Follow up on the neighbor’s kid last night:
Yes she snuck out last night to knock on my door BUT she told her mom about it first thing in the morning so she was waiting for me when I knocked on their door. So instead of focusing on the girl’s behavior I focused on the issue that brought her to my door and found out the root of the problem.
Her daughter was worried the noise would wake her mother up and trigger her PTSD and she is prone to black rages. So yes while her mother said that yes we can get loud, she didn’t hear anything last night. Far as she was concerned everything is cool. For now.
Suddenly everything made sense. This explained why this kid looked like she was in crisis when I opened the door because she was in crisis. She was worried that if her mother was triggered she would have to deal with some serious shit that she didn’t want or need to deal with. I get it. I also understand the testy confrontational behavior she switched to when she started speaking to me. I imagine this kid has tried in the past to be a peacekeeper and has been fucked over in a serious way. She has probably been caught in the crossfire more than once. I’ve been there and I feel her pain. It sucks.
Her mother saying everything is cool doesn’t solve our problem. Not one bit. Not for me and not for her daughter. Not by a long shot.
And I told her that I don’t try to be loud. I didn’t even bother trying to explain that I have a hearing impairment. At the time I didn’t think of it but in retrospect I think it would have come across as a weak excuse. I explained to her that the walking around last night was my Autistic son’s nightly ritual pacing. This isn’t something I can just magically make stop. I have already learned the hard way that by making him tired by wearing him out during the day makes him pace more before he goes to sleep. I do try to explain to him that he needs to use “quiet feet” but like I said in my previous post, this is an old house and he doesn’t get it. I also expressed my concern (again) about Little Bear, his messed up sleep cycle, and what will happen if he gets woken up before he’s ready.
She still shares my concerns but she doesn’t seem to think highly of the mental health hospital we go to (that’s the second person now that has worked in mental health that has said this to me about that place) and thinks he would be better served by seeing a neuropsychologist somewhere else. This hospital we go to doesn’t have one for children truth be told. Currently we are on the wait list for a neuropsych eval but she insists that this isn’t the same thing? Makes no sense to me because the last time I checked, only a neuropsychologist can do a neuropsych eval.
She also told me something I already knew: our school district SUCKS and he would be best served by going to the next town over. I’ve been trying to find an apartment over there for awhile now. As soon as I do I’m out of here.
The other thing I found out is she will now be the one in charge of fixing up the stuff in this building. Hoping this means I will have running water in my back bathroom again and that my hallway bathroom and kitchen sink won’t leak anymore very soon. We’ll see. Not really holding my breath. All this shit has been broken for almost 3 years now. The only hang up I have about this is it appears she is pals with the landlady.
And as of late the landlady seems to be coming up with whatever ridiculous excuse she can think of to come into my apartment – which by state law she can’t do without a 24 hour notice. Lately it’s been about my stupid window fan. She keeps asking me if she can inspect it. I humored her the first time only and after that I remind her that she has inspected it already. Bear in mind this is the same lady that conducted a surprise inspection of my home, while I wasn’t there, without notice and then wrote up a ridiculous letter about my home and slapped the landlord’s name on it. Her biggest beef? That I smoke inside when the landlord, whom I signed the lease with, gave me the greenlight to smoke inside. I call her landlady for a lack of a better word but really she is just the wife of my landlord’s business partner. My landlord is the actual owner of the building according to my new neighbor. So… I have no idea what the hell this lady is doing around here all the time other than stressing me out every day.
But that’s just this morning.
I just had a really deep, hard talk with my parents tonight. Mostly about my level of functioning. It started out with my mother getting on my case about my loss of motivation again. Instead of blowing her off, this time I sat down with her and started really explaining to her the symptoms I’ve had and still have. In the process a bunch of things really hit home and they hit hard. These things have been floating around in my head privately for awhile now but it seems my parents have had the same thoughts and have been talking about it with each other for quite some time too.
I have mixed feelings about it and I probably always will but in the long run I think it will be best if the boys and I move back with them. Especially if I follow through with the divorce – which I ought to do. This bullshit, with my husband and my landlord, ultimately needs to end. And my father and I agreed that in order for this to work we will need to work on good boundaries. We’ll see. It will be awhile – at least a month at best because Dad needs to get some work done on the rooms upstairs but we can’t live at that apartment anymore.
The ceiling has leaked every time it rains since the day we have moved in (going on 4 years ago now) and I have just discovered that Scholar Owl’s mattress is molded because of it. He has never said a word this whole time, but I found that is the source of the smell in his room. -_- He’s lucky he didn’t get deathly ill from it! These people won’t fix the roof, the plumbing, or anything. And then just last week the landlady wanted to use my wi-fi for her security cameras outside. Nope. That shit is part of my $150 dollar a month phone package, you can’t use it. And now the thing with the neighbor’s daughter. Sure the mother says everything is cool but still. It’s even more unsettling to feel like the new neighbor is friends with the landlady. It may be just the paranoia talking here but none of this can be a good mix.
