Loving Luka

F/NF words

What do I have to say here, that hasn’t been said before? It’s an ongoing battle, repetition begets boredom, boredom, depression. I’m weary from all our conversations that end up the same way, one of us hanging up on one another. I can’t do that anymore, I won’t.

I’m sitting in a coffee shop, near your apartment, trying to drink a cup of black coffee in a white mug, my hands shake, while the rain continues to flood the streets. I just think about trying to jump over the massive puddles but I don’t have any more energy in me to even try. When I was younger that was my favorite thing to do. Not now.

View image | gettyimages.com

I feel paralyzed from pain, the pain you inflicted on me. Once, I used to be carefree, like a child, happy and silly and stomp in the puddles.  I am so ANGRY at you. In the past I cared too much and where did that get me? No where. So, instead of being disappointed like I have been in the past, I am turning into myself, safe guarding my heart and not showing it anymore, at least not to you.

I don’t WANT to care anymore, I’m past that point. I’m not lying, I have cared too much in the past, believe me, you know, I wasn’t always like this. People who have known me for years will reassure you that yes, I have changed but I have chosen that change. Why? Self protection. I’m tired of being bullied and pulled apart like a hungry street dog lunging at a piece of a steak.

You know who you are. You blame me but you never look inside yourself. You need ME? That’s not good enough. You don’t treat me well enough to be on your side. You accuse me of everything you do to me, did that ever occur to you?  I just handle it better. I don’t

need to whine and carry on the way you do, I’m an adult now.  Yes, I went through hell to get here but I survived, barely, but I survived and I am strong.

Don’t you see how your view is warped? I don’t live in the past, I do acknowledge it but deep inside YOU are the one who hasn’t moved past it. Why is it that your true emotions only come out when you were bare to the bones, out of your mind? You loved me then, you needed me then. Not since then with all your false bravado. Because if you did love me why would you be so mean to me all the time?

It’s not a big dark secret, it’s an illness. Like diabetes or cancer, get over yourself. I know you think the world revolves around you, you make it that way, you make it that way. Not everybody else does that.

View image | gettyimages.com

I know you put yourself first, well, who doesn’t know that? You admit it with pride. ‘A great quality of yours, I’m sure you think.’ Me? You don’t care about me as much as you think. Because if you did you wouldn’t be a bully like you always have been and you still carry on the same way, even after all these years we’ve been together. You could work on a compromise instead of saying “Well, I  just can’t do it, I won’t do it. ” Maybe you can but you have never tried.

I was happy in the past to mediate to reach a solution we can both live by, I will not be influenced by your outbursts anymore. I will stay away. I don’t trust you since you have broken the rules of our relationship time and again and you know you have.  Deep inside you are a very troubled child. I can’t see our relationship continue on the way it has, not at my expense.

I need to put myself first, to care about me now. I hope one day you will be happy without making others unhappy.

 

I Want To Be Melissa Rivers’ Sister

One day or another

I turn myself inwards, hiding from the world.

I don’t want to go out and make small talk, my friends don’t feel like real friends tonight and

blood, it turns out, happens to be thicker than water, even when blood types are opposite.

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The news on television is too scary to watch and I take on too much of it.

That’s when I have to force myself to extricate my sensitive soul and feel alright

snuggling under the blankets for a day, maybe two, listening to music or trying to name my new pink pig stuffed animal, stroking her soft cotton skin.

Imagine a soul without a name. What shall I call her? Suggestions?

The sun is setting earlier and earlier, things are the same but they are not.

I see a very long Winter ahead of us, I don’t even have the energy to groan.

I can’t blame it on Fibromyalgia either. I won’t.

My birthday month is on, even early, I don ‘t care about getting older, I still love birthdays and I am not vain.

Wrinkles are graciously earned, gray hair are few but I don’t hide them anyway. I am the warrior that they present, I earned them.

My children are now adults perfectly able to take care of themselves without us, both a blessing and a curse. I still miss them as I see mothers posting their first and second graders first day back to school pictures, excited grins and new outfits.

I think we have done well in parenting them, we are both so proud of them, we shine.

Suicide, brain tumor,  starving herself, no will to live, and now Joan Rivers? I don’t know but now I wish I could be Melissa’s sister

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so she has somebody with her, to support her.

Nothing is fair, deep down, I still expect them to be at the end.

That’s the very immature part of me that won’t grow up. I can’t seem to learn this lesson even as it presents itself over and over again. Why? Why CAN’T I learn this?

I too, would wait for my mom to wake up, cracking a joke. But, my mom would NOT want to be brain-dead, that I know.

We all deal with pain, grief, discomfort, sadness and people really DON’T reach out to give a hand, I think that is what shocks me the most.

