Monday, November 29, 2004
Relationships 210, P.S.
By the time redneckjerk and Sarah got up it was time for Eyvonne to go to work. She’d dropped off ten dollars for me to give redneckjerk so he could buy gas.
I was seething.
He was just standing out by his truck while Sarah was ditzing around in the house. I could hand her the money to give him, or I could give it to him myself and tell how I felt. No one could do that for us. I walked up and handed him the money.
“What’s this?” he asked.
“It’s ten bucks. Put it in your gas tank and go home.”
He blinked.
“You were only here by sufferance because Sarah wanted you here. You were not supposed to stay overnight last night, and you’re not staying overnight in the future. No one here respects you because of what you did to Sarah. You dishonored her and treated her without respect. The fact that I respect Sarah is the only reason you were allowed to come here yesterday,” I said. “If you want my respect back you’ll have to earn it by treating her right.”
The whole time I was talking every Q inside was cheering stuff like “Go Shel!!” “Yeah!” “You tell him boy!”
I think ‘rion and Keeper were hoping he’d take a swing at me so we could legally take him down.
Unbeknownst to me, Thunder and Sarah were also watching from the kitchen window.
I made sure I stayed more than an arm’s length away from him because the temptation to grip his scrawny little neck and whack his head against his truck window was high.
“What did I do?” redneckjerk whined, leaning backward as if he knew I might throttle him.
“If you don’t know, that’s your first f’ning problem. Figure it out.”
I walked away.
Sarah talked to him. When she came back in she was trying not to laugh.
“He’s afraid to even come back in to get his truck keys,” she said. “Is he allowed to come in and get something to eat before he leaves?”
“Sure,” I said. “But he goes home after that, and he doesn’t stay overnight again.”Sarah blinked.
“It’s because he treats you like crap Sarah, and you don’t need that. As far as I’m concerned he’s an abuser and I won’t shelter an abuser under my roof,” I said. “If you stay with him it’s likely to escalate to violence eventually.”
“Can I ask you what you said to him?”
I told her verbatim.
“That’s pretty much what he said you told him,” she said. “I told him you were just being a good parent, looking out for me.”
She grinned and threw her arms around my neck hugging me tight.
“Thank you for standing up for me,” she said. “Nobody’s ever done that before.”
The she asked, “He still has a chance right? I mean if he treats me right he can still earn your respect?”
“Clean slate if he’s capable of it. But I doubt he is,” I said.
Sarah laughed.
“Well, we’ll see,” she said. “I’m not taking any more crap from him that’s for sure.”
She went out the door. It took her a while to convince redneckjerk I wouldn’t actually hurt him.
“Do you think he’ll change?” Thunder asked.
“I dunno,” I said. “Maybe if more people intervened things would be different. I guess if it means enough to him he can still change. He’s young.”
Thunder laughed. “If he wants to keep dating Sarah he’d better change. God, what you did was awesome, standing up to him that way.”
“It was pure Shel mode,” I said somewhat sheepishly.
We both laughed. I never told him I shook for an hour afterward. Adrenaline rush.
I actually was pretty restrained compared to years past. Maybe I finally had grown up. I wasn’t 16 anymore. A few years ago I would have put his head through the window.
But somewhere along the line I realized when I did things like that, I wasn’t tough, I was just joining the other side. I felt a lot stronger not lashing out with violence.
But trust me, if he’d thrown a punch he’d have gone down. I had enough street fighting in my past to do it without reflection. It was automatic. Somewhere in New York City there’s a big Hispanic guy with crooked fingers who made the mistake of thinking what he saw was what he’d get. Sometimes being a guy in a female body isn’t so bad.
I’d resolved a portion of the conflict stressing me out. But I couldn’t quite shake the other stuff bugging me. I still couldn’t make a good thing out of my fear that our relationship with Eyvonne was in jeopardy. We’d been together almost a decade. It was never easy, but there was a lot of good too. There’s a lot of change going on in our lives right now, good and bad. Even good changes cause stress.
I know relationships go through seasons. And I certainly know they can end. I wasn’t sure what she wanted long term anymore.
I do know every Q in here loves her. I imagined us together always. But I’m not dumb enough to believe in happily ever after. I’ll be OK no matter what. Unhappy maybe but OK.
John Lennon said, “Life is what happens when you’re making other plans.”
Dr. Dwon was fond of saying, “Expect the best but plan for the worst.”
Somewhere between these two gurus of mine lies actuality.
Start with the worst-case scenario. Eyvonne leaves. Can you make plans about that? Can you make plans for a thousand year flood, the kind that computer models don’t have enough information to spit out a predication about? Eyvonne leaving would be a thousand year flood in my life. I can’t think of a single action to take in the case of either eventuality.
It’s like planning for the apocalypse. What do you do, stockpile food? Squirrel away money? We don’t have enough of either to last more than a week.
Remember all those people who bought generators to survive Y2K? I always wondered how they thought they were going to get the gas to run their generators if Y2K was the end of the civilized world. Didn’t they know widespread power failures would freeze the gas pumps at their local COGO? What did they think they were going to do with their generator anyway, run the dishwasher one more time?
With oil reserves predicted to run out in less than two decades, now would be a good time for our government to plan something more long term than killing Iraqis to get control of the last of their oil.
But this is supposed to be a plan for what we Qs would do if Eyvonne left.
Breath. We’d do that.
We could put reminders to eat on the computer monitor and the back door. But that wouldn’t guarantee we’d do anything about it. Eating is of marginal interest when we’re even mildly bummed.
We’d keep working. We always do that. We’ve met deadlines in the midst of gave illness and personal crisis. Being dissociative helps with stuff like that.
Did I mention breathing?
OK, so it’s a short and pathetic list.
I’d rather work on planning to stay together.
Oddly enough that list starts with: Improving Shel’s self-esteem.
Because maybe Owl is right and this is a lot about my trust issues and a little about Eyvonne blurting things out of her own fears.
Settling India and Taya into the system would help.
Almost everything else I can think of to do would require effort by Eyvonne and us Qs.
There are a lot of dust bunnies accumulated in our relationship that are gumming up the works. Some of it is classic guy stuff/girl stuff.
Like she does her hair and puts makeup on and I’m distracted and stressed so she waits and waits for me to notice. Finally she asks “Do I look pretty?”
It’s a no win question, because if a woman has to ask you’re already chalked up as an idiot. If you respond, “You always look beautiful to me” in her mind she’s gone to all that effort for no good reason. If you simply say, “Yes, you look beautiful” you’re doomed because she had to prompt you. Your credibility is marginal.
It doesn’t occur to me to ask if I look handsome. I might ask, “Are my clothes OK?” “Do I look dorky?” or something like that. el worries about colors because he’s pretty much colorblind but he solves that by choosing clothes in shades of gray and black that look good with anything. He doesn’t worry about looking handsome either.
It’s probably a good time to do some relationship housecleaning. Judging by this Thanksgiving we might better get it done before Christmas. There. That’s a plan.
© 2004 M. S. Eliot
I was seething.
He was just standing out by his truck while Sarah was ditzing around in the house. I could hand her the money to give him, or I could give it to him myself and tell how I felt. No one could do that for us. I walked up and handed him the money.
“What’s this?” he asked.
“It’s ten bucks. Put it in your gas tank and go home.”
He blinked.
“You were only here by sufferance because Sarah wanted you here. You were not supposed to stay overnight last night, and you’re not staying overnight in the future. No one here respects you because of what you did to Sarah. You dishonored her and treated her without respect. The fact that I respect Sarah is the only reason you were allowed to come here yesterday,” I said. “If you want my respect back you’ll have to earn it by treating her right.”
The whole time I was talking every Q inside was cheering stuff like “Go Shel!!” “Yeah!” “You tell him boy!”
I think ‘rion and Keeper were hoping he’d take a swing at me so we could legally take him down.
Unbeknownst to me, Thunder and Sarah were also watching from the kitchen window.
