It is an odd feeling, suddenly to have the weight of that lifted from you. I think I didn’t realize at the time that even though I was mostly off the eggshells for the last decade, they were still there. I still waited for the next flare, the next insanity, the next whatever that sent me into the spiral of grief and fear and pain. Suddenly there is only silence.

I think any woman that has been thru abuse, whether it’s emotional or physical or a combination of the two, or even just watching a loved one live through their own has ingrained in them certain triggers. It simply does not matter how far you’ve grown past the event, it does not matter how much time has gone by or how much distance you have from the person. I’ve spent literally years in therapy trying to make myself whole again, and while the triggers are lessened, they still exist.

I cannot deal with screaming. I just cannot, it makes me shut down, or it makes me unleash my own fury. The problem is that my anger can scare me, I’ve tried so hard to not emulate what I had been so used to that if I feel angry it terrifies me because what if that means I have become all that I despised for so very long. Shutting down and taking a step back from it is just so much easier and so much less scary.

There are still things that I have not gotten away from. Spending so long just feeling like you were not enough, no matter how much you did or how hard you tried left this permanent need in me to please, to overdo, to push myself past my actual limits. It can be a double edged sword because while it gets me places, advances me in my life also takes me to the edge of proper functioning. I will work until I collapse, which is great for those I work for but has given me ulcers and migraines and put my personal relationships at risk. All to try to gain the approval or acceptance that was always just out of my reach.

I am terrified of physical contact in anger, whether it is against myself or someone else. I am the one that picks up the phone if I see something out of line and calls the police. While I make the call I hope against hope that the simple act of a stranger doing for that woman something that most will not (I know having lived thru it on more than one occasion) will give her the courage to walk away, run away, just get out. I have seen people look away, ignore what is going on right in front of their faces, tell themselves that it’s a personal matter and none of their business.

I am begging all of you, the next time you hear that screaming smashing thing fight, the next time you see a woman grabbed, shoved, pushed, pulled away, to do something, anything to try to help. Sometimes all that woman needs is to know that someone else gives a damn, that she is not alone in thinking this is not right, or more importantly just that she is not alone. It is easy to make excuses for those that we think love us, whether they are spouses, boyfriends, fathers or brothers. It is too easy to fall into the “it’s my fault” trap, had I been more careful on those eggshells this wouldn’t have happened, I wouldn’t have upset him, I deserve this for whatever reason. Logically you KNOW it’s not right, you KNOW you deserve more but the disconnect between what is logical and what is emotional can sometimes be too much to overcome. You spend your life making excuses for things you would never excuse yourself for.

I promise at some point I will get back to cheery happy “you won’t believe what happened to me posts”, I’m just working through some crap right now

I have always had a very strong and very close circle of friends. They are the kind of people that you don’t have to talk to every day or every week to maintain your friendship. You can pick up the phone after months of not really talking and it’s like no time has really passed. They are an amazing, caring and fantastic group of people. The best thing about my friends is that no matter what, no matter where our lives have taken us or how busy we are, if one of us is in need or in crisis they are there.

In the past few weeks my love for them has really grown. There’s not a single person who I would call friend (not just that I would say I’m friendly with, but who I consider a true friend) who has not gotten in touch to make sure that in all the crazy my family and I are ok. None of them have judged, none have gone looking for extra gossip or more of the “story” of my fathers great implosion. I will never ever ever be able to repay them properly for that.

My friends are simply unbelievable.

I know that there’s some saying out there about knowing who your real friends are when you’re at your lowest and all the chips are down, and I can’t say that I am surprised by the people that have shown themselves to be the true friends right now. They are the people I have always known I could call on in a time of need and when I was at my most embarrased and my most distraught they all reached out with their care and concern.

I will never be able to thank you all enough, never be able to tell you how much it truly means to me and I hope with all my heart that you know that I will always always be there for you too. I love you guys with all my heart and if there’s one good thing to come out of all this bullshit it’s that we’ve been in better touch, it’s long overdue.

