A former love interest once told me about how his cousins that I went to school with were so wild and crazy as teenagers, that their parents had a suicide pact. I laughed it off.
My aunt, on the day that her only child graduated high school, I found nearly catatonic sitting on her bed in her underwear with her dress in her hands when I came to pick her up. I laughed it off.
I am no longer laughing.
Grieving isn't just a physical death of a person; it's change in its entirety; your own expectations of how something should be. I can't force someone to love me the way that I wish they would. I can't make someone treat me like I am a person worth getting to know. Everything that I ever dreamed of for a life for my children may never happen.
When you're a parent of a child who is different, the world looks very different than it did before you were.
If you met me in my 20's and when my children were little at all and think that it's an entire picture of who I am as a person you couldn't be more wrong. I wanted to die. Not in the literal sense of jumping off a bridge, although there were definitely moments; it was more of a.....
I need help that I've been told never to ask for, nobody is helping me navigate life, I have been thrown out into the world to figure it out entirely on my own and I have no idea what the fuck I am doing, constant free-falling state of chaos and panic.
There was nothing about my life that I enjoyed. I wish that someone would appreciate the fact that every day that I wake up, is a day that my 14-year-old self never planned on having. I was reckless, and careless, because honestly, I truly wished that something would kill me. I didn't dream that I would be a mom before I even had a savings account, let alone two children with extreme needs. I definitely did not dream that I would be doing it completely alone. When I turned 30 and suddenly started having all sorts of medical trauma that was terrifying, again, I was left to deal with it alone. The first 35 years of my life felt like a long, dark, cavernous hallway searching for something that was always eluding me. I have always been the outsider, even to my own life. Growing up in the household of my mother, all of my decisions were made for me, and I was always told, rather than taught. Expected of, rather than heard. I have been so lonely.
Even as a child, I resigned myself to being the one who heard about everyone's birthday parties rather than the one who got to attend. The one who got to be happy for everyone else, but from the sidelines, never to participate or be included. Forever the single girl that everyone talked about behind their back, kind to my face but heeding warnings to everyone who would listen that they needed to watch out for me because obviously since I'm single, I must be after their partner. It could never have possible had anything to do with the fact that I believe in treating everyone with respect. The quiet one, who doesn't gossip about other people, but again, is gossiped about by people that have nothing to do with me. I have always been the one watching the weddings, the baby showers, birthday parties, get togethers for drinks and cards, major life-events that I would have given anything to be there for. How shitty of a person do you have to be to deserve something like this?
I guess I have been destined to have a life full of acquaintances, who will see my obituary, and say "Wow, she was a really nice person", but not anybody can say that they actually know who I am. If I'm being realistic, there isn't going to be an obituary unless I write it myself. I love every single person that I know, but I don't know how to get close to anybody. If I was even given a chance for any amount of participation, I would give 150% of myself to you. But nobody knows that.
I have lived the past 22 years of my life in this weird glass cage of emotion, switching back and forth between having to act like Mary Poppins and The Hulk.
There were the occasional playdates and sleepovers, but they would never be invited back. I had to work to make ends meet, they didn't like the daycare that was my only option. It's impossible to connect with other humans when you're stuck in survival mode. Isolation was my only safe choice.
I just "knew" once my kids were older, I would have all sorts of time. I'd be able to whatever I wanted completely uninterrupted. I'd be way more rested because I wouldn't have to lay awake all night long worrying about the never-ending checklist of making sure that I had the right food in the house for my picky eaters, emails back and forth with teachers making sure IEPs were followed, money, bills. I didn't have other moms my own age with kids.
Nah, they were just traded for the never-ending highlight reel of everything I have ever done wrong as a parent. I still end every day feeling as if I had just gone toe to toe in a boxing ring just trying my best to make sure they're still alive.
There was so much available time in my delusional future. Now when they want to spend any amount of time with me, I find myself terrified to move a muscle or make a peep exactly like when I finally got them to sleep like when they were babies because I don't want the moment to end.
I did my due diligence yesterday; counseling, journaling, commiserating with those who "understand" but still came out feeling empty through no fault of theirs. This period of my life is supposed to be mine now, but nobody has ever loved them like I do and therefore no one can possibly understand what I am feeling right now.
No one....
In the history of the world....
Ever.
I am neither the mean kid or the bug, and there was never windshield nor magnifying glass involved, yet I still feel like my heart has been squished just the same.
I didn't know how to be present for my own children while I was busy wishing someone else would take over.
As I write this, both of my children are the same ages in which I had them; my son is 19, the age that I had my daughter and my daughter, 22, is the same age that I had my son. I don't know what the fuck I am doing. For 22 years. All I know is that I have spent this time desperately holding this umbrella over them and praying that they have no idea what it feels like to have nothing. I have wanted nothing more than for them to find their way in their own time.
Alas, there is a better chance of me becoming the next Supreme Leader of North Korea than there is of me getting my children to maintain baseline human function on their own.
I have hit a wall.
My son has made it known that despite the fact that he has no money of his own, no job, nowhere to go, and zero life skills, he intends to leave on the date of the ultimatum that I have been forced to give him.
The ultimatum, given in February:
By April 1st, you need to step up and start helping me around here without an argument and making me want to kill myself. If you don't want to do that, then you need to find a job and start paying for one third of the monthly household expenses and you get to do whatever the H.E. Double Hockey sticks you want. Or, get the fuck out of my house.
I have given him all that I can in the name of "understanding", but I have watched him go down a spiraling rabbit hole of being an entitled douchebag - who is an adult now. Nothing, nothing, prepares you for watching your child, my baby, fall apart in front of your face. Gone are the days of therapy and med adjustments to help manage his multiple mood disorders that he has been diagnosed with multiple times over; he has decided that I am the mortal enemy who ruined his life because I got him the help that he needed while I still had a (legal) say in his care. He refuses to do anything around the house without breaking me down in such a way that I would give anything to be swallowed up by a sinkhole where I stand in my own home. I am all done paying to be abused in ways that I would never tolerate from someone that I was dating, yet I have endured this from my own child since they were a toddler with no outlook of it ever changing or getting better.
I have cried until there are no more tears. Dry heaving and sobbing in my car and bedroom, alone, until I'm gasping for my next breath. Stared at this computer screen trying to think of the next thing to say until my eyes want to fall out of my head because I forgot to blink.
The more I look for someone who understands that more I realize that this grief is something that I must do alone. That is, after all, what grief is about anyways, right? I don't want to be a downer, but I want you to understand that even though what I am going through (not around, or under or over, despite my best effort for avoidance) is the worst possible thing a human can endure and that they/we must do it uniquely and as individuals but there are many who have done it before and came out the other side intact. All that means, is that something within the Universe, God, fate, inertia, etc., has a plan through which I will endure this present darkness and I will hold hands with whatever is with me while I mine through more than it is possible to describe.
I will always be pushing a river that should be flowing by itself, with radical acceptance that I am wet.
