Save You

Save You

You were so tiny and small when you were born

needy and hungry, my skin felt warm

when you lay against my skin and breathed.

But underneath that beautiful skin and those eyes

lay an evil so vile that took me by such surprise

I'd have spared you this evil to you I bequeathed

But I didn't know of my own disease before you came

I  would have saved you if I had known the game

The rollercoaster ride of life you'd have to ride.

But I was just starting my own scary ride and had

no idea that you would have your own bad

time that your up and down tide

Would be so forceful, that you wanted to die.

Now, I need to save you and I'm helpless, I cry

Knowing how you feel, I feel it too

But I stay because I have to save you.

I'm afraid for you.  Life will be hard, too, 

For you and I don't know how to make it easy for you.

I don't know how to save you from your sorrow.

I don't know how to save you from what you borrow

From my genes.  That ugly disease that makes you 

Wish you'd never been born. That makes you want to die

At such a young age, you feel such deep darkness and lie

In that black hole.  I can't save you, but I'll lie there with you,

Like I did when you were born, lying on my skin,

breathing your labored breaths warm, breathe in,

breathe out.  I'll always be there with you.  I need to save you.

You got this from me, I got this from them but I didn't know

I didn't know.  And I'm sorry because it didn't show

Until after you were born.  I have to save you.

I'm your mother, you're my baby, you always will be,

I'm sad for you. Life will be hard.  And all I see

Is that baby in my arms. I will save you.

Do You Remember Me

Little girl, Little girl I remember you well in your soft pink dress and you black mary janes,
Do you remember me too, while you're stuck in the past running happily in your black mary janes.
The shoes are gone, the pink dress is tattered but I can't get you out of mind
I can't seem to grow up from that little girl blond hair eyes sparkled and shined.

I am still two, stunted in growth emotionally shattered by his hands
No one believes me, I hardly trust myself but where's the girl between two and ten?
She's up on the ceiling not looking down closing her eyes to the pain,
And even now as grown up as she is there is still guilt and shame.

I am less than you and you and you, because of what he did to me
My scars run deep inside of me that are wounds you cannot see.
If he'd sliced me open taken out my heart would you believe me then?
But then he's already taken so much from me  I wonder who I could have been?

Run little girl in your dress of pink, run around the maypole this day
Run and laugh and giggle with your friends may you never know what comes your way
May you never be scared to speak out against violence may fear never make you pay.
Run little girl in you pink dress and mary janes run, run, away.

There's a Book

There's a book in my huge piles of books that I keep going back to that pisses me off every time I read it.  I'll break it down for you.

The characters-
A girl in high school, a senior.  Old enough to know better.

A mom with schizophrenia who can't know better. SHE's MENTALLY ILL.

A grandmother who has cut herself off from the family, knowing her daughter is mentally ill.

A dad who had divorced his mentally ill wife and left them for a younger wife and leaves them with next to no money and the senior in high school to take care of her mentally ill mother.  He knows she is not taking her medication, it's why he divorced her.

The storyline-
You've read it before in hundreds of other books but if you like I'll tell it again.

Stupid girl, in my opinion, agrees to not make her mother take her meds.  Even goes so far as to think creativity is a drug to her mother and wants to remove all her paints and brushes from the house.  Is afraid poetry and painting will make her own self schizophrenic.  I guess she's never heard of a computer or a library or even a doctor?  She doesn't ask anyone but her teenage mother best friend for help.  What is she supposed to do?  She's got a baby.  I'm thinking maybe this girl missed too much high school or sniffed to much paint fumes to get out of high school anyway.

Finally, after crazy woman (mom) does something drastic like trying to burn the house down to kill the mermaids they hung from the ceiling years ago, then becomes catatonic, girl goes to get help from grandmother.  Hello 911?  No apparently she hasn't learned those numbers yet.

Grandmother does dial 911 who get there just in time to keep mom from dying of dehydration and lack of food.  Hello?  Told you they shouldn't let the girl out of high school.  Yes, she's taking care of her mother very well.  I'm right there with you mom.  Right up until I let you die.  But I didn't make you take your pills.

