Monthly Archive for January, 2011

Life Happens

I feel like if I just go on and write posts from the pages of notes I have on things I’d like to write about that I would be leaving a huge elephant in the room but at the same time I don’t plan on saying anything I wouldn’t have already said anyway nor do I plan to give it too much attention. But in having put myself out there and written about my family in the way I have over the almost six years I’ve been blogging for now I can’t say it surprises me that someone related to me has viscously attacked me, no one ever said trying to break cycles of abuse was easy, I’m not going to say I’m not hurt and that I wasn’t really pissed off but I can’t say I’ve lost any sleep over it. Given that I have never not approved a comment on this blog, no matter how mean, and the fact that all members of my family or anyone who reads here is entitled to their opinions and although there is no question that it was hard, there was no way I wasn’t going to approve it; a part of me knew it was coming from the four emails of a similar, granted shorter, FULL CAPS nature that I had already received and ignored.

If there is one thing I have learned in the last two years it’s that you can’t tell people you have changed, people either see it or they don’t and no matter what I do or don’t do, there will always be people who don’t like me, will never like me. And you know what? For a while now I’ve been okay with that and it isn’t easy by any stretch, given I crave approval and want everyone to like me. But 2010, although a year of little blogging, was a year of many, many lessons learned.

The fact of the matter here is, whether you find out from reading through my archives or have been following this roller-coaster with my family from the beginning, I have always made it clear that there is no one that I feel close with in my family, the one person I did died in 2001. So when it comes right down to it, I don’t feel the need to really defend myself against anything she said, take it or leave it, buy it or don’t buy it I’m not here to appease anyone. I acknowledge that reading some of the things that I have written about my parents over the years can’t be easy for them, but at the same time – then stay off my blog.

You can tranquilize your mind

When they read the email he’ll insinuate that I don’t know what I’m talking about, he’ll say that I’m trying to make it worse and to make it about me. But I’m not and it isn’t. Anyone who knows anything about my family dynamic has at one point asked me if a free trip to Bali every year is really worth putting up with my parents’ constant drama and bullshit. I have always answered with a resounding FUCK YES. When I went to see them in 2009 things were only semi awkward, but because I was in a really good place for a change I gave it a go and about 90% of the trip was good. I even kept my lips zipped right shut when my dad made some witty remark about how the depression in our family had skipped a generation [delusions of grandeur much]. It didn’t take me long to see beneath the mask my father wore while I was there, I left knowing he hadn’t changed a bit. I probably said a lot to the contrary back then but I wanted to believe.

Over the last year the answer to that question has been changing more and more to FUCK NO. The ignorant and racist letters they send when they moved to fucking ASIA are quite shocking. I’m simply not capable of using them for a free trip and last year we didn’t go anyway. The older I get the more I simply can not live with “we’ll just have to agree we remember things differently” being good enough for me. It isn’t. A lot of days my resentment builds, and shit man, I’ve been working on this relationship with an incredible psychiatrist since 2003. I know that I either have to walk away or accept them for who they are.

And I can’t do either. Despite trying and failing at both.

Since they’ve moved to Bali it has been one thing after another. For two people who inflicted the level of abuse and neglect on me that they did, I honestly thought that them moving to Bali would result in us simply drifting further and further a part like we were doing before suddenly they woke up one day and realized they had a daughter well after I realized I’d grown up way short handed and it has been a battle ever since. I’m sorry but you just do not get to neglect me to the disgusting and gross extent you did and suddenly decide we are going to be friends. No, it’s over, it ends here.

And now I’m being accused of trying to get my mother to have another breakdown [again] because that is how my family rolls and he reacted like I said he would in that first sentence I wrote at 2:22 PM looks like he was out of bed for about two minutes before he blasted off his ‘I’m a five year old and it’s all your fault’ message to me.

Right, so my Grandmother is in the hospital and long story short she should have either been put in a home years ago or have a paid nurse who looks in on her weekly, she is 88 years old and is basically left with distant relatives of relatives of friends to look in on her, when she talks to her children she lies to them about how she is doing because she is fucking 88 and last time she was in the hospital having HEART SURGERY instead of her daughter who lives in a suburb of Toronto going to visit her the relatives of the relatives of the friends were left to handle it all AND my Aunt still bitched about the costs.

My father because he has never liked my mother’s mother has refused to do anything to help her, like say having a professional check in on her, which has now lead to my uncle entering her apartment to find it reeking of feces, the bed pot not changed for days, the bed-linens un-save-able and bloody Kleenexes everywhere. I’m fucking furious. I’m livid. Is this for fucking real? No matter how I feel about my parents, even if I’m taken out of their will, I would STILL not allow what has happened to my Grandmother to happen to them.

And his excuse, she at 88 wanting to keep her independence and not telling my Aunt and Uncle how she was actually doing and he knows that under no circumstances can my Aunt or Uncle afford a nurse or a home, to which I reminded him that the elderly don’t always know what they want and what they need and that someone as independent as my Grandmother would NEVER give that up without a fight. There is no excuse for her living like that none. I can not believe these people expect me to have a relationship with them just because THEY are the lonely ones now. I’m not ready, I don’t know when I will be but I’m not and this just makes it SO much worse, so much worse that I may never be ready. I’m pretty sure the admittance forms to whatever home I end up tossing them into can probably be signed without my having to see them, but at least I’d still fucking help.

It’s a Process

People ask me if the site won’t be Gus Greeper anymore and if I will change everything online to my name now. The answer is no. I knew when I named the site after Gus that she would one day die. And a lot of people call me Gus and she is tattooed on my arm, I think it would feel like I was trying to forget her and I don’t know it seems almost disrespectful too, regardless of her not having been a human. I will get around to updating the about page and blarg who gives a shit about that stuff right now.

The other day I thought it was coming up on the third month anniversary but I quickly realized it’ll be two months since she passed on Thursday. I find grief so strange, the similarities to my depression are such that I’m thankful I have friends who will remind me that it hasn’t been that long since I lost my best furry buddy, the longest relationship I’ve ever had, that it is ok to get upset and cry. I have forever been a person who will easily cry over something as simple as spilled milk, but I detach from trauma and reattach generally at the most inappropriate of times causing myself even more grief.

I have forced myself to deal with this more so than I think I have with other losses, this is not to say I haven’t had situations not even remotely about Gus trigger me into the grieving process. I have tried to force myself to literally stand in my feelings. If I think I hear her paws and feel a small jolt of energy as I anticipate her jumping up on the couch to turn and realize she isn’t there, I try to acknowledge it and give myself permission to simply miss her.

where Gus rests.

I love the urn we got for her; it has dancing lions on it. It’s comforting having her here, not creepy, I was worried it would be strange and creepy but the alternative to not having her cremated individually is what was creepy to me.