You will forever fear abandonment
Because you only know to abandon yourself
In your delusional pursuit
To prove your worth
To emotional paupers
Vampires do not show up to donate
Take yourself off their donor list
Claim your tattered remains
Nurture them like you nurtured your demons
Situation: Introvert immersed in a convergence of humans held in place by sociatal norms that dictate that abrupt leaving is frowned upon while continued engagement is highly encouraged and the price is the need to pluck out each eyelash in the slowest possible torture like fashion possible.
The crux: I am the buffer of an emotionally charged leg of high powered explosives with the mad hatter himself playing with matches on my tombstone. We are one drink away from Hiroshima with an oblivious crowd that keeps watering this lawn with lighter fluid and using sparklers as ambient lighting.
The setup: Finding out you are the other woman while chaperoning your not necessarily stable friend through a silent war with her significant other all while they present a United front and you settle in the watch the shenanigans that is your current situation.
The conclusion: after finding a quiet corner to listen to true crime murder podcasts and observe the person you plan to slowly annihilate, you ponder various options like the slow roast with toxic tactics of withdrawal and utter disinterest best used on the scum of the earth that may have their contagious tentacles embedded in your heart and may need surgical excision to move past.
Who I am: The concierge to this morbid soliloquy.
Where I am: Smack dab in the middle of another intense rehab that takes a high level Douch bag, soothes his demons and releases him a better version of himself ready to grace the life of a worthy damsel into the twilight.
Context: I have a type. The misunderstood. The not hugged enough little boy stuck in an adult man’s body. I am the not nurtured enough nurturer who hopes to be picked. The 100 percent into this while relishing his 20 percent until I run out of my percent at the cusp of his 21 percent investment. I come in the savior, leave the bad guy. I am the quintessential enigma, wrapped in a paradox and shrouded in a conundrum presented as a case study in masochism.
Cards on the table: Single girl, at the birth of her career crosses paths with a single dad rebuilding his life. He presents as stable, with a well-established but demanding career, bumbling through fatherhood while ill equipped and making the best of it. His possessive nature presents to the nurturer as being chosen. Being aggressively chosen by a partner who just needs help to lighten the burden, share the load, take on life together. The subtle requests to put him first, the narcistic guilt tripping that skews one’s thoughts towards changing one’s habits and behaviors to keep the peace and belong. Fast forward to nurturer taking on a mortgage to provide a home and security for the children who have captured her loyalty, in the school district that will grow their potential and undertake the course of healing old wounds.
The catch: Stable well established has changed lanes. Accepted work assignments are few and far between. Family necessities have been deferred to the nurturer. Nurturer is overleveraged emotionally, financially and socially. Emotionally and socially isolated from her circle, financially sinking faster than the Hindenburg came down. However, the need to find himself through music production and home repair contracting is rife in our stable well-established veins. Especially now that he has backup, a safety net, room to breathe.
The crux of the matter: A brush with mortality worked like a bucket of cold water on the rosy reality the nurturer had been existing in. When a look around finds a situation that is best left behind, conversations are had, and the nurturer becomes the villain. The victims are the children. Their newfound security… is hanging by a thread. After repeated requests for help, several failures to step up and growing tension in the home. Do you walk away or wait out in the hope for change.
She walked away… into the throes of another rehab. God bless her soul.
Do bad decisions feel better if you think it over
Take a while before committing to them
Cover all bases and see no options
Can a bad decision become a good decision
If done with the best of intentions
If dressed up and presented like royalty
If muled over and hypothesized to death?
Do decisions influenced by misleading information
Get a Hail Mary?
Surely a Mea Culpa!
It feels like some bad decisions
Are the gift that keep on giving
They do not assign blame
Nor do they assuage guilt
They assign a scorched earth approach
That stretches their repercussions into the recesses of your being
When these bad decisions affect the children we raise
Shape the adults they become
Mold the partners we chose
Paint the traumas we perpetuate
How do you reach a bunkered soul
Unspook a spooked existence
Reach that soul that keeps clawing at yours
But too afraid to latch on
Does reaching out to that soul
Count as a bad decision?
Who I am: The case manager assigned to a heartbreaking case. The concierge to this morbid soliloquy.
Where we are: Seven months of chemotherapy, now radiation for the pain.
The cards on the table:
The doctors have another trial they can do. This is a research facility, there is a price to scientific breakthroughs. The word salvage chemotherapy is being bandied about. The family, I am sure, doesn’t understand what that means.
Daughters have grown accustomed to having to climb into bed with mom for quality time. They just have to catch her when the medication has her lucid with the pain at bay but before she falls asleep. Short window, but they are quick studies.
She cannot make the decision to leave her kids behind because she is a fighter, and she is raising fighters. Her work is not done, her journey as a mother is now starting. She has not had to do the womanhood talk, wipe the first heartbreak tears, or worn the atrocious mother of the bride dresses.
He can’t make the decision to continue because this is no way to live. They started this journey fearless and reckless, full of the future and talks of growing old together. He can’t make the decision to stop because he can’t give up on her. That would be giving up on them. That would mean accepting lonelier nights, raising wounded replicas of her. Being mom and dad. Losing his partner in life.
The catch:
She can’t make her own medical decisions anymore and that’s a great relief, it’s out of her hands now.
He can’t force the kids to pick, they picked to continue chemo last time and now she is peeing in a bag, medicated to the precipice of unconsciousness and too weak to walk. She has lost all her hair, barely holding onto her moxie, muscle and no store carries clothes small enough to fit her frame.
Reality check:
She is dying. No one has acknowledged it out loud. Not the doctors, she can assist in much needed medication trials. Not her husband, he vowed to be her person, her fighter, her companion forever. Not her kids, she is mom, the glue that makes home … well, home.
She will be dead soon. Her moments of lucidity are behind us, she has serene smiles and painful grimaces at this point.
The crux of the matter:
Whose responsibility is it to pick her last chapter?
Do we offer dignity and comfort? Are we too late for Hospice? Science and breakthroughs for those coming after her? What are her obligations to the next generation? Or mercy?
Looks like we will keep putting the ball in each other’s court and maybe nature might intervene and end this morbid waltz.
Thanks for joining me!
Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton
Short stories from a Broken soul 