I made sure I stayed more than an arm’s length away from him because the temptation to grip his scrawny little neck and whack his head against his truck window was high.
“What did I do?” redneckjerk whined, leaning backward as if he knew I might throttle him.
“If you don’t know, that’s your first f’ning problem. Figure it out.”
I walked away.
Sarah talked to him. When she came back in she was trying not to laugh.
“He’s afraid to even come back in to get his truck keys,” she said. “Is he allowed to come in and get something to eat before he leaves?”
“Sure,” I said. “But he goes home after that, and he doesn’t stay overnight again.”Sarah blinked.
“It’s because he treats you like crap Sarah, and you don’t need that. As far as I’m concerned he’s an abuser and I won’t shelter an abuser under my roof,” I said. “If you stay with him it’s likely to escalate to violence eventually.”
“Can I ask you what you said to him?”
I told her verbatim.
“That’s pretty much what he said you told him,” she said. “I told him you were just being a good parent, looking out for me.”
She grinned and threw her arms around my neck hugging me tight.
“Thank you for standing up for me,” she said. “Nobody’s ever done that before.”
The she asked, “He still has a chance right? I mean if he treats me right he can still earn your respect?”
“Clean slate if he’s capable of it. But I doubt he is,” I said.
Sarah laughed.
“Well, we’ll see,” she said. “I’m not taking any more crap from him that’s for sure.”
She went out the door. It took her a while to convince redneckjerk I wouldn’t actually hurt him.
“Do you think he’ll change?” Thunder asked.
“I dunno,” I said. “Maybe if more people intervened things would be different. I guess if it means enough to him he can still change. He’s young.”
Thunder laughed. “If he wants to keep dating Sarah he’d better change. God, what you did was awesome, standing up to him that way.”
“It was pure Shel mode,” I said somewhat sheepishly.
We both laughed. I never told him I shook for an hour afterward. Adrenaline rush.
I actually was pretty restrained compared to years past. Maybe I finally had grown up. I wasn’t 16 anymore. A few years ago I would have put his head through the window.
But somewhere along the line I realized when I did things like that, I wasn’t tough, I was just joining the other side. I felt a lot stronger not lashing out with violence.
But trust me, if he’d thrown a punch he’d have gone down. I had enough street fighting in my past to do it without reflection. It was automatic. Somewhere in New York City there’s a big Hispanic guy with crooked fingers who made the mistake of thinking what he saw was what he’d get. Sometimes being a guy in a female body isn’t so bad.
I’d resolved a portion of the conflict stressing me out. But I couldn’t quite shake the other stuff bugging me. I still couldn’t make a good thing out of my fear that our relationship with Eyvonne was in jeopardy. We’d been together almost a decade. It was never easy, but there was a lot of good too. There’s a lot of change going on in our lives right now, good and bad. Even good changes cause stress.
I know relationships go through seasons. And I certainly know they can end. I wasn’t sure what she wanted long term anymore.
I do know every Q in here loves her. I imagined us together always. But I’m not dumb enough to believe in happily ever after. I’ll be OK no matter what. Unhappy maybe but OK.
John Lennon said, “Life is what happens when you’re making other plans.”
Dr. Dwon was fond of saying, “Expect the best but plan for the worst.”
Somewhere between these two gurus of mine lies actuality.
Start with the worst-case scenario. Eyvonne leaves. Can you make plans about that? Can you make plans for a thousand year flood, the kind that computer models don’t have enough information to spit out a predication about? Eyvonne leaving would be a thousand year flood in my life. I can’t think of a single action to take in the case of either eventuality.
It’s like planning for the apocalypse. What do you do, stockpile food? Squirrel away money? We don’t have enough of either to last more than a week.
Remember all those people who bought generators to survive Y2K? I always wondered how they thought they were going to get the gas to run their generators if Y2K was the end of the civilized world. Didn’t they know widespread power failures would freeze the gas pumps at their local COGO? What did they think they were going to do with their generator anyway, run the dishwasher one more time?
With oil reserves predicted to run out in less than two decades, now would be a good time for our government to plan something more long term than killing Iraqis to get control of the last of their oil.
But this is supposed to be a plan for what we Qs would do if Eyvonne left.
Breath. We’d do that.
We could put reminders to eat on the computer monitor and the back door. But that wouldn’t guarantee we’d do anything about it. Eating is of marginal interest when we’re even mildly bummed.
We’d keep working. We always do that. We’ve met deadlines in the midst of gave illness and personal crisis. Being dissociative helps with stuff like that.
Did I mention breathing?
OK, so it’s a short and pathetic list.
I’d rather work on planning to stay together.
Oddly enough that list starts with: Improving Shel’s self-esteem.
Because maybe Owl is right and this is a lot about my trust issues and a little about Eyvonne blurting things out of her own fears.
Settling India and Taya into the system would help.
Almost everything else I can think of to do would require effort by Eyvonne and us Qs.
There are a lot of dust bunnies accumulated in our relationship that are gumming up the works. Some of it is classic guy stuff/girl stuff.
Like she does her hair and puts makeup on and I’m distracted and stressed so she waits and waits for me to notice. Finally she asks “Do I look pretty?”
It’s a no win question, because if a woman has to ask you’re already chalked up as an idiot. If you respond, “You always look beautiful to me” in her mind she’s gone to all that effort for no good reason. If you simply say, “Yes, you look beautiful” you’re doomed because she had to prompt you. Your credibility is marginal.
It doesn’t occur to me to ask if I look handsome. I might ask, “Are my clothes OK?” “Do I look dorky?” or something like that. el worries about colors because he’s pretty much colorblind but he solves that by choosing clothes in shades of gray and black that look good with anything. He doesn’t worry about looking handsome either.
It’s probably a good time to do some relationship housecleaning. Judging by this Thanksgiving we might better get it done before Christmas. There. That’s a plan.
© 2004 M. S. Eliot
Relationships 210
It’s amazing how just a few words can freeze your heart. Between inhaling and exhaling life will never be quite the same.
Do I have trust issues?
Is the Pope Catholic?
Maybe we could blame it on the holidays. Holidays don’t always bring out the best in people. It’s the traditional time of year for dysfunctional families to lose it.
Lillie was so looking forward to this Thanksgiving, the first in our own home for two years, surrounded by loving family.
Insert commercial here.
Fast forward to reality.
Here’s the backstory:
Sarah’s boyfriend broke up with her a few weeks ago, soon after she moved in with us. She’d lived with her grandparents for the previous two years finishing high school. Now she was going to cosmetology school near our home.
Her boyfriend treated her disrespectfully. A typical redneckjerk he was boorish and disrespectful to other family members too. Sarah was on the verge of dumping him when he broke up with her. We all rejoiced except Sarah. She cried for days.
She started dating other guys but she showed an alarming propensity for picking losers who might eventually escalate to domestic violence. Trust me, I know the symptoms. Her mother tried to talk with her to no avail. Owl was especially upset over her choices. He tried talking with her too.
The redneckjerk called after a couple weeks. She decided to have him over for the evening. She did all that telltale girl stuff, bubble bath, makeup, curled her hair and waited for him to arrive. And waited for him to arrive. And waited…. You get the picture.
This did nothing to further endear him to any of us. Owl and Thunder went into full-blown big brother mode. They wanted to hunt him down and explain how things ought to be. I don’t think they planned on using words to explain. I called them off. Barely.
Two days before the holiday redneckjerk calls and invites Sarah to dinner with his family. She accepts. Now this would be the first holiday Sarah could have spent with her mother since she was seven years old. Eyvonne was looking forward to it. Having Sarah here was like a dream come true for her. Because it meant so much to her, it did to all of us, Owl and Thunder included. When Sarah announced she and redneckjerk would be gone all day but back in time for dinner with us, I could see mayhem in the making.
“If he’s disrespectful in any way I’m telling him to leave,” I told Eyvonne. She assured me she’d already made Sarah aware redneckjerk better behave.
The only other stipulation I made was that he was not to spend the night. Not that night, nor any night in the future. I was done harboring abusers under my roof. Eyvonne agreed.
