Pictures! Oh yeah, and a little more Blowing Smoke.
Whee! I have pictures! ^_^
This is an attempt at Prescott, Kimberly's pet bird in Fade to Darkness (and Tommy's rival). He's not quite right; his leg and talons should be a lot thicker, but it's awkward to try and fit a falcon's leg on a pheasant's body. The beak is right, though. Isn't he pretty?
http://pics.livejournal.com/tsukino_akume/pic/00004ckb/
And Tommy! I decided to try and see what Tommy would look like in Cruger's uniform, 'cause even I was having a hard time picturing it. He looks surprisingly good, for what I was able to use. Curger is freakishly buff. He makes Tommy look scrawny and malnurished.
http://pics.livejournal.com/tsukino_akume/pic/00005dzr/
And also, I was asked to explain my Blowing Smoke rant and just what it meant. I'm no longer responding to that certain person's e-mail, but I know that they're going to see this anyway because they're still reading my LiveJournal. So for anyone who's wondered, this is what spawned the reasons I might just *possibly* have to sometimes say I hate my parents. (*Feel* the sarcasm.)
This is what my parents have been doing to me since I was seventeen. The reasons that I have to hate them, the reasons I've struggled to love them and forgive them anyway.
I moved away to college in August, when I was still seventeen, because my birthday is in November. So technically, the major parts of my rant are started when I was seventeen.
A week before my eighteenth birthday, I came home and got a phone call from my father that my mother had tried to commit suicide.
My parents had been having problems. My mom had recently been diagnosed as bi-polar, while another therapist had suggested she may be schizophrenic. I will give her the fact that she was on seventeen different kinds of medication at the time, and severely depressed. She was also staying in the camping trailer in my parents driveway while my dad slept in the house. I found out later that she'd been planning the suicide for awhile.
Despite their difficulties, my dad noticed he hadn't seen her in awhile and went to check on her. He found her unconscious from overdose. Rather than take her to the hospital, he took experiences from his past as a former hippie and revived her, taking care of her, and got her to a semi-conscious state. At some point, my mother's sister called and found out what was going on. She panicked and insisted my father take her to a hospital. When he didn't, several days later my aunt called the local police, who came to pick up my mother and take her to the hospital. She was shortly committed to a mental ward for ... two weeks I think?
I received the call from my father *after* all this had happened. Now, don't get me wrong: I don't condone him trying to care for her himself. But I asked him why. His reasoning was that he knew what he was doing, as he'd been forced to do something similar for friends in the past, and he didn't want her to be taken in as a suicide case and put in a mental facility. I don't agree with his choice, but he *did* save her life, and I forgave him for trying to protect her.
Apparently, I was the only one who did. My mother's brother and two sisters immediately labeled him as 'the bad guy' and blamed the entire attempt and lack of immediate hospital care on him. The sister I was brought up with was actually from my mother's first marriage, and merely raised by my father. She stayed by our mother as well, and completely ignored my father. By 'siding' with my father, I became known as 'the bad child', and was immediately ostracized by the rest of my family.
I spent the next week after this nightmare began calling my father every night to make sure he was all right, tell him any updates I'd been able to get about her from someone else, and remind him that I love him, and I supported him. I have never forgotten the night that my father told me that I was the only reason he had not taken one of his rifles, gone out into the yard, and shot himself.
Keep in mind, again, I was just turning eighteen years old.
I tracked down my mother when she was released from the hospital and tried to convince her that despite what everyone was telling her, my dad hadn't tried to *hurt* her, but help. My uncle actually told me 'maybe he was just trying to get back in her good graces', promptly handed the phone back to my mother, and refused to speak to me anymore. By the time she picked up, I was so furious that I had actually started to hyperventilate. Needless to say, I didn't go to school that day. I also failed two classes that term.
It took several months of playing go-between, marriage councilor, and support for both of my parents to get my mother on the mend and my parents back together. I never would have gotten through it without my best friends. One of them in particular that I often refer to as my big brother, spent four hours on the phone with me (on his parents' phone bill) when I called him up in tears and told him my father called me the only reason he was alive. He refused to let me hang up until he had me laughing. That is reason that I love and adore him above all else, no matter how many times he may drive me crazy.