So here's the kicker, in the back is an interview with the author and she's asked, "If you were aware that your creativity altered or infringed upon your mental state, would you sacrifice your art ( your writing, your music, your fine art if you draw like Aura or paint like Aura's mother) to retain your sanity, or would you continue to create?"
The author's answer-No doubt-I'd keep writing.  In all honesty, writing is so much a part of who I am anymore, so central to my life, I don't think I'd feel like I had much of a choice.

The author has likened the mother's paintbrushes and paint like giving a needle and drugs to a drug addict in the novel, following the daughter's thought that creativity makes you crazy.

As far as research the author states-" I didn't have to probe very deep into the subject of creativity to find out that many of our "great" artists (playwrights, poets, novelists, painters, sculptors, musicians) were in some way affected by mental illness-schizophrenia as well as depression or bipolar disorder...The idea of the "mad genius" is so pervasive, there's even a Wikipedia entry for "Creativity and Mental Illness!""  That's her exclamation point, not mine.  Continuing on..."And, yes, I did have to do some research into schizophrenia--symptoms, treatment, etc.  But I was writing fiction (oh, well in that case, please make it as awful as possible so that the person that is sick is truly as detestable as possible, a monster because that really betters the stigma of mental illness for everyone, thank you)---so of course my characters and their experiences had to drive the book, not descriptions of the condition.

So another book written showing that we with mental illness are burdens basically.  I don't see any other way to call it.  That's what this woman was to her daughter, her husband and her mother.  Of course, a person that sick shouldn't be given the option whether to take medication or not.  But that wasn't really the issue.  And I'm so glad the author got her information from Wikipedia.  That makes me feel much better.

Why is this bothering me so much?  I don't have schizophrenia.  But I care very much.  I can only imagine how horrible that disease is.  I've heard how bad the side effects of the medications are and how hard it is to lead a normal life.  I have refused to read independent and self published books about the victims of this disease because I'm tired of being the burden.  I am not a burden.  And neither are the rest of you.  And I want to fight back.  I want to put up a fight, but these authors hide behind, "It's a piece of fiction"  and I can't fight that.  Yet, it lingers in people's minds that's what they'll remember when they think about schizophrenia.  They'll remember the mother that tried to hang her daughter with herself  when they hear bipolar disorder.

So how do we change all those misconceptions about us in these books that are "just works of fiction."  Do I attack the books?  Because they actually are well written, except they make me a burden.  I am a person, not something to be borne by a pack mule.  What do you all think?

Heather

Answers

I'm trying to help but you rebuff me
I look inside for answers
There are none only outside
Those bottles that sit beckoning
Promising a way out from this worthless life
I live, I exist, I breathe, I am,
Nothing.

I plan my escape one more time.
It's always the pills, take too many
It seems such a peaceful way to go
I'm only afraid of what comes after.
Will God forgive me.  But then I'm living
in hell right now.  How much worse can it get?
Nothing.

I am nothing. My dreams will never come true.
I cannot help you, you turn me away.
I sit doing nothing watching you do it all
As I do not participate in life, a spectator
Life is a sport I don't get to play.  Just one
I read, and watch, and dream of.  I don't ever
expect to be picked for the game.  Not even
last.  No one sees me.  I am invisible.  My
participation is not desired.  I am tolerated in
the stands as a watcher.  It hurts.  Bone deep
I feel what your rejection means.
Nothing.

I was born nothing, an unwanted child
Given up by my mother to parents that
Wanted a boy.  No one understood
my emotions.  I was invisible.  I am
invisible.  I will be invisible.  Ashes to
Ashes, dust to dust, nothing to nothing.
Nothing.

When Sleep Eludes

When sleep eludes me and I'm alone with my mind
Weird thoughts go through it and I find
That it can be frightening to be alone
With myself.

Thoughts turn to things dark and dreary
Whirling through my mind and I'm weary
Of this constant cycle of a twirling cyclone
By myself.

