Posts

Posted on

Ch-ch-changes

I’ve been going back and forth about how to administer my online presence forever. And that just sounds full of myself, doesn’t it? But I know full well I turn up in Google results. It is an inevitable consequence of having an unusual name. (I am the only person on the planet, to my knowledge, with this first-and-last-name combo. The one person who comes closest has -ova at the end of her surname and is located somewhere in Kazakhstan. Of all places.) I might as well not be a passive victim in terms of what shows up. If my own stuff isn’t on page one of the results, am I even trying?

Be that as it may. I probably have ADD* or something. I can never get my act together on how to organize it all.

But in my current situation it’s as if I have all the time in the world. I may as well get some work in on resolving this issue.

So! There’s no point having a blog on my real-name homepage. It’s redundant. I think I will just make that into my own version of a “linktree” — all the cool kids have those on social media now — and then have this be my regular blog which I will link to from there. I’m still trying to figure out what I want to link to from that site and what I want to link to from here, because they may not amount to the same thing. I think I may make my homepage business/work-friendly and then save the personal shit for here. Someone obviously can still get here from there, but they’d have to make the effort and I didn’t think it was possible for people to get 500 times as lazy as they were even ten years ago, but here we are. I’ll take my chances.

I’m going to add my real name here though. I didn’t want to for years, but I never want to get to the point where I’m not telling my own side of the story. Everyone else gets to tell their bit if they want. I want my side always out there, for as long as I’m around to tell it. It’s only fair. If people still write me off after hearing my side of things, well, that just tells me who they are. Weeds out the assholes. No great loss.

I am debating whether I want to continue with Substack, too. It’s not that I don’t consider it a potentially worthwhile endeavor, but I don’t know if I have the attention span to be a really good longform writer, and short form doesn’t get my point across. Though honestly, I could be a brilliant writer and it wouldn’t matter because most people refuse to read. You have no idea what it’s like to have abilities that you can’t express because it’s tossing pearls at swine. And even pigs are smarter than this lot. Tired of it. I swear to fuck I am not a snob, at least not in any malevolent way, but how many times do I have to keep running into this before I finally stop kidding myself about what it is? I watch people misinterpret one another all the time, sometimes on purpose to be dicks, so of course they’re doing it to me too. I cannot figure out why they waste their time like that, but dealing with it is an exercise in perpetual frustration. I need to find something to do with my time that brings out my happy. Got plenty of grief already. Need to balance it out.

Anyway so. I’m working on all that, and the sooner I get it set up the sooner I can pursue things that bring out that happy. Right? Right.

Onward!

—–
*They used to call it ADD or attention deficit disorder; now it seems everyone has ADHD, with the H for “hyperactivity.” Those who have ever known me in person will be amused at the thought of me being hyperactive. Let’s just leave that H off in my case.

Posted on

Almost two-year anniversary

Wrote this in the parent group today:

—–

Coming up on the two-year anniversary of when I left my daughter’s house. She was insisting she was either non-binary or a boy and her father decided that was a fantastic time to start a new relationship (we weren’t together, just co-parenting, but he replicated his old pattern of sneaking around behind my back and he always zeroes in on a new situation and ignores everything else) and frankly, I was the odd one out. I knew even then that I would have no allies to back me up in trying to keep her from harming herself. Even her therapist had bought into it. And it’s horrible living in a place where you know you are no longer welcome.

The thing that sticks out to me is how they both went straight into silent treatment. I wasn’t allowed to talk about what was wrong with the situation anymore because they simply would not answer me. She probably wouldn’t have come up with that tactic herself, so I’m pretty sure her father suggested it. We all did communicate about some things for a while after I left but after he signed the car over, even that died away.

I ended up homeless earlier this year. They knew. Neither cared, apparently. I wouldn’t have asked for a rescue, but some expression of concern might have been nice.

I have to own up to my end, I’ve been angry and sweary. But I’ve also given them lots of openings to engage with the issues and asked questions and raised concerns and… nothing. It’s been we are both going to act crazy and/or unethically and we are going to completely destroy your life and you don’t get a say in it at all. I refuse to shut up and be polite when that is going on. The only reason I’ve gone pretty much silent from my end is because there isn’t any point. They’ve both made up their minds that her fantasy and his ego are more important than me.

He is on my permanent shit list. I had had this vague notion that when she was grown we’d come out of this as friends or at least cordial but he couldn’t even give me that. Nearly twenty years of “I love you” and “I’m glad you’re in my life” and then as soon as his long-ago ex decided she needed to get out of California he turned it right off like a switch. (She quit her job almost as soon as she got here and they got married at some point so yeah, don’t tell me that’s not what it was. He makes $130k a year at least and has home equity out the yinyang [the house has doubled or tripled in value since he bought it]. He can carry them. She knows it. I hope she dumps him at some point and if he thinks I’ll even entertain a conversation with him after that, well, buckle up Buttercup.)

Daughter, I don’t know. I come from a background of familial abuse and alcoholism and most of the physical abuse was from my brother and so I know what young people are capable of. I am not ready to make up my mind about her. If she’s too much like her father and what’s happened so far is a sign of things to come, though, there won’t be any hope there. First question she had when I told them I was leaving was “Are you taking the cats?” She’s told her therapists I’m a “conservative Catholic.” (Anyone who knows me in person would laugh themselves silly, and I am only Catholic by a technicality, which I already explained to her.) I complained to her when I lost my room in January that serial killers get treated better than I’ve been in this situation — free room and board! — and she remarked that if I was comparing myself to serial killers, that doesn’t look real great for me. I think that was the last time we talked. I’m not sure there will be another.

