17. A Good Start

A Good Start

M ara

I am wallpaper.

Background.

You might notice if I was suddenly removed, but I could easily be replaced.

I am water.

You lean over to peer at me and see only your own reflection.

You try to hold me in your hand, but I slip through your fingers.

I lack substance.

I am a mirror.

I reveal to you who and what you are to me, and how I see you.

I am nothing by myself.

I have no skin.

My existence is defined by those around me.

Should I lose one of you,

I would cease to exist as I am.

I am vapor.

I fill the empty space of the vessel that contains me.

I morph and shift to fit its borders,

I am whoever you need me to be.

I put my journal down and went back to studying my research papers, going over the diagnostic criteria yet again, striving to assimilate the new information.

Unclear or shifting self-image. Yes. I was forever doing those quizzes that are rampant online, all about self-discovery. What’s your love language? What is your spirit animal? Enneagram? Myers-Briggs Personality type? Ideal career? Ideal vacation spot? Okay, that one I knew.

Half of the time I couldn’t answer the questions with any degree of confidence. I didn’t know if I was an introvert or just depressed and anxious. I didn’t know if I liked people or just wanted to be liked. I didn’t think I was organized, but I got a lot done so I couldn’t be that bad. Did I procrastinate or was I just constantly interrupted by competing responsibilities?

I flitted from one hobby to the next, dabbling here and there, becoming quickly bored and discarding it before becoming proficient, so I had no talent of which to be proud. I’d had sixteen jobs between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four, and at least four more before Olivia came along and I became a full-time writer.

I did not have a personal style; I wore what fit. It wasn’t for lack of care. I wasn’t one of those people who despised fashion, makeup, and vanity. I loved how the right clothes and skillful makeup could bring out a woman’s beauty. I loved looking at beautiful people, male and female. I, too, wanted to look beautiful, but I didn’t know how, and my efforts always fell short.

I cut my hair when it could no longer be tamed. I wore makeup the same way I wore it in university, the same colors, too, until Bex and Willa dragged me out to a makeup counter for a tutorial and an updated palette.

Without Bex, I would still be modeling my outfits based on my mother’s taste, and her castoffs that I wore as a teen. In recent years I wore what Bex or Willa picked out for me. I still could not shop, successfully, by myself.

I recorded these slips of evidence supporting this fragment of the diagnosis .

One thing I did know about myself is that I loved my people, and I loved them hard. Including Zale. Especially Zale. Although for him, I had to acknowledge, I could also be a nightmare. I gave all of myself, I worked myself to exhaustion to give them what they needed and wanted. At times I’d feel almost resentful. I’d start thinking maybe I might like something for myself, but I could never figure out what that might be. It remained a wisp of a thought, and out of reach.

Another thing I knew about myself was that I worried. Incessantly. I worried about my mom, if she would die and my last words to her would be angry. I worried about Bex getting home safely after girls’ night. Before Rhys came on the scene, I worried about her fibromyalgia flare-ups and her detachment from the world. I worried about Willa, her safety, her inability to trust, her being alone. I worried, to the point of despair, about Olivia’s safety whenever she was out of sight, and I worried about her future.

For Zale, my anxiety was off the charts. Every time I watched him pull out of the driveway, I pulled in deep breaths to calm the fear that I may never see him again. If I lost him, I’d lose the will to live, the ability to breathe, and the scream inside me would never be silenced.

I read about Borderlines’ fear of abandonment or being left alone. I understood that, on a primal level. Though it didn’t seem abnormal to me. Maybe other people just didn’t think of those things, or didn’t think through to the end result of those things? Anyone who loves, if they thought seriously about what it would be like to lose a loved one, would feel the same fear. Wouldn’t they?

I circled back to one point, that of the shaky sense of identity. This seemed to me to be truly tragic, to the point that it hurt.

A lot.

Unstable relationships, emotional swings, tendencies toward self-harm, and explosive rage had to be worse? Not for me. I was satisfied with the few relationships I had. I’d gotten ahold of my temper, well, until more recently. The emotional swings I could hide for the most part, ensuring they didn’t affect anyone but me, and the self-harm provided me with such a sense of relief. I reasoned to myself that at least I didn’t cut, it was almost a healthy coping mechanism.

Of all the aspects that borderline personality issues entailed, it was the unclear sense of self that disturbed me the most.

I felt lost for so long, searching for my purpose, eventually focusing my energy on loving my people, which was far from wasted, rather than trying to figure out what was important to me.

What mattered to me was an endlessly moving target and depended upon who was important to me. I spent my life desperately wanting to be good at something, trying so many different things before getting bored and moving on to something else, and never becoming good at anything .

Mostly I strived to be whatever those I kept close needed me to be. Of late though, I’d developed the beginnings of a sense of self-preservation, which was an odd word choice for one who had so little sense of self. Raising boundaries, creating space for myself to figure out who I was, independently of everyone else and what they wanted or needed me to be, was becoming a goal in and of itself.

Deciding to start creating the space was a beginning, but what would I do with nothing inside me to build on? I was a hodge-podge of castoffs from the people who moved through my life, and from the people who lived life beside me.

