Dreamfest '08 (yes, that's sarcasm)

More dreams last night. These ones had my sister, ex-husband, and I think either my mother or my one remaining grandmother was in there, too. Maybe occupying the same figure and switching back and forth.

At one point, my sister and I were driving in Erie. It was dark and raining, and I was trying to remember how to get places, and taking wrong turns. She was sort of laughing, sort of impatient about it.

At another point, we were in my dead grandma's old house, but she was recently dead. We were spending a lot of time there, having to stay there overnight and such, and my sister and I changed the sheets on what had been Grandma's bed, and shared it.

I dreamed we were later standing in the kitchen, and looking at the floor. The vinyl was in bad shape, which would have been so not Grandma. But that's when my ex was suddenly standing there, looking at the floor and talking about laying tile (he's a professional tile man).

There was a dog, which was odd, because -that- grandmother didn't have a dog, the other one does. The dog's water dish had been put on the back porch for reasons we were speculating about, with me saying that 'she probably didn't want to damage the floor with spilled water'. I moved the dog's water dish into the kitchen, next to his food dishes on the floor in an out-of-the-way corner.

Then someone...I knew them in the dream, but don't remember who it was now, came up to the back porch and said something like "The gray board from Mr. So-and-so's shed is gone again." (I heard the name in the dream, but don't remember it now). It seemed important that the piece of gray wood in an otherwise white shed kept getting swiped. Interestingly, this shed and the gray piece of wood show up in other dreams - where it's called to my attention that the gray board is gone. And it always seems to be disturbing news.

This is all getting old. I feel like I've gotten on a ride at an amusement park, only nobody told me until we were strapped in and started moving that it's the worlds' longest roller coaster.

Still broken

I think I must have some part of me that got broken inside when Dad died. It's in there, dangling by a wire, and rattles around when I move through life. And sometimes it unexpectedly gets hung up in other parts, and causes problems.

And sometimes, like now, I just feel like I'm filled with broken glass and it hurts no matter which direction I go. Dad has been in my dreams lately, which puts him on my mind a lot, which brings him into more of my dreams....it's a vicious cycle that is wearing me down and hurting me and making me start to avoid sleep unless I think I'm too tired to dream. And it's all taking a toll on my ability to think clearly, to make decisions, to even type. Holding conversations is difficult, at best. I can't keep doing this, but I don't know how to stop. I don't know how to make this grief leave me alone.

It's been like this for a couple weeks now, and I don't know how much more I can take. I'm tired on so many levels, but it seems I cannot rest easy. There is no comfort, no peace of mind, no restful sleep. I crawl out of bed exhausted with only a minute to spare before I have to take the kids to school. Thankfully, that stops in one week. Maybe if I can just keep pushing until then, I will finally get some rest...once I fall into exhausted sleep, I'll be able to sleep as long as I really need. I hope.

In the Absence of Affection...

..there is a certain numbness, an anesthetic of the heart that allows you to go on functioning as if you were whole. As if the spouse that you have is everything you need, as if the children you birthed were the sunshine and light they are supposed to be, and as if you weren't dying inside.

Then there are times when that anesthetic wears off, and you're left with the aching, empty reality that nobody in your real life really loves you in the way you need.

A husband and family are no guarantee that there will be affection or love. Husband comes home, eats supper, and goes to bed. A kiss before bed, customary, expected, and lacking real warmth. No holding as we sleep, no snuggles, and nothing resembling intimacy or sex.

We make plans for the economic stimulus money that's coming. We pay bills, we discuss getting a small pool for the back yard so I can teach the kids to swim. All on the surface, all mundane.

There's no yelling, no arguing. We just ignore the elephant in the bedroom. The one takes up all the space in the bed. The elephant created by our very different sexual needs and expectations.

I don't know what he needs anymore. Obviously, it's not me.

I need the warmth and scent of male skin against mine, the touches, caresses and contact that make me feel real. Feel loved. Feel desired. I need the passion that makes a wobbly kitchen table seem like the perfect place for sex. I need the fire that makes me feel alive...instead of this awful deadness.

Those zombies in my dreams? I think they are what is happening to me, little by little. They say to me "accept the inevitable death of your heart, your soul, compassion, affection, and the ability to give a shit about anything or anyone".

