#not going to overshare this time but well. i'm very proud of my mom

[mamadoc]

1, 2, 11, 20😊

1 - Talk about someone who changed your life.

Okay. I took far too long to think about this. Since we're all in a post 6x6 and TTPD era, here's a vulnerable, tortured answer.

I had a very close friend for several years. My husband and I were very close to her and her husband. Our kids were friends. We went to the same church, all loved to travel, had similar interests and tastes, had all lived internationally, went on double dates, etc. We even considered having them raise our kids if my husband and I both passed away. In sum, we were super close.

Then COVID hit. As a doctor COVID was difficult. I struggled a lot because I was taking care of sick patients. I recall one tearful day of talking to a pregnant mom who was about to be transferred to the ICU and was saying goodbye to her other children. It really wasn't safe or comfortable to go to work for a long time. I wasn't really dealing with it well, especially with the people around me treating it like it didn't matter. I was really depressed for the first time in my life.

This friend didn't understand that or if she did, she didn't care. So, when I said I wasn't interested in going out in public and having any type of birthday celebration for my birthday (who wants to celebrate turning 41 anyway?), she started attacking me on a personal level. I was already in a dark place and instead of being a good friend and supporting me, she just keep sending me hateful messages.

That was the first and only time in my life I considered suicide. I reached out for help and got it. I wasn't in that dark pit for a long time. I'm much better now. I mostly have my sister to thank for that.

I brought her flowers for Valentine's Day with an apology note a few weeks after that. She never apologized. I brought treats to her a few weeks after that with an apology note explaining why I felt so hurt. I tried to call to explain how I felt so that I could heal. She never answered the phone.

I'm still not sure what I have to apologize for or why she never seemed to accept or offer an apology. But that was two years ago. We still don't talk. Our husbands don't talk. Our kids don't play together anymore. For a long time, I didn't like going to church because I knew I'd have to see her.

Most of that is better now. I'm just sad for a lost friendship and for the dark place I had to crawl out of.

I've used a slight modification of her name for a character in one of my stories who betrayed Lucy. I thought that might be therapeutic, but it just brought the situation up to the surface again.

Uhhh... I can't believe I just wrote all of that. I'll try to keep the rest of the answers a bit lighter.

2 - Talk about something you really want to do.

I LOVE to travel. I've been to 47 states and 16 countries. My husband and I had all of our plans in place to get to all 50 states before we turned 40. Then COVID hit and all of our plans were dashed when travel shut down. We're going at a slower pace now, but we're getting close to it. #48 (NM) in October, #49 (HI) July 2025 as a 20th anniversary trip, and #50 (AK) the summer of 2026.

11 - Share something you're proud of.

According to AO3's stats, I've posted over 339k words since I started posting 7 months ago (plus another 9-10k chapter I hope to finish tonight). I know there are those that blow me out of the water (Ahem, ahem @girlintotv and @centralperkchenford) with their numbers, but I'm pretty proud of that as a first-time writer and working mom with 4 young kids.

20 - Share with us a random fact or two.

I'm afraid I've already overshared. *yikes* But here we go.

I'm the oldest of 6 kids. The first 4 of us are all 23 months apart, then 27 months apart, and 25 months apart. So, we're essentially every 2 years for 10 years with all of our birthdays clustered together. 3 boys and 3 girls.

I had the chicken pox for my eighth birthday. My grandparents came to visit for my birthday, but they were afraid of getting shingles. So, I had to stay in my bedroom on the second floor, and they stayed on the first floor for the whole time they were visiting. I still remember standing in the hallway near the dining room while they sang happy birthday. One of my siblings blew out the candles for me and my mom brought me a piece of cake in the hallway. (Man, I'm still rocking those depressing TTPD vibes, aren't I?) I was officially not contagious the day my mom came home from the hospital with baby #5 in our family, and I remember being so excited to be healthy enough to hold my baby brother.

Sheesh. Now you probably won't ever ask me anything again. Between TTPD, 6x6, and the angst I'm supposed to be writing right now, I'm coming up with some strange answers.

Sorry to be the Eeyore in the crowd. Thanks for asking me to play though.

