Chapters 1-3, Mommy Dearest
Livejournal posted a little helpful bubble with the title of "writers block". It had a rather witty paragraph written after explaining how detective stories use metaphors to make the writing so visual and enticing at the same time. Writer's block? Ha.
I narrarrate my life in my mind, especially after reading a really great book. Eventually, I think to myself "Gawd, look at me, I'm narrarrating" but it quickly follows, like a rescued little puppy, "I wish I remembered half of this shit, because it would be a New York Time's Best Seller".
Sometimes I just narrarrate exactly whats going on at that moment, and other times I'll pick a catagory and spin a web of thought away from it.
For example, I don't exactly know what my problem is with commitment. I can't commit to a single damn thing, let alone men. I usually blame my mom. Though my best friend Nate has proved to be a miracle, my cloud with a silver lining, my permanent shooting star. I stay with him and our best friend Victor throughout the entire week at his over-crowded house, while we spend weekends at my apartment. Rather, my shared storage area. $362.50 plus about another $90 for utilities that I don't even use anymore... So about $452.50 a month for storage, weekend shelter complete with rations of food and space for my beloved tea-cup chihuahua to let out all of her retained energy through the week in a single 48 hours.
So commitment. That friend I only call when I get a new job, or find a friend I'd like to keep. Occasionally, give a visit to when I find a product worth investing once a month in like a new mascara or eyeliner. Yeah, commitment for me must feel so neglected. Like I maybe make half of my acquantences feel. Not my best friends though. I really should just propose to Nate: skip our wait-another-two-years to get engaged and even skip the wait-another-year-after-that to get married plan. I'm not a little girl anymore, and sometimes, oddly enough, the feeling of really being a woman is overwhelming, you know, instead of spending my days in someone else's house and night's in another man's bed just to try to feel like a woman. Don't get me wrong, on paper I had a very nice life. I had shelter, a mom, a dad, a brother and hell I even had a dog.
Though my mom drove me insane with her flawed personallity and scars of her past childhood that she wore fresh on her wrist like a teenage cutter. She took parenting very seriously, my mother did. She worked as much as she had to, got as much money as she could, fed clothed and supported us. What really had me resenting her very presence was she was a giant gaping hole of emotion. It was like she was hollow. She was physically present, but her hollow insides never even allowed a smile to pass through her lips. She bathed in her self-pity every morning along with her shower to bath her shell. Eventually, she had no mercy regarding my emotional psyche.
Subtle at first, of course, at age 7.
"Stand up straight Jenny- don't slouch, you get a pooch" you're chubby Jenny, even for a kid, god, look at you.
"I was so skinny at your age" she would say. That's nice, if you wanted me to be such a trophy then why the hell did you give all of the skinny genes to David?
David is my older brother, my trained professional at tuning into another station in his head when my mother and I would fight to the emotional death in my teen years.
Ah, my teen years when I practically begged for mercy the most.
Mercy? What's that? Oh yeah, that thing my mother couldn't comprehend enough to give a girl going through puberty, desperately looking for a mother's love and support like a locket under the too-low bed that went on forever.
"I should have stayed in El Salvador, I should have stayed. Married a wealthy El Salvadorian man, a handsome man so we could have had wonderful children".
Do women really think like that? Do they really play their lives in their heeads like a movie and wish they had chosen different actors and actresses? Even different sceneries?
Most of all, did she really mean it? What happened to being the apple of my mother's eye? Her little angel? Her little pumpkin? Where were the rest of those cute expressions you hear on movies? Since, apparently, she played her life in her mind so much like a movie I might as well look to them as example too. Where was the woman who giggled and helped you clean up a little juice you accidentally knocked over in those paper towel commercials?
She passed onto me a lot of resentment. I grew to resent a lot of things, and aimed in particullarly in a few directions her way. Toward her absent parenthood that she played like a job and not a role. Toward the smile she never gave me. Toward the endless nights she never tucked me in. Toward the countless times I was blamed for her loss of love, money, and happiness.
