Today I am struggling with differing perspectives, and how to determine whose needs matter the most, and what those needs actually are.
Last night I facetimed my kids. I’m supposed to get three calls a week: 30 minutes each on Tuesdays and Thursdays and an hour on Sunday. Norman and Mrs. Bates do their best to make this communication as difficult, stressful and limited as possible.

They monitor my calls even though they’ve been told not to by the court. She sometimes hides the phone. They keep the kids out of the house at my scheduled call time, they cut my calls short arbitrarily, they tell the kids they can only talk to me in certain rooms.
One time Norman was kind enough to call me a psycho bitch within hearing of the children.
He calls me crazy, tells them, “It’s just mama overreacting again,” and generally does whatever he can to torment me and make me uncomfortable during my calls.
The absolute worst was when he told Thing1 that I’m allowed to see them once a month, but I choose not to.
When Thing1 asked me why I don’t want to visit them, I tried to explain that it’s not that I don’t want to, it’s that I can’t afford it. He accepted this answer. Thing2 did not.

Every time I talk to them, my youngest child asks me repeatedly if I remember living with him and tries to bribe me into coming back. He asks me why I don’t miss spending time with him. He said he would give me a million dollars if I would come live in the same house as he does.
It’s so painful it makes it hard to breathe.
The worst part it, this morning I realized that Norman is right. In a way, I am choosing not to see my children.
I make excuses for myself: I am not well, I can’t afford it, being a lawyer is too hard on my mental health, I have no place to live.
All of these things are technically true.
But they don’t have to be.
I am choosing not to take the SSRIs. I am choosing not to do whatever it takes to advance my legal career, to make as much money as possible, to keep my promise to provide financially for my children and Norman and his mother.

On June 1st, 2023, Norman gave me a choice: go back on the SSRIs, keep practicing law, “find a more appropriate path to happiness” or he would take the children and leave me.
I didn’t want the kids’ lives disrupted, but I also didn’t want to be a zombie lawyer any longer, so I left instead.
I told myself it was best for the children. They didn’t need a depressed mother who sat in the basement all day, disconnected from reality and struggling to make her voice heard in the house in which she was living.
Not my house. Never my house. Every time I tried to assert myself, Norman would declare it to be his mother’s house.
I didn’t choose either of the houses I purchased. Norman and his mother said I didn’t know enough, and they were supposedly experts because his grandmother was a realtor. I despised the house we owned in Louisiana. I cried for days after the closing. When it came time for me to move in to the house with him after I took the bar exam, I cried for weeks.

That should have been a huge red flag.
One day when she let herself in to our Louisiana house without knocking or even telling me she was coming over, I objected. Norman got mad and told me everything he owned belonged to his mother, and that she didn’t need my permission to come and go as she pleased.
He didn’t speak to me again until my mother came to visit a couple of weeks later.
The last time I went back to Washington, as I was driving through the overly gentrified neighborhood full of obnoxious, old, and almost exclusively white millionaires, it dawned on me that Norman didn’t choose that house with me in mind.
He chose that house for his mother.
Every decision he has ever made has been for her. Including marrying me. Because somebody had to pay the bills, and it most certainly wasn’t going to be him.
She used to say that her retirement plan was for him to take care of her. And then he would say that his retirement plan was for me to take care of him. I thought they were kidding. It took me way too long to realize that they only wanted me around to be an incubator and an ATM.

I should have paid closer attention. They didn’t hide it. I simply wasn’t listening correctly.
I went off the SSRIs in the spring of 2023 because I didn’t think they were making me better. Even with the pills I struggled to get out of bed. I was disconnected from reality, constantly sad and anxious.
Toward the end of 2022 I was losing chunks of time. Thing2 asked me the other day if I remember Nana coming to visit us in the Washington house. I do not. I know it happened; I’ve seen pictures. She talks about the trip. The children talk about the trip.
I do not remember that visit.
The SSRIs mute the world. That part is undeniable. It didn’t take long after I stopped taking them for the world to seem brighter and more vibrant, for my creativity to return, for my writing to come alive the way it used to back when I was an undergrad studying English lit, pretending I was going to be a novelist someday.

But they didn’t take away my analytical ability. I started taking them my first year of practicing law, with breaks for my pregnancies, of course.
My legal writing never suffered. Only my creative writing failed me.
Thing2 has never really known me without the SSRIs. It never bothered him that I had trouble getting out of bed. He just crawled into bed with me.
It doesn’t matter to him what I write or even whether I write. He just wants his mother with him. It’s a perfectly reasonable request.
People keep telling me I wouldn’t have gotten so bad if my husband had been a better man. If he had made different choices, if he had behaved with more compassion and less greed, I would still be living in the same home as my children.