Sarah left before dawn with redneckjerk. Owl and Thunder left mid-morning for their first round of turkey at their grandmother’s house with their dad’s family. It was peaceful and mellow. Tantalizing turkey smells filled the house. Owl and Thunder arrived home by midafternoon. Their first question was “When will supper be ready?” It wasn’t Thanksgiving until they had turkey here.
Eyvonne was at the kitchen table making a sign for the wigheads on poles in the yard she and Sarah had rigged up to prank Ian. “PILGRIMS, What we should have done” it said.
The subject of redneckjerk came up.
“Why do we have to have him here? None of us wants him to be here,” Thunder said.
“Sarah wants him here,” Eyvonne said.
“If he says or does anything we don’t like he’s leaving,” I pointed out.
“We need to respect Sarah’s decision to invite him,” Eyvonne said.
“I’m tired of respecting Sarah’s decisions,” Owl snapped.
Everyone froze.
Eyvonne barely looked up from her sign making.
“Then Sarah and I will look for our own place,” she said.
Some people are born Aztecs. My daughter’s one. She ripped my heart out when she was sixteen and never looked back. But that’s another golden moment of dysfunction.
That was then and this is now, as Eyvonne is so fond of pointing out.
Now I was standing in the kitchen trying not to faint or puke. My blood burned. My vision distorted. If I moved I’d keel over.
This was not the first time Eyvonne threatened to leave. The last time blindsided me too. We were still living in the dumpy trailer in western Pennsylvania, four hours from any of our family except Owl. Eyvonne announced one morning that if her mom became ill she planned to move in with her parents to care for her. Her mom is diabetic, eats what she wants, smokes and doesn’t exercise. This is inevitable.
Just like that. No ‘we need to come up with a plan, or ‘how can we work this out’. Definitely no ‘how do you feel about this?’ or ‘will you be all right if I do this’. No ‘this would be a temporary solution’.
Just ‘if mom gets sick I’m moving out’.
Good morning to you too. Are we still together? Do you care?
The fallout from this was I learned I could get through a crisis without falling back into destructive behavior patterns. There was no cutting. I kept eating. I just felt like shit for days and spawned a new alter. Does that count as destructive behavior? I couldn’t help it, it was an automatic response. Welcome to the Q Flinch. Happy birthday. (He’s extremely ticklish flinching when anyone touches him.)
Later Eyvonne said that wasn’t what she meant at all. Leaving us. I’d misinterpreted. I’d over reacted. Who’s dissociative?
We are. We want things back to normal so badly we let it go. There was a lot of talk which didn’t really change our understanding that our relationship was conditional, secondary to her mom’s health.
Now our relationship was secondary to hers with Sarah too. Again, no discussion first.
Later she said it was an automatic response to protect her daughter. A misunderstanding. She’d heard Owl say he was tired of respecting Sarah. In reality he said he was tired of respecting Sarah’s decisions, meaning they were bad ones. Eyvonne couldn’t argue that. It was true.
All of that was moot to us. What mattered to us was that she would trash our relationship because our kids were having an issue. Any issue. I thought of all the kids as ‘our’ kids. Not Owl and Thunder as mine and Sarah as hers. I thought if we had problems we worked them out, whether it was a parent’s health or our kid’s conflicts.
Were we a family? Or is her presence here just inertia until some crisis forces her to move on?
Adjusting to Sarah moving in hasn’t been easy for any of us. Eyvonne hasn’t been the end receiver parent in over ten years. She stood beside us as we parented Owl and Thunder, many times clearly not in agreement with our parenting style. Now faced with the bewildering aspects of parenting a teen she saw more wisdom in our approach. Owl and Thunder weren’t turning out so bad.
Having another family member meant a lot more work for us Qs too. By some horrible twist of fate or bad karma we like things neat and clean, the laundry done up, food cooked on a semi-regular basis.
To Eyvonne none of that is a priority. In the nine years we’ve been together she’s run the vacuum cleaner maybe a dozen times. That was more frequently than anyone else we’d ever had a relationship with so maybe we shouldn’t be complaining. Or maybe we should be looking at reasons why that happens. I figure it’s some adolescent stage she’s stuck in and our obsessive behavior feeds it.
If the empty wood box or a sink full of dishes doesn’t speak to anyone else it speaks to me. To be exact, it speaks to el. He hates a mess. He can barely abide clutter. If someone leaves a glass or a Pepsi can lying around he is compelled to it clean up. I tried ignoring housework once to see how long it would take other family members to pick up the slack. They didn’t even pick up the trash which overflowed onto the kitchen floor. Ammonia from the catpan burned your eyes and no one cleaned it. We folded. But we protested too.
Fortunately this came to a head just before Sarah moved in. Eyvonne has been doing a bit more housework, at least sporadically. So has Owl.
Enter Sarah stage right.
She shows no more inclination to pick up after herself than most teenagers. I still don’t feel the way to teach is to yell, cajole, bribe or scream. However setting a good example hasn’t worked real well either.
Maybe it’s finally begun to pay off. Owl keeps the wood box filled without my ever mentioning it. I’ve never had anyone keep the wood box filled before this. He shows other signs of adulthood too, doing chores before I max out, actually finishing a job. He even cooks. He said he understands working at home means just that: working. He said it isn’t fair we should have to do all the housework just because we’re home. He carefully avoided pointing out that Eyvonne and now Sarah are home most of the time too.
We Qs have never had a relationship where we didn’t do most of the housework, childcare, and yard work besides running a business and writing. During our peak insanity in this regard we ran a retail antique shop, developed a computer business, worked part time in the school system and as a stringer/feature writer for several newspapers.
OK, this is starting to sound like just another a bitch session. Maybe it is. It’s better than crying. It beats cutting. And it’s accomplished something else. It’s making us take a good hard look at our goals.
And I can almost hear Pleiades. It’s not a mindtouch. It’s more like just knowing. I know what he’s feeling. And it isn’t good. He’s feeling crappy. Not surprising. If I have trust issues he’s got bigger ones. He’d started coming in to see what love is all about. No worries about him swiping ops for a while. He’s back in ‘watch and wary’ mode. So am I.
The only stand I took on redneckjerk coming to dinner was that he was not to stay overnight. Eyvonne agreed to make that clear.
But, oh dear, neither Sarah or redneckjerk had gas money, all the gas stations were closed, and he couldn’t cash his paycheck because it was a holiday. So he couldn’t possibly go home.
“He had no choice,” Eyvonne said defensively. “They didn’t know the gas stations would be closed and he wouldn’t be able to cash his check. Besides, he’d been up for over 24 hours straight. What did you want him to do?”
“Leave.”
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know if you’ve packed your jammies you plan to sleep over. If I had known about the feeble excuse Owl and I would have sacrificed our snow blower gas and given him ten bucks to leave. I’m inclined not to call Owl and Thunder off the next time he pisses them off. I might even throw the first punch myself.
Do I have trust issues?
Is the Pope Catholic?
Maybe we could blame it on the holidays. Holidays don’t always bring out the best in people. It’s the traditional time of year for dysfunctional families to lose it.
Lillie was so looking forward to this Thanksgiving, the first in our own home for two years, surrounded by loving family.
Insert commercial here.
Fast forward to reality.
Here’s the backstory:
Sarah’s boyfriend broke up with her a few weeks ago, soon after she moved in with us. She’d lived with her grandparents for the previous two years finishing high school. Now she was going to cosmetology school near our home.
Her boyfriend treated her disrespectfully. A typical redneckjerk he was boorish and disrespectful to other family members too. Sarah was on the verge of dumping him when he broke up with her. We all rejoiced except Sarah. She cried for days.
She started dating other guys but she showed an alarming propensity for picking losers who might eventually escalate to domestic violence. Trust me, I know the symptoms. Her mother tried to talk with her to no avail. Owl was especially upset over her choices. He tried talking with her too.
