I am undecided as to how long I am going to do these Morning Pages. One part of me says it is a useful free-writing exercise and I get only good things out of writing it. Another part of me says that my rambling, raw words are just a waste of electrons and that no one really wants to hear another sob story or about the mundane details of my life. It's a tough debate. I am tired and that doesn't help much either.
My tiredness isn't a result of a lack of sleep. I actually slept fairly well last night, though I would have appreciated not having recurring dreams of being short on time to get everything I needed to do done. It was ... unpleasant. It wasn't a full on nightmare because there was no real terror involved, just a great deal of exasperation and frustration. Also, I would have slept better if my new sleep medication didn't have the side effect of causing chills during the first few hours it hits your system. I kept waking up and adding blankets. Then I got overheated and had to put a few away. It was really irritating.
I am tired of being stuck. Emotionally, I am not at a great place right now. There's some troubles happening on a couple fronts for the extended family and I functionally can't do a damn thing to help anybody. As much as I want to say damn them all, there are some members of the family that I am involved with and I care very deeply for (the ones who got screwed by the rest of the family, basically). It's hard being estranged from your birth family for the most part.
When things get challenging, you don't have that resource for advice, guidance, or possible fiscal assistance to turn to. You have to figure out how to make it work on your own. For the family members that I'm involved with, I'm basically it for the people on this side of the family for them to turn to. I wish I had enough money and resources that I could help all of them out. I wish I was smart enough to say "Here's the solution to this problem." or at least had the ability to do something more than give advice that as I look at it just looks even more shaky as time goes on.
I'm not the matriarch of the family. There is no matriarch of the family. And the family of my birth is disintegrating due to internecine conflict. My grandparents were the ones who held that family together and when they died, things started to unravel. Relatives started behaving badly and showing their true colors after years of keeping their real feelings under their hat for fear of angering my grandparents. It's disgusting and disappointing. As a result, the younger generation has walked away like I did.
I have no idea how to help these young women navigate young adulthood. I've got some suggestions based on my own screwed up life experiences. I can spot relationship red flags a mile away, usually. But there's a lot that they have going on that I just can only say, "We love you. We support you. And if you need us, we're here for you." Those words feel pretty empty right now because I can't do anything more than that.
It's pure torture. I was raised in a household where I had to help parent my brothers at a young age. The expectation was because I was the eldest child, I naturally had to do so and it was my training to be a mother and a wife when I grew up. The age gap between my brothers and I is less than a decade. I wasn't qualified or even remotely old enough to supervise them. Still, there I was a few years out of diapers changing diapers on my baby brother instead of a baby doll. There I was, just shy of being old enough to be in elementary school and I was monitoring my younger brothers' behavior to make sure that our violently unpredictable mother didn't fly off the handle because some arbitrary (yet mutable on the basis of her mood that day) rule was broken. And I got into trouble for doing it even as I was expected to do so. I grew up with this deep seated feeling that I was personally responsible for the welfare of the youngest members of the family.
Here we are, approaching my forty-third year on this rock, and I can't shake that feeling. I can't shake the feeling that I failed my brothers because I went off to college and didn't stay home to intervene when things got crazy in my parents' house. I can't shake the feeling that I somehow failed my brothers because they grew up to have serious issues themselves and have proven to be unreliable and toxic people. I look at my sons and somedays I see my brothers. I flashback to being a kid and terrified that we're going to collectively be punished for some whim that went awry of my mother's that we had nothing to do with but being in the physical proximity of her when it happened.
PTSD is a bear, y'all. It's been making it really hard to write. I've got the old fear that someone is going to punish me for writing down 'lies' and the newer fear that someone is going to use my journal entries against me to try to destroy my family. I try to write. Then terror grips me and I delete entries. It doesn't matter if it's fiction or not. This has been happening for months. It's why my blog entries have been so few across the multiple blogs that I run. (Except for the reading blog, that's just got nothing because I haven't read a book in about a year. Again, trauma colliding with stress. Hard to relax with a book when memories of people throwing stuff at your head to get your attention while you were reading roll over you. And it was things like shoes and slippers. There was a reason why I'd take my books with me when I went hiking and hid in the woods to read a chapter or two as a kid.)
I suppose I wrote something on this blog for today. I didn't want it to be ugly or depressing. But, this is what's been worrying at my mind for months. And as I learn more about what's going on in the lives of people I love, it just gets more intense. At least I am sort of sleeping now. At least I'm only mildly depressed. I'm sure that this awfulness will pass. I just have to hang in there like a kitten on a window screen, all claws deployed.
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