WHY I AM THE WAY I AM

To add to the second blog, (not that I want your empathy here but I'm trying to make you understand the significance) his life expectancy has also automatically reduced...by some say as many as 10 years and that's WITHOUT complications which are many and have a high probability of occurring. I'm devastated is what I'm trying to say. I'm devastated.

What I intended to write this blog about....before I got sidetracked with the last blog is WHY I AM THE WAY I AM. Geez, that's a big title, right? That's a whole lotta s'plainin'. (I'm channeling Ricky Ricardo..and I'm avoiding with humor. I'm so good at that.)

You ever seen those movies with the poor people who are so prideful that they can't take handouts from ANYBODY? And the refuse to acknowledge they are poor like...they don't know it so they give to people who are poorer than them? It feels like when I think about my life I'm describing one of those movies. As a child, I was never allowed to take even the smallest handout from another adult or child. If I came home with a toy that a friend gave me then I was sent back the next day with THAT toy to return to her and ANOTHER toy as well that was larger, showier and more expensive. It was statement. We had to make statement. We weren't poor. Admitting we were poor was like....putting your tail between your legs and giving up. I promise you haven't seen people who were more prideful. We didn't...couldn't think of ourselves as poor. It's taken me YEARS to even realize we were! Since we couldn't afford a nice house or nice things for our house then to keep up the outward appearance every thing that people saw had to look and be nice. So our house was horrible but when it came to prom we had to shop at the nicest place in town for my dress...it had to compare with the other girls. We couldn't have people thinking we were poor. We never ate out because we couldn't afford it. I mean...EVER. We ate at home because we could do that in our falling down house and the world wouldn't see what we couldn't afford. We didn't take family vacations. EVER. Once my Mother and Father went to Branson, Missouri...that's the farthest they ever traveled and the only vaca I ever remember them taking and it was JUST them. That's why eating out is such a treat for me (literally) and taking my kids on vacations is such a point of PRIDE. Our car, our clothes..the things people saw had to be nice but we had  to work so hard and spend so much on those looking nice that it left less money to even hardly maintain close to normal in other aspects of our life.

I never realized how much all of this directly effects my feelings on SO many things. I never had my own room. I slept on the couch til I was 16. It's very VERY important to me that my kids have their own rooms. The fact that the new baby means someone shares a room hurts me. I will fix this soon. I never had a space for toys so I was only allowed a few small ones that didn't take up much space. I buy my kids lots of toys (well, according to my standards but not as much to some) and I allow them to be as large as possible. I encourage imaginative play because my Mom laughed at me when she overheard my imaginative play and I was such a sensitive child that I was forever hurt by it and never felt comfortable playing near or in front of her. She certainly never joined me. My Grandmother cooked REAL food for the family because that was ONE thing that we could do well. We could provide excellent food because cooking was cheaper than going out. She is 90 so she was older and she had thoughts about breakfast..like it shouldn't be cereal and milk. It should be healthy, filling and send you on your way for a great day of school. She would stand in front of the gas heater (the only heat we had in the house was in the living room...well, there was a space heater in the bathroom) and warm my jacket for me every morning in the winter so I wouldn't get cold. That woman is a saint. If we needed help we never went outside of the family. That was blasphemy. To let other people even suspect we were in dire straights was against everything we believed. We had to put on the front. They had to see we didn't need them. We didn't need their things or their pity or their help. We would be self-reliant. If we needed something we asked the family. The family is the only ones that were 'let inside'...inside the house, inside the secret..inside.

The person I am today. My fierce self-reliance, my inability to ask for or accept help from people...my snootinesss about money. It was all formed in early childhood. I don't say these things because I want your pity. Oh God NO, please don't give me that. I hate pity. I only say it so people who think I'm harsh or judgmental or mean or I care too much about THINGS....well, I don't know if you can understand unless you've been there. I love giving extravagant gifts....because if your truly poor then you can't give, can you? But we weren't poor so we gave extravagant gifts to convince others (and hell, ourselves) that we weren't. I mean so many aspects that people hate about me can be explained.