The redneckjerk called after a couple weeks. She decided to have him over for the evening. She did all that telltale girl stuff, bubble bath, makeup, curled her hair and waited for him to arrive. And waited for him to arrive. And waited…. You get the picture.
This did nothing to further endear him to any of us. Owl and Thunder went into full-blown big brother mode. They wanted to hunt him down and explain how things ought to be. I don’t think they planned on using words to explain. I called them off. Barely.
Two days before the holiday redneckjerk calls and invites Sarah to dinner with his family. She accepts. Now this would be the first holiday Sarah could have spent with her mother since she was seven years old. Eyvonne was looking forward to it. Having Sarah here was like a dream come true for her. Because it meant so much to her, it did to all of us, Owl and Thunder included. When Sarah announced she and redneckjerk would be gone all day but back in time for dinner with us, I could see mayhem in the making.
“If he’s disrespectful in any way I’m telling him to leave,” I told Eyvonne. She assured me she’d already made Sarah aware redneckjerk better behave.
The only other stipulation I made was that he was not to spend the night. Not that night, nor any night in the future. I was done harboring abusers under my roof. Eyvonne agreed.
Sarah left before dawn with redneckjerk. Owl and Thunder left mid-morning for their first round of turkey at their grandmother’s house with their dad’s family. It was peaceful and mellow. Tantalizing turkey smells filled the house. Owl and Thunder arrived home by midafternoon. Their first question was “When will supper be ready?” It wasn’t Thanksgiving until they had turkey here.
Eyvonne was at the kitchen table making a sign for the wigheads on poles in the yard she and Sarah had rigged up to prank Ian. “PILGRIMS, What we should have done” it said.
The subject of redneckjerk came up.
“Why do we have to have him here? None of us wants him to be here,” Thunder said.
“Sarah wants him here,” Eyvonne said.
“If he says or does anything we don’t like he’s leaving,” I pointed out.
“We need to respect Sarah’s decision to invite him,” Eyvonne said.
“I’m tired of respecting Sarah’s decisions,” Owl snapped.
Everyone froze.
Eyvonne barely looked up from her sign making.
“Then Sarah and I will look for our own place,” she said.
Some people are born Aztecs. My daughter’s one. She ripped my heart out when she was sixteen and never looked back. But that’s another golden moment of dysfunction.
That was then and this is now, as Eyvonne is so fond of pointing out.
Now I was standing in the kitchen trying not to faint or puke. My blood burned. My vision distorted. If I moved I’d keel over.
This was not the first time Eyvonne threatened to leave. The last time blindsided me too. We were still living in the dumpy trailer in western Pennsylvania, four hours from any of our family except Owl. Eyvonne announced one morning that if her mom became ill she planned to move in with her parents to care for her. Her mom is diabetic, eats what she wants, smokes and doesn’t exercise. This is inevitable.
Just like that. No ‘we need to come up with a plan, or ‘how can we work this out’. Definitely no ‘how do you feel about this?’ or ‘will you be all right if I do this’. No ‘this would be a temporary solution’.
Just ‘if mom gets sick I’m moving out’.
Good morning to you too. Are we still together? Do you care?
The fallout from this was I learned I could get through a crisis without falling back into destructive behavior patterns. There was no cutting. I kept eating. I just felt like shit for days and spawned a new alter. Does that count as destructive behavior? I couldn’t help it, it was an automatic response. Welcome to the Q Flinch. Happy birthday. (He’s extremely ticklish flinching when anyone touches him.)
Later Eyvonne said that wasn’t what she meant at all. Leaving us. I’d misinterpreted. I’d over reacted. Who’s dissociative?
We are. We want things back to normal so badly we let it go. There was a lot of talk which didn’t really change our understanding that our relationship was conditional, secondary to her mom’s health.
Now our relationship was secondary to hers with Sarah too. Again, no discussion first.
Later she said it was an automatic response to protect her daughter. A misunderstanding. She’d heard Owl say he was tired of respecting Sarah. In reality he said he was tired of respecting Sarah’s decisions, meaning they were bad ones. Eyvonne couldn’t argue that. It was true.
All of that was moot to us. What mattered to us was that she would trash our relationship because our kids were having an issue. Any issue. I thought of all the kids as ‘our’ kids. Not Owl and Thunder as mine and Sarah as hers. I thought if we had problems we worked them out, whether it was a parent’s health or our kid’s conflicts.
Were we a family? Or is her presence here just inertia until some crisis forces her to move on?
Adjusting to Sarah moving in hasn’t been easy for any of us. Eyvonne hasn’t been the end receiver parent in over ten years. She stood beside us as we parented Owl and Thunder, many times clearly not in agreement with our parenting style. Now faced with the bewildering aspects of parenting a teen she saw more wisdom in our approach. Owl and Thunder weren’t turning out so bad.
Having another family member meant a lot more work for us Qs too. By some horrible twist of fate or bad karma we like things neat and clean, the laundry done up, food cooked on a semi-regular basis.
To Eyvonne none of that is a priority. In the nine years we’ve been together she’s run the vacuum cleaner maybe a dozen times. That was more frequently than anyone else we’d ever had a relationship with so maybe we shouldn’t be complaining. Or maybe we should be looking at reasons why that happens. I figure it’s some adolescent stage she’s stuck in and our obsessive behavior feeds it.
If the empty wood box or a sink full of dishes doesn’t speak to anyone else it speaks to me. To be exact, it speaks to el. He hates a mess. He can barely abide clutter. If someone leaves a glass or a Pepsi can lying around he is compelled to it clean up. I tried ignoring housework once to see how long it would take other family members to pick up the slack. They didn’t even pick up the trash which overflowed onto the kitchen floor. Ammonia from the catpan burned your eyes and no one cleaned it. We folded. But we protested too.
Fortunately this came to a head just before Sarah moved in. Eyvonne has been doing a bit more housework, at least sporadically. So has Owl.
Enter Sarah stage right.
She shows no more inclination to pick up after herself than most teenagers. I still don’t feel the way to teach is to yell, cajole, bribe or scream. However setting a good example hasn’t worked real well either.
Maybe it’s finally begun to pay off. Owl keeps the wood box filled without my ever mentioning it. I’ve never had anyone keep the wood box filled before this. He shows other signs of adulthood too, doing chores before I max out, actually finishing a job. He even cooks. He said he understands working at home means just that: working. He said it isn’t fair we should have to do all the housework just because we’re home. He carefully avoided pointing out that Eyvonne and now Sarah are home most of the time too.
We Qs have never had a relationship where we didn’t do most of the housework, childcare, and yard work besides running a business and writing. During our peak insanity in this regard we ran a retail antique shop, developed a computer business, worked part time in the school system and as a stringer/feature writer for several newspapers.
OK, this is starting to sound like just another a bitch session. Maybe it is. It’s better than crying. It beats cutting. And it’s accomplished something else. It’s making us take a good hard look at our goals.
And I can almost hear Pleiades. It’s not a mindtouch. It’s more like just knowing. I know what he’s feeling. And it isn’t good. He’s feeling crappy. Not surprising. If I have trust issues he’s got bigger ones. He’d started coming in to see what love is all about. No worries about him swiping ops for a while. He’s back in ‘watch and wary’ mode. So am I.
The only stand I took on redneckjerk coming to dinner was that he was not to stay overnight. Eyvonne agreed to make that clear.
But, oh dear, neither Sarah or redneckjerk had gas money, all the gas stations were closed, and he couldn’t cash his paycheck because it was a holiday. So he couldn’t possibly go home.
“He had no choice,” Eyvonne said defensively. “They didn’t know the gas stations would be closed and he wouldn’t be able to cash his check. Besides, he’d been up for over 24 hours straight. What did you want him to do?”
“Leave.”
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know if you’ve packed your jammies you plan to sleep over. If I had known about the feeble excuse Owl and I would have sacrificed our snow blower gas and given him ten bucks to leave. I’m inclined not to call Owl and Thunder off the next time he pisses them off. I might even throw the first punch myself.
India, Are you Listening?
So. Hi India. I gotta admit the temptation to call you Indy is pretty strong.