This time period was what I've often considered the first major betrayal of my life by my mother. Forced to council my own parents, I lost any connection I had to all my aunts and uncle on my mother's side of the family, and therefore the cousins I had once been friends with. My sister and I became farther apart than ever in what I often called 'his and hers kids' - she got mom, I got dad.
I'm aware that it's incredibly selfish to be offended and resentful of the fact that not only did she no longer value her own life, but she had that little value for *mine* and the day I was born. I don't care. To this day, every week before my birthday I remember that it's the anniversary of my mother's suicide attempt. I will remember that for the rest of my life.
When I graduated college, I had been offered a summer job before going for my bachelor's degree that would have been a fantastic way to make a great deal of money to put towards tuition. (In future reference, never trust a seemingly-solid get rich quick scheme.) It seemed like the greatest plan: I was set up for my bachelor's program, I had a position on a kitchen crew for the volunteer firefighters who take care of the summer wildfires in the northwest, and I had an apartment waiting for me when I got back.
My parents had been making plans to sell the house that I'd grown up in and move for a change of pace. I came to stay with them before my new job slightly earlier than I'd originally planned because I had offered to help my mom with readying things and spend some time with her. Within days after I showed up, she got into a fight with my father over some 'fixing up the house' items she'd gone out and bought on her own. He claimed he'd wanted to go shopping *together* - and she'd bought a couple things that they really didn't need and couldn't afford.
She packed her things and left him for three months.
About two weeks later, I went on my new job. I can honestly say it was the worst job I've ever done, the shortest time I've ever been with a company, the only job I've ever quit, and has given me an incredibly amount of respect for anyone involved with the volunteer firefighter crews. All of that is really a completely different story, so I'm not getting into it now.
But while I was gone, I spent a lot of time calling my dad to talk to him. We'd really bonded through my mother's suicide attempt, and then again through the time that she'd left him as I came home between fires. And one day, he told me he'd realized that things were peaceful without her around. That he was starting to like it that way, and he wasn't so sure he wanted her back.
At nineteen years old, I swallowed every little girl instinct in me that wanted my parents together and had fought to keep them that way, and told him he had to do what made *him* happy. Not me, not her, not anyone else. I told him that if she was making him miserable, he had to do what was best for himself.
When she finally returned, he told her he didn't want her back. He said later that she cried, screamed, ranted, even begged. But he refused; he couldn't handle living with her anymore. I supported his decision completely, even when she blamed a lot of it on *me* and rarely spoke to me for roughly two years or so. Like him, I found it was actually rather peaceful that way.
But then it was also during this time that my dad gave me the single, most useful peace of advice that I was ever given about dealing with my mother: 'She's crazy. And we just have to learn to live with that.' I've kept those words in my heart to this day.
After I quit my horrible job, I couldn't afford to return to southern California to go back to school, and therefore never got my bachelor's degree. Instead, my dad let me stay with him while he prepared the house to sell and filed for divorce. I was slightly less than useful, but I tried to do my best whenever I could.
Finally he sold the house, and I found myself homeless. I bounced between friends and co-workers for several months, until I had worn out my welcome in my last place to stay and found out my job was about to be outsourced. I went to my best friend, and together we drove back down to southern California in search of work, and hopefully a place to live. We spent about six months living out of my car. Eventually we got back on our feet, found an apartment with help from a friend, and finally seemed to be getting our lives back together after a lot *more* trauma.
Then I found out my dad was making friends with my mom again. He was lonely, and all his 'lady friends' as he liked to politely call them for my sake, weren't working out. I'm still not sure about the details, but they tentatively patched things up and made peace with each other.
When they told me he quit his job because he was moving back in with her, I wanted to scream.
After everything they put me through, after all the times I struggled to forgive her selfishness, her insanity, her guilt trips, and her problems that she kept forcing on me. After I lost most of my family and was just barely salvaging a relationship with my sister. I put aside *everything* that was still bothering me, because I wanted to practice forgiveness. Because I wanted to understand they are human, they make mistakes. My parents had done good things for me too; I couldn't focus on the bad.
