I struggled for a long time with factors in my life. I am a compulsive overeater, I have a history of attention seeking, I have been a liar and a thief and occasionally a twitter stalker. Much of which was to support my compulsive behavior. I have other behaviors too. I consistently look for love in "all the wrong places" and am still always surprised by the poor outcome, but they are my behaviors. I own them, and I control them... more or less. I am responsible for these behaviors. I get sick of the damned victim attitude. I had all this crappy shit happen to me, I am a victim of life, people use me and walk all over me, I had a shitty childhood, no body loves me ENOUGH boo fucking hoo.
The reason I chose to talk about this today is twofold. I have "friends" online, although many of them I don't know if I can call them friend. We have nothing in common, up to and including the fact that I scrape and claw to get to a place where I don't feel like shit daily, struggle with my real life, and try like hell not to take the easy way out and blame the world for my problems. They don't. I will occasionally glance at a twitter page and become infuriated by the ceaseless attention seeking and blame on everyone else. I was that girl. I know how that path goes. I guess part of it is just that my panties are in a twist that when I offer the advice from taking that path that it goes unheeded. Yes, I know that I wouldn't have listened to my mother when she gave advice, but had I had a slightly older contemporary... someone who had really been there...
Second, My mother was here for a visit recently. I know where I got my poor behavior, my attention seeking, my inability to let things go, many of my negative traits. I know that a lot of my positive traits come from her as well however. My mother loves as much as she is able, its just not always adequate. I fall into that trap myself, and with unhealthy people, but once I realize how critically unhealthy they are its too late, I'm in it. I don't like to back down. My mother is an interesting study. (I truly think I missed my calling by not going into some kind of psych.) She will tell me that I should stop blaming the bad things in my life on the past (much of which pertains to her parenting ability) things that I wasn't allowed to do that my sixteen years younger sister is allowed to without the bat of an eye, or just things that happened to me, traumatic or not. However we hear from every moment of her life how her past shaped her decision making. The trauma of losing her mother at 17. Admittedly horrific, particularly after the pain of cancer. The part she glosses over was how wild she was prior to then, that she didn't have the storybook loving relationship with her parents. We hear about how the "love of her life" from high school broke her heart. How that still pains her so deeply. My step-father was in constant competition with this man, that he never met. nearly 40 years later my mother still talks about this love, but my sister should get over her love quickly because it is an inconvenience to my mother. Everything is a secret, her continued smoking is to be kept a secret from my sister to avoid conflict, and yet she then will complain that she has poor relationships with the people around her. And, my mother was diagnosed at a young age with Multiple Sclerosis. That is the big evil in life now, every behavior, whether it was there before or not. I know it sounds like I am an unforgiving witch, and I know some facets of her behavior are affected by her disease, but I am tired of every conversation, every thought, every interchange with my mother being punctuated with "its my disease that makes me this way" when she was this way long before the disease took lasting effect. Everyone has problems completeing a thought from time to time, everyone forgets things, everyone has emotional moments, everyone has problems. My mother gets so freaked out and pissed off over the slightest thing. You can't say anything to her without her getting hostile and feeling attacked or suspicious. Including benign things like "How are you" if she feels there is the slightest bit of a "tone" to your voice she will freak out on you. She will attribute that to the disease now, but I've gotten my ass kicked over the same thing in the past. Granted I may not have always been aware of my attitudes like I am now, but... just once I would like to be able to have a normal conversation with my mother. I am also tired of everything being about me and my sister when nothing has been for me and my sister, but in the retelling it makes my mother look like the good guy. I am nearly 35 years old. My mother tells me she is staying in contact with my biological father to make things better for me. They talk to each other like I am a minor still. She's "loaned" him money - a fact that would make other members of my family livid, but I am supposed to believe its all for me. She's offered him a place to stay and gets jealous when he talks about his girlfriend. But its all for me. And when he disappears again, or he doesn't communicate enough and she gets her feelings hurt its not her fault for opening herself up to him again, it will be my fault or is my fault because she was only talking to him for me. My mother drank heavily, and I would call her an alcoholic until I was like 13. She attributes her stopped drinking to me, that after she literally became a falling down drunk at a wedding I was looking at her with great confusions and concern, but my stepfather (although I think this was prior to them being married) looked at her with utter disgust. What do you think was the motivator there. She doesn't feel that she was an alcoholic though, and she can control her drinking now. (Which is why after she and my stepfather divorced every full bottle of wine and everything else in the house became an empty bottle). I think she's replaced her addiction to alcohol with an addiction to prescription pain killers that she uses for the MS.
And while we're discussing addiction and inability to take responsibility for actions... my "stupid fucking biological" as my sister lovingly refers to him is in the phase of his recovery where he is trying to put his life right with the people that he hurt. That includes me apparently, however he seems to be getting annoyed with the fact that I am not ready to embrace this with open arms. I hadn't heard from him in several days, so I sent him an email, and his response, the man that abandonned me for so many years responded with "I thought you had abandonned me." I was livid. Then proceeds to ask my mother for my phone number! I told my sister to tell my mother to tell him I wasn't ready for that kind of commitment. I am tired though of every aspect of shit in his life being attributed to his life of addiction. He chose that life. Yes, I understand that addiction takes over your life, and people need to hit a bottom, but at the same time, you can not wait 30+ years to decide not to be an asshole your whole life.
So I continue to struggle with my one time educational blog or what I hoped would be educational devolving into a place of my whining and railing against the universe, and my struggle to become a better person, to be able to truly love, to truly give of myself before I wind up alone.