No one makes the time, they have themselves to consider first, last and in-between.

I am not sure who I am anymore, who I’ve become.

Maybe, just maybe, I’m disappointing myself, maybe I have become one of them too.

Nothing would surprise me anymore.

Nothing does.

Plinky Prompt

The Great Kindness Challenge Logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

• 
• What do you love most about yourself? What do you love most about your favorite person? Are the two connected? See all answers

• Edit answer |
• December 1, 2013 by hibernationnow

• Love to Love you Love me.

• KINDNESS. WARMTH.

  Being kind and thoughtful to other people is very important to me, being sensitive to their needs. My favorite person is my husband who is also kind and supportive, probably in different ways. We both have huge hearts, we both probably care TOO much and feel disappointed in people who are not as warm and understanding as we are.
  This is the way we are, naturally, it is who we are inside. Dealing with selfish and self-involved people with no feelings about anyone but themselves is hard for us. Most people are not like us, we are lucky to have found each other. In this great big, self-involved world, we are definitely in the minority.
  We have each other for now, I’m terrified, absolutely terrified for the day that one of us will be left without the other.

Carry On Tuesday – Time To Say Good-Bye

Broken Heart symbol (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Those of you who subscribe to Carry On Tuesday know we don’t pick the prompt, but I would be personally devastated if this WAS the last prompt. The prompt also comes at a very appropriate and hard time for me which makes me feel like my heart is breaking, smashing into little crystal shards that can’t be put back together.  My flesh is being torn apart yet my soul is comfortable and relaxed, knowing I can’t take any more. This break has been coming for a very long time, I know it has, and my feeble attempts before were useless, flimsy, like the shreds that are left on my overused red, silk robe. “I’m sorry” I whisper to my sister silently but I can’t live this way a moment longer. I know you don’t understand me, I know you feel like I act like the victim all the time but, in my heart, I have been the victim. The fact that you can’t see that shows how far apart we really are.

I know I have hurt you too and I am sorry but I feel that my abusive barbs are reactions to your lack of emotions and actions. Can’t you see that? Actually, you probably can’t. I never, in a million years, thought I could be part of a family that was broken, broken with glass shards that gouge and make us both bleed. It can’t go on like this; I know it’s time to say good-bye.

I needed you so many times, when we were teenagers and adults and you adamantly just said “no.” Why? Because you didn’t feel like it or you didn’t want to, it didn’t fit in your schedule, it was always just about you. It was cute when you were little, our parents joking about your mirror that said “It’s all about ME!” but growing up it grew less funny and more hurtful.

I know you hate it when I write about you in my blog so trust me to say this will be the last blog post. I won’t mention you again in a negative way at all. There is a tiny part of me that prays for a miraculous reconciliation but deep down I know that people don’t change. I need to accept my status as an “only child” and again use my friends as my family. I do apologize for telling you out loud that “I wouldn’t pick you as a friend” although it was true, it was hurtful. I need nurturing people in my life, people I can trust to be there for me when I need them; people I can depend on: this was never your strong suit. Not when the window washer abused me when I was a child and I tried to wake you up or when I was mugged and asked you to walk me home, both times you didn’t want to be bothered. That is not okay with me, how could it be?

When I had a lump removed from my breast in my early twenties you did come up to help me with the bandages but only after Mom and Dad forced you to come, they told me. While you came to my college graduation you didn’t ride in the car with Mom or Dad, you insisted on flying so that when they called my name up to the podium, cum laude, you were on your way back to the airport to leave.

When I was in the Emergency Room countless times with Mom or Dad, alone, I called you ONCE because I was very worried. I asked you to come FOR ME, you only lived half an hour away and it was early evening. You said “no” because you didn’t want to: that’s not a good enough reason for me. You question if I hate you? Yes, part of me does.

I still love you as my sister, but it’s not love that is strong enough to keep us together to have a relationship. It’s an obligatory love because you are part of a family we used to have. Just because it is time for me to say good-bye does not make it any easier at all. If there was a way to work on this relationship, I would but you won’t. You are too filled with your own hatred and anger and defense mechanisms you can’t see yourself as others do. I have always loved you, I probably always will. This love hurts way too much for us to be connected. I wish you love, good health and peace; I just can’t be part of it anymore; not the way it has existed for me for all these years. No. That’s not to say that I don’t think this is incredibly, horrifically, sad. I do.

Tales of the youngest child…..

