is "Can't you just stop thinking about this?" 

Because what fucking part of obsessive and compulsive doesn't fucking make sense?

Well, that escalated quickly

One of the hardest exposures I had to deal with during my cognitive behavioral work was my pantry. Nothing was allowed to be tidy. I actually got angry and mentally cursed my therapist more than once about it. I hated it. And when I wrapped things up in January I didn't run right home and put all my crap away properly like I wanted.

Today i was looking for something, and put a few things back. And all of a sudden I was lining up cans with all the labels facing straight ahead, and then I got out my label maker to put some beans in tupperware. And then the tupperware cabinet was from hell, so I had to fix that before doing anything else....

Which ended up with me scouring the kitchen sink on the verge of tears. And then getting a wooden skewer out to get the tiny bits of crud out from around the faucet and sprayer.

I feel like I let myself down. I am just so not in control of some things in my life right now. I have to track them, but I can't control them at all. And it's hard. Harder than I realized, apparently.

Is this thing still even on?

I just walk away from my blog for 6 months at a stretch and then always come back with approximately the same not very witty title. I am nothing if not consistently inconsistent.

So, last I typed and you read I was working on cognitive behavioral therapy to get my OCD and panic attacks under control. In September, Team Annie gained a new player. Another therapist, this time a lady, to help me sort out some trauma and PTSD issues. Which is what I thought would happen all along from my initial phone conversation with  D about setting me up for CBT. Because I knew there was a well of pain I had constructed my entire life around avoiding. And right on schedule, once I began to have so much less fear about the minutiae of daily life, some of these bigger and more painful experiences started to slip up to the front of the queue. And they are ugly. And they are shameful. And there were flashbacks. And nightmares.  And awfulness. And instead of hiding, I said I needed more help. So for a few months, I was seeing two therapists weekly and The Man and I were seeing a third every few weeks.

At the end of January, I graduated from CBT so now I am just down to the trauma work and the marriage work. Both of which are going pretty well. The marriage work was to begin to make some new patterns now that I don't require as much care taking. Because being me was hard on my marriage. And as much as he wanted to protect me and keep me from being hurt, it wasn't healthy for him to have to take care of everything all the time, not healthy for either one of us. The trauma work is hard. There were times last summer when I was touching a bathroom door handle at Target, or watching the puke scene from Bridesmaids for the 500th time and I thought that was hard work. There were times when we began to move toward my discharge where just the thought of it would make me cry, because I was so scared. I wasn't sure how I was going to be able to live my life  without having to tick off banned behaviors. How I would conduct my errands when they weren't assignments? How would I stay accountable when I was the only one I had to be accountable to? Because I haven't done so hot when I am the one left in charge of me and I felt very sure that I wasn't going to be able to keep my shit together.

Those were hard things, but now they seem like a cake walk compared to the work I have to do. And there isn't much homework for this. Except that when something painful comes up, I can't pack it away in a box and put it away at the back of my brain. I have to live with it. I have to let it suck. I have to help my brain find context for the events so that it can be properly refiled so that I stop reacting to anything similar with full on panic. And I have to use grounding techniques sometimes to keep from flashing back or dissociating. At any given moment I can be somewhere and trying to appear calm and inside I am looking at the walls, the floor, listening to the music, whatever things I can see, hear, smell, or touch to help me stay grounded in 2014. And it works more often than it used to.

And as I repair damage, I sometimes feel at loose ends. I got so good at being broken that I forgot how to be anything else. Not that I felt like a victim, in fact I never felt like a victim. Which is part of my problem, because there were times when a victim is exactly what I was, but I was so unused to being allowed to feel my feelings that I stuffed it down and convinced myself it was my fault. Because I deserved what I got, because I should have known he was a bad person before it got to that point.. I refused to admit that this sort of abuse was something that happened to me. I wasn't sitting around feeling that the world had done me wrong, I was just broken. And now I am patching up the damage a little bit at a time.And I have begun to try and get on with the business of having a life. I meet with friends. I stay responsible for social contact. I run errands. I do stuff. And every day it gets a little bit easier.

My life has turned around nearly 100% from where I was last year at this time. I have plans. I have some good things happening. I am participating in my marriage as more or less an equal partner. We look forward to what the future may hold for us. I am beginning to sometimes feel normal. That I don't have to be other. That I am not only a pile of broken and sad and yuck, no matter what was drilled into me from a very young age. I can be sad and I can feel hurt and I won't have to cut off the world or cut or scratch myself to control the pain. I am a person who is learning to have a life, to allow myself to have hope and dreams again. And I am so late to the party for so many things and just trying to make up for lost time.

This is photoblog!

You have to read that title in your best County Fair Demolition Derby Announcer voice. You do have one, don't you? Doesn't everyone?

I am too lazy to do a real blog post, but need to exercise these writing muscles just a wee little bit. NaNoWriMo will be here again before I know it and I have no idea if I am going to go for it again this year or not, but I need to get into a much better writing practice.

So let's dive right in, shall we? With a photo.

Looks a piece of bread with jam on it, right? It is. But this is why it's a big deal for me tonight: I drove alone to the grocery store wearing no makeup at all on my face to buy that bread. While I was in the store shopping I went from one entire side of it to the other, stopping to go up one middle aisle for oatmeal. I stopped by the alcove for the bathroom to put my palm flat on the wall for one second and then checked out and came home and put my home canned jam on this bread and am now sitting here eating it with wall germs on my left hand. Because I can't wash my hand yet. And when I do finally wash my hands? I have to make a tally mark on in my notebook of banned behaviors to keep track of how often i wash my hands. Because on Thursday? It was 18 times that I remembered to mark it. And that didn't even seem like a lot to me at all.

Why do I have to do these random weird things? Because before July 2, 2013 my driver's license had been expired for 5 years. Because I didn't go anywhere by myself because I was too frightened. And then I stopped going anywhere at all pretty much for around 2 years. And I don't ever want to get back to being that sick again. So I touch walls. I make random small talk with strangers. I eat pretzels from a bag that my husband put there for me because he isn't a good hand washer and I don't like to eat food he has touched unless I have inflicted my OCD on him. I don't get to ask him to wash up before he touches the pretzels, and he can't do it right after he showers. I mentioned before that these are my troubles, and this is how I am tackling them. One weird task at a time.

Also? I'm not allowed to knit in public for the time being. Coping mechanism, ritual, barrier...blah blah blah words. I get it. I don't like it, but I get it. When I sit in a waiting room all I want to do is knit, the calming motion of the needles, yanking yarn up every row or so with my right hand. Instead I sit there and let the awkwardness just roll over me. I look at the magazines and mentally alphabetize them. I imagine them being in a tidy pile on the table. Or at least not left wide open on the table, Jesus Tapdancing Christ, people, REALLY? Close the magazine for fuck's sake!

If it's really bad, I can knit. But I am suppose to dole out the knitting in public like Klonopin: sparingly on an as needed basis. And I am tenacious and don't like to give in, so I just knuckle down and don't whip out the knitting. Sometimes I take it in with me in case I need it, sometimes I leave it in the car. Or even leave it at home.

But there has been knitting. I actually feel a renewed interest in knitting at home, possibly fueled by excellent shows on Netflix. I finished my Shalom. I love it. If I get my shit together tonight I may also finish my September Swing cardi and then can see how fast I can knit up Juliet.

Oh and while I am here, my liver seems to have passed muster as of earlier this month. I still have to be careful, but my numbers were within normal range for the first time this year. It's promising.