Mommy Time

I realized today that my mom never cared about me, or what I did, unless it pertained directly to her.
I was thinking about kids and thought that when raising a child, you HAVE to set boundaries with them, otherwise how will they know how to set boundaries for themselves and with other people? And then I thought "But maybe I'm just really really biased because my mom never paid any attention to me unless it was entirely negative and abusive and self-serving and something to know that she was watching over me in any way would have been wonderful."
I can remember one or two times when my mom set rules for me, mostly what time I was to be back by. If I didn't listen to it that one time, she yelled at me endlessly for a few hours and then it was never brought up again. I can remember the one time I got in trouble for ditching my curfew, and that's because it never occurred to me that I had to listen to anything she said. I wasn't being difficult or rebellious (consciously), rules were just so foreign that it never occurred to me to follow them. Most of the time she would set boundaries and absolutely nothing would happen when I ignored them. I mean nothing. NOTHING nothing. She didn't even notice. I don't think she even remembered setting them. And I think, "Well, she was mentally ill. There's probably a lot she didn't remember." And then I think of EVERY SINGLE TIME she perceived that I was being abusive, and how she would bring it up OVER and OVER again over YEARS, and never once forgot. A boundary or two would have been nice, something real, something to let me know that she was watching what I did and cared about my well being. But she didn't, unless I was in her periphery and doing something she thought was manipulative and mean and abusive. I didn't exist unless I filled a role she thought she needed, a horrible one that someone my age could never fill.
I remember when I did something "bad" and she said I couldn't take tennis lessons. She and my dad had hassled me and hassled me about my eating habits and absolute lack of exercise, and so tennis was what I chose as my healthy activity. And that was taken away. And she still hassled me about my eating habits and lack of exercise. The one productive thing I could have been doing. I remember waking her up and telling her that we were late, and she groggily told me that I couldn't take tennis because of what I was done. I froze for a second, the mental kind of freezing, and wordlessly left the room. It didn't make any sense. It angered me, but I didn't know why. I cried. I had been really excited about playing tennis. I don't remember what I had done that was bad, but I'm absolutely certain that I did it again with absolutely no punishment. The one thing that would have made sense.
She never cared about how my day went, not really. She would ask, but it was always really obvious that she was only half-listening to everything I said, especially as I got older. The older I got, the less she cared. The less she was able to control me, I guess is what it was really all about.
My mom made me out to be her. The things she constantly accused me of doing, the abuse that she was certain I was heaping on her, I recently realized it was all things she was constantly doing to me; putting me down, yelling at me. (Yes, she accused me of yelling at her while yelling at me.) She treated me like I was an idiot and yelled and cried and screamed when she perceived that I was doing the same thing to her. This was usually when I would say something funny and she would just whip out this meaning to what I had said that was NOT THERE WHATSOEVER. I could never get her to believe that I was JUST talking, that it wasn't about her. I try to tell myself that she had and still has borderline personality disorder, that there was something REALLY wrong with her, but it doesn't make it any better. It doesn't make the pain any less.
After an estranged relationship, we started talking again. I was in my early early 20's, so this was just about three years ago. We saw each other once a week for dinner and she always insisted that we go to a bar. Talking to her was like talking to a brick wall; she cared even less, but there was this weird energy about her, like she was trying really hard to pretend that she did. Something was there that hadn't been there before, but something even bigger was completely lost. I can't be anymore clearer than that. I felt like crap around her, but I was desperate for her love and attention. She got frustrated with me when I said I didn't want to eat in bars anymore because I was trying to quit smoking and drinking. She told me to "stop being difficult". I don't think she was ever okay with my trying to quit smoking. She never said anything directly of course, but she always got silent and grouchy when I would talk about it or having withdrawals or something. We didn't have a relationship, we had dinner where I talked and she barely responded except when I did something she thought was stupid. Then she gave me crap about it, smiling, but it felt horrible. Then on thanksgiving, I felt so depressed and edgy and upset that I couldn't imagine going to a party and being around a bunch of people I had never met, as were our plans. I called her to tell her. She exploded. She sounded just like she did when I lived with her and even gave me crap about the fact that my sister hadn't been calling her. Then she cut off and said the my mom equivalent of "Fine, I don't care. Fine." I was heartbroken. I tried to make it better, I apologized and apologized and told her I would see her next week. But her tone was still malicious and angry. She hung up without saying goodbye. I broke down completely and cried slept through the whole holiday. The most emotion she had shown me in a matter of months, and it was to yell at me like she used to. I realized that she hadn't changed, no matter how much she and I wanted to believe that. That was nearly two years ago, and I haven't spoken to her since.
I quit smoking cold turkey the following January.