For anyone out there reading this who doesn’t already know, we’ve called our 1954 ½ ton Chevy pickup “Indy” since Owl and Thunder dubbed it “Indiana Truck” years ago. Every time we drove it back then we faced a ‘road of doom’ fraught with probable breakdowns.
It still has the original six-volt electrical system. The windshield wipers are driven by a vacuum system that works off the engine. When you go uphill, the wipers stop, frozen on the windshield where they were when you stepped on the gas. The heater spit out tepid air and the defroster never really worked unless you consider clouding up the windshield working. All winter the boys sat on the edge of the seat paper towels in hand ready to wipe the windshield. When they complained because Indy has no radio I’d say “This is 1954, sing!”
We sang a lot. Do you remember that India? Were you lurking around back then?
I can’t help wondering about your name. Most of us Qs have names that illustrate our job or contain a set of similar sounds.
“Trekker” is so named because his job essentially involved watching Star Trek when the emotional strife in Lillie’s first marriage got too high. When he surfaced into the Q he thought Start Trek was the actual outside reality. He was really disappointed he would never meet Talosians, Ferengis or Klingons. I pointed out they’re based on particular types of people.
“Trust me you know some,” I said.
On the other hand Trekker was relieved to know he’d never have to battle Gorns or stay on the alert for Kelvans.
Keeper’s name also derives his job. He oversaw a group of little ones who broke from his care to rampage through the system for a while. That was a wildly unpredictable time. Some of it was fun. It was always a riot taking Owl and Thunder sledding, to a movie, or an amusement park. It’s even more fun if you actually experience that excitement because you’re physically sharing ops with a l’ilone.
I like to let l’ilones sit on my lap and steer when I’m driving country roads, just like I did on farm roads when Owl and Thunder were little. By the time they could reach the gas and brake they already knew how to drive.
But back to names.
Shadow’s name also reveals his job. He maintains he knows EVERYTHING any Q knows, every hidden memory of abuse, every skill (knowledge is not application or experience), everything. He is after all el’s shadow. You most definitely are not highly linked to el India. No more or less than I’m linked to him anyway. Which is why your boast to Eyvonne that you knew everything any of us knows rang sour. I knew it wasn’t true. If you were worried about prompting mistrust, that was a bad topic to boast about.
I’m glad you clarified the issue. Most alters coming into the Q after years of hiding get up to speed rather quickly by tapping system resources. Very few however seem to be able to apply their new knowledge to actually accomplishing a complex activity without some practice. When Trekker was first learning to drive one of us who already knows how shared ops with him, kind of a Q driver education program. It’s like the difference between watching a video about riding a horse and actually riding one. There have been a few notable exceptions to the rule.
Ian for instance rode our horses the first time with no help, no instruction at all from anyone inside or out. He remembered it from his last life, or so he claims. He rides in a very distinctive way, confusing all but the most willing mount trained either English or Western style with signals they don’t know.
Our horse Chia quickly picked it up. He and Ian made a rare team. Ian’s style uses lots of leg prompts and very little rein. A bit isn’t required. In fact he sometimes used no reins at all, just Chia’s mane. They would whip through a line of aspen trees like barrel racers, Chia bending in tight circles, Ian’s leg almost touching tree trunks. You can’t learn how to do that from tapping system resources. Your body needs to ‘know’ how to move to make it happen.
When you were driving Thunder’s car I thought about Ian riding horseback. I knew then you’d either been around a long, long time and had had your times of stealing ops, or you were remembering something from a former lifetime. Like maybe you were a racecar driver? Then I noted your driving style is my driving style. And of course you look like me. So I guess I expected your name to somehow link us. India just doesn’t do it.
Many Qs names have ‘el’ in them. el is the most obvious example since it’s his entire name. He chose it as he cut Baby’s hair, naming himself after the poet T.S. Eliot. I quickly assumed a name in honor of another poet, Shelley. Back then I felt competitive with him. I couldn’t quite see the need of another male in the system. But I accepted him because he’s such a cool guy. We had a lot of fun as kids together. Being multiple means you never lack for playmates or company.
You might find it odd we chose poets as our heroes. But remember our mother read to us all the time. Words were everything to us, poetry the rhythm of our escape.
Another group of Qs has the sound ‘ie’ in their name; like Baby, Lillie, Jamie Lee. Lillie kind of spans those two groups. A third name set contains the sound ‘an or en’ like Ian, ‘rion, Gwen. Even if it doesn’t sound similar to you, it does to us. We could never get phoenics in school. We still don’t get it even though today’s it’s spelled phonics. What does ‘oe’ sound like anyway?
Owl is auditorially dyslexic. It has a subtle effect on his speech. He insists on putting an ‘n’ in the word couch. He says ‘counch.’ I think he comes by it naturally, I still say ‘prolly’ instead of probably. It’s what I hear. None of us Qs were much good at helping the boys with elementary school phonics homework.
But we were talking about our names.
There are Qs who go by numbers, like an alter spawned by Trekker who calls himself One. Ian had a baby alter who said his name was Ian Two, but later we found out he was really saying “I’m Iantoo.”
A long time ago a little one of ‘rion’s went by Twelve. Twelve was as close to that angry alter Dr. Dwon warned us about as any of us. It solved a lot of problems when they integrated.
Twelve is a definitive number for us. Shadow says so, therefore it is. He claims there won’t be more than 12 of us active at any given period of time. It was intended to be reassuring to me because I was scared back then there would eventually be so many Qs we’d focus inside and lose track of outside.
But I’ve gotten over that fear. Who’s counting. We’re fine. We have all the tools we need to get us through whatever you newbies throw at us. If you perceive that as a warning so be it, we’re dialoguing here.
Except I was going to say dancing, not dialoguing. That made me flashback to the first dream Taya sent me. Which annoyed me for some reason so I typed dialoguing instead of dancing. I think you two are getting to me. There must be some kind of mindtouch because it wasn’t like I just recalled it. I relived the entire freaking dream.
I’m sure later when I’ve had time to think about what just happened I’ll see meaning in it that I am missing at this moment.
Since I can’t quite grasp whatever message was intended there, I’ll go back to Q names. Welcome to another dissociative moment.
Star’s name didn’t seem to fit anywhere in any Q name pattern unless you follow our spectacular backward circular Q logic. Star = light. She was blind.
So. All that said, I still wonder where India fits. How ‘bout it? Fess up or I’ll start calling you Ink. Or Ghandi. And for that matter, how about Taya? What does her name mean? How do you guys fit into the system?
A Google search for Taya revealed the word is related to indigenous people in Venuzuela. It is part of a ‘welcome’ phrase of another indigenous group, the name of an ancient Tell in Iraq, a surname in Japanese and Arabic languages and a Star Trek Deep Space Nine character who was actually a hologram. Taya is also the name of an apparently infamous porn star, a running shoe and a line of jewelry. None of these connections rang any bells for us. I’m sure it means something to you, India and Taya. Maybe in time the rest of us Qs will understand too.
I guess I haven’t lost my obsession for mapping and charting the Q after all. Somehow understanding how we’re interlinked is important to me. It’s like a puzzle I’m bound to solve. But there isn’t any real solution. Not one anyway. It’s kind of like physics. You know when they get to the part of a theory that makes no sense and you have to leap over a bunch of mathmatics to make the equation balance.
Cartoonist Gary Larson summed it up nicely. He drew two physicists at a blackboard covered with numbers. One is saying to the other “And then a miracle happens.”
Someday I’ll be able to balance the equation, but I don’t think the miracle part will go away. Our life is one long miracle.
Anyway I’m very glad you wrote to me India. Even though it makes me uneasy that your name and Taya’s don’t seem to fit into the Q pattern. I won’t understand any sooner if we can’t talk at all. This is an ingenious solution to our unique problem.
I wasn’t quite sure about our initial conversations becoming part of this book. I was even less comfortable at first about publishing it to the blog. el said that’s a natural response for a guardian, born of an outdated need to stay hidden. I pretty much agree with him.