What can you do, I guess?
Except grow up.
I grew up quick. I fell in love quick, I lost my virginity quick, I sought that affection quick, missing from my shelf in my bedroom complete with a shrine of collections my mother should have contributed.
I moved out quick, on and off. Since 15. Wether they were days or weeks at a time I moved out. I did everything I could to avoid her perplexed reality, now permanently embeded with the movie she desperately, pathetically, played over and over. She compared her reality to her dream life as often as she compared prices at the grocery store while the rest of her family was left to suffer at her lack of meeting her expectations.
My life was missing that mothering puzzle piece that she never though to put down through all her pacing back and forth, playing her movie in her mind.
While a cough and sneeze were a sign of worry and concern for most mothers, they were a sign of another hole I would have to burn in her pocket to go get medicine, tissues, and some juice. She had no problem chastising me for it, either. Nevertheless, I stay away from medicine and try my hardest never to get sick. While now I have beautifully loving friends to express enough [priceless] interest in my health, it just kind of stuck that being sick meant more money, time, and effort lost.
That was one of my many ways of growing up.
I got a job quick. I tried alcohol quick. I became promiscuous quick. No matter what I did, though, that affection was like a color. Sex was maybe green, boyfriends were blue, my bisexual phase allowed girls to be pink, my hero of a dad was magenta, my brother was yellow, my dog was even orange. But I needed red. My mother was red. I desperately dug at my heart to allow something else to be red. I looked to be teacher's pet for some classes, I had sex more and more, I tried to be the favorite at work. I would get online boyfriends through friends, I would even try to subsitute myself as red. My love for myself was already violet. My rainbow shined light everytime I cried, just like the sky. And everytime I would cry or slip further into the vice grip of depression, my sky would look at me, like, "Where's Red today, Jenny?" I don't fucking know I'd reply, Why don't you go ask her?
Then came the peak. Thirteen was my most exposed age. I imagine I was actually 14, then 15 it got pretty bad. I don't fucking know... For some reason, I have no timeline developed in my head between birth and the age of 15.
Anyway, Red was unavailable, as usual. She had no emotional core so her shell, her image was extremely important to her. So she was either running around making sure the house was clean or playing her little movie in her little daily theater. Either way she was distracted enough to not notice what I did to substitute Mrs. Red.
Real red.
My best friend at the time, Lacey, was fun, imaginative, and most of all, mature. She grew up in California and hung out at the beach a lot with hot older guys and most of her family was older, so she grew up fast. She was 13 just like me but she had older boys, and even men, drooling all over her.
I just watched, and envied.
She had problems at home too, though. Her mom was kind of a nutcase. Really open and out about her life. Lacey had to take care of her mom and sister while trying to get along with her step-dad, Greg.
Lacey was kind of my hero, and I looked to her for a lot of things like love of music, men, and movies. She dressed really punk rock, so I started slowly getting into that scene. She was rather sexual for just being 13. She hadn't lost her virginity yet, neither of us did but we had very sexual guy interests -so there we were. A couple of horny, cute, punk rock teenagers. It didn't take long to lose it. She lost it first, then me.
Lacey tried some very grown-up things to distract her from her hectic life; and it must have been easy in such a huge mansion equpped with a pool and jacuzzi and a doorbell-speaker thing in every room. She became a total pot head, but I only tried it a couple of times and never really saw the beauty of it enough to be into it as much as she was. I didn't have the money or sugar daddies she did to get a hold of it, anyway.
So at some point she revealed to me she had a very nasty habit. It developed just recently, too.
We were sitting on her gigantic bed one day, on her satin sheets, just talking while she smoked her pot.
"Yeah, so my mom is thinking about sending me to a hospital" she said, after letting the smoke seep through the side of her mouth. The smell of weed was still kind of hard to get use to.
"Why? What's wrong, are you ok?" I grew worried
"Yeah, well kind of. Sometimes, I can't help it, but I'll be shaving in the shower and look at the razor. I'll just slide it across my wrist and I won't be able to stop"
Ohhh. That kind of hospital. The one where they catagorize suicidals, druggies, and anxiety cases as crazies.