Ask game

#ask game

[cyberphuck]

So, about the story of how I met my dad and why I love him so much

@qthewhatever asked me to talk about my dad, how he became my dad, and our relationship. I thought this was going to be a fun jaunt through good memories, with maybe a few grateful tears along the way. But the story of why my dad is so special to me can't be told without the context of why my mother *isn't* special to me, and the stark difference between how he treats me, and how I was treated by her. The cliff's notes version (do they even have those anymore?): Dad became my dad kind of by accident, when Seb and I started "pretending" to be siblings in order to be able to rent a room together. Dad is Seb's dad, so it follows that since I'm Seb's sibling, Dad is my dad too. Then he just... fell into the role, because dads gotta dad. He is always proud of me, no matter what, and no matter how badly I fuck something up he could never, ever stop loving me. He cares about me and doesn't get annoyed by the ups and downs of my moods. He lets me cry when I need to. He lets me take a break when I need to. He loves me, *really* loves me, so totally and completely that even though we look absolutely nothing alike, no one who has ever seen us together doubts that he's raised me from birth. That's not what it was like with my mom. I only got so far through recounting her decades of abuse before I found that I couldn't do it anymore. I'm still going to post what I have, because I think other people should read it and maybe become comfortable talking about their abuse *as* abuse and not "I'm sure I was doing something wrong somehow, and it was my fault they were always so angry at me." Also, I spent a long time working on it. This is not a happy story. trigger warnings: child abuse, emotional abuse, verbal abuse, mental illness, mentions of suicide, mentions of self harm, mentions of various serial killers, mentions of psychiatric hospitals, autism portrayed in a negative tone, fatphobia, and brief mentions of drugs and drug use. (this story is also not complete; it stops when I'm around 27, but I added an epilogue.)

My family had been in various financial situations throughout my childhood, but I was raised upper middle class, which was the same tax bracket that my mom had been raised in. My biodad, Ichiro (Dave) left when I was three, and I saw him once ten years later and then never again. So mom raised my older brother Nick and I by herself (except for a 3 year stint with Chris the Coke Addict Who's Dead Now) up until I was thirteen.

I'll admit I was not an easy kid to raise. I was (and still am) weird and awkward and autistic and prone to oversharing with strangers as well as long crying spells over seemingly low-importance things. Nick was also sensitive and somewhere on the spectrum, but it was me who was the loud one, the hyper one, the one who people politely said was a "late bloomer" and "marched to the beat of their own drummer" (at one point my mom told me I was "marching backwards.") I refused or forgot to eat so often that at six I became malnourished enough to warrant a visit by CPS. I was always being called into the principal's office for doing weird shit at school, like making potions out of shampoo and throwing them at passing cars or lion-roaring at boys I didn't like or whatever. When I got sick, I got VERY sick, like the time I straight up got Scarlet Fever and almost died, or the time I had a fever so high I started convulsing, or the lots of times that I had to do fasting blood draws every month because I had a very low red blood cell count and no one could figure out why.

Bottom line I was very weird. Mom was weird too, my grandparents were weird, but they knew how to "show" in public. I didn't. Nick's nickname for me was "The Spaz." Worse, I constantly craved attention and had absolutely no concept of Stranger Danger (I still kind of don't), and the year I was born, Richard Ramirez was active and killing in Southern California where my mom and Dave lived. In 1992, Jeffrey Dahmer was arrested and his apartment full of chunks of Milwaukee's queer community was broadcasted all over the news. In 1978, when my mom was a young woman, Mary Vincent was attacked by a man who picked her up while hitchhiking. He assaulted her and then attacked her with a hatchet, cutting both her arms off above the elbow. She has hooks for hands now. 

To keep me by her side and not wandering around out in the open, mom told me about all this. Everything-- that Dahmer was killing and eating people, that Ramirez tortured and murdered people, and how Mary Vincent had asked a strange man for a ride and now she had no arms. There's a scene in the beginning of *A Time to Kill* by John Grisham where a young black girl is being raped and tortured by two white men. It's a page or two long, but very graphic, and when I was eight my mom sat me down and made me read it to show me what could happen to me if I went anywhere alone.

At the time, we lived in Lausanne, Switzerland, which is not exactly a hotbed of violent crime.