But I have choices, too.
I was the one who decided to try to heal instead of just drugging myself into some semblance of coping. I was the one who decided that my feelings were more important than money.
I was the one who decided to put myself ahead of my children.
Do they actually need a happy mother?
Thing2 has never known me to be happy. One time, shortly after I left, he told me he was glad I was gone because I yelled too much.
That’s fair. I shout when I am hurt. And Norman hurt me a lot.

The not speaking to me for days. The refusing to look at me. The forcing me to make appointments with him to have a conversation.
The more he punished me with silence, the louder I got.
But what if he wasn’t there? What if my fog had no monsters in it?
What if it was just me, quiet and numb, floating through the greyness?
Healing takes years of hard work, and there’s no denying that Norman is doing his best to impede the process. He makes no effort to hide the pleasure he gets from my pain.
He laughs when I cry. That is the man I married.

I haven’t been a good mother to Thing1. The post-partum depression made it hard for me to bond with him, and then I was so caught up with being pregnant and having a new baby that before I knew it he belonged to Mrs. Bates more than to me.
I did my best though. That’s why I read to him so much. It was the only way I could come up with to connect with him. I didn’t just read him baby board books. The first thing I ever read him was A Wrinkle in Time. He heard the first three Harry Potter books, all of the Anne of Green Gables books, and several Roald Dahl books before he was even old enough to walk. Then I started worrying that the stories were too scary for him, so I switched to Beverly Cleary and a series of STEM books for babies that I had stumbled upon.
When Thing2 was born I kept right on going, lying in bed with Thing1 while Thing2 looked on from his crib in their shared bedroom. I did better with Thing2. That’s why he misses me so much.
I try to read to them on facetime, but it isn’t the same. I miss reading to them, and I offer almost every call, but they usually say no. They haven’t asked for a story in months.

I want to be whole. I want a life that doesn’t hurt, a chance to bring my own characters to life, a chance for fulfillment and joy.
There were a few days like that last year. Days when I felt this bubbling giddiness inside my chest, and everything felt real and right.
But the things I want will take years to achieve and most people who try to make a living as a writer ultimately fail.
It’s hard not to think that every minute I spend chasing this improbable dream is a minute I steal from my children.
Happiness will take years. Coping can be achieved in 4-to-6 weeks, if the dose is high enough.
I don’t think anyone is really happy these days, anyway. Life is too hard for most of us, and getting harder by the minute, with no relief in sight.
I’ve been looking at federal attorney jobs in the northwest. The kind where you don’t need a state specific bar license, as long as you’re admitted to practice somewhere in the United States. Some of them might not be so bad, like doing policy research of the Office of the Attorney General. It would be boring and tedious, but it probably wouldn’t hurt. And it pays a living wage, although not nearly as much as Norman would like me to make.
I’ve never made as much money as Norman would like me to make.
He used to tell people that my job was to try to get the worst people in the country out of jail. His mother would just straight up lie and tell people I was a prosecutor instead of a public defender.
They both talked constantly about how nice it would be if I was a judge. The fact that I didn’t want to be a judge and said so every time they brought it up was immaterial to them. They wanted me to be a judge, and my protestations were met with proclamations that they believed in me, and I just needed to try harder.

Try harder to be someone I didn’t want to be.
People keep telling me I need to learn to love myself, but they’ve got it the wrong way around.
I think the person I am inside my head is fucking fabulous. That’s what ruined my life.
Everything was fine when I hated myself, when I thought that Norman’s version of me was superior, when I believed I deserved everything he ever said or did to me.
The problems all started when I decided that the real me is pretty damn awesome and that she deserved not only to exist, but to be treated well.
The conflict comes from feeling obligated to my children—and even to Norman—to keep being the person I invented.
What is more important, being happy or being there?

“Both” is not an option at the moment. If I stay here, if I keep doing what I am doing, it may be in a few years.
But is it fair to ask my children to wait that long?
What damage am I doing to them by not being physically present in their lives more often?
What damage would I do to them being physically present, but emotionally disconnected from the world around me?
Which is worse? What harms them the least? What decisions of mine are most likely to teach them the lessons I want them to learn so they grow up to be better men than their father?
I haven’t called about getting a prescription yet. Until I get a legal job there’s no point. But if I do get a job offer, I’m going to have to decide.
Which perspective is more important? Which choice makes me a good mother?
There may not be a right answer.
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Lonely No More
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