Although we’ve been presenting, writing and publishing about being multiple for nearly a decade, it’s one thing to write about ourselves and quite another to share the drama of bringing an alter in from the cold as it’s happening. Still, if people are ever going to understand what it’s like to be us, this could be a definitive experience.
As far as the nanowrimo exercise goes, this is still a work of fiction. Are you listening Oprah? Confession. As if you didn’t know, it’s not pure fiction. It’s more like one of those movies “Based on a true-life story.”
That’s us; we’re a true-life story. The small differences between this piece of writing and our literal history are insignificant.
I’m reassured to know you mean no intentional harm India. And thanks for your offer to block me from ops if I were thinking about cutting. Yes it’s an addiction. No, I don’t expect it will actually ever happen again.
I know you mean well to offer taking ops but it feels wrong. If there is one thing I can’t stand it’s not being in control of the body in the face of eminent, real, possible, perceived or imagined danger. That’s my job, my reason for being.
In the beginning it was simple. Lillie handled outside stuff. el maintained our cognitive abilities. Baby stayed inside. I guarded and protected all of them.
Now we know it worked only because unknown to us lots of others took on the burden of the bad stuff. One of my main jobs was protecting us from knowing that, but ironically I didn’t consciously know that.
Faced with your re-emergance now I can’t help but wonder what you did to keep us safe. I hope you’ll soon trust me enough to tell me. Even if you never do, whatever it was, thank you.
Right now you’re a puzzle India. A piece of math to bridge a gap in the equation of Q. Why India? Or are you just hiding your real name, hedging your bets until you’re sure of us. Trust me, we’re not so bad.
Things will get better between Eyvonne and I. Relationships have their ebb and flow. Don’t withdraw from Eyvonne, she needs us now as much as we need her.There’s been a massive amount of stress on us, good and bad, lately. It isn’t always this chaotic. Trust me, it’s been worse before. Our money problems will resolve. Our tooth will heal. I’ll be happier. So will you.
I wonder what Shadow calls you.
© 2004 M. S. Eliot
For anyone out there reading this who doesn’t already know, we’ve called our 1954 ½ ton Chevy pickup “Indy” since Owl and Thunder dubbed it “Indiana Truck” years ago. Every time we drove it back then we faced a ‘road of doom’ fraught with probable breakdowns.
It still has the original six-volt electrical system. The windshield wipers are driven by a vacuum system that works off the engine. When you go uphill, the wipers stop, frozen on the windshield where they were when you stepped on the gas. The heater spit out tepid air and the defroster never really worked unless you consider clouding up the windshield working. All winter the boys sat on the edge of the seat paper towels in hand ready to wipe the windshield. When they complained because Indy has no radio I’d say “This is 1954, sing!”
We sang a lot. Do you remember that India? Were you lurking around back then?
I can’t help wondering about your name. Most of us Qs have names that illustrate our job or contain a set of similar sounds.
“Trekker” is so named because his job essentially involved watching Star Trek when the emotional strife in Lillie’s first marriage got too high. When he surfaced into the Q he thought Start Trek was the actual outside reality. He was really disappointed he would never meet Talosians, Ferengis or Klingons. I pointed out they’re based on particular types of people.
“Trust me you know some,” I said.
On the other hand Trekker was relieved to know he’d never have to battle Gorns or stay on the alert for Kelvans.
Keeper’s name also derives his job. He oversaw a group of little ones who broke from his care to rampage through the system for a while. That was a wildly unpredictable time. Some of it was fun. It was always a riot taking Owl and Thunder sledding, to a movie, or an amusement park. It’s even more fun if you actually experience that excitement because you’re physically sharing ops with a l’ilone.
I like to let l’ilones sit on my lap and steer when I’m driving country roads, just like I did on farm roads when Owl and Thunder were little. By the time they could reach the gas and brake they already knew how to drive.
But back to names.
Shadow’s name also reveals his job. He maintains he knows EVERYTHING any Q knows, every hidden memory of abuse, every skill (knowledge is not application or experience), everything. He is after all el’s shadow. You most definitely are not highly linked to el India. No more or less than I’m linked to him anyway. Which is why your boast to Eyvonne that you knew everything any of us knows rang sour. I knew it wasn’t true. If you were worried about prompting mistrust, that was a bad topic to boast about.
I’m glad you clarified the issue. Most alters coming into the Q after years of hiding get up to speed rather quickly by tapping system resources. Very few however seem to be able to apply their new knowledge to actually accomplishing a complex activity without some practice. When Trekker was first learning to drive one of us who already knows how shared ops with him, kind of a Q driver education program. It’s like the difference between watching a video about riding a horse and actually riding one. There have been a few notable exceptions to the rule.
Ian for instance rode our horses the first time with no help, no instruction at all from anyone inside or out. He remembered it from his last life, or so he claims. He rides in a very distinctive way, confusing all but the most willing mount trained either English or Western style with signals they don’t know.
Our horse Chia quickly picked it up. He and Ian made a rare team. Ian’s style uses lots of leg prompts and very little rein. A bit isn’t required. In fact he sometimes used no reins at all, just Chia’s mane. They would whip through a line of aspen trees like barrel racers, Chia bending in tight circles, Ian’s leg almost touching tree trunks. You can’t learn how to do that from tapping system resources. Your body needs to ‘know’ how to move to make it happen.
When you were driving Thunder’s car I thought about Ian riding horseback. I knew then you’d either been around a long, long time and had had your times of stealing ops, or you were remembering something from a former lifetime. Like maybe you were a racecar driver? Then I noted your driving style is my driving style. And of course you look like me. So I guess I expected your name to somehow link us. India just doesn’t do it.
Many Qs names have ‘el’ in them. el is the most obvious example since it’s his entire name. He chose it as he cut Baby’s hair, naming himself after the poet T.S. Eliot. I quickly assumed a name in honor of another poet, Shelley. Back then I felt competitive with him. I couldn’t quite see the need of another male in the system. But I accepted him because he’s such a cool guy. We had a lot of fun as kids together. Being multiple means you never lack for playmates or company.
You might find it odd we chose poets as our heroes. But remember our mother read to us all the time. Words were everything to us, poetry the rhythm of our escape.
Another group of Qs has the sound ‘ie’ in their name; like Baby, Lillie, Jamie Lee. Lillie kind of spans those two groups. A third name set contains the sound ‘an or en’ like Ian, ‘rion, Gwen. Even if it doesn’t sound similar to you, it does to us. We could never get phoenics in school. We still don’t get it even though today’s it’s spelled phonics. What does ‘oe’ sound like anyway?
Owl is auditorially dyslexic. It has a subtle effect on his speech. He insists on putting an ‘n’ in the word couch. He says ‘counch.’ I think he comes by it naturally, I still say ‘prolly’ instead of probably. It’s what I hear. None of us Qs were much good at helping the boys with elementary school phonics homework.
But we were talking about our names.
There are Qs who go by numbers, like an alter spawned by Trekker who calls himself One. Ian had a baby alter who said his name was Ian Two, but later we found out he was really saying “I’m Iantoo.”
A long time ago a little one of ‘rion’s went by Twelve. Twelve was as close to that angry alter Dr. Dwon warned us about as any of us. It solved a lot of problems when they integrated.
Twelve is a definitive number for us. Shadow says so, therefore it is. He claims there won’t be more than 12 of us active at any given period of time. It was intended to be reassuring to me because I was scared back then there would eventually be so many Qs we’d focus inside and lose track of outside.
But I’ve gotten over that fear. Who’s counting. We’re fine. We have all the tools we need to get us through whatever you newbies throw at us. If you perceive that as a warning so be it, we’re dialoguing here.
Except I was going to say dancing, not dialoguing. That made me flashback to the first dream Taya sent me. Which annoyed me for some reason so I typed dialoguing instead of dancing. I think you two are getting to me. There must be some kind of mindtouch because it wasn’t like I just recalled it. I relived the entire freaking dream.
