Rhythm Gym

I don’t understand what happened tonight. My guy had a six pack of beer during the day. He is an alcoholic, stuck at home due to chronic unemployment and the pandemic, and he is on probation and not supposed to drink. He held me down during a black out, which is a misdemeanor, and they can urine test him and take him to jail at any time because of that and a bunch of DUI’s and arrests around drugs and alcohol that stretch like a necklace through his past. Ninety percent of his alcoholism and drug abuse is from anxiety and PTSD, which came from being beaten, starved, and scapegoated from a crazy family where the battering of wives and children was considered normal.

He was being fussy, and arguementative about things, in particular dinner, and while I was cooking it, he announced he was going to the store. When I inquired if he was getting beer, he said yes and for once I actually spoke up and said I would be gone if he did, because 12 beers = blackout. After 23 years of this, I can count on him baiting me, blaming me, and telling me to “Shut the fuck up” or a number of other threatening and disrespectful verbal abuse. For years now , about 4, my only real recourse is to get in my car, leave and sleep in my car, staying away from my home, the cats and him while he is “in his cups” so that I can avoid being abused and caught up in the endless choas of his rage. He has done damage to the house and a number of other not so funny antics, including destroying a piano and getting himself arrested a number of times without me having a thing to do with it.

Tonight he told me I didn’t have to tell him THAT, meaning me saying baldly I will leave if he went for that second 6 pack. Never mind I left on Friday night, and stayed away until 2 am, when he was passed out, to return home. Because he was drunk, there was a cat fight between our male cat and another one he has taken in who is unspayed and is trying to gain ground inside the house on the already spayed cat we’ve had for some time. His doing, and not what I think is a good idea, but there is no limiting him when it comes to cats. He called me 5 times while I was gone, and I did not answer, because it’s always hateful ranting and raving that I have had long tiresome years of.

When I matter of factly stated he will scapegoat me because he always does, and that he can’t control himself when he is drinking, he told me to “Shut the Fuck Up.” I made ready to leave, but I finished cooking and serving the the dinner, eating my own portion. He didn’t go to the store, started watching the movie we had on, and when I brought him his dinner, he ate it. He choose not to get the second 6 pack and he is in bed now snoring away. What the hell happened? I wish I knew.

When I was younger I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life, but the one thing I knew I didn’t want to be was a Mother. I wasn’t too keen on being a wife either, because those two roles seemed to come with a lot of slavery attached to them. And no one in my family was talking about any of that, particularly my sisters, mother, grandmother or aunts.

This was well before I had any idea about “Feminism” or what was known at the time as “Women’s Lib.” All I knew was that everything hinged on going to college, actually leaving THE FAMILY and living somewhere else, to study, to get a degree, and then……there would be something else, possibly some freedom from the long, dreadful gravitational pull of having to be a girl in a family. As a girl, I was constrained by an invisible but quite powerful force to “not make waves” and I knew perfectly well it was about having sex and growing out and away from the dependency on my parents physically, socially and most importantly, FINANCIALLY..

Though I didn’t want to believe it, I knew, somehow, deep down, that none of my family really cared about me growing up and becoming someone they could not keep controlled and in my place. I don’t know how I knew it, but I did. when I was 15, I thought about running away from home. I was really BORED with my captivity, but I knew I didn’t know enough about how to actually make it in the world and take care of myself, so I stayed, swallowing my role as main scapegoat and redundant dependent. It got harder and harder to continue the illusion I was a good, obedient girl, ready to do everything and anything to make everyone else happy, but I had no where to go with any other kind of behavior. I was widely read, intelligent, full of life, but afraid and very aware of my lack of ground and experience. I was basically alone, especially in my late high school years when my dad was drinking and my mother was using me as a weapon against him.

What I didn’t know was my lack of outward rebellion was fomenting a contempt from my mother and sisters. They thought I was too stupid and weak to rebel. I was just too confused and disempowered, unable to connect to my own future. They didn’t trust me and I certainly learned I could not trust them. I was lied to and left out of many family secrets, mainly because my mother thought excluding me would keep me under control, and make her deficient thyroid condition more bearable for her.

College and some jobs I got for awhile gave me some freedom, but not enough and the years dragged on with me emmeshed in the financial dependency I hated. I was apparently expected to get engaged, and when that did not happen, and I didn’t get a long term job and place to live, I was considered a failure. I did rebel one summer by getting a job at a summer camp, but when that turned to shit because of the owners selling it and exploiting their camp counselors, I went up to Oregon and cleaned fish with a rake track athlete I’d met, and lived with him for several months. And I came back and attended college the following semester, so I was still dependent. I stopped out of school and went to work as a fire fighter for a year. I had an affair with my fire captain, and I finally broke up with a boyfriend I did not want to marry. He proposed after I had already left him.

I went back to school and finally finished to graduate with a BA, and there was an awful confrontation in a motel pool in my college town between me and my mother just before my graduation. My mother basically put the dog leash back on me, and reeled me in. I was not an adult, and I was now to return to my slave sexless daughter doll role and “come home” to be exploited and forced to caregive her and my father. In my mother’s mind there was nothing so despicable as an OLD MAID.

I now know I was luckier than many young women because my family did not tell me how inept I was with all the shit you are supposed to do as a young woman to be attractive, “get” a man, and eviscerate me over that, they just talked behind my back. I now know my mother’s real plan was to use me until she died, like you use something you believe you own. I was inferior in her mind, and therefore, justifiably exploitable. She got her wish, and I finally learned that it is motherly love that is compassionate love. It is in fact, the most wise and enduring love, not related to liking anything or anyone at all. It is the most powerful love because, over time it eventually outlasts and neutralizes hate, resentment and blind stupidity. In the end, it is compassion which spares the mind, heart and body of the person who learns to be, have, and do it. And that person is finally me.

