There Ain’t No Good Plans for Me

**trigger warning** suicidal ideation

I’m trying to be optimistic.  Truly I am.  I know what I want from my life and I can almost see a way to make it happen.

The magical dream doesn’t have to be lost.  If I can just get the pieces to line up.  The problem is that so much of it depends on factors outside of my control.

For starters, I need a job that doesn’t destroy my soul.  Why is it so fucking hard to get a job in this country?  You see all this shit in the media about how the problem with millennials is that they don’t want to work, while I’m standing over here jumping up and down begging to be allowed to do anything other than what I’ve been doing the last decade.

I genuinely do want some “menial” job working in a factory somewhere.  I want to spend my days doing manual labor, at least for a while.  Everyone is always yammering about how good exercise is for your mental health.  So why is it surprising that I long for a job where I can turn off my mind and tax my body and give my soul time to heal?

You can’t go back to the trailer park.

It doesn’t matter how far you’ve fallen, or what you actually want out of life.  Once you’ve risen to a certain level, society won’t let you climb back down the ladder.  It doesn’t matter how much you hate it up there.

Nonetheless, I can’t give up.  For the first time in my life, I know exactly what I want.  And until the world actually ends, I’m going to keep trying to get it.

I can pinpoint the day I ran out of hope.  It happened last December.  And for a while after that everything was darkness and despair.  Norman kept getting meaner and meaner, literally laughing in my face while I begged him for help.

“You deserve it for leaving me,” he said.  He twisted the whole narrative around until I was an evil, high-powered lawyer who took all his money and ran off with another man.  And because no one in Washington knows anything about either of us, that became reality for dozens of people.  Because stories have power.

For a while, that became reality for me, as well.  I forgot the actual reasons I left him.  I forgot that I had already left him twice before I “cheated” oh him.  I buried myself in guilt and self-loathing.  I accused myself repeatedly of abandoning my children.

For many months, I stopped wanting to be on this planet at all.  I let the voices from the past that live in the back of my head remind me that I was a mistake, that I never should have been born, that my mere existence on Earth destroyed lives.

When Norman filed that affidavit in court stating that I had never been involved in parenting the children and that they didn’t miss me at all, I believed every word.

That was when I made a plan.  One last visit with my children in August, to say goodbye, and I would be gone from this world by September.  Don’t freak out.  That isn’t the plan any longer.

Sometimes I think Norman wanted me to die.  He knew about my problems with self-harm.  He knew about my suicidal ideations.  I know he knew, because I told him.  His response was to laugh, to use my deepest fears that I had confided in him as weapons against me, and to tell me I deserved every bit of it.

Norman has known about my mental health problems for two decades.  It’s what made him so embarrassed to be seen in my company for the first five years we were “together.”  He kept telling me that it was all in my head (that’s actually true, but not in the way he meant it) and that I should simply choose to be happy.

About three years into my legal career, I told Norman that I hated being a lawyer, that it was destroying my soul, that I only did it because he wanted me to and that I wanted to quit and find a different career.  He told me that was a cruel thing to say, that he believed in me even if I didn’t believe in myself, and that I just needed to work harder.  So I did. 

After Thing1 was born I had really bad post-partum depression.  One day we went for a walk, and I admitted to Norman that I had been having suicidal thoughts again.  He told me to stop being dramatic, that everyone is suicidal.  When I disagreed, he told me that everyone hears a sad song and wonders what the world would be like if they weren’t in it, and that I needed to get over myself and choose to be happy.

He was really big on the “choose to be happy.”

For years Norman told me that psychiatric meds were for the weak, and that he disapproved of me taking them.  It wasn’t until he realized that the meds made me pliable, allowed him to control me, that he decided they were a good thing, and encouraged me to take them.

After Thing2 was born, when I asked my midwife if there were any anti-depressants I could take and still be able to breast feed, he suddenly became very supportive of psychiatric medications.

