Avoiding Dad

I reckon that I am pretty much the master of avoidance. It's quite simple to do, especially if there are feelings involved. My relationship with my father is a strange one, that's for certain. He seems to want to love me to the best of his ability (it's an odd thing, his love) and I seem to want to avoid being loved and also all of the hurtful feelings that surround the man who is my father.

When I was young and living with my mother, I was not allowed to see him. It was her decision because he was a biker (BADMAN!!) and I guess he wasn't shaping up to her standards after she became impregnated with me. I have to wonder however, how she justified being with such a person if she was so opposed to having him in my life after my birth. Apparently he lived with us until I was 2 when my mom had decided she'd had enough of his biker ways. After that he was sent away and told to never try and see me.

I spent a lot of time as a child wondering who my father was and why he wasn't around. I got some very flimsy excuses from my mother but never the truth. The truth being that she had "banned" him from seeing me. I was told she didn't know where he was all the while he was living within a 1 km radius of my apartment. I recall running into him at the grocery store when I was very young, he spoke to my mother and I remember after, asking her who he was and she told me it was my father. She did more harm than good by banishing him from my life. My childhood was spent very angry and frustrated. I took a lot of tantrums and I cried a lot about the father I never had.

I felt it was my fault somehow that he didn't want to see me. I must have been a bad girl; not worth loving enough to stick around or even to try to contact me or have visits every now and then. I was just an accident. One that was not supposed to bind this man and woman together for the duration of my life. I was told that he didn't want anything to do with me and of course, I believed my mother. I would find out later, after she passed away, that this was not quite the case. Or was it?

I overheard my grandmother and my mother talking one night after they had a few drinks in them. I was over at my grandparent's house and I awoke at some point in the night after being asleep for a while to use the washroom. I could hear some arguing going on downstairs and so I eavesdropped on them, as most curious children often do. I found out a couple of things that night as I listened from the top of the stairs. I found out that I was a mistake, that I was a bastard. I also heard that he raped my mother and that's how I came to be. I heard my Nanna asking my mother if she ever planned on telling me the truth about what happened. I suppose it was to quell the beast within myself by telling me that my father was a really bad man. My mother never told me. I kept these secrets locked away in a safe place in my mind. To this day, I don't know if the rape story is true but I am a bastard. This I know all too well.

After my mother passed I became very angry with her for keeping me all to herself and not at least allowing supervised visits or something, anything! Then I tried living with him out in Alberta but that failed for reasons already stated in this blog. It wasn't until I attended a 10 day super-intensive personal retreat that I realised that it was not just my mom who was to blame.

The retreat I attended was one in which the focus is placed on your parents and the traits you either a) adopt from them or b) adopt but rebel against with in the first 12 years of your life. The mission of this organisation is to allow you to recognise these traits and free yourself from them as they are your parent's and not yours. It's objective is to stop the never-ending cycle/vicious circle that supposedly rules our lives without us being aware. Well, it worked alright. It worked too good. It opened up a whole new can of anger and sadness that I didn't want to admit existed in me.

I was sent there by my request via my grandmother as it costs a pretty penny and I could not afford the fee at the time. I was going there with the intention of finally forgiving my mother and letting go of all of the pain that surrounded her and her death. My main focus was to be on my mother. We were asked questions in a questionnaire before our arrival so they could assess and tailor your treatment as best as they could. I answered most of the ones concerning my mother but since my father was not in my life as a child I didn't think it relevant to answer all of the questions concerning him as he as he was not in my life when I was young, nor could I as I did not have the answers.

It was about half-way through the course when we started to focus on our fathers that I snapped. We were doing some cathartic work by bashing wiffle bats onto a large pillow while focusing on the negative traits. Oh it worked. It worked too well. I was bashing away at the cue cards with the traits written on them when "abandoning" came up as one of his traits. I started to bash the SHIT out of that thing. I mean, I was having a blast hitting things and all and when I was doing the ones for my mother, I was more sad than angry. I started yelling at the damn pillow (aka my father) and I cried and yelled for quite some time.

Up until this point, I had completely put all of the blame on my mother for his behaviour, or lack thereof because that was easier. It was much easier to think that she had told him that she'd kill him if he should try and contact me or have visits when I was young. He had done the same thing himself while I was living with him, he put all the blame on my mother saying that there was nothing he could do but respect her wishes.

I'm sorry, but if you love your child as one should love a child, there is nothing that can stop one from seeing said child. Why didn't my father take her to court? Why didn't he try and sneak visits in with me when he knew the park I played at almost 24/7? He only lived about 4 blocks away from the damn park! This realisation hit me like a tonne of bricks. I was so upset and angry at my mother for abandoning me when my father did exactly that, only when I was 2. So now I firmly had two parents who abandoned me only it took a lot of thinking that I didn't want to do to bring it out of me. All along I knew this, for I am not naive, nor am I dull. I'm pretty sharp and always was, so I would pick up on things that other children didn't. I was just also VERY good at blocking things out of my mind that hurt too bad. Who am I kidding, I'm still a master of that!

