This has just been an awful week. I like work, it's nice. I love my friends, they're great.
But I have been through so much. And for the most part I toughened up and got over it, but sometimes it just hits me like "hey, Lauren, some hardcore shit happened to you. Be upset."
This april will make two years since my dad died. I was 21. He wasn't sick, but he'd always been in poor health in the sense that he didn't have a good diet and stuff like that.
My mother and I have never gotten along. Never. She's just a pretty awful, unloving, petty and mean-spirited person. She has some good moments. When I was little it's not like she beat me or locked me in the bathroom or anything. But on a personal level, she never wanted to listen to me talk, as kids do. And if she was in a bad mood, which just seemed to spring up sometimes, she would pick on me right before I was about to go to school to start my day. Like, I remember one time I was 9 or 10, waiting for the bus, and she walked by and said "you can't wear those socks with that skirt, go change." I liked my socks and also, the bus would be there any minute, and I said it'd be fine. She proceeded to tell me she couldn't fucking stand me, she hoped people laughed at me, I looked like an idiot, etc. And then the bus would come, and I'd have to go to school with that having started my day.
When I was 17, my mom just up and decided we'd be selling the house. My father was in remission from cancer, tired, not always feeling well, and he relented without really thinking it through. We'd spent 16 years there, and he tried to back out of it, and I pleaded, and in the end my mother won. She also sold all of our furniture, including some of my dad's antiques and valuable records.
And then, once we moved into the new place, my parents divorced. I stayed with my dad because we were always close. Literally, we called each other about a dozen and a half times throughout the day just to say hi or check in with each other (I was also an only child and a total daddy's girl). My mother, in the meantime, didn't want anything to do with me. Years passed. She barely called. But she blamed me for not calling first all of the time. Whatever. When we DID get together, we fought, so I just tried to avoid it.
So then, April, 2006, my dad and I are upstairs talking about yogurt. Freaking yogurt. I was pissed that he bought the wrong kind, and he was like "chill out, it's no big deal." And then he played this computer game and I watched for a while.
He went downstairs, and I was checking myspace, and there's this horrendous THUD. Then silence. My dad wouldn't answer me, and when I came downstairs I found him lying dead on the floor with his eyes open staring at me.
It was like 15 minutes before an ambulance came. Nobody in my family believes in answering their phone, including my mother. I rode with his corpse in the ambulance. I had to sit there in my pajamas, alone, while a doctor told me he was dead. I called the neighbors and asked them to please let my dog out to pee.
Nobody in my family picked up. For hours. I called a friend to come and get me, and when she said "Hey, what's up Laur?" I said "So yeah. Can you come get me? My dad died."
I came home to the sound of my dad's cell phone ringing (the Law and Order theme that irritated me to no end because someone was always calling.) He was supposed to have been at work. I had to introduce myself, and say he had died and wouldn't be coming in, sorry.
And for like, days, I was just on this blissfully reclusive cloud. I just sat in the empty house watching shows I'd recorded on the DVR and that had stacked up because the day my dad died, Sunday, had been the day I planned to watch them.
My family, who has never been especially close to me, tore through his things like vultures. I had my uncle and maybe two others who genuinely tried to help me, and a couple of people who sat with me and talked, or slept on the couch so there'd be someone else home when I went to bed.
The rest of my family, including my mother, pawed through his things, took what they wanted. Someone took the PHONE off of the WALL. Some of his remaining records are gone, CDs, appliances, expensive things, 50's-70's memorbelia, whatever people wanted they took. And I just kinda sat there like an invalid going "huh? whatever you want."
The day of my dad's funeral, I came home to my mother uprooting my father's garden and planting her own flowers. She said "get over it and go write your thank you notes, life is tough" (FYI her parents are still alive, and don't speak to me because I'm not catholic).
One of my cousins invited me to stay with her while I got my bearings. After I'd been there a couple of weeks, she demanded $1,000 rent and wouldn't let me have my stuff back until I got it. I just gave it to her. The people who came to the funeral had collected two or three thousand dollars for me for school. My cousin built a new deck. Coincidence? Who the fuck knows.
My mother found out that my dad's condo was now in my name, and that it was going to foreclose and she could get it for a great price, so she took it. And suddenly she wanted to be mommy again. I didn't have anywhere to go. I was still in school, and netting about $150 per week, which was nothing compared to the 12k in loans I had to pay. So I moved in with her rent free.
I've been living with her for about a year. It's my dad's place, but her stuff is everywhere. I have his things in the basement and she keeps reminding me that they need to be thrown away.
Cue the violins, right? I wish I was dramatizing this, but in actuality I'm summarizing it.
So whatever, you know? I don't whine. I don't complain. I don't expect special treatment because my dad died. I live with it. I lead a relatively normal life trying to stay out of my mother's hair, dangling yarn in front of my cat, writing, napping. Whatever I can do.
My mother hasn't been speaking to me since Monday. To hell if I know what the fuck I did, and I don't care. Sometimes she shuns me, been doing it since forever. I've learned to let it roll off my shoulders. I let so much shit just roll off my shoulders. Everyone has problems. I'm not the only one who's lost a loved one. I'm not the only one who deserves a little man playing a violin in the background.
But sometimes it just gets to be too much. It just accumulates. It pools to the center. I woke up to a rejection letter that had been thrown on the floor in front of my bedroom. I went out with some friends who cheered me up. when I came home, my mother had deliberately shut all the lights and locked all the doors before she went to bed. The house was pitch black and the lamp is across the room. When I turned on the light, first thing I saw was a SASE waiting for me on the floor by my room. A second rejection.
I feel like crying. And you know what, I probably will.
ETA: Thank you everyone for commenting. It means so much. Things haven't gotten better. In fact, they've gotten worse. And now,
this thread now has a sister post. Oi vey...