All that aside, I was a cute kid and a good-looking teenager. I was adorably freckly with never-neat red hair, and then grew into a curvy teen with long red hair and wore cute clothes. Mom bragged to people that I was an author and an artist, and she would often tell me that she loved how 'cool' I was. (cool, in this sense, meant wearing the clothes she bought me and not styling my hair in any way she found ugly. She often pointed out ugly people on TV or on the street, and say something like 'I'm glad YOU don't dress like that.') 

I was smart-- I didn't get good grades because I could never get around to doing my homework, but I scored high on tests and most teachers liked me. I wasn't one of the popular kids, but I was always the leader of whatever little gang I was in, deciding where we went and what we did, and mom loved that, too. And she really, *really* wanted me to go into medicine.

Junior and senior year was where it all started to fall apart. 

Mom's husband is a veteran with severe PTSD. 2001 - 2005 were the worst years with him; he was overbearing at the best of times and the fact that he was a boomer from Brooklyn and I was a millenial from LA really didn't help us see eye to eye. But he had a hair trigger and would back me against a wall to loom over you  and scream in your face. Nick, who was taller and angrier than me, would scream back. Once, Nick was sent to the store for parmesan cheese and came home with the powder kind in the green can instead of the tub of the fancy grated cheese, and the resulting shouting match almost ended in a fist fight.

My depression started getting really bad when I was 17. By 18, I started self-harming, and for the first time had the thought that if I died, if I was gone and were nothing, everything would be better. I also had my first hospitalization.

I'm at 21 inpatient psychiatric stays now.

Worse, I was an adult now and had not transferred gracefully from high school to college (to go into medicine, nothing else was enough for her). I didn't even have a graduation-- I tested out of school in early 2003 and the only pomp and circumstance I got was a half-sheet of paper with 'CALIFORNIA HIGH SCHOOL PROFICIENCY EXAMINATION' printed on it. I had gained a lot of weight, partly due to meds and partly from depression and post-school downtime. She told me my hair looked like a rat's nest and once remarked to her husband, 'look at the size of her!' I no longer wore cute clothes and was not actively trying to turn my art or writing into a profitable career. 

Mom and her husband told me that I absolutely had to go back to school again, or they'd kick me out. The closest community college was two counties away (counties in California are really big). They told me they'd only take me to the nearest bus stop (still an hours' drive) and then I'd have to take a three-hour bus ride to the campus. The absolute earliest bus left at six am, which meant that I could only take classes starting at 10 am, and then had to leave by 2 pm to take the bus back home (the return bus did go all the way back to my area, but didn't run as often). 

They treated my trek back and forth to campus every day not with pride or pity, but contempt, as in "this is what you get for not succeeding." I had two more hospital stays.

After a particularly bad episode with mom's husband where he tried to force his way through a door and I had to climb out a window to get to neighbor's house and call 911, I moved out to stay with Nick, who had left about a year earlier. I was determined to be an adult and build a life for myself, but my depression and self-harming got steadily worse, and though I had several jobs and tried to go to college, every few months I'd do some serious damage to myself and end up back in the psych ward, pushing all my plans back to zero.

Nick moved in with his girlfriend, leaving me to shoulder the rent on our room on my own. I managed for about six months, but I couldn't stay at any job for long. I went to live with Skittle, where my depression took such a nosedive that a lot of nights were just spent huddled in a ball and sobbing. I felt worthless. I felt like I was nothing. 

Skittle and I broke up, and with nowhere to go, I moved back in with my mom. There were short periods thereafter that I would move out again, but basically, after I turned 23, I didn't get away from her again for five years.

Mom was never really happy with me again. I helped out wherever I could, going with her to the ranch where her horses were and volunteering to do all the dirty or hard tasks so she could have more time to ride. I did not and still do not like horses and have no interest in riding them. I went to make her happy. I wanted to do whatever I could to make her like me.

(Mom's ranch friends loved me, because I had been taught to show well in public. With them, I was witty and hard-working, and so sweet to come there to help my mom. Didn't I want to get on a horse, just once? No?)

I brought my mom breakfast and her meds when she woke up, so she could lay in bed while they took effect instead of having to hobble to the kitchen. I did chores around the house. I took the laundry to the laundromat twice a week, and brought them home clean and folded. I walked the dogs and took them to the park. 