Meanwhile my best friend since age 8 or 9 has decided that my misery is all because I obsess too much about the trans thing. The fact that an 18yo young woman has been on testosterone for six months and has been using a binder and will probably opt for an elective mastectomy doesn’t faze her at all. The weird thing is she’s a social conservative but then, I’ve been telling people this is not a leftist movement. There’s room within conservatism to accept it for what it claims on the tin even if a lot of conservatives don’t. So I’m not wholly surprised. But it’s getting to the point that I could be talking about a completely different thing and she’ll start in on me with the “quit with the trans stuff” again. I am not sure how much longer she’s going to be in the picture, and I hate to say it, because in a lot of ways she’s been really supportive of my general situation. But she’s a social worker. If she has any sense of responsibility for people’s health and sanity whatsoever then she should be working harder to understand this issue than she is. She is very head-in-the-sand about a lot of things that matter: not only is she uninformed, she delights in being uninformed and considers it the morally superior position. Not even kidding. It’s one of the few areas where we clash. And now it’s gotten personal for me, she’s making it all about my feelings as if my brain is faulty instead of being concerned about my daughter’s welfare. Red flag. She has a 9yo daughter, too. I don’t even know.

Sorry to vent. August has been hard and September isn’t shaping up to be much better.

Posted on

Happy birthday, Freddie

A note: This has not been dropped from the official greatest hits album. It has been dropped off a version of it that is being played on a children’s music platform. Rightly so. They can listen to this song when it’s actually age-appropriate for them. Holy shit, internet nonces, calm the fuck down.

Posted on

Letter to Kay

After going back and forth for almost two years about whether to, I finally decided to write to Matt’s mother.

I put Matt’s home address as the return. If for some reason Kay and Roger (Matt’s stepfather and adoptive father) aren’t living at the house I used to visit, the letter will simply be returned to Matt. I’d love to be a fly on the wall for that moment. Just one more little needling.

But, I suspect they’re still in the same place. I expect absolutely nothing from this — and they could signal to me that they got it; they’ve got one of those creepy Stepford joint Facebook accounts and I am a very easy find. They did not, however, attempt that when I first left. They just pretended I don’t exist. So I know what’s going to happen: nothing.

After what happened with Cheryl, my ex-husband’s mother, that’s actually sort of a relief. And I should have learned my lesson long before now: just because someone acts like they like you doesn’t mean they do. I have no real friends in life, and I may as well face it.

I wish I could say that was deserved. It really isn’t though. I see people worse than me with friends, family, and social circles absolutely everywhere. I think most people are just shitty, that’s all. I have my shitty moments too. I am not sure what to do with that information. I am not sure it matters.

I think I wrote the letter to give my side more than for any other reason. That way I can tick off a box and say it’s done and they can’t say they didn’t know. Or they could, but they’d be lying. Because sure, one of the worst liars I have ever personally known came from kind and honest people. Sure he did.

Anyway. Here you go. For posterity.

—–

22 August 2023

Hi Kay.

Sorry if you were expecting someone else. I didn’t put my own return address on this because, well, I don’t know why I’m bothering, and I fully expect this to go nowhere. But I also wanted to be able to speak for myself, which up til now I have not had the opportunity to do, since neither you nor Roger ever reached out to me after things finally fell apart. Thanks for that, by the way.

First of all, I wanted to clear up a particular point on why Matt and I never married. As you know, he was already married when I got pregnant with Althea. He ended up divorced the following year, however, so why didn’t we tie the knot then? That seems to have been a sticking point with some of you, your aunts in particular.

He did ask me to handfast with him (non-legally-binding ceremony) the year I was pregnant, but when he asked, it was with all the air of one being dragged kicking and screaming to ask for something he didn’t actually want. We never discussed how or when or where it was going to happen, and then he started screwing around with Yvette (it’s one thing to have an open relationship, quite another to sneak around behind someone’s back when you’ve told them you weren’t going to start any new involvements, which he had in my case), so things got really toxic and it would have been silly to discuss it then because no one wants to marry, legally-binding or otherwise, a person who’s making them miserable.

Well, you might say, but that was 2004 and you’ve had almost twenty years since. Yes, that’s true. And he’d shown me that he lies and he can’t be trusted to do anything but spend money, often inappropriately, which frankly does not make one a good husband candidate either. I needed him around to help with Thea. I did not need to be married to him for that. You may rest assured that after 2006 or 2007 we had nothing like an intimate relationship going on, either.

As to why I finally left. What happened in 2004 and 2005 (because he still wouldn’t stop lying and sneaking around) wasn’t bad enough. He had to put me through it again, this time with Crys. His argument is that we weren’t together. That’s completely fair, so my question is why did he carry on like he was having an affair, and right when we were running into serious problems with Thea, too. I’m also perimenopausal so I was going through distressing health changes, my daughter was in a crisis, and I had no one to turn to for help or support because Thea’s particular situation means everyone has made me into the villain because I won’t affirm it. Matt knows why I won’t. He didn’t want to deal with it. He wanted to escape again like the little fucking coward he has always been.

I am tired of people making me into a monster for the most ridiculous of reasons. And that includes my own daughter. I loved her before she was born, I loved her and was heartbroken when I left, I still love her now. But you must understand I am the villain because I still call her “her.” Because I know she’s female and can’t change that. That is probably THE most ridiculous reason to make someone into a monster that I’ve ever heard of. I wasn’t going to stay and keep being the odd-out scapegoat, watching her destroy her health and body for nothing when I can’t even try to stop her, being treated like an intruder in my own damn home because I’m harshing Matt’s special fairy tale.

But I’m out of their lives now and I’m sure they’re much happier. I’m sure you are too. Enjoy.