But it's nagged at me. I tried keeping it in. I talked about it all to my best friends until they were ready to pull their hair out. I vented through my personal journal, my writing, even artwork. Last month, I tentatively made an effort, after feeling out the situation, to talk about it to my mother, to tell her that things about the past still bothered me. I even made weak jokes about needing a therapist to help me work through it - something I'd been forced to finally admit to my friends over a year earlier.
She told me she didn't like to think about that time anymore.
I've got a lot going on in my life right now. I'm on a now unofficial medical leave from work, because I suffered a worker's comp injury that was denied as worker's comp. My knees are constantly in pain, and I have trouble walking for even short periods of time. My re-evaluation isn't until May. I can't seem to get a doctor's note that will let me back into work, so I haven't had an income since December. I'm living off the good grace of my roommates, who also happen to be two of my best friends. Their good graces have reached the point of financial instability, and they were forced to tell me I needed to either get an income, or move out. I don't have any other close friends in this area that I could stay with. I've had three nervous breakdowns within the last six months. Two crying for over an hour; one involved locking myself in the bathroom all night, clutching a cup of tea and giggling while I beat my head against a wall.
Last week I had a bad conversation with my roommate and best friend who I love as my sister. It left me very upset, and I'd pretty much had the last straw. So I wrote a rant about everything in my life that I was feeling at that exact moment. That I resented the position my friends had put me into, I resented my parents for the issues I struggle to get past every day, that I hated being hungry and poor all the time, that my physical condition and mental state is seriously beginning to frighten me.
My mother read it and told me that hatred wasn't welcome in her house, and I needed mental help.
An effort to reach out to my remaining aunt and my siblings to inform them that I was no longer speaking to my parents and why, to allow them to understand the situation without feeling forced between anyone, my aunt replied to tell me that I shouldn't blame my problems on everyone else and that when I'm ready to reach out to *them*, my parents and sister are all ready to reach out to 'help' me. She also suggested mental help.
Neither my sister nor my father have made any attempts to talk to me, therefore I am no longer making any attempts to talk to them.
I have no idea if my older brother and my oldest sister have any intention of speaking to me ever again since no one's even mentioned them, but as they've never really been part of my life, I'm finding that I really don't care so much. If they want to make an effort, that's up to them.
The best friend/roommate that I had ranted about feeling like she didn't respect me as a writer let me cry when she asked me what was wrong and I burst into tears two days ago. When I confessed that I was afraid to tell her because I didn't want to lose her, she promised to *always* love me and be there for me. After we'd talked and I'd explained everything, including what I'd written and why, I went to do some errands while she read my rant for herself. That same night we were still talking, and the next day we went shopping together.
I told the other best friend/roommate that my parents had disowned me, and she pointed out that with my mother's mental instability she'll probably try to call me in two months pretending it never happened. I talked to her about the rant and that I'd said things about her. She said that was good that'd I'd got it out, but she didn't want to read it so we wouldn't get into a fight.
Looking back over this now, I'm laughing at the sheer ridiculousness of the entire situation. *I'm* the problem here, because I was honest that I needed to let out everything I was feeling when no one else would listen. When I was *scared* to say things to the people I wanted to talk to. Because my family hurt me, over and over, and I struggle to keep forgiving them for it.
But I know they're wrong. I know that I'm *not*.
People who've never met me, never knew me, didn't know *any* of this, took the time to understand that I needed a shoulder. They made me feel more completely loved and supported in *two days* than my family has done in the past six years. All because I just spilled out what I needed to say for one night.
Now I apparently don't have any blood relatives. And I haven't cried over them since the first five minutes after I read the very first e-mail response. Because I asked them to accept me, insignificant, broken, fragile, confused, and frightened as I am, and they shoved it back in my face and said I needed mental help.
I don't need you anymore. I don't need your family, I don't need your problems, I don't need your bullshit. If you don't throw any of my things that you had in storage in the garbage, you know what my forwarding address is. Get a life. I've got mine, and it doesn't include you anymore.
There are only so many times you can ask someone for forgiveness. You've used all of yours up.