Sorry I haven’t posted in awhile. I didn’t even bother with the mood tracker last week and I haven’t started one for this week yet either.

Since I have run out of meds (two weeks ago?) I have noticed that the irritability in me is climbing pretty damn high. I’ve been feeling keenly aware and sensitive of my personal boundaries as of late too. It’s annoying to continuously find yourself explaining common decency and respecting boundaries to grown adults who should fucking know and understand this already. My youngest son, Little Bear, has greater respect for my boundaries than the adults do. There is something seriously flawed in that. And I don’t know how to reconcile or even address it. Not without blowing up anyway.

I don’t like blowing up. I don’t like that there is even a part of me that does it. I often don’t like to acknowledge this side of me exists. Yet, any time I’m upset and wish to keep it to myself that’s when Mom corners me and confronts me and expects me to talk about it. I don’t get to simply say, “I don’t want to talk about it,” and walk away. At that point she won’t drop it. And of course, she can’t be discreet or discrete about it either. It always has to be in front of a bunch of people. I fucking hate that.

It doesn’t matter that I’ve come to the conclusion that what she’s doing is similar to that of minding the pressure cooker. If the pot is building up too much pressure, you manipulate the weight on the value to release some of the steam to quickly bring it down. To do this with a person involves a degree of manipulation and her need to do it says to me that she doesn’t trust me to manage myself. It’s insulting and degrading.

I seriously despise feeling my autonomy being stripped away from me.

I confronted Dad yesterday about how they treat each set of kids differently. My kids get treated one way, my brother’s kids are treated a different way, and both my sisters’ kids are treated differently. Dad tried to deny it, but cut himself off and said that he doesn’t really pay much attention to what Mom does.

My children, even as visitors/guests in their house, have never been permitted to leave even so much as a used tissue laying around. They have always demanded that my kids clean up after themselves. Yet this weekend I watched my sister come for a visit after coming back from Belgium and there her kids were leaving half-eaten food, empty paper plates and cups, and her oldest son surrounded himself with a mountain of used tissues on the coffee table while he tinkered on his laptop. Neither of our parents breathed a word about it. And who was stuck cleaning it up every time they walked through? ME.

My brother’s kids come to fucking visit and they leave the living room toys strewn all over the place downstairs, and fucking candy wrappers everywhere and who gets jumped on to clean it up after they leave? My son, Little Bear, when he didn’t even help make the fucking mess.

But when we visited, we were expected to clean up after ourselves and to make sure everything was picked up before we left.

But no, Dad still tried to tell me it was because we live there and all the kids are treated the same before he cut himself off. This has been a line of shit they’ve fed me for as long as I can remember – before any of us had kids. We have never been treated the same even though Dad preaches how important it is to do so.

And then Dad will sit there and bitch about how Piggie never visits and how they never see her daughter. First off, they live less than 15 minutes away. Nothing says you can’t get off your ass to go visit them if you want to see them so damn bad. Honestly, I have no idea why she doesn’t visit other than SHE FUCKING WORKS ALL THE TIME. God forbid you make a serious effort to provide for your own family. And her daughter likes to keep herself just as busy. So taking everything into context, I don’t fucking blame them.

And now Dad started talking about how he wants as all to get together once a month for a family meal. So far no one has committed to it. Last time I lived here and he did that, I was the one expected to buy all the food – particularly the meat, when he wants 1 pound of meat per person – for that. This is the reason why he promised me this time around he wouldn’t charge me more than $300 a month for food even as he denied that this shit ever happened. Hell, it was this very thing that triggered the fight between Mom and I that caused her to declare I was suicidal and threatened to blue paper my ass if I didn’t get put on meds immediately. Which now that everything has blown over, was really kind of stupid considering that I was already on meds at the time. I don’t think anybody has any desire for a repeat of that shit. I don’t.

So in the end, when Mom came home from work – after she saw me in the store, made a beeline for me, and confronted me right there in front of all these people we don’t even fucking know about what I was so upset about – she apologized and admitted she was the one that ate all the fucking specialty M&Ms from the big bowl of candy I had bought for MY SON and his birthday. Someone else had picked out and ate all the fucking Smartees that he specifically requested (and I bought two big bags of them just for him and told everyone that) and left behind the wrappers all over the living room… particularly at the computer desk Dad set up for the kids visiting. The computer NONE of my children use because they all have their own computers upstairs. And yes, we know which kid it was – the same one that kept bugging Mom for her candy. As if the candy from the piñata and then raiding my son’s candy wasn’t enough.

On the surface, part of me says it shouldn’t be a big deal BUT the day I went shopping for cake, ice cream, soda, and that fucking candy I spent $133 dollars. This isn’t counting the presents or the stuff for the piñata that I purchased at a different time. Most of the cost was in that fucking candy. Halloween, Christmas, Easter, and Valentine’s Day are THE WORST times of the year to be buying candy. I wasn’t able to find a variety bag in WalMart that day for less than $10 and I had three extra kids I didn’t even know were going to be there and budget for to consider. That’s a lot of fucking money to be treating like public property and I’m getting really damn tired of it.