When I told him the meds made me feel dead inside and I wanted to stop taking them and work on healing instead of just coping, he was strongly against it.  When I told him that I was quitting the law, that I wanted to go back to school, that I wanted a chance to be the person I believe I am, he again told me that I just needed to work harder at being a lawyer and learn to believe in my own myself as much as he did.  When I asked him to be nicer to me, he said his world was ending.

I guess it was.

When I was twenty years old, I met a cruel, selfish man who told me I was socially unacceptable, and I believed him.  When I was twenty years old, I met a cruel, selfish man who told me I was inferior, and I believed him.  When I was twenty years old, I met a cruel, selfish man who said he could “help me” by teaching me how to behave properly, and I believed him.

For nearly two decades, I let Norman guide my decisions.  When he finally decided it was suitable to take me out in public, he would apologize to people in advance for my behavior, before I even opened my mouth.  Afterward, he would tell me all the things I did wrong and instruct me on what to say and how to act the next time we socialized.  Eventually I just stopped attending any social events that I didn’t plan myself, for fear of embarrassing him.

Not all of his influences were bad.  While practicing law was a mistake, going to law school was the best decision I ever made, even though I only did it because he wanted me to.  In law school I learned that I’m actually quite smart.  I had spent my whole life hearing how stupid I was, but my performance in law school made it impossible to maintain that belief.

The last year of law school was hands down the best year of my life.

Norman also gave me my children, who I love more than anyone and anything else in this world.  I no longer believe that I’m a bad mother and that my children are happy that I left.  I understand now that he only said that because he knew how much it would hurt me.

The man was a mistake; the children were not.  Both things can be true.

At least according to my therapist anyway.

I didn’t abandon my children.  I left a toxic marriage that was destroying me.  Unfortunately, I was not in a position to take the children with me at the time.

While I miss my children desperately, leaving them in Washington was actually a good decision.  Thing1 feels safe there.  It turns out that living through three natural disasters in the first five years of his life, one of which forced us out of our home for an entire month, left the poor child with some PTSD of his own.

One night, Thing1 spent our entire facetime call listing natural disasters and explaining how he was safe from them in the house he lives in now.  Hurricanes, floods, tornados, earthquakes, tsunamis, he had researched them all and could perfectly articulate all the reasons why he was safe from them in his new home.  I knew his logic was sound because I had done the same research myself when we first bought the house.

He was only six.  Six-year-olds shouldn’t be that obsessed with natural disasters.

It turns out the reason he’s afraid of the dark is because we would frequently lose power in Louisiana.  He needs a light on at all times so that he knows the electricity is still working.

Thing1 feels safe in Washington.  That is why I stopped fighting for them to return to Louisiana.  Not because Norman is right, and I’m a bad mother.  Because I want my children to grow up feeling safe.

There’s no way for me to reasonably pursue my personal goals in Washington.  Believe me, I’ve checked.  And even if there was, I’m not strong enough to handle having to see Norman in the flesh on a regular basis.  We were together for twenty years; he knows exactly how to hurt me and I’m still to fragile to withstand his attacks.

When Thing1 was six weeks old I was crying in the pediatrician’s office because I just could not make breastfeeding work.  The doctor sat down in a chair, took both my hands in hers, looked me straight in the eye and said, “what that child needs most of all is to see his mother smile.  All the breastmilk in the world won’t make up for growing up with an unhappy mother.”

I think that advice still applies.

My children need a mother who is healthy and happy.  And I’m never going to heal if I keep forcing myself to be someone else’s idea of who I should be.

Thing1 wants to be a youtuber.  He makes videos all the time and is desperate to make his own channel.  He loves scary stories and is fascinated by the way fake things can be made to look real on the screen.

I want to be a screenwriter.  All the scripts I’m working on right now are either horror or fantasy or a little bit of both.

If I keep going, if I continue chasing the me that lives inside my head, if I make my own plans and pursue my own goals…

How awesome would it be to make movies with my son someday?

Today I am discouraged.  The present seems impossible, and I’m still overwhelmed by the pain of the past.

But if I keep going, if I keep trying, if I take control of my own narrative and work out how to make the things I want happen, the payoff could be bigger than I ever dared imagine.

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