The good news is that I came out of the retreat having forgiven my mother for what she did. I had found compassion for her and I was able to take a good long look into what she had become as a result of learning behaviours or rebelling against them from the grandparents. I could no longer blame her for what she did. I still get quite sad because she abandoned me but I no longer hate her. I no longer have the penchant for violence I once had due to all of that anger regarding my mother.

I have a whole new ballgame to deal with now as I was not quite able to forgive my father the way I was able to do with my mother. I wasn't intending on finding anything that would make it about my father in the first place. Unfortunately, I did.

Now my father is slowly dying of his own accord. He has late-onset diabetes and he's lost a leg and four fingers thus far as he doesn't seem to give a flying fuck enough to quit drinking or smoking cigarettes which is what is taking his life away so quickly. He doesn't eat right at all either. I figured after losing a leg that he would smarten up and take better care of himself. I was wrong. Next went the fingers. Now he's riddled with pain and sores that wont heal. I am watching my father die and I am still angry with him for not being in my life when I was a child, when I needed him most.

I don't know how to relate to him as I should. I have a weird thing about men. I suppose it stems from not having them in my life at all (with the exception of my grandfather who tried his best but was pretty anti-social/anti-emotional) when I was growing up.

He gets mad at me for not calling him, yet he doesn't really call me either. He rarely remembers to call on my birthday and I can count on one hand the gifts he's given me for xmas and birthdays whereas I get him gifts all of the time. It's not really about the gifts though, just the thought. It would be nice to know you are thought about other than when you call and get in shit for not calling often enough..

The reason why I don't call as much as I should is because I have given up on him getting better and now he's dying. I don't like dying; death. I don't do well with it at all for obvious reasons. So now I am trying to avoid him as much as I can because if I should have that talk with him and forgive him, it will be that much worse when he does die. I will lose my only living parent and I don't know if I could handle the pain of losing someone I really, truly love again.

I seem to be doing the same with my grandmother whom I love to death... but that's another story. I feel awful about it, but I don't want to die myself. I can only fight myself off from ending it all so many times before it actually happens. When my grandfather passed I couldn't even go to the hospital to say goodbye. I regret it now immensely but there's nothing I can do to change what happened there. I went out after he passed and got SO fucking drunk and then I popped a bunch of ecstasy and truth be told, I hoped I would not wake up. I did wake up however, and my daughter was conceived a month later.

Sorry Dad, nothing TOO personal... :/

Stop..the tingling already!!

Sometimes I feel like this.

Click on link above but you may not want the sound too loud..? heh.

I blame that on antidepressants. More specifically the SSRI variety.
After my mom died I was pretty fucked up. I'm sure anyone would be, having discovered their only parent dead from suicide. DUH. I was put on SSRIs at the age of 14, one year after my mother's death.

I was angry, upset, confused. I felt guilty about the whole situation. The night she died, I was downstairs in the basement after having snuck in a boy *gasp* who lived too far away to walk at the time, so I offered for him to come and sneak into my place and have the basement bed. I got home after the party, went upstairs to where the bedrooms were and knocked on mom's door and said "Hey, I am home." It was around midnight and I was 13..Not cool but whatever. Teens do stupid things all of the time. Her words were "Ok."

Those were the last words we spoke to each other.

I went back downstairs to the basement where the boy was and he asked if I would stay down there with him. I was feeling rather rebellious and I said yes. I was still a virgin and remained one after that night.

Somewhere around 2am (according to the coroner's report) my mother fell out of her computer chair and onto the floor, she then proceeded to choke on her own vomit. Sleeping pills, booze and depression don't mix apparently. Who knew? If only I had slept upstairs in my room, maybe I could have saved her.

The next morning I woke up, walked the boy to the store and then walked home. It was getting late and there was no sound from my mother's room, her door was still locked and I figured she was passed out cold from a hangover. It would not have been the first time. I took a hanger and poked it into her door-handle lock around noon. I figured I had had enough of her boozy behaviour and it was time to get up and be a mother. I was instantly changed forever when I opened the door and found her lying on the floor as I described above.

At first it was disbelief but I knew in the back of my mind that things were not right. She was blue and stiff. I tried to wake her up but I knew that was not going to happen. I went downstairs to grab the phone and called my Nanna. I told her that mom was dead, she didn't really understand me because I was in hysterics and so she called 911 for me. I didn't bother because I knew they couldn't do anything.