Part of me is really sad by all this because my spirit is very independent, but I can’t keep pretending that I’m just fine anymore. The truth is I’m a wreck that is struggling pretty damn hard way beyond the matter of motivation. Lately I feel like I’m doing good to keep appointments straight, never mind anything else. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. I’m angry all the time now. ALL THE TIME. Even here on my blog it seems like I can’t do anything but rant. I don’t think my parents fully understand just how much I feel like I’m drowning every day. In fact it is easier for me to get on here and rant about something than it is for me to admit that I am not functioning right now.
It’s weird though. I don’t identify as depressed. I don’t identify as manic either. But I can’t seem to keep my head straight. I struggle to fix basic meals for the boys. I struggle to get housework done. I honestly can’t not get ahead of the mess right now. My home is a complete disaster fuck right now. Like the mess monster waltzed in, convulsed in some kind of morbid seizure, vomited all over the place, contemplated suicide, but then decided to camp out here in permanent residence instead. The moment I make any head way, there the bugger is with its little “fuck you and giggle” packages. Never in my life would I believe that being so overwhelmed, dis-empowered, and exhausted would be normalized. But it has become just that. It’s a miracle that we make it to our appointments. And every day that I live there in that apartment I feel like these people are out to get me. Dad’s response? “Maybe they are.” Thanks… that’s really not helpful.
At least my mom understood and support my thoughts on why I feel it might be worth getting me screened for Autism. It seems like the more we understand my middle son and what Autism is, the more questions I have about me – about my childhood and everything. It’s just a lot on my plate right now. My sister, the BSN, on the other hand still seems to think that it’s not possible to be both Autistic and Bipolar at the same time – even though both disorders are genetically related. I know I have brought it up once before in my blog and I dismissed it back then. But damn… everything I know says I should be more functional than this. I need better solutions than a wave of a hand and a dismissal. I need real answers and I’m tired of feeling like I’m outside on the edge of life looking in just waiting for… something.
My mother also confronted me about my PTSD tonight. Not sure if “confronted” is the right word though. She asked me what caused it. I told her that I don’t know and that I have a therapist right now that WILL NOT talk to me about my past – like at all. I just know that my jaw on my left side has been dislocated and healed that way at some point but I have no memory of what happened. There is no medical record anywhere about it. No one that I know knows what happened either. My mother got this face and told me back when I lived in Texas I called her in the middle of the night all upset and barely coherent. She said I sounded pretty messed up and that I told her I wanted to come home and that I was trying to tell her what happened. She made it sound like she didn’t understand much of it, but her face told me otherwise. She did give one detail, a single phrase… “gang rape” … but I have no memory of this phone call at all. No memory of anything. I was 19 at the time and the part that sucked was my parents had no idea was I was in San Antonio at the time. My mother’s sisters were of no help to her either. Apparently their attitude to her was I brought this on myself. So my mom thinks whatever happened that night is what caused it.
What I do know is that years later after I came back home my doctor discovered that my jaw had healed out of place. As in something had happened to cause it to become dislocated and it wasn’t set back into place to make it heal correctly. Now in order for it to be corrected it will have to be broken and reset. Funny thing, I have no memory of that either. No idea why or how my jaw was dislocated. No idea why I have no medical records anywhere explaining what happened. I talked about this with my sister once and she said this isn’t uncommon for head injuries like that to have no memory BUT the part that always bugged me was that no one else in the family knew that it had happened either. With all the medical training my family has had I fully believe if I had been with family when it had happened, they would have taken me to the hospital. They would have remembered, even if I can’t. There is only one time in my life that I wasn’t surrounded by close family and friends that would do this for me. And this is when I lived in Texas… you can’t tell me this isn’t connected.
The other thing that’s been bugging me for awhile now is how I typically find it easier to open up to and talk with men then I do to women. And it’s usually women that trigger me more often than men. I’ve had more than one trauma in my life. None of them involve women. At least far as I know. But something about my mom – the undercurrent of the conversation or something I don’t know how to explain this – told me to bring this up. She gave me a dark look and for the first time in my life I came to know that my mom is one for theories. She had two possibilities. Either I had a female friend that set me up to get hurt or I went to get help from someone after the event only to get hurt more. She said I had been at a party and given the memory loss I would say the second would be more likely. For one, I didn’t really have any female friends back then. But if whatever it was I was telling my mother was real and not some messed up thing in my head at the time, I can honestly see me turning to a woman for help believing that surely another woman would help me. But she must not have, given how hard it is for me to trust other women in person. A part of me wonders if there is more to it than that though. Because when I say triggered I mean I actually feel threatened by women more often than I do by men. I perceive women to be more threatening more often. But I don’t remember any one event that would explain why. My conversation with my mother doesn’t explain that either. It just raises more questions really.
And I don’t know how to process any of this. I’m not sure if I ever will.
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