For some reason, my mind couldn't wrap around that idea. She even showed me under her wrist band. The fresh, sad scars filled with faces begging her tender love and care.
I think I had seen an episode of Seventh Heaven where they implied a girl cut herself and sent her to a hospital for help. They never showed those helpless, abused cuts though. Pulsating with anger and utter despair at the same time, all while trying to fight an infection.
I was such a girly girl that I couldn't imagine inflicting any pain on myself at the time, so I just became another skeptic.
Until that one day.
One day my mom was particularly cruel in her words of choice as we had yet another fight. I was about 14, and still going through all those akward years which pathetically called for Red to come into my rainbow any day now.
I couldn't get the pain of knowing my mom was just a shell and nothing more out of my head long enough to breathe, let alone think of anything else. I cried hysterically with the music blaring in my room. She made me her own little minion in the sense that I now too, had movies running in my head. Except, not of imaginarey things; of my real life, full of the sad things, playing over and over, pulsing my heart harder and sadder. Despair choked the air of me and my self pity was officially justified at that very moment. My mom couldn't even pretend that she loved me as her offspring. Not even a little. It blew my mind as I thought of those movies filled with kind, considerate mothers to pat your knee with antiseptic then give it a little kiss to make it better after scraping your knee at soccer practice. Those moms in those paper towel commercials. Where were they? Why were they so untouchable for me? My mom had never even really hugged me. Her shell sent a signal to her brain only long enough to make her remote lift her arms and put them over me and pat. Not even embrace. I just wanted one real hug! No, fuck that. I wanted one everyday. A loving embrace and 5 minutes of a whole, real mom to talk to. But it wasn't there. It wasn't even gone because to me, gone implies it was there at some point. It was missing. It had never even showed up since preschool when she faked it well enough to make me believe she really didn't want to leave me.
Fuck memory. It continually embeded those moment of that absent affection in my sad little imaginary scrapbook.
Lacey couldn't even be red. The sex I was slowly getting into couldn't be red. The boys and the flirting couldn't be red. My mom was suppose to be red, goddamnit.
Red. I needed Red. Where was red?
Then the conversation I had with Lacey on her bed replayed in my mind. Rather, the picture of her tender wrist flashed over and over in my mind.
I was still on the floor when I realized something shiny out of the corner of my eye. A safety pin. Comfort swam like synchronized swimmers as I started to distract myself from the self pity crawling under my skin. It crawled slower now, but still crawled. It moved under my left wrist. My pain and anger started crawling under there, too. I bent the safety pin.
Suddenly, a wind symphony warmed up. The violens tuned as they dragged across strings, the clarinets played a few notes, the flutes trumpets and percussion all played miscellaneous notes like a song. I held the sharp tip to my wrist and the symphony began to play. It was a vigorous song, indeed. Beethoven? Mozart? No, too dark. I scratched my skin in a fast pace. I was so chicken but I had to do it.
I scratched again, harder this time. Nothing. Just my symphony playing its song, tuning out everything else. I started scratching harder and harder, while the song began to climax. I took a final slice across my skin, the tent of satin trapping my self pity, my anger, my resentment, my hate. Suddenly the symphony stopped, everything went dead quiet like I was on a stage and a magic trick just went completely wrong. The music blaring was quiet, the audience of scratches were quiet, my synchronized swimmers were still, my agonized tears were quiet, and even the razor sharp safety pin, staring away in shame, was quiet. Suddenly, an applause. People rose, my swimmers swam majestically in delight and and the symphony played a mixture of dark music with an undertone of cute and happy, thanks to the flute. The physical pain, though poking and tender, substituted my emotional pain beautifully. I continued this ritual until my arm was covered in blood from the base to half way up between my elbow and hand.
And there, there was the beggining to my temporary fill in for Red. Real Red. Red that was there for me. I fooled myself into that substitute so now my sky winked when the rainbow came out. "So I see you finally found red, huh Jenny?" Why yes I did! I announced proudly, like a wounded soldier who won another battle. Thank you for asking!