I was in my house alone with my dead mom and finally the police arrived. I answered the door and let them in. They went upstairs to check out the situation. It was pretty grim I suppose, because as I was standing at the bottom of the stairs I could hear one of them say that "She is a goner." One cop noticed this as proceeded to lead me outside of my place. "Where's your father?" "I don't know, I am not allowed to see him." "Oh, well, hopefully your family will show up soon." Yeah, hopefully.

Until then I stood on my front doorstep, surrounded by ambulance, police and fire workers and of course, the whole neighbourhood. What a spectacle I must have been! I was living in a suburb full of packed together prefab houses so there was quite the crowd. Thankfully, one of the neighbours just picked me up and carried me to her house and put me in bed. I was a bawling mess and in shock.

So, funtimes.

After what happened I was sent to a psychiatrist at the hospital in order to make some sense out of what I was feeling and what happened. I didn't really feel like being open, nor did I know how to because I learned from the best, my mother, how to bottle things up and not share feelings. That doctor didn't last.

I ended up living with my father for the first time in my life who was living in Alberta at the time. The CAS flew me out there and I stayed because I thought anything must be better than living in a group home full of fuck-ups.
I only lasted six months with him as we didn't know each other, I was a wreck and we both had the same temper. I ended up moving back out here to Ontario and in with my grandparents again.

This time I was sent to "The Best Child and Adolescent Psychologist in the City!!" and I thought maybe I could learn to be open with her. She immediately diagnosed me with depression (no shit), and ADD! Well, this I did not know I had but ok, she must know best, right? I was put on Prozac and Ritalin. We never did do much talking about the real issue and that is what I needed most. I have heard countless people who had dealings with her in the past tell me now that she pushed pills on all the kids. Got an eating disorder? SSRI!! Having trouble concentrating because all you can think about and picture is your dead mother? Ritalin for all!! Later I would find out that it's not recommended to put anyone under the age of 18 on these meds.

Anyway, that's the back story. I kept seeing her until I was 18 when she could no longer see me because I wasn't an adolescent any longer and sent me out into the world to find my own adult psychiatrist. That was a giant FAIL. All the time I was on the drugs, anger and resentment, confusion and guilt, shame and self-hatred was growing and seething within me. I felt everyone else had given up on me, so why should I give a flying fuck, right?

I had family that could have intervened at any point during my teens for it was painfully obvious that shit was fucked up. No one did. That's fine. My grandparents were trying their best to look after the headcase I had become but unfortunately, they liked to get drunk a lot too. Bad scene. I hated booze at this point in time because of what it turned my mother into and I couldn't understand why in the FUCK they would want to drink the same shit that contributed to their daughter's death. I didn't understand addiction at this point in time.

I have been on countless SSRIs for over 16 years. Prozac, Zoloft, Effexor, Celexa, Paxil..to name a few. All of these had the same result. I would get a tolerance and they would have to be upped. I felt like a freakin zombie most of the time and I was doing drugs and at 18 I started drinking that very same booze I hated.
I would go on and off the SSRIs because it was not helping. I was getting the prescriptions from my GP who had no psychiatric training.


I just wanted the pain to go away. Cutting was helping a bit but nothing could take away that all-encompassing darkness that grew inside me and festered there until I was a walking dead person. No emotions other than hatred and anger, but even those were slightly subdued by the SSRIs I was on.

Withdrawal symptoms are the worst. I have been trying to come off my latest drug, Celexa and it's freakin hard. Not as hard as Paxil was because that shit is pure evil. I do feel similar symptoms coming off the Celexa though, they just are not as intense. I have chills, buzzing or electric shock type feelings, my brain doesn't know what to do with these emotions that were being suppressed and so for now, I am just taking my Clonazepam. Ok, that is not entirely true. I have been cutting my dose down for months now and I was on 10mg every other day for a couple of weeks. Now it seems like I get to the third day without the stupid drug and I get crazy feelings like I described above. It's like coming down off of really bad E. I get to a point where I can't stand it anymore and I resort to taking that 10mg again and it starts all over again.

This is frustrating. I want to see what I am like without the drugs as I have a sneaking suspicion that most of the actual depression came as a result of what happened with my mom. I probably do suffer from it to a certain degree but so does everyone from time to time.

Anyway, I am having feelings that I haven't felt in a really long time. I am starting to remember a small bit of my childhood which I so cleverly managed to block out as a defense mechanism against the pain of remembering having a mother.
It's sad, I really don't remember ever having a mom. I know I did, but I can't retrieve many of my early childhood memories of her. I really wish I could.

I have learned to forgive her and find compassion for her instead of resentment and anger. How can I resent someone who did what I have thought about doing a million times since but never could? She was mentally ill. Plain and simple.

Now please, PLEASE go the eff away you stupid withdrawal bullshit. GAH!