What did I enjoy? Even that was a difficult question.

I knew I loved the beach. Just the thought of the beach could take me there in my mind where I lifted my face to an imaginary sun, opened my ears to the sound of the seagull and the surf, raised my arms in supplication to the breeze that lifted my hair off my neck and wrapped itself around my near-naked body. I expanded my lungs with the salt of the sea air, breathing life into dust. Just the word beach evoked the seemingly conflicting feelings of freedom and belonging that I found there. I dreamed of one day living by the sea. Perhaps one day, when I’m old and alone, I’d walk into the surf and let it take me home.

That I knew, I loved the beach. I wondered if there was a label for someone who was a beach lover. I looked it up. Thalassophile. Weird word, but I liked having the label.

I am a thalassophile .

I also loved sex, craved it. I even loved my body during sex, how it responded, muscles tightening, skin quivering under his hands, nerve endings firing, senses alive, body twitching, stretching, arching, twisting, quaking, smelling, tasting, sighing, gifting me with more pleasure than I could ever conceivably explain. I think I would have liked it even if I didn’t need it. Maybe. Probably.

I am sensual.

I liked reading, especially outside, in the summer, under the shade of the wide, arching branches of a tree, or when it’s bitter, curled up on the couch with a candle and a cup of tea. Reading was an excellent escape. I knew the word for that, bibliophile.

I am a bibliophile.

I liked crafting and art, but rarely, if ever, did I enjoy the outcome of my artistic labors. I messed around with illustrating my children’s books, just to give the illustrator an idea of what was in my head while writing, but I could not in good conscience call myself an artist. Could I?

I liked writing, but it took a supreme act of will to finish what I started. It did not come easily or naturally, but it served to unload the albatross of emotional baggage. Still.

I am a writer.

Gardening! Gardening was mine. Truly mine. I shared my bounty with my friends and family, I liked to show it off, I enjoyed helping them with their gardens, but even if no one else existed in the world, I would still do it. I did it for me.

I am a gardener.

I recorded what I knew of myself in my journal. This was a good start.

Raising boundaries would stop others from encroaching on my space, my time, and stealing my peace. I needed boundaries against one person, and one person only right now, my mother. I snorted to myself, of course she’s the one person in my life who would never accept them.

In fairness, over the past year I’d pulled away quite a bit. My mood had been so low when I wasn’t angry, that going to visit her usually resulted in binge-eating when I got home, while I processed her criticisms and her praises. The energy required to survive a visit with my mother, which meant leaving without fighting or arguing, was more than I’d had to spend. Cutting back on visiting was a natural progression, a bit of self-preservation I didn’t know I had in me to give myself.

I was, finally, at the ripe old age of forty-five, separating from my mother and finding out who I was going to be apart from her. Something I should have been allowed to do in my teens and twenties, something I should have insisted on doing in my thirties, but I wasn’t dead yet, so I guessed it wasn’t too late .

For the first time, I began to understand that my mother’s treatment of me was not an annoying quirk due to an insensitive personality, or the result of being less than smart, but was abuse. Abuse that robbed me of significant developmental milestones, abuse that negatively affected my relationships, especially those with my husband and my daughter, abuse that cheated me out of my own sense of self. It wouldn’t hurt if some of my endless reserve of anger was directed at the source of the problem, or at least, toward gaining a solution to neutralizing the source of the problem.

I’d done enough emotional labor for the day, and it was just past nine in the morning. The good news was that it was Thursday, animal shelter day and girls’ night. I had the afternoon to myself, and my girls would be here afterwards.

Olivia was happy to go, and she got ready with no fuss. Once she left, I turned my music up as loud as I could stand it, filling up the space inside me with its heavy beats, mostly listening to Staind, but Breaking Benjamin, Hinder and Saliva made appearances in my playlist as well. The afternoon was well spent polishing the manuscript that had given me such trouble. A bit of space and an uninterrupted stretch of time worked wonders.

When Olivia arrived home with Bex and Willa, I’d just left my sunroom to start preparations for dinner. Olivia burst into the house full of stories. Usually when she got home she was quiet and mellow, fatigued from socializing. Today she was chatting away as she walked through the door, both Willa and Bex with her, nodding, smiling, and interjecting a word or two.

Seeing them all together, Bex so petite and sassy, flitting about, Willa tall and oh so curvy, her face split by a wide smile, and Olivia, sweet Olivia, her hair a messy halo of curls, her hands contorted into little flying birds as she chattered, I was struck anew by the beauty I had in my life. My girls. My beautiful, vibrant, funny, complicated, perfect girls.

“Mom!” She saw me and switched her focus. “Today I worked with Loulou and the pocket pets!”

Her face lit with excitement.

My own smile stretched wide across my face to see her so animated. “You did? Was it fun?”

“It was very fun,” she stated firmly, “and they are quiet…” she scrunched her nose slightly, “a bit stinky though.”

Bex and Willa laughed, and I hugged my girl.

“You want a snack?”

“No thanks, Auntie Bex took me out for ice cream while we waited for Auntie Willa to finish her shift.”