Do I realize how illogical this all is? How it doesn't make sense and I'm not poor anymore? Of course I do....but that's just my head talking. I am trying to change. I have made great strides. I can accept gifts from people...yaaay, lol. I can occasionally, though rarely, ask for help. I have accepted some used clothes for the baby boy coming. I have, I have...and they are cute. And I'm happy I did. Do I have pride still? Yes. Fierce pride. Is it insane and illogical and stupid and does it lose me friends and am I a harsh person? Yes, to all of the above. You can't live in the dark and fight it and win by becoming part of the problem instead of the solution. This blog is just talking about the THINGS...not even the people. My family lived in fear of "the law". We took care of our own...usually by ignoring it. I lived in domestic violence most of my life. Those people, those things, that way of life...you adapt or you become. You change or you become them...you become what you hate or you fight to be something different. I didn't get where I am today by bitching. I tried that btw. I went to the counselor at school and showed her the huge ball of hair that my Mom had pulled out of my head and I told her the stories of abuse..how she abused me and my Father. You know what it got me...nothing. In trouble for going to an outside the family person with our problems.  She told me Mother and there was a brief time when my life didn't suck....and then it started all over again and I didn't have the heart to tell anyone. So yeah...bitching doesn't help btw. Won't change it. Your life suddenly won't be better...in fact, it may be worse or because you dwell there..bitching in that dark place then that dark thing might just catch you and you might end up becoming a part of the dark instead of the light fighting the dark. I fight with the parts of me that want to be my Mother every day. EVERY GODDAMN DAY. I don't lose my temper, that's A WIN. I don't throw things at my husband, hit him and my children in anger, manipulate the people I love with THINGS...if I have friends, that's one point against my Mother since she raised me not to have friends (I promise you can raise your kids that way). Every time I make a decision or do something and I think she wouldn't like it, I won.

I'm harsh because I was raised that way. I was raised in the harsh light. I made a choice. I took one giant leap out the first day of college and I never looked back. I won't go back to that. I won't live in darkness. I won't let anyone take me there. Not you, not her, not my husband...I fought HARD to get here. I made positive choices. I said..even if I live under a freeway somewhere I will live without her. Luckily that didn't happen...I'm too smart for that. I'm too determined. Despite what she told me my whole life, I'm worth more than that. I love myself more than that. When I felt like nobody loved me or saw me, I took comfort in knowing that I was MORE. They may not can see more but it's there. She never cursed me but she called me stupid and other names. She picked on every little thing I ever did wrong and never praised anything I did right. It was never good enough for her. She was verbally abusive as well as physically.

I read A LOT. It was my escape. The only way I could be someone else. I could not be me. I literally read 75% of my free time or more. You could ask the kids I went to school with...they'd tell you. When I was in Elementary there were these 3 girls..very popular, very mean...and because I couldn't be bullied (they were no match to me after having stood up to my Mother..they were elementary) they picked on me worse. I stood out. I had long, scraggly hair. No makeup. No hair colored. No fancy in style clothes (new clothes but pentecostals were definitely not in style). No nice house. I never could have friends over. No boyfriends of course. Who wanted me? They made fun of me A LOT. I was severely picked on and sometimes I would think I had found a friend.....just to have them be embarrassed by me and turn on me too. I once had this "nice" girl turn on me and yell, "Just stop following me and leave me alone!" because she was getting picked on for giving a shit about me. I was lonely. That's another reason I turned to books. When nobody is playing with you on the playground then it can by detrimental to your psyche to watch so I read books. I traveled far away places from those kids.

I will judge people for bitching about stuff because I hate it..but I will not judge people for being different than me. I cannot. I will not. I'm a strong person because you can't come through that whole and not be. Who says I'm whole? Anyways, I don't like weak people. Boo fucking whooo. Are there people who have endured worse than me? You bet your ass. There has to be. Is everyone's story different? Do we all have hangups about weird things because of our upbringing? Probably.

I've spent time trying to convince myself that my upbringing was some sort of normal. That it was just a different brand of normal. We all blame our Mother's right? Is it Freud that says it's all our Mother's fault? Anyways, I'm not saying this as an excuse. I'm trying to explain. Maybe even some to just myself. These were some new ideas and thoughts that came to me this morning from delving into WHY I AM THE WAY I AM...and this is what I come up with. Thanks for taking the journey with me.