And this bullshit of telling me, “Well you left it downstairs so we thought it was fair game,” after I’ve been told I can’t keep food upstairs is a crock of shit too. So fuck it. I bagged up all that candy and stuffed it in the mini fridge where I keep my coffee creamer because it’s fucking hot enough up here to melt it. It’s bullshit. All fucking bullshit when my brother lived here they were allowed to keep food and eat up there as much as they wanted. I know for a fact this was the case because Dad’s number one pet peeve was that my brother’s wife would bring down their dirty dishes right after he finished washing dishes. Every. Time. I’ve watched her fucking do it to him more than once. So if they weren’t allowed to have food up there, then why were they bringing down dirty dishes from up there.

Dad keeps saying, “What’s good for the goose is good for the gander,” all the time but whatever reason this has never applied to me. Not while growing up and not now.

I will say in Dad’s defense that when it came to the food rule that he told Mom that wasn’t right and he said it before we moved in. This didn’t stop Mom from saying it to me more than once since then.

I tried to complain about all this to Mom a month ago, and she started in with her, “As long as you live in this house your father will,” and I just cut her off right there. I told her this isn’t about Dad because he isn’t the one taking over on me and treating me like I’m still 5-years-old. She just said, “Oh,” and dropped it.

I can’t help but feel like the reason Mom does all this is because she is convinced there is something wrong with me. Yes, there is. I’ve been diagnosed. But she is the one that pushed for Tuxedo Cat to be screened for Autism specifically and she had taken me in to be screened multiple times when I was little. It generates the concern that I may be opening a Pandora’s Box of some kind by getting a neuropsych eval.

I had already decided that if they do an IQ test of any kind that I won’t be disclosing the results. I’ve already seen how Dad changed the way he treated my youngest brother once he knew the actual overall score. I have no desire of experiencing a revival of that mess aimed at me. Am I being selfish here? You fucking bet. I call it survival mode.

Having said all that, I feel it would be prudent of me to make it clear to the staff at the hospital that the neuropsych eval results/report be sealed from any and all family members. It’s one thing for them to know the diagnoses, but they don’t need to know all the nitty-gritty details in that record.

It was bad enough when I received the first set of court documents in the mail and Mom called me downstairs after she saw me take it up to my room and demand that I let her read it. I blew up on her. It pissed me off to feel like I can’t fucking comprehend what the hell I’m reading – not to mention denied privacy. And no, I didn’t let her read it. Fuck that noise. Yes, it pissed her off that I wouldn’t let her look at it but I have no apologies or regrets about it.

Not only am I NOT 5-years-old, but I’ve also had a lawyer tell me that I have a very good understanding of the law for someone that has never been to law school. So no, I don’t need my mommy to read these court papers for me and if I have a question about any of it, I’m talking to a lawyer who went to school for this, passed a rigorous exam, and does this shit for a living. The LAST thing I need is legal advice from my parents. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve proven to them that isn’t how something is worded in the law or how something fucking works.

I’m tired and angry, and tired of being angry. I’m tired of feeling as though my authentic self is not permitted somehow. I spent my entire childhood telling myself it would be better when I’m older and I just needed to hang on. Well, it never got better. My speech and expression is still being policed, and I’m still being micromanaged. I don’t know how to change this.

So yeah, therapy sucked today since it felt unproductive as hell. All I did was rant about this and how I feel like I have no direction and purpose of my own. The boys are doing better at the moment, and thus I don’t need to juggle anywhere near as much as I’m used to juggling in my head. So I don’t even have that to focus on.

I have multiple skill sets and I’m not really using any of them. I know how to make jewelry and I’ve done beadwork but I do nothing with it. I know how to make things with needlepoint. Do nothing with that either. I can write and I don’t even freelance with that. I have some rudimentary understanding of code and code assembly but you do see me taking that any further. Music? Nothing but share and discuss other people’s work. Doesn’t matter that I can read and write music and played the flute and oboe at one point in my life. I have an understanding of food production and nutrition and do nothing with that as well now. I’ve taken business courses too.

Any one of these could be a path to success yet I don’t embark on the journey. All of it is just knowledge wasting away, collecting dust. And for what?

Why do I hold myself back? I know that I am. I can see that I am. I just don’t understand why. It does me zero good. Why can’t I find the courage to live the life I want to live and just do the things I want to do instead of frittering away with it all like an aimless hobby?

All I hear in my head is a voice saying it’s a waste of time and effort, but I don’t know where it’s coming from. It’s hard to shake a voice like that. How do you even address something like that? Would knowing where it’s coming from make it any easier to overcome?

I don’t fucking know. But I’m tired of sitting around, waiting to be needed again just so I can be useful. Honestly, being needed isn’t something I lack very often. That isn’t my problem. What my problem is that I feel like I’m not wanted unless I am needed and during the rare downtimes I feel unproductive and aimless as fuck. And for whatever reason, whatever it is that I would like to do during this downtime – like pursue or explore a dream – feels like a total waste of time. Maybe it’s because I feel like no one needs me to do any of these things?

But what if I need me to do these things? Is that a good enough reason for any of it? Or is it really just a waste of time and effort? Must everything I do be only to serve others? Because they need me? It’s a lonely and isolating way to live.

I feel like I never learned how to fly.

My brain wants to do all the things, but I feel frozen in place. Just stuck, like I’m not permitted to do any of it – much less dream of it.

And I resent it. I resent all of it. It’s an ugly hole to find yourself in. And I don’t like it.

I’ve been beating my head against this wall for as long as I can remember. I need to change that. Somehow.