Monday *yawn* Morning

Okay, okay. I'm outta bed. I have an eye peeled open and am working on consuming enough caffeine to power the other one. Why am I so tired? Because I was up until 3am-ish working on a slide show.

I discovered the other day that Adobe Photoshop Elements does slideshows. So...I hadta do one, just 'cause. That's how I do.

Apparently, how I do also includes staying up obnoxiously late on a Sunday night to finish one of these little projects. I so totally ignored the fact that I have to drag my ass out of bed by 7:45 to drive the kids to school at 8:00...*yawn*....

Good news is, I got it done. Bad news is, the file's too big to send it in email. So I guess it'll have to wait for distribution. That's okay - it's just pics of me and some music, so I'm sure some poor unsuspecting soul will be glad they can't be ambushed with it!

Well, that's all I'm writin' for now. Tough cookies. *yawn* I'm gonna go rest my eyes....

The Tween Years

Today is picture day at school, and late last night, I had the girls pick out what to wear. Middle daughter (from here out, D8) had little trouble finding something suitable to wear. Oldest daughter from here out, D11) ended up crying when I asked her if she had a pair of black pants.

Nonplussed, I asked her what could be so awful about black pants that made her cry. Come to find out, it wasn't the pants at all (I didn't figure it was, but you have to start somewhere). She was feeling like there was too much pressure about how she was going to look for the pictures. I wanted her to dress one way, and she felt that it was going to be very different from what other kids were doing. She said 'you can't understand how I feel'.

Well, we had a heart to heart on that one. I showed her pictures of me at her age - glasses, bad hair, the beginnings of teenage skin...it was painful for me, but I wanted her to see that I DO understand. I know a lot of parents seem to forget what it was like to be a kid, but I'm not one of them. Maybe it's because it was so rough for me. I don't know. But talking to her was a little funny, because I remember my Mom giving me some of those same pieces of advice. Things like "you might want the same haircut some other girl has, but it might not look as good on YOU as it does on her" and "fads are fine, but classics are timeless". And I laughed at myself and TOLD her that my mom had said some of those same things to me, and that, like D11, I wasn't willing to listen.

I think there's a difference, though, and I told D11 this, too. My mom would just deliver a statement and not discuss the reasoning behind it. So it always felt like she was making arbitrary statements rather than taking ME into consideration. But with D11, I made sure that I took the time to talk to her about how these things relate to HER - that while Skye has a cool haircut that looks great on her, getting the same cut wouldn't make D11 look like Skye. And I explained to her that while the Hannah Montana t-shirt is cool, it doesn't make for very good portraits. And I backed that up by showing her the section in my photography lessons on portraiture that deal with backdrops and subjects, and simplifying. She didn't have much to choose from in the way of solid color shirts without distracting graphics, but we came up with a black polo shirt and black pants. And when I did her hair this morning, she looked fabulous!

I hope this teaches her to trust me a bit more. I know kids think they know everything - I've been there, I remember. And being 11 is SO awkward for a girl. Not a little girl, not yet a teen...hence the name they've come up with for it - tween. I just want to get her through these years with some semblance of self-confidence. It will be my gift to her - and something I never had. Rather than hide wounds behind false apathy, I want her to be armored against them with a solid sense of who she is and what she's worth. I want her to be able to shake off comments from rude brats, and also be able to accept a compliment with grace. She deserves to be happy - I want SO badly for her to be a happy, confident young woman. Maybe I feel that something good will have come of my own messed up youth if I can use it to make things better for her. It kills me to see her suffer such self-doubt..it's too much like looking back at myself at that age. I can't reach back and help that version of me, to tell her it will be okay, that she will survive even when she doesn't want to. But I can maybe head that all off for D11, and let her not only survive, but thrive.

I think maybe guiding her through this is helping to heal me a little. She is so terribly much like me in some bad ways, and if I can just steer her in a better direction....she can have a better life than me. I might be able to stop her from becoming bitter and shutting herself off from any real friendships or relationships. Maybe she won't be afraid to love, and won't suffer from a lack of it. Maybe she'll be confident enough not to marry the first (and second) man that comes along. Maybe she'll have the courage to be true to herself, and to speak up for what she needs or wants.

I was going to say you couldn't pay me to go through my tween years again...but through her, I am.