For reasons unknown, I am having the urge to continue confounding and irritating my family by playing the rogue black sheep bad aunt who, scapegoated and ignored for decades, sends ambiguous Christmas and birthday gifts. Nobody gives a shit about me, and there is rarely any kind of response to what I have sent for decades.

My niece and middle sister still send me something for Christmas, though My oldest sister and husband are no longer playing because she is blind, and he is retired. They have saved big money on being in a rest home by moving in with my niece, husband and their two daughters.

One of my nephews and his wife are doing well raising a daughter, and my other nephew has a new baby with his wife. I can’t help but wonder, after all these years, what exactly has kept the cold war going. I know it was started by my mother and oldest sister, who decided I was the scum of the earth because I didn’t get married, have children and stayed with an abusive, deadbeat, drug addict/alcoholic.

I also know a whole lot about the family’s darkest secrets, which were not fully confirmed until I was doing all the care giving of my mother in her declining years. My sisters didn’t have any respect for me, but they could not really come down and take care of her. It was horrible and very hard, but I got it done and handled it all the way up to her death. I finally decided to focus on getting my share of the estate, and that I was dead to my family. They have demonstrated hate and disrespect to me, covertly and not so covertly.

And they thought they were going to put mom away, but by the time they made it down to do it, she had gotten better, and it was her money supporting everything and I had told her she had to deal with them because they were never going to listen to me. She told them she was not going to 3 Bells and that I was doing a good job, which ended the putting mom away thing.

I have no idea where to go with this, and I don’t expect my grand nieces and nephews to not go along with the party line. But I know that something really stinks in Denmark. Either that, or I am delusional about something that is eventually going to bite me in the ass.

I’ll tell you what the hell is wrong with me. You are the hell what is wrong with me, that’s what. When you use that question it’s because you are doing your gaslighting game on me, and I don’t answer to you or it, because it is a trick question, designed to pretend you are able to listen to a true answer. What the hell is wrong with me is your constant over sensitivity to everything, and your need to blame me for it, persecute me as though I am the cause. I am NEVER the cause, but you bank on being able to get away with this demented mixup of cause and effect.

I know exactly where it comes from and why you do it. It’s because a major bunch of parts of you are stuck way back in multiple traumatic memories of unspeakable atrocious abuse from your sick and crazy family, and there was no sanity or justice, so now you take your pound of flesh from me. You bite the hand that has fed, protected, and taken care of you, because you HAVE TO HAVE YOUR WAY one way or another, and you cannot stand peace and harmony. Internally, it doesn’t make any sense to you, and anyone who doesn’t abuse you is unconsciously in your mind a target, a vessel to shit on, because that is how things work in your twisted personal universe.

When I take the bait and either get real with you, honestly express quite justified anger or say anything, that does not keep your false sense of innocence intact, you go to defcon 4 and call me a bitch, or an asshole or a cunt, and I am not only bad, I’m everything that is bad, always have been because I am the traitor woman like all women who betrayed you by being women, who, in your book are weak, treacherous, unreliable and uber powerful. We are also just degraded body parts, TITS and PUSSY. I am never entitled, no matter how I am, to any real respect. When you express anything to me that is loving, kind or complimentary, it’s nothing to actually take in because you don’t really believe it. You think women are shit, and you are deeply dependent on me, but you hate me for it. And this is what your family, your evil stepfathers, your maternal grandfather, and the world at large has taught you.

You know you are sick and fucked up, but you can’t face it because there is so much unconscious guilt and deep inferiority that you have to stay out of feeling it because it hurts and robs you of any ability to function, and there is no way you can handle it alone and no way you can trust anyone or anything outside of you to help.

Though you have had some very good fortune, you don’t feel as though you have because you were abandoned and harmed so deeply from the beginning, betrayed by your mother and father and others of your family, that ever getting any real help seems impossible to be safe receiving. You don’t recognize real safety and love because you were raised to believe you weren’t worthy of it.

There is a character in “Wall-E”, the animated Pixar/Disney film about a little trash compacter robot on a deserted planet earth. When Wall-E gets onto the gigantic cruise ship that humans have fled earth with to get away from the eco disaster they have caused by over consumption and Eco-stupidity, he meets other robots designed to take care of humans.

It is a little white thing on a wheel with arms that hold a bar of something that cleans the floor in front of it, and when it sees something to clean in front of it, it says, in a drone like hum “foreign contaminant!” Then it scrubs the floor or surface with a rubbing motion. Even though it is only a simple robot, it has a very important role in helping the good guys in the film not get sent into the incinerator to burn by holding the door open for their escape with it’s small little body.

I think of that character when my partner treats me like I am some kind of filthy, disease carrying vector in his life. I, whose hands constantly wash the dishes, do his laundry, massage his body, fold his laundry and put it away, clean the house, cook food, shop, and touch everything. I, who spray 70% alcohol on the toilet, the bathroom faucets, shower, door handles, top of the washer and in the kitchen Every. Single. Day!

I know this is a result of extreme traumatic abuse that he experienced in early childhood, and there are times he inhabits functional shards of himself in my presence, but it is really impossible to live with such warped schitzophrenic perceptions without paying a huge price. The bank of hate which resonates behind this madness erodes me, day after day, year after year, resonating with my inner defective programming that says I do not matter, and that I am NEVER ENOUGH, NEVER GOOD ENOUGH, no matter what I do.