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  1. just funny!

    July 24, 2009 by shishnit


  2. Happy Birthday to me!!

    May 17, 2009 by shishnit

    Another year wiser….prettier….happier.


  3. stoppin 4 brakes

    April 11, 2009 by shishnit

    Soooo much stress this week but its coming to an end. I’m at sears auto getting new brakes. I have read blogs on my new cool sidekick.

    Yesterday we got an estimate for termite treatment. $600. Not as bad as my imagination was fearing.

    Things are looking up. The sun is shining. I’m going to make a stop at the bookstore and go home and write that big huge paper due on Monday.


  4. maternal discord

    March 17, 2009 by shishnit

    More... The back story

    Some day if I have nothing at all better to do, perhaps if I’m bedridden and can only type and I’m no longer gaining degree’s, I will then write the entire long drawn out story of my mother.

    I have come a long way regarding my feelings towards her.  I started to blog back in August of 2001.  When I first started to open up about her and blog about it, I was highly angry and hadn’t really talked to anyone about her.  Since then I’ve sat in several years of therapy and I’m really a-ok about the topic.  Except that it’s widely more acceptable to feel kindly towards one’s mother.  It never comes across as “okay” or “cool” to think your mother sucks.  Mine does.  No matter what anyone says, the facts remain the facts and any woman who can disown her child, refuse to utter her name thereafter or acknowledge that she exists…well that’s not normal and she’s not normal.  I don’t understand her, I never will.  But I’m finally ok with that, because I feel I am better off not being influenced by her being a part of my life anyway.  I want a mother….just not mine.

    The few posts I wrote about her…and no I’m not going to bother linking them…if someone really wants to know, they’ll copy/paste and do the work to know.

    this one
    this one
    and this one

    Those three posts say a lot about my past.  But I’ve come to a place where I’m really not angry, even though it may appear that way to others.  I am merely ambivalent about my past, my absent mother, and the lack of her presence whatsoever in my life since I was 19.5 years old.  It’s been 20 years this year and I’m ok with it, really I am.  But I will say what I want to say about it without apologizing to anyone.  It is my truth, my reality.  My mother is a woman who caused a great deal of harm to me, and in her absence has been more of a gift than she ever was during her presence.  I have now lived longer without her than I have with her.  She’s very much alive and living in my hometown, Johnstown.  She’s the same mess she was when she kicked me out.  I’m allowed to be angry, but I’m really not. 

    I won’t send her an email or a letter because I have no earthly idea if she even has an email address, and she would simply mark anything I mailed to her personally with a giant “REFUSED RETURN TO SENDER” message just like she did when I sent her a birth announcement regarding my now 16 year old son’s birth 16 years ago.  

    I will be sending my beloved Aunt DeDe my graduation announcement and another one for her to mail from my honmetown to my mother.  She’ll have to accidentally open it to find out I graduated.  But….it really won’t matter to her.  She’s heartless when it comes to me.  I email with my sister, who is my mother’s favored child and close to my mother, and she advises me only that I am a null and void subject with my mother.  She behaves as though she only ever had two children.  The rest of my family allows this behavior and that pisses me off more than my mother does.  

    However, I’m over it.  It will never change.  It hasn’t changed in 20 years.  I certainly don’t hope or hold my breath.

    But….yes…upon seeing my diploma…I really thought “fuck you mother…fuck you!”  Although it’s hard to explain to people that it’s a fierceness born from spending my first 19 years of life trying to be “good enough” for her to love me…..only to find that I wasted all efforts and so now I know I am good enough but my fierceness comes from my desire to have everything in the world that I ever wanted …not because of her…but despite her trying to break me.

    She hasn’t.  She won’t.  I always survive.

    Trust me…I used to tell people my mother wasn’t present in my life because she died in a car accident.  Now I’m brutally honest.  She’s not present because she chose not to be, she makes that choice daily.  And I no longer want her.  I sometimes mourn not having ever had a mother…someone that thought I was the greatest thing since sliced bread, like all mothers should feel for their offspring…but low and behold….I found out that I had my own child and that child….well he thinks I’m pretty cool and that I’m good enough without trying.  Therein my soul is saved.

    My mother has missed out on much.  I have become stronger, better, bolder…than I ever thought I could be….without her. I am not angry, but I will not apologize for overcoming the damage she caused.  I will never know what it is to have a mother, I had an egg donor who spent my childhood resenting my mere existence.  I was not planned for and never wanted…and she never missed a chance to remind me of just how my coming along ruined what she wanted her life to be. She’s a sad lonely lady….and sometimes in life you lie in the bed that you make.  I don’t find glory in that….I just know firsthand that she goes to bed alone every night, she’s never met her own grandson and that….well that is not a life I would call “good enough” for me.

    I wish I had a mother. It does make me angry that people assume I should love mine.  I don’t.  I don’t hate her.  I hate her actions and her inability to find help for herself.  

    My family story is not the average norm. I’m not the kid who  just didn’t dig her mother….I’m the kid the mother didn’t want and therefore verbally dismissed and in turn abused.  I never saw it as abuse until I went to therapy where two different doctors told me emphatically that my mother is probably sick because mother’s don’t do that stuff under normal mental health conditions. If she’s sick, I’m sorry…but I can’t say it erases what she did to me.  It doesn’t.

    One cool thing that came from my fucked up family story was the time I met Po Bronson…now that was cool and that experience really helped me heal a lot.

    http://www.flickr.com/photos/poetical/sets/72157594360251923/

    Oh and one other thing….my mother paid for my sisters college degree, she also paid to send my younger brother who quickly failed out.  When I wanted to go to college, she told me to “get a job and have some kids because when she was my age she was strapped down with me”.   Yah so it took me 20 years to find my footing enough without family or support to get that degree.  So yah…fuck her!!!  That’s not anger…..that is pure and simply…..tenacity.


  5. Nothing – poem

    January 31, 2009 by shishnit

    from my archives, circa 2001

    Nothing
     
    Its the nothing things
    The things that you do
    That I never thought of
    Watching you read a book
    Now is enough to love
     
    The way you chew your tongue
    wrinkle your nose
    or push back your hair in the wind
    makes me curl my toes
     
    These things are what I missed
    when you were away
    These things I have kissed
    again
    in the nothing that I say
     
    Let me tell you nothing
    but the smile upon my lips
    Im sitting here
    Drinking my cappuccino
    With tiny little sips
     
    You ask me what Im thinking
    Its something too hard to explain
    I say nothing.
    Knowing nothing will
    ever be the same