Slaves and Pets

I've been fortunate enough in the last month or so to be RPing in Shang with a really good partner. One of my slave alts is owned by a man who is involved in some sort of shady business, the kind that requires him to have a 'crew' that watches his back and helps him run things. He is big, tall, rough and gruff and not someone to meet in a dark alley. He bought this slave without any prior rental - just saw her and bought her. Well, it's amazing, but the RP has been fantastic and fun. And it has gotten me thinking.

About a year and a half ago, I had a Master that I thought was perfect. He didn't seem to think he was, though, and his doubts sort of derailed things. Along the way off the track, he aked me if I wanted to be a slave or a pet. I didn't know what to say. I had never thought there was a choice; in my mind, a sub is what her Master or Dom wants her to be. I didn't want to make a choice, but he was insistent. I don't remember what I chose now, but I guess it was wrong, because he's not my Master anymore. I still sometimes think about all that and wonder what the hell happened, but I suspect it's more a who than a what.

Anyway, this new RP partner and the way his character (JD) treats mine (Calista) has gotten me thinking about that question again - slave or pet. And I realize, after seeing the way JD treats Calista, that a choice isn't necessary. When my former Master wanted me to make the choice, I had thought I was doing something wrong, and that I was being punished by being limited to one role because I couldn't handle both. Well, I know now that I can handle both, and they flow seamlessly together for me. JD can treat Calista with incredible care and tenderness; he calls her his "Hellkitten" or "kitten" for short (which I adore) and dotes on her at times, but he's also able to treat her as property - sharing her with his crew, punishing her, whatever he needs to do.

Asking me to choose between slave and pet was like asking me which I wanted to keep, my arms or legs. It felt so wrong and so strange, and I agonized over it and drove myself nuts over it to the point where I was so confused I couldn't function as either. I wanted to sit in his lap AND kneel at his feet. Then after I chose, it was constant self-monitoring and doubt. Was I allowed to do X, or was that only for what I didn't choose to be? If I did Y, would that be taken wrong?

I'm so glad I'm getting to RP being both for someone. It's just RP, yes, but the effect of having my gifts of submission AND affection both equally accepted is helping alleviate the confusion and self-doubt I carried away from my last Master. With some more positive experience under my belt, maybe I'll be ready to try again. Because being a sub without a Master is awkward, at best.

Dice!

My 1-pound bag of D&D dice arrived today! Ninety-seven new polyhedral dice in a variety of colors and sizes. Way too cool!

After plucking out a few choice ones to augment the 56 dice I had from my college days, I put the rest in a clear divider box for the gaming table. I now get to keep my original dice (my pwecious) to myself to use as a DM set. Never realized DMing took so many dice! To make it easy on myself, though, it helps to have enough 10-siders for all the monsters' initiative rolls, etc. I assign each baddie a different colored die and roll 'em all out at once.

What kind of geek am I do be doing a happy dance over dice? Well, a happy one, of course!

I have to say, most of the dice in the bag were not what I would have picked, but for bulk dice they're okay. The kids like them - good thing, too, because they're going to be using the speckled buggers! I'll keep my pretty marbled ones, my glittering ones, and my gem-like transparent ones.

Roll a Life's Little Delights check.

It's Raining Caterpillars and Frogs

Well, it's raining here, and it seems to have brought out tons of fuzzy caterpillars and billions of baby frogs (okay so maybe not that many..). The kids and I keep trying to identify the caterpillars; Mom got the kids a 'Butterflies of the Carolinas' field guide, and about 80% of them show small photos of the larva stage. Our little fuzzballs seem to be in that 20% that aren't pictured. Of course.

We had to rescue a baby frog from the cat last night. Oliver was extremely interested in one spot of the kitchen floor near the back door, and when we investigated, there was an itty bitty baby frog (fwog) hopping frantically around. You could almost hear the "oh shit! oh shit! oh shit!" that had to be running through the poor thing's head. The look on Oliver's face was, of course, "I wonder how he'll taste...."

Not getting much done lately, but I don't feel that bad about it right now. I started DMing an AD&D campaign for hubby and the girls, and it's been a little hectic. I haven't run a game before, so I decided to use modules I got for free from www.dragonsfoot.org to get me going. They were designed for 1st Edition AD&D, but I'm having no trouble using them with AD&D rules. The XP and gold values are a little screwy, but they're easy enough to alter. My main thing was needing the basic story and the maps, and this is working out great for our little first-level group. Right now, they've just solved a murder and are about to go on the chase. It makes a DM proud. *sniff, sniff*

Maybe next gaming session, I'll throw in some caterpillars and frogs...