My mom told me that I was a draw on finances. I started cleaning houses, and eventually lucked into a job cleaning weed for a hefty sum of money. I made enough money in one three-day weekend to buy my own car, which was a good thing since mom's truck was repossessed not long after. I'd gotten the trimming job in November. I sometimes stayed over at the weed guy's house so I could do two or three days of trimming in a row. In December mom told me that all I cared about was money.

Early the next year, my boss was between sales, so he was late paying me. I owed my mom two hundred dollars (I can't remember for what), and she treated me with open hatred for every day I didn't have it. Bitter and upset, I posted something on facebook to the effect of "does anyone know where I can find two hundred dollars so my mom will love me again?" Mom saw it and sent me a message: 

"you want to play this game? better not call for a while I better not see you for a while. a person must learn to keep family business private [Jaydee]."

I also got:

“Just sit there and pretend you’re not here.”

“I’m trying to reminisce about happier times, before all this.”

“You know you think it’s all about you, but I had your brother first.”

“If you don’t like the things I say to you, leave and find someplace with someone nicer.”

“Go get a shrink and figure out why you’re like this all the time.”

[epilogue: the next year, I was planning to commit suicide because I saw no other way out. Seb offered to let me stay with him in Texas; my options were Texas, or death. I pondered that for a while. A few weeks later, I got a refund of a Pell Grant from my college that they'd mistakenly taken two years earlier. Mom and her husband made it expressly clear that as soon as the money hit my account, I was to hand it over to them. Instead, I bought a plane ticket, pulled out the rest of the money in cash, wiped my ass with her husband's face towel, and snuck out with two suitcases in the middle of the night. I had left a note for mom saying I didn't want to be abused anymore and told her I was going to stay with a friend in Central California to throw her off my trail. I also told her that if she ever tried to find me, or bothered any of my friends to get information, I would put all of her secrets and records of her abuse on facebook for all her friends and relatives to read.

I didn't see her or speak to her again for nearly ten years, until this May. Then I flipped her off.]

#tw abuse #tw child abuse #tw verbal abuse #tw emotional abuse #tw mental illness #tw suicide mention #tw self harm #tw depression #tw mental hospital #tw fatphobia #tw my mom sucks

[zykjhrzqkn1h4m3xyine]

1/02/2019

I woke up at 7:30 today. This isn't good, my goal is 6:00 and I'm only getting worse and worse every day. I had an epiphany, is that the word. I realised that she said that I have like one class where I'm in the same class as one of them, but since it's only one class, that means that I should only see them twice a month right? Unless I have more than one class on that day, oh god. This whole mess would've never happened if it wasn't for the choices and made and if my last name was different. Anyway, I didn't make my own breakfast today, or even eat breakfast. I guess I'll eat breakfast at school. I need the school track suit and new sport shoes. So those things I really need. So I need to separate my wish list and my need list. I saw a new method of seeing if you really need something, it's asking: would you rather be given the amount of money that something costs or would you rather have the item. It's a pretty good method.

It's now recess. So I'll talk about roll call, Gabby is in my roll call. Before school started I went to tech and I asked ms da Silva if she could separate me and Gabby. She agreed. So what happened in roll call was I sat next to Ivy, and ms da Silva separated me and Gabby by putting someone in between us. First period: it was English, I sat with Stephanie, we did some research on war poets. We didn't make a lot of jokes. But it was okay. Ema was also in English. She was also in second period.

Science was a nightmare. Ema was sitting in the row behind me, and the whole thing with Ema and when I wanted to break the friendship with her. It's exactly same thing. This time eve is the middle person and she's saying the exact same thing as Gabby that one time. The reason why I'm here now is because I told Gabby and I trusted and followed her advice. I'm not going to make the same mistake. I sitting with Olivia, Clarissa and Eve. This is only temporary, I don't consider myself part of their "group". I'm not going to make myself comfortable, because I will lose them again. Tomorrow I'm going to the library and to study. I was really scared in every subject except visual design. That's the only time I felt comfortable. Visual design is alright, we were cutting shapes to like make an abstract face, but that's pretty boring. That seems like something you would do in visual arts. I knew new people, I know Daniella, and I how know hajera. Daniella kinda looks like Irmak. I need a device in visual design that can downooad Adobe products. That's going to be an issue, I can only bring my old really clunky laptop. I don't have a laptop. I wonder if ms Papus will find it acceptable. LlWe got a code for Google classroom, I'll write code in here later. It's:

It's now after school. I'm walking home. A lot happened just then. So during lunch, in the last quarter, Eve, Clarissa and Olivia, made me talk to Ema and Ameera. They talked to me, I shook like crazy. Then I started crying, I told Ema, the reason I was like this, was not because of Ema. They asked me if I wanted to be friends with them. I said no, at this point I was already crying really hard. I told them that I didn't want this (twice) I told Ameera that I was only getting in her and Gabby's way. So that's all I told them. I told Ema that I know she can never forgive me, so it would be better if I left. I told them how I wanted to throw myself off the library every day. She said that she didn't know if she forgave me or not. I did it, I told them that I didn't want to be their friend. I'm proud. I was still crying really hard so I went to the office to ask if I could go home. Ms Maharaj saw me, and she was really concerned about me. She convinced me that I didn't need to go home. I went to the bathroom to clean myself up. I accidentally spilled half my miceller water in the sink. That added to an otherwise horrible day. In visual design I was informed by Ashley that I had chewing gum on my shoe. That is the most stereotypical thing that happens when the main character has a awful day in a movie. That and getting hit by water when they're walking on a sidewalk by a car. I really wanted to do film study, but that's okay. I'm glad I didn't go home. It's better if my parents don't find out about this, especially my dad. I don't want to make them upset. I don't think anything good happened today. I don't know why I'm so unlucky, my family is all really unlucky. I want to live but just not this life. It's raining a little bit on me right now, but I don't mind. My bag is heavy, but I don't mind. I need to buy a math book and a red pen. I also need to study for three hours. If time is money, I need a loan.

It's 4:30 and me and dad are going to Officeworks right now, I need a math book.

Mac is nice, but he's not going to be one I like. I need someone who wants to take care of me, and me to them. I don't even want to date anyone until I'm 16, so I'm good. I'm glad I can talk to you, so I don't accidentally overshare my feelings.

I went to office works, we didn't get a red pen, but we got two graph books, they're both 7mm, but they don't have the spiral spine. 48 pages each.

I have poetry homework today, as well as studying for science. I also need to join the classroom for visual design.

I did English homework, or at least part of it. It's kinda hard to do, but we have the weekend to do it. I'm talking with Mac and Emma. Mac has a very bad relationship with his mom. I think his mom is mentally ill, but he really truly despises his mom. She smokes but she gets angry when anyone critiques it. I think that she's ashamed of her smoking habit but that's just my opinion. I think she really needs therapy, based on the way she treats her son. Like at the age of 14, she allowed him to get a desk. He was big hopes and he's putting in a lot of effort to work towards them. He's a good kid, I hope he succeeds in life.

Mac is such a pure boy, I hope he succeeds in life omg. I already knew this but, he was beaten up, and bullied in primary school, a lot of people backstabbed him, and that's the root of his trust issues and worries.

Oh so we got on the topic of the Dolan twins. And then I said that I liked them a little, like Y'know I like their videos. And I didn't want him to think that I was a like a crazy fan or anything so I said that their fans are crazy y'know? Girls like them because they're goofy" And he responded really negatively like "well it's working they've got you" and that sort of distrust and sudden negatively made me feel really sad and scared. And I started crying. Not really hard just like in the middle of the night that kind of crying. I'm really sensitive right now, even the smallest bit of negativity can send me into tears. Because I was so scared not to make the wrong move when I was friends with Gabby and Ameera, that really shook me up. Or maybe I'm just really fragile. I don't want my sensitivity to be an excuse for my actions.

So the annoying thing about me when I cry is that my nose becomes really really red and my eyes become bloodshot and it usually lasts for about an hour, I've also noticed that the top of my lip becomes red. I'll include a photo

I've already done my skin care in this photo so it's less red but if you turn up the contrast it's going to be accurate.

The white line is when I started crying.