Hanging Up

I hate feelings.  I have said before that I experience them like a crash test dummy;  ignoring them until I'm drowning and broken, without a choice.  Four years ago, during the holiday season, I was given therapy homework to write about what I have for a really good coping mechanism, and one that I fail at miserably.  

Hence the subject of this post.  This one tips the scale both ways, depending on the day.

It has taken me 19 years, 2 months, and a day, to say out loud the reason why my brain is wired to treat my son the way that I do.

I've been getting run over by the freight train of self realization lately, and I think it has a lot to do with the amount of processing that I have had to do.  I'm in a new place, both figuratively and literally, where I am completely unable to reach for the old familiar attempts at stuffing the proverbial "it" down.

My son.

Until the day that he was born, his name was going to be Connor.  At the time of my pregnancy, the Laci Peterson case was all you could see on the television.

It's not a secret that I've been a single mom for 21 years.  The story behind it, is kept for those who are interested in knowing.  The story behind that story, is close to the chest.  Like, took me 15 years to say out loud.  I tell it a little more freely now that my children know, but it's still not ever going to be public information.

Back to the task at hand - I didn't take my meds today, so bare with me, squirrel brain is real, and it's even worse when you have been finally embossed with the correct label and you forget to take the substances preventing you from procrastinating for another 19 years.

I named my son after me.  Kind of.  Until I was 22, my nickname was Jessie to anyone who knew me.  For ten years after he was born, I stopped using it, and while I don't know why, it feels good to use it again.  The entire time I was pregnant with him, my favorite movie was Hanging Up, with Meg Ryan and Walter Matthau. Meg Ryan's character, is me.  Watch it.  You will understand. 

These scenes makes me feel so much.  

My least favorite memory, turned reoccurring nightmare:

My favorite name for a boy was always Jesse, so I said to myself, "Fuck it.  Men do it all the time, and under these circumstances, who the hell is around to stop me?"

He was born on his due date.  I almost died giving birth to him while everyone who came to "coach" was worried about the baby and paying attention to him, the doctor was doing everything she could to keep me alive, and nobody cared to check on me.  For three days, it was just me and him together in the room at the hospital.  Reighan was so excited to be a sister.  

I had to muster up the energy to drive to Bangor to get his lay-away at Walmart that I had started for him.  According to the doctor, I was supposed to have two more weeks.  I was signing forms and the attendant at the desk had gone back to get the box.  I felt the double stroller jostling around but I just figured it was my toddler being herself, bebopping away to the overhead music.  She was very speech delayed, most everything that came out of her cherub-like mouth didn't make any sense to anyone but her.  I can still hear her say, clear as day and with as much conviction a  tiny big sister can muster, "THAT'S MINE."  

I turned around, to find an empty rear stroller seat.  A woman was walking out of the service desk area with my baby!!!!  After chasing her through the store and trying to navigate a cumbersome double stroller through early 2000's Walmart, I finally caught up to her, ripped him out of her arms while she screamed like a banshee that I was taking her baby.  Her boyfriend had been using the bathroom and left her outside waiting for him.  She was out on a day pass from Acadia Hospital - for those who don't know, it's a mental health facility in Maine.

Until today's therapy session, where I emptied my guts, probably more than I have in the entire 6 years I've known this mans, I have merely given everyone else the Cliff's notes version.  Minus the trauma. Even now, just forcing myself to remember everything, reliving it in detail, my entire body feels like it's been dipped in an ice bath. Last night, I couldn't get rid of it. It was an octopus suctioned to my face.

For 19 years, 2 months, and a day, my brain has been wired to protect at all costs.

"Allow yourself to grieve; you have to if you're going to keep your sanity."  Something that his teacher told me when I noticed a sudden personality change in forth grade.  I was so quick to jump to the defensive with that statement.

"First of all, I was never sane to begin with.  I'm fine.  I've got this".  

Turns out, it the hardest truth I had to swallow.  I had it like I was wrestling a greased piglet.  

No matter what is happening, no matter how tired of it I am, no matter how much abuse I endure, no matter how I get treated in ways that I would NEVER tolerate from someone that I was dating.  But my brain is programmed by something primordial.  I have to protect him.  

Whenever he is hurting, I do everything in my power to make it stop.  You want this new thing you did nothing to earn?  Sure thing!  You have made a complete mess of the house that we live in?  Oh that's fine, I'll spend my entire day off cleaning up after you.  Spending my days on a continuous Mary Go Round of trying to decide what to mention that is going wrong so that something will get better.  It doesn't.  Saying no to him about something as nonchalant as frozen mac and cheese last week sent him into a tirade via text message for twenty-five minutes about how I screwed him up as a child and got him help and medication that fucked up his brain chemistry permanently.  And there is zero reasoning in his mind that this is definitely not how it works.

For the past three months, he is not taking his medication to help manage his bipolar disorder. To the detriment of my own mental health, I have allowed defeat to sneak its way into my mind like an octopus in a bottle. 

I have been passively suicidal for years.  

Things have been so bad, that at the end of the day I am finding myself with absolutely nothing left to give to the point where I took my good streak at school and failed my past two classes miserably.  Easy ones, that I loved and simply didn't have the brain power to put effort into.  I should have passed both with an A.  I don't want to be home. I can't get anything done with him around because he just explodes into an argument if I even ask him something as simple as to pick up his dirty dishes that were sitting in front of him all day with dried food on them, or to put his dirty socks in the laundry pile - that is behind the couch he is sitting on when he does it.  If we are having a civil conversation, and he doesn't hear something that I said, his entire being changes and beats me down with verbal attacks until I admit that I didn't say it and apologize.

This past weekend in an effort to save him I did the one thing that I never wanted to do.  I called the police, and I had them take him to the hospital. Saturday, he was no longer safe in more ways than I can lay out here.  It simply isn't my story to tell right now. 

The kicker, 

I work for NAMI.  I teach courses, run support groups - plural.  I am a peer support specialist.  

I cannot help my own child.   

Tonight, I told him that he had to leave. He was screaming at me about the pizza crust that I had bought so he could make homemade pizza for dinner not working for him. I gave him 48 hours to find somewhere else.  He won't.  Since that day at Walmart, I have never felt so helpless and scared as a mom in my life.  For five days now.  Things are slowly, and hopefully, clearing. He has to want it for himself.  I know that. I just know that I am so tired of feeling so broken.  

"Sometimes to be heard, you have to hang up."