My philosophy has always been that when life takes a giant crap on you there are two paths to take. You can either let yourself become the victim, which I did for a while when I was younger, or you can stand the hell up and fight back. Life is about growing, learning and becoming stronger, otherwise all you’re doing is making excuses.

I see people, know people who all the time use the horrible things that have happened to them as a crutch. Please hear me when I say there is a time for mourning, there is a time when you just need to break down, just need to feel the sorrow and the pain and think damn right now my life blows. Eventually though that corner needs to be turned, what’s happened has happened, you can’t change it and cannot undo it no matter how hard you try. Either you bask in the suck of it and make it the reason that your life can “never” be good or you learn from it, let it make you stronger.

This current round of bullshit will also pass. It won’t be easy all the time, it will try to drag me down and while occasionally I will allow myself to bask in the suck of it, the majority of my time will be spent using it as yet another life lesson and yet another thing to make me stronger and better.

So as I’m sure you locals know my father flipped the fuck out. I’m not just talking about the flip the fuck out that my family and I were used to. I’m talking giant, public, flaming, news at 11 flip out.

After the initial blitz of crap that came from it where nearly everyone I’ve ever known or worked with called or emailed or facebooked or whatever’d me died down I was left with some reflection. In a way it’s kind of like a giant release. Suddenly all those who wondered why I was always so weird around him, or why I didn’t seem to care for him understand or at least think they understand.

Now, finally, the ties that bind, those that have been holding us, gagging us for years are severed and I can talk freely. We’ve spent decades being yelled down, manipulated, and abused into submission and damnit I don’t have to be quiet anymore.

As I collect my thoughts more, as life settles into this new normal, which is not normal at all honestly, I plan on posting more. It’s cathartic, but most importantly if it helps just one person then it’s worth it. I know that out there there are thousands of women who are afraid. Women who don’t know what they will do to set him off next- those who don’t believe they’re good enough because they’ve spent so long being told about all of their faults and all of the things that they do wrong. I know what it’s like to not know whether you’ll make it thru the night without yelling, praying that just one week will go by without a blow up, without the shit being thrown and the fists coming at you. You are not alone, you can survive it, you can be stronger.

It started out simply enough I went to the local Lowes to get myself some pretty new flowers for the front flower bed. A1 was having a garden tour at the house so we were due to be invaded by a plethora of old people who were going to be wandering around my house being all judgy and such. I found several pretty flowers, some potting soil and new pots for the front porch, loaded them up in the car and headed to the house.

I’m about halfway home, crusing down the highway at a comfortable 75 mph and the next thing I know, something large and wet jumped from my backseat and landed on my arm. ON MY ARM. So I did what any other person who’s just been assaulted by something large and wet unexpectedly would do and I freaked the fuck out. I was screaming like a 12 year old who just saw that Justin Beiber kid and started swerving all over the highway. I look at my arm, and there’s a frog, a FROG sitting on my arm, looking back at me. Apparently the high pitched screaming didn’t really do much for the frog so it jumped from my arm to my dashboard and stared at me like WTH lady you’re a million times bigger than me please chill the fuck out.

So now I’m on the highway, still doing 75, staring at a frog who’s sitting on my dashboard staring at me. That’s when I decide you know what, I need to call my mom, cause she’s not gonna believe this shit. Mom answers on the second ring and I say to her “I almost just died in a horrible fiery crash on the highway cause there’s a frog loose in my car!”. She doesn’t quite understand what I’m saying cause I’m still a little 12 year old girl so asks me to repeat myself cause all she got was fiery car crash. So I start to tell her again, in a calmer voice, when the fucking frog leaps from the dashboard onto my shoulder freaking me the fuck out all over again. At this point my mom’s yelling back at me cause I’m pretty sure she thinks I’m being killed.