No one else lays awake its just me
Me and my thoughts they won't let me be
They want me up creating some fantastic thing
Just myself.

The dogs slumber undisturbed by my wanderings
My husband snores unaware of my dangerous ponderings
And I start that cycle running in a magnificent ring
Around myself.

I cannot sleep, I cannot stop
My mind is alive, body ready to plop
I cannot shut down, I will drown
Myself

Words flit by before I can catch them
Paper is of no use, just another item
I will lose myself in when I put them down
Somewhere near myself.

Ideas pour in and out like water in a pitcher
Projects started, left for ideas much richer
Myself, myself, myself, Just myself, by myself,
Around myself, Somewhere near myself.

Nothing New

The problem with having a writing blog is having something to write about.  It's hard when you don't have a topic.  I'm not depressed so I can't bring you all down to sit with me in my pity pit and wallow in the shallows of the dark murky waters of depression sea.  I'm not manic or you could bet I'd be pumping things out faster than you could read and you'e wonder what they hell I'd been smoking.  It's true, when I'm manic, there is no amount of drug that can put me to sleep.  I sit at a computer for five days and nights and pump out a complete 300 page novel.  I've done it before and when I tell the doctor, "Yeah, I'm doing great!  Just wrote a novel in five days!" They give me that look.  The one that is just short of sending you to the hospital with a bunch of drugs in your arms.  See that's the thing about mania that no one but those of us who go through it understand, for a little while, it's the best possible high in the world.  There is no drug in the world that could make you feel like this.  It's better than love, sex, food, your best day ever!  It's all those and more.  I really did write a coherent piece of writing that made complete sense and I read it again today and it still sounds like what I wanted to say.  I was angry, furious with my best friend.  He'd hurt me like I said no male would ever hurt me again.  The problem is my best friend is also my husband.  And I was completely isolated.  No one ever let me talk to them about my problems.  I was the listener.  Not the talker.  I fixed everyone else's problems.  I never was allowed my own problems.  So, I used my writing and my mania and I wrote every angry word and feeling and desire out and poured them into the pages of that novel.  It was the best therapy I could afford!  And then, when that one was finished and I was still angry with him, I wrote another novel, and another and another.  I probably got five or six completed novels out of that anger and that bout of mania.  And I'll never know if what he did to anger me triggered that mania, I think not because it came two months later, or if it was just the built up anger fed the mania.  This mania was focused, no sleep, very bad for my health and I did not participate in my family's life at all.  How could I?  I was writing non stop.  But the mania ended with no hospital stays, no suicide attempts or even thoughts and no major depression.  I came away exhausted of course, but feeling accomplished.


That anger is gone now.  Talked away and forgiven, never forgotten though.  Hints of it jab at me and whisper in that tape that plays all my insecurities back at me from time to time.  But I have promised myself, despite all I have put him through,  once my children are in college, if he ever hurts  me like that again, I will use that anger to leave.  I am hard enough on myself, I came from a family that was hard on me emotionally not understanding my sensitivity.  The same conversation/argument gets played out between us over and over and at times I wonder if I hate men. ( I always love books where the men shove it up the man's back side.  Olivia Goldsmith was my favorite writer for the longest time!  I've read every single one of her novels- She wrote The First Wive's Club, but the book was  much better than the movie!)  But I'm not really a big fan of women either.  I just like it when the women are winning out over the men.  Anywhere, in anything.  Maybe there's something wrong with me.   Let's see, I live in a house with three boys.  I have two male dogs.  No female friends around me at all.  There is the Red-Headed Demon still living here and I have not found a way to forgive her.  I know I need to for me to move on, but I have not found that to be a priority right now.  And I'm not even sure I know how to start.  But back to the men.  I think  that once you've lost your faith in someone or something, it's very hard to lose all your doubt.  Things happened to me when I was young, bad things, things I don't want to remember and I haven't believed in God in a long time.  If there was a God, why would he let that happen to me?  Where was he when that was happening?  Or does he just sit back and wait for the older person in the situation to do the right thing. Free will?  I didn't have a choice.  But I do have a choice as to whether I believe in a being that would sit back and let people die of hunger without lending a hand.  Let children kill each other with machetes.  Let women die of AIDS and leave their children orphans as infants.  Let children be sold into slavery.  Where is God in all of that?  How do I believe in God when that is all happening?  I don't know.  Yet, I do believe in something.  I do believe in purpose and I don't think life is just random.  I believe there is order in this chaos, somewhere.  I have no idea what my purpose is.  I think it's to write.  It's what I've always done.  But I don't paint beautiful pictures with my words.  I'm no poet.  My sentences are simple and my plot is stuck.  But every day, I read, I write, I learn and maybe I won't be an author in this lifetime.  Maybe I'll come back and do things different next time around.  I won't be afraid of what I have to face as a child.  It will make me stronger and I'll have courage and I'll learn to not be a victim of harsh words instead of waiting thirty five years to learn how to say, "Stop, that hurts my feelings."  God I feel like my life has just been one long battle with no victories sometimes.