I narrarrate my life in my mind, especially after reading a really great book. Eventually, I think to myself "Gawd, look at me, I'm narrarrating" but it quickly follows, like a rescued little puppy, "I wish I remembered half of this shit, because it would be a New York Time's Best Seller".
Sometimes I just narrarrate exactly whats going on at that moment, and other times I'll pick a catagory and spin a web of thought away from it.
For example, I don't exactly know what my problem is with commitment. I can't commit to a single damn thing, let alone men. I usually blame my mom. Though my best friend Nate has proved to be a miracle, my cloud with a silver lining, my permanent shooting star. I stay with him and our best friend Victor throughout the entire week at his over-crowded house, while we spend weekends at my apartment. Rather, my shared storage area. $362.50 plus about another $90 for utilities that I don't even use anymore... So about $452.50 a month for storage, weekend shelter complete with rations of food and space for my beloved tea-cup chihuahua to let out all of her retained energy through the week in a single 48 hours.
So commitment. That friend I only call when I get a new job, or find a friend I'd like to keep. Occasionally, give a visit to when I find a product worth investing once a month in like a new mascara or eyeliner. Yeah, commitment for me must feel so neglected. Like I maybe make half of my acquantences feel. Not my best friends though. I really should just propose to Nate: skip our wait-another-two-years to get engaged and even skip the wait-another-year-after-that to get married plan. I'm not a little girl anymore, and sometimes, oddly enough, the feeling of really being a woman is overwhelming, you know, instead of spending my days in someone else's house and night's in another man's bed just to try to feel like a woman. Don't get me wrong, on paper I had a very nice life. I had shelter, a mom, a dad, a brother and hell I even had a dog.
Though my mom drove me insane with her flawed personallity and scars of her past childhood that she wore fresh on her wrist like a teenage cutter. She took parenting very seriously, my mother did. She worked as much as she had to, got as much money as she could, fed clothed and supported us. What really had me resenting her very presence was she was a giant gaping hole of emotion. It was like she was hollow. She was physically present, but her hollow insides never even allowed a smile to pass through her lips. She bathed in her self-pity every morning along with her shower to bath her shell. Eventually, she had no mercy regarding my emotional psyche.
Subtle at first, of course, at age 7.
"Stand up straight Jenny- don't slouch, you get a pooch" you're chubby Jenny, even for a kid, god, look at you.
"I was so skinny at your age" she would say. That's nice, if you wanted me to be such a trophy then why the hell did you give all of the skinny genes to David?
David is my older brother, my trained professional at tuning into another station in his head when my mother and I would fight to the emotional death in my teen years.
Ah, my teen years when I practically begged for mercy the most.
Mercy? What's that? Oh yeah, that thing my mother couldn't comprehend enough to give a girl going through puberty, desperately looking for a mother's love and support like a locket under the too-low bed that went on forever.
"I should have stayed in El Salvador, I should have stayed. Married a wealthy El Salvadorian man, a handsome man so we could have had wonderful children".
Do women really think like that? Do they really play their lives in their heeads like a movie and wish they had chosen different actors and actresses? Even different sceneries?
Most of all, did she really mean it? What happened to being the apple of my mother's eye? Her little angel? Her little pumpkin? Where were the rest of those cute expressions you hear on movies? Since, apparently, she played her life in her mind so much like a movie I might as well look to them as example too. Where was the woman who giggled and helped you clean up a little juice you accidentally knocked over in those paper towel commercials?
She passed onto me a lot of resentment. I grew to resent a lot of things, and aimed in particullarly in a few directions her way. Toward her absent parenthood that she played like a job and not a role. Toward the smile she never gave me. Toward the endless nights she never tucked me in. Toward the countless times I was blamed for her loss of love, money, and happiness.
What can you do, I guess?
Except grow up.
I grew up quick. I fell in love quick, I lost my virginity quick, I sought that affection quick, missing from my shelf in my bedroom complete with a shrine of collections my mother should have contributed.