The frog then jumps from my shoulder back to the car door. I’m now off the highway and able to tell my mother in a clear and calm voice that there’s a friggen frog loose in my car. In all her proper britishness she says “Are you sure it’s a frog and not a toad?” This leads to a two minute debate about how she’s pretty sure it can’t be a frog it must be a toad and i’m telling her, nope it’s most defenitely a frog, I am aware of the differences between the two.

I get home, walk into the house and look at A1 and say there’s a friggen frog loose in my car. This seems to not phase him at all, like this is the kind of thing that happens all the time to people, completely normal. I grab a flashlight and head out to the car to try to track this thing down while he waves to me from the couch. out in the driveway I open all the car doors and the trunk and I’m looking everywhere for the damn frog. While i’m doing this SisterDear calls, she’s just moved into our neighborhood and is literally one street over and she’s wants to know what I’m doing. So I tell her, yeah I’m looking for a frog that is loose somewhere in my car. Her only response is “I’ll be right there”. Two minutes later she has arrived and now she and I both are trying to find this freaking frog who has vanished into thin air.

After 15 minutes of hunting we can find the frog nowhere. I assume, or hope at least that the little fucker jumped out one of the open doors so we give up. She goes home and I go to plant my new flowers. As I’m taking one of the flowers out of it’s lowes pot to seperate it out my hand hits something wet. Yup the frog has returned to it’s flower pot and it’s sitting there, watching me again. It hopped into the front garden, and I’ve not seen it since, but one thing I have learned from this is that I will now check all flowers prior to loading them into my car for unexpected wildlife.

To give you all a little glimpse into the way things have been going lately, lets talk about my weekend. Friday I burned the crap out of myself on the oven. Nothing says “Yay Dinner!” like the smell of tasty chicken and burnt arm hair. Currently I am sporting a fantastic burn mark on my left forearm. I’m hoping it won’t scar, but if it does I’ll just make up a fatastic story about being in some kind of fight involving torches.

Saturday I decided I needed to do a little shopping, and for once not shopping that involved groceries or household supplies so I took myself to the local mall. I found one of those once in a blue moon right by the entrance parking spots and thanks the shopping heavens. I then got some killer deals on pretty girl underthings and returned to my car thinking oh, how wonderful, the stars are shining on me today. Then I promptly got into a fender bender while exiting my fantastic parking spot after netting my awesome shopping deals. I have to say for being little and cute my Scion kicked that Accords ass. I have a little dent and a bit of scratched paint, she has a totally busted out bumper.

Sunday it rained… ALL DAY. I swear it’s like we’ve been picked up and moved to the Pacific coast. This place feels more like a scene from the last Twilight movie than Kentucky, and has for the last several weeks. Apparently the slow steady rain was far too much for our poor power company to take and our power went out. At that point I was just WAY over the weekend and all the suck.

So now we sit at Tuesday. A1 has been sick the last few weeks, and especially the last few nights when we go to bed he’s been suddenly turning the bed into a hot box. The last two nights I’ve woken up feeling like I’m under a heat lamp so sleep has been a little hard to come by. Personally I prefer the freezer method when I sleep, where you’re covered by 15 different blankets and it’s so cold only your nose sticks out and you make little icicles with your breath. He’s more the mid-temp kind of sleeper, throwing covers off of himself mid sleep and onto me which just adds to my trapped in an oven feeling. Tonight I think we will be adjusting the AC again to try to find that happy medium.

This has been my last few days, how have things been with all of you lately?

Case in point- yesterday I get an email from someone who just connected on another social networking site with a person I used to date. Apparently he ex used to be friends with this guy, and he somehow figured out we (she and I) work together (still not sure how) and told her to tell me hi.

So I get an email along the lines of “Jackass from 10 years ago” says to say hi to you! Huh, well, that’s interesting. Especially considering the history that “jackass from 10 years ago” and I have. I’m saving what I really call him for later in the story since I don’t want to give it all away and ruin the surprise. As SarahSpace said, this is a story I could eat out on for years, and I realized I’d probably never shared this particular gem with you fantastical readers and she enjoyed it so much that I figured what the hell lets have story time. We’ll call this my early Christmas present to you.