My youngest, 11, asked me coming home from school if I had a good life, must have heard a line in a song or something.  I said yes I did.  I didn't want to tell him all my troubles.  He said, "Well your married.  So that's good.  You've got two kids.  That's good.  Or, maybe not, I guess we could be better."  I laughed and told him my kids were perfect.  He is not usually one to be self deprecating.  "Daddy has a job he likes.  And we're back in our old house."  I agreed and told him I needed a job, but I was scared.  It's been 14 years since I've been in the work place and I don't feel qualified to do anything.  The last thing I did was run a book store.  Last I looked they were closing those up right and left.  And the boy who is not known for his kind words says, "It's okay mom, I'll still love you even if you don't have a job."  I thanked him and laughed.  Then he asked me, "Why don't you be an author?"  I cracked up and tried to explain how that works.  Then he said "Then be an illustrator!"  The idea of being an illustrator is so far out of my realm of job skills that I could be a long haul truck driver before I was an illustrator.  He thinks because I can follow the instructions in the step by step drawing books I'm a great artist.  But I cannot think of something in my head and draw it.  But I gave him a mighty A for the effort and for making me laugh!  And for believing me.  That's the thing, my boys, all three of them believe in me even when I don't believe in myself.  So, maybe I won't leave the big guy after all.  I wouldn't know what to do with myself.  I would be a total recluse.  No, I need him much more than he needs me, but don't tell him I said that.


Oh and end of September, that's when my mania usually hits.  I'm off antidepressants this year so maybe no cycling-we'll see.  Coincidentally it's also my birthday at the end of the month.  I always wondered if feeling awful on my birthday had something to do with my being adopted.  I now know it has to do with having Bipolar Disorder and it's a common time of year to start those mood swings.  But see how the imagination can twist things up?

Creative Blog Hop - Primeval Loss

PRIMEVAL LOSS

Fear blood red, dark

Dripping in my veins,

Strangling my dreams,

Squeezing my heart into,
Tears from my eyes,

Screams from my primal being,

Prehistoric notions, now nightmares,

People stare, women with swollen bellies shrink away from my pain,
It isn't contagious but scares them just the same.
Minutes feel like hours as I sit surrounded by my sadness,
Punishment again for one small transgression,
Or some large one, doesn't matter. The sentence doesn't fit the crime.
My husband comforts despite his own pain,
The nurse gives us a pity smile,
The doctor offers her sympathy,
Within an hour, your former life is sucked from my body,
Discarded in a bag, thrown away and with you my heart.
You were my girl, my Emma Grace, my continued connection to this life,
You were my last and most longed for child.
It was for the best some say, Nature's way of taking care of things
Best for who?  Not me, my heart aches like never before.
Nature taking care of what? Again, not me, she's taken from me again.
But the blame is truly inside me. Some deep lacking within me.
Four times now I leave the hospital with empty arms, my pain runs bone deep,
As I entomb myself in shame and let my wounds scab, mend but never heal,
Never forget, I am not worthy to be your mother.