Last night was weird. But then, every night has been at least a little weird recently. I was talking to someone in my head, someone I admire creatively. I do that a lot; if I have to talk to someone in my head, I'd rather it be someone I think is awesome. So anyway, I'm talking to this person and I was laying on the floor because my right leg has been killing me and I had been doing stretches. Suddenly, this person whose personality I had totally created rolled over and opened up my ribcage and looked inside. This also happens a lot, a pleasant conversation in my head ends with whomever I'm conversing with doing that, and it's always when things continue to go pleasant and don't devolve into a rape fantasy. It always catches me off guard because I'm not controlling it. I almost yelled out. The the person faded away and all this weird shit started happening. I tried to focus on the music I was listening to to make things safer, but I realized that all the music was doing was keeping things in a very uncomfortable position. So I turned it off and laid back down. I don't know if I was remembering things or releasing energy in picture form. My dad was hitting and beating me and throwing me and screaming at me while he did it. He was yelling "I HATE YOU I WISH YOU HAD DIED YOU'RE NOTHING YOU'RE NOT WORTH SHIT" as he hurt me. A couple of those had come up in dialogue in a short film I had written the day before, so it just made the question of whether it was real or not more confusing. Then he did the same thing to my sister while I watched. But I wasn't really watching it, I was just laying there and feeling her pain and my own fear while he hit and beat her and screamed at her too.

This probably doesn't make any sense to someone who has never experienced it before.

Meds

My doctor put me on two new medications, one for my asthma, and one for the pain in my mouth due to having a tooth pulled. Both cause mood swings, one causes hallucinations. Every time I am prescribed a medication that causes mood swings, I think "Oh, it will be okay this time." But it never is. I'm highly susceptible to the side effect of mood swings, I have found. Every single medication I have taken that could possibly cause them have...well, caused them. I took the asthma medication anyway because I'm sick of not having full use of my lungs. The night before my appointment, I was laying in bed trying to sleep. My lungs were tight, as they always are. I tried doing deep breathing to calm myself down as I was having trouble sleeping, but the inability to breathe with the full use of my lungs was making me feel very claustrophobic, especially since you can't just walk out of not being able to breathe. A trip to a different city showed me that this will not always be the case, but for now I am stuck here. I have no job and no money, and moving away from this place will take at least six months, probably more. The idea of another six months of not being able to breathe was making me panic. I don't remember how I finally fell asleep. So I got this new inhaler, low dose steroids. Every logical part of my mind was telling me not to take it, that i probably don't have asthma, that it's because of my constant state of low-grade panic that I can't breathe. But I was desperate. I had tasted regular breathing and fallen in love, and the idea of being in my normal state was making me panic. So I used it, and I took the pain meds because I was sick of the stabbing pain in my jaw every time I ate or drank.
As I was trying to fall asleep last night, I had something like a hallucination. (Which is a rare side effect of the pain meds.) I didn't think it was real, though the sensation and images that came along with it were hard to get out of, and I didn't. I felt like I was full of dead, rotting, maggot-infested meat and it was slightly viscous and spilling out of me. I felt disgustingly sexual, like I was being touched and every touch created more rotting meat. I don't think I can convey through words just how horrified and disgusting I felt. Then I had the sensation that cockroaches and flies were squirming their way out of the meat and crawling all over me because they were attracted to filth. When I finally fell asleep, I dreamed that I was made of nothing but dead, rotting, insect-infested fleshmeat. I remembered that I didn't start having the scared sexual feeling noticably until I stopped living with my dad and started living with my mom full time at thirteen, because my mind felt safe to feel it without my dad constantly around, I think. That feeling, the dead rotting feeling, was with me constantly. I had and still sometimes have nightmares about finding corpses in such a state of decay in my house, in my mattress, under my bed. They are the scariest nightmares, and I can't explain why in a way that would make sense. I think this is why I suspected my mom of molesting me in my sleep when I was fifteen, because the horrible dead raped feeling didn't flow out of me until I was living with just her. (Not to say that she is entirely innocent, but that is a different post.) I remember waking up every morning with wet spots on my blanket. I would check to make sure it didn't come from me, and it didn't. Everything was dry except for these spots on my blanket every morning. I knew my mom came into my room and dug through my drawers sometimes looking for clothes, and I knew she usually did so after showering. (I had woken up to the noise she made a couple times.) She would sometimes touch me in weird ways, like the time when she was making me a dress and she touched my breast without warning, presumably to see how it fit. Or the times when she would cuddle me after screaming at me for hours and her hand would come to rest too closely to my chest. Or the few times when she would compliment whatever I was wearing by jokingly saying "It's looks good on your boobs" in a jokingly sexual tone. Imagining her coming into my room and molesting me wasn't too far of a stretch. I think that the dead rotting feeling comes directly from her also. She told me when I was seventeen that her older brother had molested her, and all that did was refire my suspicions that she had done the same to me.

I have lost my point in all of this. I guess the whole point of the story is I'm not going to take either medication anymore.