I’m sure later when I’ve had time to think about what just happened I’ll see meaning in it that I am missing at this moment.
Since I can’t quite grasp whatever message was intended there, I’ll go back to Q names. Welcome to another dissociative moment.
Star’s name didn’t seem to fit anywhere in any Q name pattern unless you follow our spectacular backward circular Q logic. Star = light. She was blind.
So. All that said, I still wonder where India fits. How ‘bout it? Fess up or I’ll start calling you Ink. Or Ghandi. And for that matter, how about Taya? What does her name mean? How do you guys fit into the system?
A Google search for Taya revealed the word is related to indigenous people in Venuzuela. It is part of a ‘welcome’ phrase of another indigenous group, the name of an ancient Tell in Iraq, a surname in Japanese and Arabic languages and a Star Trek Deep Space Nine character who was actually a hologram. Taya is also the name of an apparently infamous porn star, a running shoe and a line of jewelry. None of these connections rang any bells for us. I’m sure it means something to you, India and Taya. Maybe in time the rest of us Qs will understand too.
I guess I haven’t lost my obsession for mapping and charting the Q after all. Somehow understanding how we’re interlinked is important to me. It’s like a puzzle I’m bound to solve. But there isn’t any real solution. Not one anyway. It’s kind of like physics. You know when they get to the part of a theory that makes no sense and you have to leap over a bunch of mathmatics to make the equation balance.
Cartoonist Gary Larson summed it up nicely. He drew two physicists at a blackboard covered with numbers. One is saying to the other “And then a miracle happens.”
Someday I’ll be able to balance the equation, but I don’t think the miracle part will go away. Our life is one long miracle.
Anyway I’m very glad you wrote to me India. Even though it makes me uneasy that your name and Taya’s don’t seem to fit into the Q pattern. I won’t understand any sooner if we can’t talk at all. This is an ingenious solution to our unique problem.
I wasn’t quite sure about our initial conversations becoming part of this book. I was even less comfortable at first about publishing it to the blog. el said that’s a natural response for a guardian, born of an outdated need to stay hidden. I pretty much agree with him.
Although we’ve been presenting, writing and publishing about being multiple for nearly a decade, it’s one thing to write about ourselves and quite another to share the drama of bringing an alter in from the cold as it’s happening. Still, if people are ever going to understand what it’s like to be us, this could be a definitive experience.
As far as the nanowrimo exercise goes, this is still a work of fiction. Are you listening Oprah? Confession. As if you didn’t know, it’s not pure fiction. It’s more like one of those movies “Based on a true-life story.”
That’s us; we’re a true-life story. The small differences between this piece of writing and our literal history are insignificant.
I’m reassured to know you mean no intentional harm India. And thanks for your offer to block me from ops if I were thinking about cutting. Yes it’s an addiction. No, I don’t expect it will actually ever happen again.
I know you mean well to offer taking ops but it feels wrong. If there is one thing I can’t stand it’s not being in control of the body in the face of eminent, real, possible, perceived or imagined danger. That’s my job, my reason for being.
In the beginning it was simple. Lillie handled outside stuff. el maintained our cognitive abilities. Baby stayed inside. I guarded and protected all of them.
Now we know it worked only because unknown to us lots of others took on the burden of the bad stuff. One of my main jobs was protecting us from knowing that, but ironically I didn’t consciously know that.
Faced with your re-emergance now I can’t help but wonder what you did to keep us safe. I hope you’ll soon trust me enough to tell me. Even if you never do, whatever it was, thank you.
Right now you’re a puzzle India. A piece of math to bridge a gap in the equation of Q. Why India? Or are you just hiding your real name, hedging your bets until you’re sure of us. Trust me, we’re not so bad.
Things will get better between Eyvonne and I. Relationships have their ebb and flow. Don’t withdraw from Eyvonne, she needs us now as much as we need her.There’s been a massive amount of stress on us, good and bad, lately. It isn’t always this chaotic. Trust me, it’s been worse before. Our money problems will resolve. Our tooth will heal. I’ll be happier. So will you.
I wonder what Shadow calls you.
© 2004 M. S. Eliot
Light = Sanity
I wrote this before I found India’s file. I wanted to post his file first. I’ll be posting my response later today.
Just for the record, this post puts us only about 1,500 words from completing the 50,000 needed to be a nanowrimo winner. nanowrimo ends tomorrow. I have a feeling we’ll be going over the limit.
We’re thinking about keeping up the blog, at least for a while. If anyone out there is reading this and getting anything positive from it we’d be more inclined to keep it up. Let us know.
Sometimes the only thing that saves our sanity is light. Our love affair with light started when we were very young. Lillie and el and I can just sit and watch clouds and cloud shadows too, the way they race across fields and slide over the mountains.
Sunsets and sunrises fascinate us too. We have prisms hung in all our windows to invite the light inside. Sunrise plays rainbows all around our bedroom. We’ll drive 20 miles to watch the sun set from the highest mountain around. You can see nine mountain ranges from there.
Light is part of the rhythm of our life. It’s always on the edge of our awareness until it becomes so intense it demands full attention.
The other people who seem to grasp our fascination are artists and photographers. But for them it’s an applied science. For us it’s more.
We count the day’s passage through the slant of light on a stand of aspen trees. We see afternoon in the glint on our pond. It’s our anchor. We breathe it. We measure season and time of day by the intensity and slant of light. We see spring coming through subtle changes in thin winter sunlight long before first blossoms. Summer dawn is slow and sultry through a full array of leaves.
A camera captures reality, not what our heart sees. We replay inside mid-day, sunsets, and storms of fragile duration and exceptional beauty. Inside the light is always exceptional. Inside we always walk in beauty.
When we were hospitalized a decade ago el and I would sit cross-legged on the wide windowsills looking out. We watched the world go by. We lost ourselves in the play of light on distant mountains, birds on the wing. We meditated.
Sometimes we simply went inside. We took the light with us as we’d learned to in childhood. Sometimes we sat like that for hours.
Once when we did there was a psychiatrist and a nurse standing in our doorway when we stretched and jumped down from the sill.
“What were you doing?” the doctor asked.
It was dark outside. We’d been on the windowsill for at least a couple of hours.
“Meditating,” I said.
“How do you do that? I’ve always wanted to learn,” he said.
I shrugged. “You just focus down until it feels right.” I figured he wouldn’t get it if I told him to take the light inside. And I didn’t want to explain the difference between our inside world and the meditative experience. Sometimes it’s pretty subtle.
Owl says writers and artists who are multiple and have their own inner worlds like we do have it easier than those who don’t. He’s right. We have a rich inner construct to play in, to draw on for images and characters.
One of the first novels I wrote stemmed from a vision we’d had in childhood. It was an easy step from that into the realm of sci-fi. I even named the hero after myself. It was a classic Q in-joke.
When we read we hear characters speak, we see their world as if we were watching a movie. When we were younger the books we loved the most stayed with us. We could ‘read’ them inside over and over, seeing every page as we turned it. We kept them in el’s library. When bad things were happening outside we could retreat to the center of our world and read. We could pull information from those pages to use outside.
Sometimes I can still do it. I pull a book off a shelf in el’s library find the page with what I want to know. Or if someone else is reading they can share a book with others. It helped us get through school. Back then we could pull a textbook off the shelf or our notes from a class and see them, page by page, word for word. We could call up an image of something a teacher had written on the blackboard weeks earlier. It got us through a lot of exams. It’s not as easy to do now. Sometimes I think we’ve just grown rusty at it because we don’t do it as often.
Another little trick I had was staring at teachers during tests. If I focused on the teacher the answers were there. I just knew them. It freaked out one of our history teachers in high school. I sat in the front row and focused on him during every test. He was sure I was cheating in some way because I got hundreds on every pop quiz and test for a whole semester. He watched me so closely he nabbed me switching with el.
“Are you ambidextrous?” he asked.
“Ambiwho?” I was sweating. I knew the word and I knew what it meant. He’d seen me writing with my left hand then as el took ops he passed the pen to his right hand.
