9:55 p.m. - 10/10/03
i just hope it's enough to buy a miracle.
It's already less than a week until I see him again. (This is my attempt at optimism. Does it hold up?) I know I can make it. It's not unbearability I'm worried about; it's discomfort. As he said, it would just be nice if we could meet Monday, considering how shitty things are. I'm as ok as can be expected. Maybe I'm more ok than can be expected; I mean, I take seriously good care of myself. Unfortunately, that doesn't automatically result in a wonderful life. Character and effort should be rewarded, damnit. I would like to see someone rewire the world to put that little "bad things don't happen to good people" ordinance into actual effect. Bad things make my head ache.
I called my dad tonight. It felt like time to make contact again, even though I saw him last week. I'm still feeling the weirdness of having gone about a month without seeing each other. He wants me to come visit him, to "bust out" as he puts it. It's a hard concept for me to understand because, as you may recall, I don't particularly like going anywhere that makes it difficult to return to my own room, and it takes really decent things - like good friends and culture and the suchlike - to entice me. As much as I love my dad, as much as I want to spend time with him, I cannot go back to Brigadoon right now. I can't. I mean, I'm considering it, partly because I feel guilty (bleg) and partly because it would mess around with the week and maybe make the absence of a Monday appointment less weird (or be entirely difficult and make it way more painful to force myself through the week), but in all honesty it seems insane. I don't want to be away from 'home' (by which I mean my familiar space, my room) right now, and I certainly don't want to be in Brigadoon, where all a girl can do is crochet, watch television, make small talk, and watch more television. Oh, and eat. Obviously. Eating is a major form of entertainment in Brigadoon. Grargh. Do I think it sucks that I want to be 'home' and that 'home' is no longer a place where my dad lives? Yes. I do. But I also thought it sucked when my parents lived together, and I'm not in the mood to decide which is worse, but for the moment, I'm compelled to notice that my mom and I are both getting better, our relationship is slowly working into one I can actually depend on and appreciate (for more reasons than, "she's my mom and I love her; of course I do"), while my dad continues to live in the apartment two steps away from his mom's, sounding almost exactly like her, refusing to recognize the impending divorce, and no longer attending therapy. I don't mean that as a dig at my dad; I really don't. But it is true that my mom is the healthier parent right now, the one I need to be staying with, though I'd prefer to be staying at home (as opposed to the one in quotation marks.) I just hate this. I know I have to stick to my needs and spend time with Dad outside of Brigadoon, outside of visiting him, but that's just so hard. It's so hard to be with him and to say I want to go home, which means away from him. It's so hard to feel like I have to somehow redeem the relationship, cheer him up, make things ok...when what I really need to do is communicate what I feel about what he did, so that we can move through that and have a real relationship again. Eegh. Chas says it gets better with time; it takes time for people to come to terms with what they've done. I hope that's true for me, too. Sooner rather than later. I miss my dad, but his sickness anchors me underwater, weighs me down and makes it hard to breathe.
I don't feel like I have the energy to write about today's session, but then I don't feel capable of doing much of anything. I guess I can try and see how far into I get.
I went in feeling really, seriously like there was nowhere near enough time, going crazy that we were late (even though he was far later), and that he was late, and that we weren't going to have enough time to cover anything. I helped this issue significantly by struggling to talk for the first five or ten minutes I saw him. He asked how things had been; I told him really not so good but had trouble elaborating. He talked about how overwhelming and complicated our potential subjects are; I added that his leaving town makes things more difficult. He was really understanding about that; he even said something like, "Yeah, I was hoping you'd be out of town this weekend" (as planned a few weeks ago) "so it would be a mutual abandonment." I told him it's only abandonment if someone makes the commitment to stay; otherwise it's just leaving - and he sat back and said what a wise statement that was. Completely straight-faced and clueless. I bust out laughing and told him he's the one who suggested that to me. He found his "echo" wise, despite the fact that he'd forgotten telling me.
When I told him that things had been really difficult, he said "Sara" rather quietly, once again giving away that he is either hugely psychic or reads this journal. Forget the fact that two sessions ago, I was bawling about how much I love the girl and how much it hurts to be so helpless. Why would he say that first, out of nowhere, if he weren't psychic or reading this journal? Why wouldn't he mention Monday's session or ask one of those vague questions psychiatric doctors always ask? It's especially eerie when he's right; although what's happening with Sara is hardly the extent of what I'm facing, it's certainly at the top of the list. I can't imagine being more scared than this. I can't imagine feeling more desperate. I can't imagine more heartache, except at the thought of losing her. The largest portion of my session was me crying and talking about how much I love and how it hurts, and the doctor handing me kleenex. I started out with fairly healthy statements like, "Why her? Why any of us? Why do any of us have to be sick?" and wove my way into the less healthy, "Why me? What grand thing did I do that I get to live?" He replied to the second one with a long description of my life, something like: "You're right. What did you do to deserve this? To deserve having to fight for life everyday without using the tools you're used to? To deserve being in the middle of a potential divorce? To deserve having to grieve so much and be in so much pain?" (And then the one that kicked me in the stomach.) "To have to question your sexuality and orientation when so many people come into that so much more easily?" It was the first reference to Monday's session, and I told him - when he said to point those things out to to my guilt - that it would be a stronger argument without that last one. I told him what I talked about wanting to: that I don't want a sexuality, any sexuality, that I would squash it down or cut it off if I could, that I don't want anything to do with it. He seemed a little surprised but not really flustered by that, and he reminded me what I've been reminding myself - that there have been quite a few other times when I didn't feel capable of dealing with something and ended up being more than capable, ended up integrating the part of me, and shaping myself closer to a whole being.