Image by kodama (home) via Flickr

I have an older sister who is five and a half years older than me but in some ways I feel like an only child. We are nothing alike and since she never wanted to have anything to do with me growing up, there are not a whole lot of memories that we share. I always told my sister that I would never “pick her to be my friend.” That says a lot. It sums up everything in our relationship. When I needed HER she was never there for me, when I got mugged and asked her to walk me home the next day, she wouldn’t. When I was abused and woke her up she told me to go away and let her sleep. When I had surgery my sister had to be prodded and pushed by our parents to help me; they told me that. She flew to my college graduation and left before my name was called to the stage. My parents had driven up to my graduation which, agreed, was a very long drive, she flew and they let her. I was always the one left to mop up her messes, to parent our mother and father, sometimes, to parent her. Even now at age 54 and almost 60, we are not close; I may love her but I do NOT like her. When my father was in the Emergency Room many years ago I begged her to come. She refused. I begged her again, to come there FOR ME and she said “no.” She did not come, she didn’t feel like driving in the dark even though it was only a 30 minute drive from her house. How can one forgive that? I try to help people, and do good deeds for others, she doesn’t. My mother says “she’s good at calling every day” and “she knows the daughter to call if she needs someone.” Trust me, I am not bragging, believe me, this is not a competition, I don’t consider myself “winning.” How could I? If she is forced to help it is only when if it is convenient for her. I don’t like having a sister that I can’t rely on for anything. My best friends fill that role. I trust them, I can rely on them. I probably could rely on Facebook friends that I have never met before I could count on her. When my first-born, my son, was born she told me to leave a message on her answering machine because she didn’t want to wake up for the news. She is totally self-involved and selfish and she has no clue how she comes across to others, she doesn’t even know herself. She once told our ill mother that she wanted to have lunch with me but I couldn’t and continued to tell our mother that she would NOT drive the extra 20 minutes to visit our mother. My mother, in tears, tells me these things but not her. She has always gotten away with a lot, my parents did not want to make any more waves in her tumultuous past, not even a ripple. That was their big mistake and I knew that as a teenager but they did not. My mistake? For sometimes thinking she will come through, having a tiny flicker of hope and always being let down. My husband questions me: “but it is your sister” he says, “you KNOW how she is” and he is right. I do know how she is; I will never be sure of why she is like that but I have to accept it because she will never change. The ONLY good thing that came out of my sister and me is that we each have a boy and a girl and the “cousins” adore each other. This is one good thing, maybe it needed to skip a generation; they have each other.

What Do Words Really Mean?

As parents we teach our children, from a very young age, to see please, and thank-you. We teach our children to respect their elders, to give up there seats on trains or buses for the elderly or the handicapped or women who are pregnant. We drill, over and over that “there is a word missing……”  We hope that they will eventually do this on their own. It’s what we expect from them but recently I’ve realized it doesn’t always work out the way we think it should. Maybe our expectations are too high? Maybe we are totally wrong. It could go either way.

We even prompt them sometimes and my children are not children anymore, they are 15 and 17. Something you would like to say we ask lightly? Did you forget anything? It’s really nothing more than a step up from “what’s the missing word little Susie?”

My husband and I took our teenagers to Aruba over Christmas holiday. We barely saw our son much less heard from him. He was safely ensconced in his “bachelor pad” pool house of his best friend’s grandmother’s mansion. Our daughter, being stuck with us in our room and without the amusement of fighting with her brother non-stop, tended to be sullen, and critical. When my daughter was 2, it was all about her. She is now 15 and everything still has to revolve around her. She has a lot of compassion for animals, I hope she will learn compassion for people, other than her friends, too.

We try and lead by example, my husband and I are both very polite individuals; both of us having grown up with European parents. We tended to be stricter than any of our friends who have children. Even my niece and my nephew never had curfews and their parents hardly ever knew where they were. This is not acceptable in our house. There are a lot of things we DON’T know and many things we have already have conceded, but we still feel children still need some structure.  Is that too old fashioned or being sensible?

My husband and I are betting if the children will thank us for this vacation. He thinks they will not. I think my son might and then my daughter will murmur her agreement.  So far, we haven’t heard any “Thank you’s” for meals, expenses, the trip…..Do the words replace actions?   I don’t think so. It’s something, but it certainly is not enough, not nearly enough. I know I have to give them slack, a lot of slack because they are teenagers and their worlds do revolve around themselves….

Am I being too harsh?  Is it wrong to expect teenagers to have manners? Am I fooling myself?  Honestly? I really don’t know.  Our son spent the entire time with his friend in Aruba without so much as an e-mail much less a phone-call  to us.  He only came to visit here when he and his friend wanted to use the gym OR when his friend’s father made them visit for a little while on Christmas Day.

This is our first encounter with teenagers at this age and we’re lost. Both my husband and I were not typical teens (whatever that really is). We were highly respectful and gracious and always had good manners. Call us boring but that’s what we were.  In the soon to be near future, my husband and I plan to go away on vacation sans teenagers and enjoy each other all the more.