I moved out quick, on and off. Since 15. Wether they were days or weeks at a time I moved out. I did everything I could to avoid her perplexed reality, now permanently embeded with the movie she desperately, pathetically, played over and over. She compared her reality to her dream life as often as she compared prices at the grocery store while the rest of her family was left to suffer at her lack of meeting her expectations.
My life was missing that mothering puzzle piece that she never though to put down through all her pacing back and forth, playing her movie in her mind.
While a cough and sneeze were a sign of worry and concern for most mothers, they were a sign of another hole I would have to burn in her pocket to go get medicine, tissues, and some juice. She had no problem chastising me for it, either. Nevertheless, I stay away from medicine and try my hardest never to get sick. While now I have beautifully loving friends to express enough [priceless] interest in my health, it just kind of stuck that being sick meant more money, time, and effort lost.
That was one of my many ways of growing up.
I got a job quick. I tried alcohol quick. I became promiscuous quick. No matter what I did, though, that affection was like a color. Sex was maybe green, boyfriends were blue, my bisexual phase allowed girls to be pink, my hero of a dad was magenta, my brother was yellow, my dog was even orange. But I needed red. My mother was red. I desperately dug at my heart to allow something else to be red. I looked to be teacher's pet for some classes, I had sex more and more, I tried to be the favorite at work. I would get online boyfriends through friends, I would even try to subsitute myself as red. My love for myself was already violet. My rainbow shined light everytime I cried, just like the sky. And everytime I would cry or slip further into the vice grip of depression, my sky would look at me, like, "Where's Red today, Jenny?" I don't fucking know I'd reply, Why don't you go ask her?
Then came the peak. Thirteen was my most exposed age. I imagine I was actually 14, then 15 it got pretty bad. I don't fucking know... For some reason, I have no timeline developed in my head between birth and the age of 15.
Anyway, Red was unavailable, as usual. She had no emotional core so her shell, her image was extremely important to her. So she was either running around making sure the house was clean or playing her little movie in her little daily theater. Either way she was distracted enough to not notice what I did to substitute Mrs. Red.
Real red.
My best friend at the time, Lacey, was fun, imaginative, and most of all, mature. She grew up in California and hung out at the beach a lot with hot older guys and most of her family was older, so she grew up fast. She was 13 just like me but she had older boys, and even men, drooling all over her.
I just watched, and envied.
She had problems at home too, though. Her mom was kind of a nutcase. Really open and out about her life. Lacey had to take care of her mom and sister while trying to get along with her step-dad, Greg.
Lacey was kind of my hero, and I looked to her for a lot of things like love of music, men, and movies. She dressed really punk rock, so I started slowly getting into that scene. She was rather sexual for just being 13. She hadn't lost her virginity yet, neither of us did but we had very sexual guy interests -so there we were. A couple of horny, cute, punk rock teenagers. It didn't take long to lose it. She lost it first, then me.
Lacey tried some very grown-up things to distract her from her hectic life; and it must have been easy in such a huge mansion equpped with a pool and jacuzzi and a doorbell-speaker thing in every room. She became a total pot head, but I only tried it a couple of times and never really saw the beauty of it enough to be into it as much as she was. I didn't have the money or sugar daddies she did to get a hold of it, anyway.
So at some point she revealed to me she had a very nasty habit. It developed just recently, too.
We were sitting on her gigantic bed one day, on her satin sheets, just talking while she smoked her pot.
"Yeah, so my mom is thinking about sending me to a hospital" she said, after letting the smoke seep through the side of her mouth. The smell of weed was still kind of hard to get use to.
"Why? What's wrong, are you ok?" I grew worried
"Yeah, well kind of. Sometimes, I can't help it, but I'll be shaving in the shower and look at the razor. I'll just slide it across my wrist and I won't be able to stop"
Ohhh. That kind of hospital. The one where they catagorize suicidals, druggies, and anxiety cases as crazies.