Lets get in our way back machine and head back to 1999. I am 21, almost 22, and all about short skirts going out every weekend night and shakin what my momma gave me. As I recall I was very good at the shakin part. I meet a guy in a bar- which really was the whole intent of the short skirts and 4 inch heels to begin with. He works at the bar (score! cheaper drinks!) and he’s pretty damn hot. That whole dark hair blue eyes thing that has always gotten me, and he had that goin on in spades- that and the whole cheaper drinks thing. He is nice to boot, so we exchange numbers and proceed to that whole casual dating thing.

Things seem to be going well, he’s smart, interested in the things I like, working his way thru school, has his own place. You know nothing that is screaming to my naive little mind RUN RUN LIKE HELL IT”S ABOUT TO GET WEIRD. Oh how weird it got. This one man is probably single handedly the weirdest of all the men I ever dated. Weirder than the foot fetish guy, weirder than the guy who only wanted to talk about the tv show wings, weirder even than the guy that always like to cook for me but always got so hot when he cooked that he sweated all into the food (though that one was more gross than weird). This one too had a slightly higher jackass quality than most- but really that part of the story pales in comparison to the other stuff.

So anyway, things are going great! We talk, we cuddle, we seem into each other, the bedroom life is going well. Then the relationship hops on the crazy train and away we go. It started simply enough, he had a secret, something that he didn’t share with everyone, something “people have a hard time understanding”. See now with my jaded 30 something year old eyes I know that those statements lead you to a point of a man admiting to one or more of the following 1) he used to be a woman, 2) he WANTS to be a woman, 3) he wants to see if you could let him wear your shoes/underware/makeup and dance around the house in them, 4) he was in jail for something, usually something really bad or 5) he’s about to ask you to do some kind of freaky ass shit in the bedroom. Normally with 5 is something like, threesomes but with another dude, open relationships, S&M, whatever. What I was not, and I mean TOTALLY not prepared for was the version of 5 that I got. He wanted me to dress him up like a baby and “mother” him.

Yeah you still with me? By dress him up like a baby- I mean full out, I mean the whole adult diapers, baby powder, give him a bottle, pacifier, sing to him like he’s my newborn son. Apparently that made him “hot” or some such. Needless to say, that wasn’t so much my cup of tea.

Well whatever is a girl to do with that one? How do you even begin to broach that subject with your friends? Yeah meet my new boyfriend, what you don’t know is right now he’s wearing a diaper so that you know he’s REAL good and in the mood when we get home.

At that point, you pretty much know the relationship is on the downward trend. But we’d already planned a little vacation together, driving to BFE north of here for a week to see his family, the sights all of that. I figured well may as well do that- I’d already taken the time off work so whatever. Long as the diapering wasn’t a thing it would be fine, he was still a nice guy, whatever (esentially all the things that 22 year olds say to themselves when their brains can’t comprehend wtf just happened). So off we go on our 8 hour drive to meet the family.

Our vacation is for 7 days- on day 5 he dumps me. In BFE. When we still have to drive 8 hours home TOGETHER. THEN he asks if I want to just finish the last two days of our vacation up like nothings wrong. Again, I politely declined. In fact I let him sleep for most of the 8 hours while I drove us home in the middle of the night. That was the last time I talked to him (shockingly I know). Now 10 years later he is sending me remote Hi’s. I don’t even know how he knew where I was. I didn’t work here then, and my last name is not the same but somehow he did. SarahSpace thinks perhaps he’s been digitally stalking me these last 10 years which I spose is possible but either way I think I’ll not be responding to his greeting. Or maybe I should and ask him if he’s still all into that crap. BTW- he’s been diaper guy in my head since then