Sometimes I wonder if other multiples do these sorts of things. We met a few over the years online. But most were pretty needy when we met them. They wanted to talk about how their teenage alters acted out and how did other people handle that? Please. Help.
I long to find other multiples who are functioning and productive. Support groups are all well and good, except we find ourselves cast in a supportive role more often than not. It’s not that we don’t want to help. But we’re not therapists.
We are good listeners though. We elicit confidences all the time. We care about people and they know it. We believe everyone has a story to tell, and every story is important.
That belief carried us far as reporters. It gave us the tenacity needed to interview octogenarians who were nearly blind and deaf, learning what the world was like when they were young, how things had changed so very much but was still the same. People lived and laughed and loved when the only transportation was horse-drawn.
Sometimes the elder I was interviewing would grow quiet and we’d sit there watching the light change, time passing in companionable silence.
If I waited long enough they’d start talking again. Sometimes they talked all afternoon before they were done. These old, old people were happy someone wanted to hear their stories. They didn’t care that I was writing for the Sunday edition, or that thousands of people would read my words. They only cared that I listened.
It’s what we all want, someone to listen. Listening is caring. Caring expresses love. If no one listens you feel abandoned. I once had a therapist tell me I had abandonment issues.
“But I was never abandoned,” I argued. I thought abandonment meant leaving a baby on a doorstep or something. I was amazed to learn neglect and abuse is a form of abandonment.
I know it consciously just like I know I have trust issues. If there is a Q who doesn’t they haven’t come in from hiding yet. On some level I know whatever affects one of us affects all of us.
No Q came through childhood unscathed. On the other hand we are who we are because of what happened. I don’t always like what’s going on in our life, but I do like being who we are. I know you English teachers out there are shaking your heads at the word who in the previous sentence. My grammar checker says the right word is ‘whom’. But it doesn’t sound right. It sounds alien. So I’ll stick with what’s familiar. After all this is our story.
Oprah are you still listening? I thought so. Good. Now, do you see the way the light is illuminating the top of the mountain? Doesn’t that lift your heart?
© 2004 M. S. Eliot
Just for the record, this post puts us only about 1,500 words from completing the 50,000 needed to be a nanowrimo winner. nanowrimo ends tomorrow. I have a feeling we’ll be going over the limit.
We’re thinking about keeping up the blog, at least for a while. If anyone out there is reading this and getting anything positive from it we’d be more inclined to keep it up. Let us know.
Sometimes the only thing that saves our sanity is light. Our love affair with light started when we were very young. Lillie and el and I can just sit and watch clouds and cloud shadows too, the way they race across fields and slide over the mountains.
Sunsets and sunrises fascinate us too. We have prisms hung in all our windows to invite the light inside. Sunrise plays rainbows all around our bedroom. We’ll drive 20 miles to watch the sun set from the highest mountain around. You can see nine mountain ranges from there.
Light is part of the rhythm of our life. It’s always on the edge of our awareness until it becomes so intense it demands full attention.
The other people who seem to grasp our fascination are artists and photographers. But for them it’s an applied science. For us it’s more.
We count the day’s passage through the slant of light on a stand of aspen trees. We see afternoon in the glint on our pond. It’s our anchor. We breathe it. We measure season and time of day by the intensity and slant of light. We see spring coming through subtle changes in thin winter sunlight long before first blossoms. Summer dawn is slow and sultry through a full array of leaves.
A camera captures reality, not what our heart sees. We replay inside mid-day, sunsets, and storms of fragile duration and exceptional beauty. Inside the light is always exceptional. Inside we always walk in beauty.
When we were hospitalized a decade ago el and I would sit cross-legged on the wide windowsills looking out. We watched the world go by. We lost ourselves in the play of light on distant mountains, birds on the wing. We meditated.
Sometimes we simply went inside. We took the light with us as we’d learned to in childhood. Sometimes we sat like that for hours.
Once when we did there was a psychiatrist and a nurse standing in our doorway when we stretched and jumped down from the sill.
“What were you doing?” the doctor asked.
It was dark outside. We’d been on the windowsill for at least a couple of hours.
“Meditating,” I said.
“How do you do that? I’ve always wanted to learn,” he said.
I shrugged. “You just focus down until it feels right.” I figured he wouldn’t get it if I told him to take the light inside. And I didn’t want to explain the difference between our inside world and the meditative experience. Sometimes it’s pretty subtle.
Owl says writers and artists who are multiple and have their own inner worlds like we do have it easier than those who don’t. He’s right. We have a rich inner construct to play in, to draw on for images and characters.
One of the first novels I wrote stemmed from a vision we’d had in childhood. It was an easy step from that into the realm of sci-fi. I even named the hero after myself. It was a classic Q in-joke.
When we read we hear characters speak, we see their world as if we were watching a movie. When we were younger the books we loved the most stayed with us. We could ‘read’ them inside over and over, seeing every page as we turned it. We kept them in el’s library. When bad things were happening outside we could retreat to the center of our world and read. We could pull information from those pages to use outside.
Sometimes I can still do it. I pull a book off a shelf in el’s library find the page with what I want to know. Or if someone else is reading they can share a book with others. It helped us get through school. Back then we could pull a textbook off the shelf or our notes from a class and see them, page by page, word for word. We could call up an image of something a teacher had written on the blackboard weeks earlier. It got us through a lot of exams. It’s not as easy to do now. Sometimes I think we’ve just grown rusty at it because we don’t do it as often.
Another little trick I had was staring at teachers during tests. If I focused on the teacher the answers were there. I just knew them. It freaked out one of our history teachers in high school. I sat in the front row and focused on him during every test. He was sure I was cheating in some way because I got hundreds on every pop quiz and test for a whole semester. He watched me so closely he nabbed me switching with el.
“Are you ambidextrous?” he asked.
“Ambiwho?” I was sweating. I knew the word and I knew what it meant. He’d seen me writing with my left hand then as el took ops he passed the pen to his right hand.
Sometimes I wonder if other multiples do these sorts of things. We met a few over the years online. But most were pretty needy when we met them. They wanted to talk about how their teenage alters acted out and how did other people handle that? Please. Help.
I long to find other multiples who are functioning and productive. Support groups are all well and good, except we find ourselves cast in a supportive role more often than not. It’s not that we don’t want to help. But we’re not therapists.
We are good listeners though. We elicit confidences all the time. We care about people and they know it. We believe everyone has a story to tell, and every story is important.
That belief carried us far as reporters. It gave us the tenacity needed to interview octogenarians who were nearly blind and deaf, learning what the world was like when they were young, how things had changed so very much but was still the same. People lived and laughed and loved when the only transportation was horse-drawn.
Sometimes the elder I was interviewing would grow quiet and we’d sit there watching the light change, time passing in companionable silence.
If I waited long enough they’d start talking again. Sometimes they talked all afternoon before they were done. These old, old people were happy someone wanted to hear their stories. They didn’t care that I was writing for the Sunday edition, or that thousands of people would read my words. They only cared that I listened.
It’s what we all want, someone to listen. Listening is caring. Caring expresses love. If no one listens you feel abandoned. I once had a therapist tell me I had abandonment issues.
“But I was never abandoned,” I argued. I thought abandonment meant leaving a baby on a doorstep or something. I was amazed to learn neglect and abuse is a form of abandonment.
I know it consciously just like I know I have trust issues. If there is a Q who doesn’t they haven’t come in from hiding yet. On some level I know whatever affects one of us affects all of us.
No Q came through childhood unscathed. On the other hand we are who we are because of what happened. I don’t always like what’s going on in our life, but I do like being who we are. I know you English teachers out there are shaking your heads at the word who in the previous sentence. My grammar checker says the right word is ‘whom’. But it doesn’t sound right. It sounds alien. So I’ll stick with what’s familiar. After all this is our story.
Oprah are you still listening? I thought so. Good. Now, do you see the way the light is illuminating the top of the mountain? Doesn’t that lift your heart?
© 2004 M. S. Eliot