I mentioned that I didn't want to integrate this part of myself, and therefore it was different than those other situations (though I did think of one change - learning to be angry - that I didn't even want in my life and am very glad for now.) He said that he didn't expect me to believe him, but it really was a good part of me, and I talked about how I didn't even understand what it was, and I didn't want to understand, and he talked about how it would turn out so wonderfully, but right now I'm frightened and I can't know that. He said as long as I'm frightened, I shouldn't worry about it. He said to give it to him, and he'd take good care of it. It needed time to incubate, he said. It was comforting...even if I still believe that I'll never quit being scared. Even if I'm convinced he's convinced I'm gay, and that terrifies me because I don't know, and what if he thinks he does?
In related news, my mom has taking to bashing lesbians (generally my father's/ brothers' domain.) I think it's a passing phase - I mean, the woman is hugely accpeting and has several lesbian friends - but for the moment, she's really pissed off about her former place of employment, the retreat center that went under. It was run by a gay nun, and after it fell apart, four new gay nuns took it over, and invested their lives and money and everything else in it. Now they're having problems, such as, no one is responding to any of their mailings, no one is glad the place survived, and so forth. Except the lesbian religious community. Apparently that's the only place that this institution managed to minister to at all effectively. So all my mom's anger about the job and the fact that these people are contacting her trying to figure out exactly what a mess they've gotten into is being fueled into uncool remarks about lesbians. It's seriously ill-timed. For instance, today, I told her that something she said (by virtue of being a contradiction of terms) reminded me of something I would hear in N*land, and then I took it back quickly because it seemed like such an awful thing to say. "I'm sorry!" I yelped. "It just came out! It just came out!"
"You just came out?" she said. "Oh, well, then you should go to [the place where I used to work.]"
I joked it off with, "Nah, I'd have to be religious first" but inside I was screaming. Aiyyyhhh! Has she lost her freaking mind? This is my going-to-the-ends-of-the-eart to prove just how accepting she is mother. And she picks *this* week- this week when the doctor and I first start talking about the subject I never once talked about, not even at Rogers, the one I've never dealt with ("yet" he added), the one when the doctor *leaves* yet again, to take up gay-bashing? I've consulted my other personas and we are not amused.
There's really not much to say if I'm not going into every word I said about how much I love Sara and every word he said back. Which I don't think I am. I'm not sure I can. It was too hard to say the first time. Besides which, some of it feels too personal. It's weird how I can air anything I experience in this journal without feeling at all uncomfortable (well, except for the really difficult subjects), but when it's about a relationship, when other people are involved, it's so much more difficult to write freely. I guess I believe that they have a right to privacy and to hear things directly from me. I do believe that. Maybe that's what's interfering.
Apparently, I also believe that by thinking about what could happen to Sara, I'm going to make it happen, and that by writing my way through any of these feelings, I'm managing to minimize her as a person. He said those two facts gave him a really good indication of where I am, which I guess is good. There's not a lot else that's good about them. I told him she's not material, she's a real person, greater than anything I can create, and he talked about how high the stakes are knowing that - how I know she's more than I can create, and if I lose her, there's so much I will lose. I told him I wanted to go up there and make all her meals and sit with her, and I burst into tears (again) because I could hear Dave talking about the girl he "would have eaten *for*" (one of his early patients) - who died of anorexia, and I could see him sitting with Tracy, trying so hard to get her to eat some chips, and I knew that it was impossible. "But the only way to get better...is to have...yourself...so I wouldn't do any good that way. My force-feeding her wouldn't do any good."
"But you still wonder, if you did it. You still try and come up with the answer." Which remains that there isn't one. There's nothing I can do, except love her, and she's already very clear on how much I do. I'm very clear on how much she loves me, how much she doesn't want to hurt me or leave me, as well as...the fact that love isn't enough to cure this disease.
But it's something, I guess. I hope so, since it's all I have to offer her. "It's very similar to how your play turned out, isn't it?" the doctor said, meaning the new one, which I detailed in full a session or two ago. "The commitment to stay despite the pain. It's your greatest gift and your greatest curse." It is. It's everything. And apparently, sexuality is a part of it, which makes no sense to me, but he said we'd talk about it. He said it's a hard spot to be in, when the options are losing someone or living in the uncertainty of how many more times are we going to go in and out of this before it conquers or is conquered. I told him I'd take the anxiety of uncertainty. I'll take that any day over not having her.
After the session, he said a few words to my mom, about how she could help me over the next few days. I have no idea what those few words were. He asked me if there was anything I wanted him to address, and I told him the only request I could think of: "Please, just, don't tell her - anything." (About the sexuality issue, which we once again ended with...grr. That's so hard. She already knows how scared I am about Sara, which is good, I think, even though sometimes her response to it is hard. She asks too many questions. I just need to be held while I cry, but once she gets that, she does a good job.) The good news is, when I asked the doctor to be careful not to give anything away, he looked at me like I had asked him not to instruct my mom to move us to Guam in his absence, like it was completely impossible that he would ever say such a thing. I suppose he assumes that I trust him to maintain confidentiality by now, which I do, but with every new issue that comes up, I freak out over it again. It helps me to say out loud that he needs to not say any of it out loud...
"Of course I won't say anything!" he said. "That's incubating. It's not ready yet. You don't worry about that."
I actually laughed, standing up to shake his hand. "I've been terrified of this for at least eight years, and you're telling me not to worry?" But I do like that he took it with him. He's supposed to look after it, and I'm supposed to not lose my mind. So long as I'm as frightened as I am, it's not yet time, he says. This is a gerbil casting a monster's shadow, he promises. And since he whispered early on that the possibility of losing Sara is one of the rare, real monsters, I was glad to hear him say so.
I may not believe a word of it, but I do pay attention. And he's been wrong less times than I have fingers on one hand. I like those odds.
chord
�
�
