I can never show him this, but writing it helped me feel better anyway

Dear Vella,

Recently you have been PMSing, excuse me, irritable and blaming a great many things on your eldest son and your eldest son’s girlfriend. While both these people admit they are hardly stainless innocents, there are some things that they rightly refuse to accept responsibility for.

Things that are not Eagle’s fault:

• Your leg ulcers.
• Your summer flu.
• Faruque’s bad habits.
• The bloody oppressive summer heat.
• The fact that Ash sometimes calls when you want to talk to Eagle. This is made especially pertinent by the fact that you keep slamming into the room, yelling for thirty seconds, then leaving for ten minutes or so before coming back in and yelling again. If you have a point to make, then MAKE it for goodness’ sake instead of ranting vaguely and then storming out. And if you leave, you cannot expect Eagle to not assume you are done with the conversation and find something else to occupy himself.
• The fact that when you vehemently tell him to do something, then five minutes later and just as vehemently tell him not to do it, Eagle just sits there like a lemon blinking confusedly.
• Your forgetting to use a condom, approximately twenty-one years and eleven months ago.

Things that are not Ash’s fault:

• Your leg ulcers, summer flu, Faruque, etc.
• The mess in Eagle’s room. Amazing though it may sound, Ash is not capable of making a mess in a room at the other end of the fucking country.
• Any and every defect in Eagle’s character.
• The fact that she sometimes calls when you want to talk to Eagle. You hardly have a schedule or some such that she can avoid.
• The fact that Eagle does not always agree with you.
• Eagle’s lack of ‘respect’ for you. That has more to do with the fact that it’s hard to respect a total whackjob even if they are one’s father.
• Original sin, bird flu, the destruction of the rainforests, the high price of butter and the common cold. Despite your claims that she is responsible for ‘everything’.

the home front

I can't blog about this. It's too private, too personal. But I can't not say something about it either.

All I can say is-homophobia in religion sucks, especially when it gets internalised. That, and...there's the moment when it all becomes horribly real and immediate-all the shit you know goes down. When some of it happens to someone you know, or a friend knows. The moment you can hear the wolf at the door.

Cousins, it's dark outside.

Does your brain ever do this to you?

Me: *playing Pokemon innocently*
My Brain: Sacredshipping.
Me: what?
Brain: Eusine and Morty are TOTALLY getting it on. Sacredshipping.
Me: That's beside the point. Go away, I'm busy with the Bug Catching Contest.
Brain: Sacredshipping.
Me: Neither of them are my type.
Brain: You're not the one doing them, so you're not required to think so. Sacredshipping. Write it.
Me: Pokemon isn't my fandom and never has been. Well, except for the anime when I was, like, prepubescent.
Brain: Gotta start somewhere. You already did those Gym Leader drabbles. How about doing some fanart too?
Me: I can't draw.
Brain: Stick figures.
Me: And I haven't got any paper.
Brain: Go buy some.
Me: I don't know where to find an art shop.
Brain: Try Google.
Me: I'm meant to be saving money, dammit.
Brain: Cheapskate.
Me: Will you please go away now?
Brain: Sacredshipping. WRITE IT.
Me: *kills a lot of innocent Caterpies*
Brain: Sacredshippingsacredshippingsacredshippingsacredshippingsacredshipping-
Me: DAMN YOU.*gives up and writes it*

Judy

Aquila says: It could be worse. There was this one game I got-also Square-where I never actually figured out how to work the battle system at all. Despite hours of effort and reading the guide pamphlet thing. In the end I said bollocks and returned it to the store.
Ash says: Unlimited Saga?
Aquila says: That's the one. I'd forgotten the name till you said it.
Ash says: I had the same problem.
Ash says: Shame, cuz it looked good.
Aquila says: My theory is it's another xenophobic world. The characters are like, 'WE DO NOT WANT PEOPLE LOOKING AT US. GO AWAY.' So they are Obstructive, and Complicate Simple Matters in a successful bid to make people storm off in frustration.
Ash says: Or maybe they were dying for their story to be told, and the developers fucked up, and they're sitting around waiting for visitors and wondering "why doesn't anyone like us?"
Aquila says: I like your version better. That little witch girl seemed sweet, come to think.
Ash says: Yeah.

Judy walks the labyrinth. Her location is not marked on any map.

The labyrinth is an egg that she failed to hatch from. The labyrinth is the womb of a dead mother. The labyrinth is a school with no pupils but her, and it is the endless silvery dimensions behind the mirror.

Grandfather was trapped in a mirror, Judy thinks. I have to save him. But grandfather is not here.

Maybe if she walks the labyrinth long enough, she will find him. Maybe if she walks without stopping, checks every door and passage, she will reach the way out.

She is very tired, and her little hands are cold.

Judy walks the labyrinth. Her companions are three familiars that patter behind her in the dust. They do not speak, and they are cold to the touch. As she is cold.

She has a memory that this is not what she was promised. Things have not always been like this. Once she was warm, and sheltered, and a mother-voice whispered to her of games, and adventures, and other children all in sunlight. It told her stories that made her laugh, and dance in anticipation. They were not fantasies. They were truths. Prophecies.

Prophecy is dead now. Stillborn. Miscarried.

Her existence now is not Life. Neither is it Truth.

Judy walks the labyrinth. Sometimes she sobs, but tears never fall. She thinks that tears might make her feel better. They would be hot, she thinks; salty and hot and wet. She might be warm, if she could cry.

Maybe tears would wipe clean the dust that clings to her, her hair, her clothes. She is covered in grey. She cannot remember the colour of her skin. She has a few vague ideas about it; are people brown, or pink, or blue? And what did colours look like, anyway?

Purple was nice, she thinks. She thinks she remembers wanting to be purple.

Judy walks the labyrinth. Sometimes she remembers things. She remembers a breaking, a hot, bright world glimpsed for a few, precious seconds, and then, the labyrinth again, cooling slowly.

She is a genius, she thinks. Is that right, that word ‘genius’? She’s quite sure that she is one, as much as she is sure of anything. But she can’t quite remember what a genius is.

Perhaps ‘genius’ means grey, and cold, and solitary. Perhaps ‘genius’ means dust that falls into her mouth and nose, unfocused vision, and slow, muzzy mind.

She isn’t sure that she likes being a genius, but she has got to be something. She clutches to the word, because it describes herself, and she does not have many words that describe herself. If she cannot describe herself to her, then maybe she does not exist. And she does not have many words at all.

She was going to have words, she thinks. Words, and numbers, and colours. They were in the promise. But the promise never came true.

And unkept promises fade.

(A/N: No, I have no fucking clue where this came from...)

Yet another headache, courtesy of family and their hangers-on

Okay. Hypothetical-well, not so hypothetical-question here.

I got my hair cut recently-quite short. Ever since then, my mother's boyfriend has been referring to it as 'spikey dykey' in a disparaging way.

Now, okay, my hair does seem to grow in natural vertical tufts when it's that short, for some reason(it never used to). And I am not really thrilled with the look either-it wasn't what I was hoping for.

But I'm pretty sure it's NOT overly PC to get annoyed at someone equating being a lesbian with being unattractive!

Especially since I sort-of came out to my mother and her boyfriend some time ago.(I told them I liked girls. They don't believe me. Apparently I am too young and naive to know. HAH.)So-in effect, he was telling someone that as far as he knew identified as a lesbian, that she looked like a lesbian, and that this was ugly.

So...finally protested about this, in a phone conversation the other day. My mother's boyfriend laughed and said it was a joke and that my hair was 'spikey dykey'.

When I pressed my point, he got shirty and said I was overinterpreting and being too PC. And when I pointed out that not all lesbians have spiky hair he denied this and claimed that he knew more lesbians than me, and knew more about lesbians than me, and all the lesbians he knew had spiky hair, and that I was ignorant and talking about things I didn't understand.

...I mean. Really. FEMMES EXIST DAMMIT! > <

I'm pretty sure it's not me with the problem, here.

I am not one of us

I don't know if it's just me, but I've never felt quite included.

Technically I am a member of many groups. Not groups like organisations, that's a whole 'nother post subject and one for later, but...demographics. English. Mixed race. Genderqueer. Fantasy geek. Etcetera. I don't deny this. It's obvious.

Yet whenever anyone says 'us', no matter how stirring their speech is, no matter whether I think their sentiments are right or wrong...a little voice inside me says, 'I'm not one of you.'

Not in any insulting way, you understand. Not 'I'm not one of you!' hurled like an insult, defiant and secretly terrified, but simply a statement of face. I'm not one of you. Full stop.

I don't really understand why. It's just been...well, a rock-solid certainty, for as far back as I can remember.