Just then Sirius made her presence known by winding around Olivia’s ankles. Olivia scooped her up in her arms .

“I’m going to my room with Sirius.” She started heading toward her room. “I’m going to lie down on my bed and let her sniff all over me. I’m full of new smells today!”

I looked at Bex. “Ew?”

Willa scrunched her nose and nodded in agreement. Bex just laughed.

We chatted while I put the rosemary chicken in the oven and chopped up the broccoli, cauliflower, and brussels sprouts for our roast veggies. Laughter made the work fly by. I was just putting the potatoes into the boiling water for the mashed when Olivia stomped out of the bedroom, her eyebrows scrunched low, her face red, eyes welling with tears.

“Mom!”

She stood in the middle of the family room. Her arms rigidly straight at her sides, ending in hands balled into fists. As soon as I saw her I turned off the stovetop behind me and moved toward her, giving her my full attention.

“What’s the problem, little bird?”

She shook with anger. “Netflix isn’t working!”

“Okay.” I began my fact-finding mission. “Did it just stop?”

She’d been in there for at least forty-five minutes.

“No!” she screamed. “It wouldn’t work! I’ve been trying, and trying, and nothing I’m doing is working! ”

She’d had a good day, but socializing was always wearing on her, and that, combined with the frustration of her chosen decompression tool not being available to her, had put her over the edge.

“Let me take a look, see if I can fix it.”

I was standing beside her, and I put my hand out to gently lead her to come to the bedroom with me. She slapped my hand away and looked at me furiously. I held her gaze, being sure that nothing more than curiosity and compassion were reflected in mine. If she sensed anger or frustration from me, it would set her off even more.

After several moments of intense eye contact from her, she spun and headed toward the bedroom.

“Hopefully, I’ll be back in a few minutes.” I threw over my shoulder at Bex and Willa.

Willa relaxed at the table while Bex took over at the stove, stirring the potatoes. She tapped the wooden spoon on the edge of the pot, satisfied that they were not sticking to the bottom, and rested the spoon on the plate beside the stove.

“No problem, chickie. Take your time.”

“We’ll finish the dinner and let ourselves out if you’re still wrapped up,” added Willa.

“Thank you…” I only half heard what they said but trusted they wouldn’t let my kitchen catch on fire .

“Mom!” Olivia screamed from the other room, and I hustled to get to her.

It turned out that it was not a simple fix. This required negotiating a new plan with Olivia, who was determined to watch her shows.

“I always watch my shows when I’m tired.”

“Yes, you do. But the internet is down, which means we can’t access Netflix. So, what can you do instead?”

“I always watch my shows.”

Her lips trembled. This was not a welcome change in plans.

“May I make a suggestion?”

“Can I watch my shows?”

“Right now?”

“Yes!”

“Right now, the internet is not working…”

She started to yell, her hands back in fists.

“Hold on, Olivia, let me tell you what needs to happen.”

“Then tell me!” Hands in fists, face red, lip trembling, and then tears sprung from her big brown eyes.

“I need to call and get the internet sorted out. That’s going to take time, and I’ll need you to be quiet while I talk on the phone. I’d like to get you comfortable doing something else while I do that, and then, hopefully, you can watch your show. Does that sound like a good plan?”

“I want to watch my show,” she replied quietly.

Slowly, she began to accept the necessity of changing her plans.

“I know, and I want you to watch your show.”

“I want to watch it now.”

“I know, but can you watch it now?”

“No, because the stupid internet is down. It’s stupid! I hate it!”

She was pacing, trying to work off the frustration.

“Want to hug mommy? A big, tight one?”

She looked at me warily, wanting what I was offering, but not yet wanting to let go of her anger. I opened my arms, she moved in. I wrapped my arms around her, holding her tightly. After a minute or so, her body began to relax, and I moved us to lie down on the bed.

Fifteen minutes later, she took a deep breath and shifted to move away from me. I released her. Her face was still a mottled red, but she was calm.

“Will you call the internet now, Mommy?”

“Yes, I’ll call. What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to stay with you.”

“Okay. ”

Sometimes after a meltdown Olivia wanted to be on her own, sometimes she wanted to be with me. This had been a short one overall, we were just hitting the forty-five-minute mark, but her moods had been up and down so much lately that it had taken its toll. I could smell the dinner and I hoped Willa or Bex had turned off the oven. I could still salvage dinner, once I finished on the phone, if they’d turned it off.

“I just need to check the oven.” Olivia’s brows snapped down. I spoke firmly, “Olivia, it’s important to make sure the smoke alarms don’t go off,” her expression cleared, “and then I’ll come back and call the internet.”

I took a deep breath on my way to the kitchen. The stove was off, and my girls had let themselves out. I loved my child, but lately it took everything out of me to be patient. I found a note on the counter.

Dinner is ready! Covered in the oven.

I peeked into the oven. The chicken, veggies, and mashed potatoes were all in a casserole dish, covered with a glass lid, ready to eat. My girls, my chickies. So good to me. I grabbed my cell phone and dashed off a quick thank you and sorry text to both, then went back to Olivia to fix the internet.