blahg, blahg, blahg

Road trip to Louisiana commenced around 2am EDT Tuesday the 21st. Arrived at Dad’s around noon CDT on Wednesday the 22nd. Can’t do those 15-hour road-warrior sessions anymore, especially after several months’ worth of stressing out, then moving a lot of heavy things in a short time and stressing out some more over basically losing my daughter.

I’m being kept completely in the dark now; she rarely speaks to me and, despite his assurances prior to my leaving that he’d help get more of my things to me once I was here, he’s said nothing to me at all. It’s been a week since I left.

I mentioned to my friends on Facebook that this whole mess has been an exercise in letting go. Here it is again, more in that vein. I would really like his help, which he already stated under his own impetus that he would give, coordinating getting a few more things to me but I can’t make him care about something besides his penis and his reputation, which of course (typical for a man) won’t be hurt one bit by his bad faith or bad behavior. So my having a fit at him won’t accomplish anything.

Nothing he’s keeping there will prevent me functioning here as far as I know. I will just live my life, and we’ll see what happens. If I hear from him, cool. If not, when he’s done fucking Girl Genius*, he can fuck himself too.

I am not going to chase after the kid begging for her approval, either. There is a lot going on there that I haven’t discussed publicly, at least not with my real name attached to it, and basically it amounts to my child has joined the nonreligious version of a cult, one approved of by government, many religious groups, most medical authorities, large swathes of society (until they learn/understand what is actually going on) and probably her own father, who told me otherwise while I was still living in Ohio but as I’ve exhaustively laid out in previous posts, he is an habitual liar and I can’t trust him. She’s allowed this cult to interfere with her mental health and her employment and her progress as an athlete. Somehow this is all my fault, too, for not wanting her to destroy herself. I can’t see us having a normal mother-daughter relationship again for a while, and maybe not ever again.

Something else I have to let go. I could not even try to offer her an alternative (rational) viewpoint without her going into an anxiety spiral. So, cool. I’ll just back away down here to Coonass BFE where I can’t ruin anyone’s life anymore. We good with that? Okay.

She cried when I left. Given what a horrible person they both decided I am, I have no idea why.

He at least had the decency to not pretend to be sappy for once. Thank fuck.

Dad needs me anyway, it transpires. Not only is he in stage four kidney failure, I find out after I get here that he has a partial artery blockage and I’m pretty sure it’s the same artery that ruptured and killed John Ritter. Dad will be 70 in late November. He needs more than occasional rides and visits, he actually needs a younger body around here shifting heavy shit for him. It’s very different doing for someone who needs it as opposed to slogging around for an able-bodied 50something petulant child who thinks women are vending machines, pop in money or a dick and you get everything you want. I have at least one way to earn for now (Matt is sending money once a month until December of next year, no idea why… he gave reasons, they don’t make sense, as usual) and have time to acquire the one I have been aiming for, badly, for more than 1.5 years now. I’ll manage.

Hope to have internet service and not just this half-assed phone data connection soon. We’ll see.

—–
*I shit you not, Crys has the whole blonde hair and glasses thing going on just like the Girl Genius character in some obscure geek comic-book series Matt loves.

So did Yvette.

So did Vivien.

I think I’ve figured out the real reason I keep falling short.

Brunette.

20/20 vision (even with needing readers).

Oh well! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Thanks to a blood-pressure surge and a killing rage that wouldn’t quit, I went a whole night last night with pretty much no sleep, which I haven’t done in months and now I am catching my second wind. I had some more to say about what I shared yesterday.

First off, while I am positive I forgot some details, I’m confident that I remembered enough to get the general outline of the story across, and whatever I forgot probably didn’t materially change the tendencies in or outcome of that story. Basically, I doubt I forgot about anything that would make Matt less of a lying, conniving, escapist bastard. I did deliberately leave some things out, because they are of a more sensitive nature and I’m not comfortable sharing them under my real name. They do not involve me mistreating anyone, but they do involve other people who would probably not like me to associate their names with certain problems I’ve had with said people. So it’s just as well I’m reticent on these subjects. I don’t need to dig myself any deeper.

Secondly, no, I am not in the habit of doing in-depth exposés about ex-boyfriends. The problem is that I seem to have a broken man-magnet. First boyfriend went on to become a domestic abuser (and was also a cop for a while, which made him ten times as scary) — not of me, thank goodness. First guy I slept with went on, after we broke up, to rape another girl at knifepoint and did some prison time for it. First guy I got engaged to was also enamored of threatening women with knives — again, not me, thank goodness — and also got in trouble for domestic violence (after my time). The only guy I married went felon with breaking & entering and grand larceny, as I already sort of mentioned in the previous post, and was also in the habit of punching holes in walls when he was angry, as two or three holes in the kitchen wall testified when he was arrested. BOY DO I KNOW HOW TO PICK ‘EM. At this point, if a man likes me, I assume something’s wrong with him. But I also have some exes with less-“exciting” stories. Damn good thing too ’cause I’d be in a loony bin by now.

Speaking of which.

