Entry #2

My poor therapist. Today's session was nearly a straight hour of tears. I began by talking about my apparent inability to keep a relationship. Have a relationship? Be one of two people within a relationship? I don't know. But the overall topic was wondering if I may, in fact, be alone for the rest of my life.

"Where does that belief come from? What makes you think that's the truth?" she asks kindly.

My eyes dart to the left as my brain begins searching. It goes through the men that I've dated. How each one ended. I'm searching for an appropriate answer for her. But it isn't there. What I do find however, are a lot of words that have gone through my head on repeat.

Statements about probable reasons that I’m single: "You aren't the type of girl that men want to keep around", "Maybe if you weren't so difficult...". Statements about the way I communicate about my personal life: "I wish you'd talk to me about things. I didn't know you'd been out on a date" only to be contradicted with "Why are you telling me anything about this guy, it's not like he'll be around long". I can’t seem to do anything right. Even the way that I am me is wrong.

I’ve tried bringing the past up with my mother before. It's never gone well. "Oh I didn't mean it that way", "I never said that", "You are blowing that way out of proportion" are only a few of the general responses I'm accustomed to hearing. I don't see an apology coming my way. Ever. But did all of this start with my first boyfriend? Absolutely not.

I look at my therapist through Zoom lens and ask her "Do you ever watch Dr. Phil? He always says 'it takes 1000 atta girls to erase one deep insult from a parent'". She smiles and nods. "I keep thinking. And when I think back to being a kid, I can't find the good memories. There has to be some...but I can't find them. I feel the dread of being sent to my dad's house and not knowing what to expect. Not knowing who was going to be there. The house filled with beer, whiskey, cigarette smoke and loud music. I remember going to bed and listening to them all laughing and trying to talk over one another and the music. I remember being hungry and there being no food in the fridge. I remember pouring cereal into a bowl, then going to pour milk on it and it falling out in chunks. I remember returning from there in tears on many occasions for a number of different reasons. And I remember being told I had to go there weekend after weekend." I have no idea if this is the same logic as the thousand atta girls. After a certain amount of traumatic incidents as a child do you eventually erase all the good ones? And for some reason, as awful and unreliable and mean as my father could be, it was my mother's actions that I didn't understand. Was the world such a different place when I was a kid that these incidents weren't cause to, I dunno, NOT send your children there? Sure. A divorce went through and there was a custody agreement. Would a judge look at children left unsupervised for long periods of time, returning to the mother's house in tears because they hadn't eaten, speaking about the parties going on and say "Well the papers say they go there on the weekends. There's nothing we can do." Where was the instinct to protect us?

So. A discussion that started as "I was spending some time with a man I was interested in. It's completely blown up somehow and I'm sure we will never speak again" has taken me back to my 5 year old self. How is this all connected? This honestly doesn't make logical sense in my head.

My therapist looks at me. "You have homework. And it's not going to be easy. You must sit down and write a letter of apology to yourself as your mother. You need to write down all the things that you very well may never hear from her, that you deserve to hear.”

It's official. This sucks. This was not the plan. The plan was to have a realization that one day I really could fall in love and it was possible that I would even get married. And instead, here I am, sitting in a pool of my childhood tears. I feel like it's going to take awhile to file through and undo nearly 40 years of this mess. Oh well. As they say “The best time to start was yesterday. The next best time is now”.