But I have been through so much. And for the most part I toughened up and got over it, but sometimes it just hits me like "hey, Lauren, some hardcore shit happened to you. Be upset."
This april will make two years since my dad died. I was 21. He wasn't sick, but he'd always been in poor health in the sense that he didn't have a good diet and stuff like that.
My mother and I have never gotten along. Never. She's just a pretty awful, unloving, petty and mean-spirited person. She has some good moments. When I was little it's not like she beat me or locked me in the bathroom or anything. But on a personal level, she never wanted to listen to me talk, as kids do. And if she was in a bad mood, which just seemed to spring up sometimes, she would pick on me right before I was about to go to school to start my day. Like, I remember one time I was 9 or 10, waiting for the bus, and she walked by and said "you can't wear those socks with that skirt, go change." I liked my socks and also, the bus would be there any minute, and I said it'd be fine. She proceeded to tell me she couldn't fucking stand me, she hoped people laughed at me, I looked like an idiot, etc. And then the bus would come, and I'd have to go to school with that having started my day.
When I was 17, my mom just up and decided we'd be selling the house. My father was in remission from cancer, tired, not always feeling well, and he relented without really thinking it through. We'd spent 16 years there, and he tried to back out of it, and I pleaded, and in the end my mother won. She also sold all of our furniture, including some of my dad's antiques and valuable records.
And then, once we moved into the new place, my parents divorced. I stayed with my dad because we were always close. Literally, we called each other about a dozen and a half times throughout the day just to say hi or check in with each other (I was also an only child and a total daddy's girl). My mother, in the meantime, didn't want anything to do with me. Years passed. She barely called. But she blamed me for not calling first all of the time. Whatever. When we DID get together, we fought, so I just tried to avoid it.
So then, April, 2006, my dad and I are upstairs talking about yogurt. Freaking yogurt. I was pissed that he bought the wrong kind, and he was like "chill out, it's no big deal." And then he played this computer game and I watched for a while.
He went downstairs, and I was checking myspace, and there's this horrendous THUD. Then silence. My dad wouldn't answer me, and when I came downstairs I found him lying dead on the floor with his eyes open staring at me.
It was like 15 minutes before an ambulance came. Nobody in my family believes in answering their phone, including my mother. I rode with his corpse in the ambulance. I had to sit there in my pajamas, alone, while a doctor told me he was dead. I called the neighbors and asked them to please let my dog out to pee.
Nobody in my family picked up. For hours. I called a friend to come and get me, and when she said "Hey, what's up Laur?" I said "So yeah. Can you come get me? My dad died."
I came home to the sound of my dad's cell phone ringing (the Law and Order theme that irritated me to no end because someone was always calling.) He was supposed to have been at work. I had to introduce myself, and say he had died and wouldn't be coming in, sorry.
And for like, days, I was just on this blissfully reclusive cloud. I just sat in the empty house watching shows I'd recorded on the DVR and that had stacked up because the day my dad died, Sunday, had been the day I planned to watch them.
My family, who has never been especially close to me, tore through his things like vultures. I had my uncle and maybe two others who genuinely tried to help me, and a couple of people who sat with me and talked, or slept on the couch so there'd be someone else home when I went to bed.
The rest of my family, including my mother, pawed through his things, took what they wanted. Someone took the PHONE off of the WALL. Some of his remaining records are gone, CDs, appliances, expensive things, 50's-70's memorbelia, whatever people wanted they took. And I just kinda sat there like an invalid going "huh? whatever you want."
The day of my dad's funeral, I came home to my mother uprooting my father's garden and planting her own flowers. She said "get over it and go write your thank you notes, life is tough" (FYI her parents are still alive, and don't speak to me because I'm not catholic).
One of my cousins invited me to stay with her while I got my bearings. After I'd been there a couple of weeks, she demanded $1,000 rent and wouldn't let me have my stuff back until I got it. I just gave it to her. The people who came to the funeral had collected two or three thousand dollars for me for school. My cousin built a new deck. Coincidence? Who the fuck knows.
My mother found out that my dad's condo was now in my name, and that it was going to foreclose and she could get it for a great price, so she took it. And suddenly she wanted to be mommy again. I didn't have anywhere to go. I was still in school, and netting about $150 per week, which was nothing compared to the 12k in loans I had to pay. So I moved in with her rent free.
I've been living with her for about a year. It's my dad's place, but her stuff is everywhere. I have his things in the basement and she keeps reminding me that they need to be thrown away.
Cue the violins, right? I wish I was dramatizing this, but in actuality I'm summarizing it.
So whatever, you know? I don't whine. I don't complain. I don't expect special treatment because my dad died. I live with it. I lead a relatively normal life trying to stay out of my mother's hair, dangling yarn in front of my cat, writing, napping. Whatever I can do.
My mother hasn't been speaking to me since Monday. To hell if I know what the fuck I did, and I don't care. Sometimes she shuns me, been doing it since forever. I've learned to let it roll off my shoulders. I let so much shit just roll off my shoulders. Everyone has problems. I'm not the only one who's lost a loved one. I'm not the only one who deserves a little man playing a violin in the background.
But sometimes it just gets to be too much. It just accumulates. It pools to the center. I woke up to a rejection letter that had been thrown on the floor in front of my bedroom. I went out with some friends who cheered me up. when I came home, my mother had deliberately shut all the lights and locked all the doors before she went to bed. The house was pitch black and the lamp is across the room. When I turned on the light, first thing I saw was a SASE waiting for me on the floor by my room. A second rejection.
I feel like crying. And you know what, I probably will.
ETA: Thank you everyone for commenting. It means so much. Things haven't gotten better. In fact, they've gotten worse. And now,
this thread now has a sister post. Oi vey...
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