Thirdly, I’m fully aware I looked like a lunatic yesterday. Just remember we live in a culture where it’s practically a capital crime for a female-type person to point out a man’s shortcomings. You know it. I know it. We all know it. Let’s dispense with the bullshit. Just keep in mind that 99% of your revulsion at reading my story yesterday was you not liking it because a woman’s airing a man’s dirty laundry. And then ask yourself why you are, on the other hand, oh so fine with that man misbehaving in the first place and his misbehavior will not adversely affect your relationship with him. And why you don’t want to allow a very upset woman to express that upset in a way most people would understand if she were a man. If you think I am always going to keep my mouth shut and smile and be prim and proper when someone’s got me over a barrel or has done damage to me or my life, boy do YOU have a lot to learn.

You might have guessed this tendency doesn’t keep me in many friends. You would be absolutely correct. But you find out who your true friends are at times like these and, well, I’m just really fucking bad at finding true friends. (I’m sensing a theme here.)

I do have a few.

I am grateful they’re in my life.

In other news…

I talked to my dad yesterday morning. Good conversation, considering it had been well over a year. I’ve been fairly stressed out with the pandemic and everyone being home ALL THE TIME because before that, I’d get a reprieve a couple, maybe three days a week and be able to catch up on some housework or at least decompress, and I haven’t been able to do that hardly at all now in more than a year and a half. Art fell by the wayside, crochet and knitting were dropped, and I hadn’t been talking with my dad. It’s all just sort of a thing. I am not proud of it. But we caught up. I could not bring myself to flat-out ask him if I could move in with him, but I did dance around the edges and ask him about local apartments and that kind of thing. He asked how people were, one at a time, and then asked about me. I danced around that too. But later I texted him and gave him more of the story, and then I got onto a Facebook group for his hometown and started asking about rentals and storage units. Already there is a promising rental unit, of all places, right near where Dad lives — six hundred a month including utilities. I doubt I’ll be able to snag it, but we’ll see what happens. If I can’t, Dad’s friend Carrie has offered me the temporary use of a room.

Matt was true to his word, for once, on Sunday night and did not bother coming home. It took him over an hour after Crys’s plane was scheduled to take off yesterday to finally get here. (It does not take an hour to get from the airport home.) According to him, she’ll be moved here by the end of the month. He will not nail down an exact date. It could be the last week, it could be next week. I do not want to be left being his babysitter while he swans off to her house and ignores everyone. He will have to figure out what to do with our daughter. He will just have to live with that.

I’m leaving her here because she’s getting near the age when she has to start figuring out making a living and the whole bit. It is better for her to be in the city than out in the boonies where I’m going. We have also been having major interpersonal difficulties since early last year, so she’s been generally not very happy with me, and she is in full-on Social Justice Mode and is likely to believe that seven-eighths of our family are irredeemable bigots. I don’t need that and she doesn’t either, but I do need to be able to work, and Matt had no compunctions whatsoever about leaving me alone with her for long stretches while he fucked every woman in the phone book. It’s his turn to be inconvenienced. I don’t think of her as an inconvenience, no, but the having to be responsible for her can be. And even with that he’ll have it easier than I did because she is old enough to be alone for a certain amount of time. If he wants to keep his advantage over me in the Kid Wanting A Relationship With Parent department, he’d better not abuse that.

As much as my mama instincts are kicking in wanting to micromanage everything before I go… I really have to let that be his problem. I had to figure out things on my own. He can too.

Meanwhile I need to earn more money starting later today, and I have a lot to get rid of. The good news is that some of it will bring in at least token money. The bad news is that one thing I may be letting go of is my rocking chair, and I really do not want to do that. If I can at all figure out how to keep it, I will. But if it’s get rid of it or not be able to go home, off to Goodwill it will go. I haven’t sat in it in years anyway, as the upholstery is cracked and the stuffing’s shot and all the joints are loosening up. It can be someone’s fun rehab project, if it can’t be mine.

I went and looked at my dad’s friend Carrie’s Facebook because she’s sort of helping me maybe find a place… and her timeline’s full of encouraging messages about letting go of the past and moving toward the future. Dating back to well before this latest blowup. The universe is weird sometimes.

Okay. I think I can try to sleep now. (It’s almost 1am.) I don’t think I will be doing a whole lot of this sort of post on this site. I know I’ve said this in past years when I was personal-blogging regularly in various places, but my life is going through a catastrophic change and I’m having a hard time and needed to express myself about it, and I also felt that I should explain to people why I keep referring to my life being shit but not being more specific than that. So here you go. I explained. You’re welcome… I guess?

I have a story to tell, and it’s a long one, but it’s necessary to tell in order to explain what is going on right now, so I would appreciate your patience if you are curious at all about that.

I will not get every single detail in. I will get in enough to give you a general idea. So if you were there and want to go “well you forgot to mention this,” if I remembered to mention every single thing that might be pertinent here, I might as well write a novel. You going to pay me? No, you will not. So shut it.

Continuing on…
Continue reading “personal: 06 September 2021”