Maybe it's psychological. Something to do with my parents-my mother refusing to admit I was part African, my father refusing to admit I was part English, in the simplified version. Maybe it was because I hated baby dolls and action-men both as a kid, and played instead with plastic animals, narrating long complex stories with my lions and tigers and bears(oh my). I don't know.

All I know is that whatever you are, whatever I am, I am not one of you.

That does not mean I don't sympathise with your problems, or that I think you are Wrong and I am Right, or that I pig-headedly deny that we share a common enemy or friend. All it means is that I am not one of you.

I am not plural. I am me, singular, and that is all.

What that means...I don't know.

Big post of thinky and fear and so forth

Been reading some stuff on Dw3t-Hthr’s blog about fear of motherhood, fear not of the ‘I don’t want this, don’t make me do this!’ sort, but fear that goes hand in hand with the wanting, fear and want twined round each other like a nest of garter snakes. She talks about fear of what she might do to her kids, what she might inflict on them-passing on the generational curse. I understand that, and I wish I didn’t.

Reading it makes me think about my own fears. I’m scared of what I’ll do to my children, what kind of parent I’ll be, because the first people we learn parenting from are our own parents and mine taught me so many bad things that I am still painfully unlearning. I don’t want to be my mother and snap and lash out and try to stuff my children into a just-like-me box made out of ticky-tacky. I don’t want to be my father and live in a world of my own, not paying attention to what my children actually think or say, meaning well but being totally unreachable because when they talk to me I don’t listen, don’t even register their voices. I want to teach and protect and not be a burden of spikes digging into their minds, hanging on them as they try to grow up. I don’t want to be a monster…

And as well as that, and even worse than that…I’m scared of what my children will be. Maybe that train of thought started with my fiercely hating my mother, wanting so badly for her to be out of my life, and having everyone tell me that this was Normal. Everyone hates their mother when they are Teenage. Everyone rebels when they are Teenage, purely out of spite, for the sake of rebelling. Because god knows, Teenagers don’t have any thoughts of their own, they don’t see their own paths and try to follow them, they just want to make their parents angry…

I heard that over and over, and somewhere in there I started doubting myself, and that added to the misery…

(These days I don’t have much hate left towards my mother. Just resignation and sadness. And a firm determination to cut all ties with her sharply, as soon as I can support myself. Not solely for my sake. I could cope, you know, if I just had to see her once a year at Christmas or whatever, and that could be managed if I only moved far enough away…But I don’t want her anywhere near my children. Ever. Not even for one day a year. I don’t want that poison in their lives.)

However it started, I’m scared. What if my children hate me? What if they rebel against me, and the way to do that will be to become Normal People, geek-hating, gay-bashing Mundanes like those that made my growing-up hell…

I want children so badly, but what if they turn out to be objects of fear?

It makes me want to cry and hide my head under the blankets. And meanwhile a small annoying voice in my head says I’m getting ahead of myself, worrying about stuff that won’t happen for years yet. But it’s my future that keeps me going, the thought of my future; if the Promised Land turns out to be another deathtrap, where will you live…?

And I don’t have any answers.

But then I start examining myself and think that what this all boils down to is that I don’t trust. I don’t trust myself to be a good or passable parent. I don’t trust my unborn kids to have the good sense to be decent people. I just realised that I also don’t trust my girl-my future wife, and thinking that lifts me out of my misery a little, gives me a happy little buzz-to help me, help catch my mistakes. I don’t trust in my own strength to cope if the Worst Case Scenario actually happens. I don’t trust my God and my little gods and spirits to help me and give me strength…

And then I remember what Athene said a long time ago about trust and trustworthiness, that Zidane didn’t find people trustworthy by never trusting them, never trying to trust.(And that means accepting the possibility of getting hurt, and not letting the hurt when it comes turn you bitter…)

And I wonder if maybe total inability to trust isn’t what makes Silvers, or some of them at least. If maybe closing yourself in and threatening the host of monsters outside with a knife isn’t what makes you a monster, too. There’s got to be a middle ground between naïveté and cynicism; between the idiot that can’t smell a trap a mile off, and the idiot whose mantra is ‘it’s not paranoia if they really ARE all out to get you’. The Golden Mean, and all that.

I’m working on it.

My grandmother is a bitch.

Roll on the seventeenth when I can go up to Dad's place.

Thank you, that is all.

...well, this is a new one.

Yesterday my mother went out to a parent/teacher meeting at Ian’s school, mostly OK save for flu. She came back doubled over and clutching her stomach and asking Ian(he was closest at the time)to call 999.

I went in the ambulance with her to the hospital, and I’m not sure why. Duty, maybe. Curiosity. Probably some of it was that I wanted to get out of the house and away from Ian, too. I didn’t feel upset the way I would if someone I loved was sick. I haven’t loved my mother for years…if I ever did in the first place. You need a personality to be capable of love, and as soon as mine developed it was in opposition to my mother’s. Opposing personalities can be reconciled, but…not in this case. There’s just too much bad blood between us for me to ever think of her with affection.

On the other hand, I DEFINITELY wasn’t gloating. I didn’t feel good about it at all.

I wasn’t sure what to feel, really. I felt blank inside. And vaguely panicked. Slow-motion panic. I didn’t scream or shout. I’d been reading Tales of Symphonia fics online the previous night; somewhere at the back of my mind I thought about blank-faced ‘angels’ with their souls locked up, and the famous Aurion poker face. I always thought that face was a trick; something he, and others I know, had learned how to do in order to conceal their emotions. Now I wonder whether sometimes stuff happened that they didn’t know how to deal with, didn’t know what to feel about…so they just went blank. I was wearing that face.

Symphonia also made me think of the Orchestra, and thinking of the Orchestra made me think of other Packs, and I wanted very badly to be with a Pack just then-somewhere warm and noisy with lots of friendly people. I wanted to see long-time rivals bicker and long-time lovers snuggle.(These are sometimes the same people of course, and sometimes they even do both at once…)I didn’t want to actually talk to anyone, though. Just sort of sit there and be warmed by other peoples’ normal lives-or what passes for normal life, in a Pack. A good, accustomed weirdness. In a way I would have preferred to be with the Orchestra than with my own Pack or with the Emblem Packs. People in those Packs know me well, they’d want to talk to me and involve me in things. The Orchestra are friendly but they aren’t so close to me, and they have their own problems right now with a couple of unexpected and troublesome visitors to host. They’d probably let me sit down someplace, and just carry on whatever they were doing around me. That was about all I felt up to, really.

I didn’t talk to my spirits. My mind had sort of shut down. I didn’t want to talk to anyone, even if they were in my head, even if they were parts of me.

I wonder what the paramedics and the folk at the hospital thought of me. The blank-faced teenager who sat very still and stared at the wall, or read a book silently.

Though, a lot of people in the Accident and Emergency waiting room were quiet…everyone was, actually, save one babe-in-arms. Maybe that’s normal. I got a chocolate bar and some terrible tea from a vending machine. I felt very cold, physically and mentally; the tea and chocolate helped a bit, but not much.

Before my grandparents picked me up and took me home again, I found out what was the problem, at least. A urine infection-probably. The weird thing is, though, my mother didn’t display any of the usual symptoms of urine infection. And I’ve had urine infections before, and they were annoying and painful, but they didn’t leave me doubled over and shaking uncontrollably. The healerfolk think it’s possibly something to do with her recently having had a coil fitted.(The thought of those things has always freaked me out a bit. I suppose I shouldn’t comment on methods of contraception, since I’ve never had a reason to use any of them; still, there’s something creepy about fitting metal semi-permanently into your reproductive organs. And what about TSS?)

She’s staying in the hospital overnight, at least; don’t know when she’ll be back, though the doctor said it will be okay, it’s not life-threatening.

I also feel annoyed at how useless I was. Of course, I’m not healer trained, and I did all I could in the situation, and professionals were there who had the thing in hand, and it’s not like I ran out and left her in trouble, but still. Something real happened here for once-a genuine emergency-and I was useless. It makes me feel ineffectual, resentful and annoyed. Also annoyed at myself FOR feeling like that, when it’s so pointless.

*sighs*

I hope I never have to go through this again…though, with my mother getting older, odds are I probably will. Or something along these lines, anyway.

A Resolution

Prompted by a screaming fit that my mother's boyfriend had at me recently.

When I have children, they will act up. Everyone's kids act up. I will tell them off for it, because that is the right thing to do.

But I will never, never say 'Aren't you ashamed of yourself?!'

I might say, 'Aren't you ashamed of what you've done?!', but there is a big difference there.

Little things like that are important.