For some reason, my mind couldn't wrap around that idea. She even showed me under her wrist band. The fresh, sad scars filled with faces begging her tender love and care.
I think I had seen an episode of Seventh Heaven where they implied a girl cut herself and sent her to a hospital for help. They never showed those helpless, abused cuts though. Pulsating with anger and utter despair at the same time, all while trying to fight an infection.
I was such a girly girl that I couldn't imagine inflicting any pain on myself at the time, so I just became another skeptic.
Until that one day.
One day my mom was particularly cruel in her words of choice as we had yet another fight. I was about 14, and still going through all those akward years which pathetically called for Red to come into my rainbow any day now.
I couldn't get the pain of knowing my mom was just a shell and nothing more out of my head long enough to breathe, let alone think of anything else. I cried hysterically with the music blaring in my room. She made me her own little minion in the sense that I now too, had movies running in my head. Except, not of imaginarey things; of my real life, full of the sad things, playing over and over, pulsing my heart harder and sadder. Despair choked the air of me and my self pity was officially justified at that very moment. My mom couldn't even pretend that she loved me as her offspring. Not even a little. It blew my mind as I thought of those movies filled with kind, considerate mothers to pat your knee with antiseptic then give it a little kiss to make it better after scraping your knee at soccer practice. Those moms in those paper towel commercials. Where were they? Why were they so untouchable for me? My mom had never even really hugged me. Her shell sent a signal to her brain only long enough to make her remote lift her arms and put them over me and pat. Not even embrace. I just wanted one real hug! No, fuck that. I wanted one everyday. A loving embrace and 5 minutes of a whole, real mom to talk to. But it wasn't there. It wasn't even gone because to me, gone implies it was there at some point. It was missing. It had never even showed up since preschool when she faked it well enough to make me believe she really didn't want to leave me.
Fuck memory. It continually embeded those moment of that absent affection in my sad little imaginary scrapbook.
Lacey couldn't even be red. The sex I was slowly getting into couldn't be red. The boys and the flirting couldn't be red. My mom was suppose to be red, goddamnit.
Red. I needed Red. Where was red?
Then the conversation I had with Lacey on her bed replayed in my mind. Rather, the picture of her tender wrist flashed over and over in my mind.
I was still on the floor when I realized something shiny out of the corner of my eye. A safety pin. Comfort swam like synchronized swimmers as I started to distract myself from the self pity crawling under my skin. It crawled slower now, but still crawled. It moved under my left wrist. My pain and anger started crawling under there, too. I bent the safety pin.
Suddenly, a wind symphony warmed up. The violens tuned as they dragged across strings, the clarinets played a few notes, the flutes trumpets and percussion all played miscellaneous notes like a song. I held the sharp tip to my wrist and the symphony began to play. It was a vigorous song, indeed. Beethoven? Mozart? No, too dark. I scratched my skin in a fast pace. I was so chicken but I had to do it.
I scratched again, harder this time. Nothing. Just my symphony playing its song, tuning out everything else. I started scratching harder and harder, while the song began to climax. I took a final slice across my skin, the tent of satin trapping my self pity, my anger, my resentment, my hate. Suddenly the symphony stopped, everything went dead quiet like I was on a stage and a magic trick just went completely wrong. The music blaring was quiet, the audience of scratches were quiet, my synchronized swimmers were still, my agonized tears were quiet, and even the razor sharp safety pin, staring away in shame, was quiet. Suddenly, an applause. People rose, my swimmers swam majestically in delight and and the symphony played a mixture of dark music with an undertone of cute and happy, thanks to the flute. The physical pain, though poking and tender, substituted my emotional pain beautifully. I continued this ritual until my arm was covered in blood from the base to half way up between my elbow and hand.
And there, there was the beggining to my temporary fill in for Red. Real Red. Red that was there for me. I fooled myself into that substitute so now my sky winked when the rainbow came out. "So I see you finally found red, huh Jenny?" Why yes I did! I announced proudly, like a wounded soldier who won another battle. Thank you for asking!