A visit from Dad

I woke up crying this morning. I had hit snooze a couple times, still mostly asleep, dropping back into a dream.

In the dream, I was talking to someone I knew, in the dining room of a house that seems to appear in my dreams at times. There was a little TV in the room, and it was showing one of the "Beethoven" movies. They showed the woman standing with some people on the porch of a yellow house with white trim, like she was a realtor showing the house to clients. I said "Hey, that looks like my grandma's house" and the camera pulled back, showing the house number as 174, and turned to show the open ball field, basketball court, pool and playground across the street, and I gasped, "That IS my grandma's house!". It was exciting to me, because I love that house, and to see it had been used in a movie was just cool. (Note: I don't know if a similar house ever was really used in the movie, and I'll have to look and see if the house number was 174 - I sort of doubt it was, but I'm not sure what other significance that number may have)

Well, the sight of the house started me reminiscing about 'grandma's house', and some of the little nooks and crannies Dad and I had found there, etc. (Thing is, these nooks, crannies, and passageways were part of 'grandma's house' that exists only in my dreams, and doesn't really look like Grandma's real house - it is a house that I've never seen or been to, but know very well. Dad and I have explored and done work in this 'dream house'. In my dreams, I know for a 'fact' that it is grandma's house, though.) I was telling about finding a narrow hidden passageway that zigzagged up the side of the house, between what people thought was the outer wall and what was really the outer wall. This led to more reminiscing, most of it things Dad and I had done that had made an impression on me. Like the time we were doing plumbing under our store in Elgin, PA, and found in the crawlspace a cut passageway tall enough to walk upright in, and a small room at the end. The room had old wood saloon doors on it, and inside I could see a wooden rocking chair and some shelves with mason jars. Dad and I think it was a little Prohibition-era thing, but we never knew for sure. It was just an amazing discovery (and a real one, not a dream one).

At some point between the tellings of my stories, the dream showed the room I was in again, only now I was in a small room with a bed, and I was sitting on the edge of the bed, and there were two doorways on the wall in front of me. The left doorway led to the rest of the house, and the right doorway was to another very small room, where Dad was sitting in a chair at a table, listening to me tell the stories. He seemed a little upset and said "You know, you can put all the coins and stuff we found, all the treasures, in a pile and take a picture, and it would be just as good to say 'here's what we found'." (I don't know what he means about the coins) And I just looked at him and said "No, Dad - it's not about the stuff..." and paused, then said "What I'm trying to say is 'Thank you for making it fun'." And I looked down, and I was packing a six-pack of pop into a black nylon cooler for him, just as I heard myself say in the most pain-filled, heartbroken voice "You can't DO this to me.." as I began to cry. I glanced up and saw him laying on a bed or something on the floor, just before I was lifted up through layers of consciousness to become aware of myself clutching a pillow....and crying.

I lay in bed this morning and sobbed until I had to get up and take the kids to school. And as I write this, the tears fall more. I miss my Daddy.

"I can't hold on to me, wonder what's wrong with me.."

I'm not sure what's wrong with me today. Or any day lately for that matter. There's just this..utter apathy. I take even less interest in anything than usual. I'm restless, but I don't know what I might want to do. I do know I want to sleep ..and sleep and sleep. I talk to only a couple of people now, and even they are hearing from me less and less.

I know. I'm depressed. As usual. And I know Marcus would say "go talk to somebody"...but what he doesn't understand is that doing that would require far, far more of me than I'm able to give right now. First there's the phone call - having to talk to some receptionist and tell them you want to make an appointment about depression. Gawd, the thought of that alone is enough to make me say 'no thanks'. I'm depressed, yes, but I don't wanna really tell anybody. Gawd, how vile. But let's assume for the sake of argument that I would do such a thing. Well, then there's the appointment itself. Pile Will into the Jeep and drive all the way somewhere, probably in the city, where I hate to go. New places, having to deal with more people...it's just too much. And then there would be the appointment itself. I mean, what the hell do you say? I'm depressed. And when asked why, I have no answer except that this is how I am. Chronically depressed. And I don't really wanna talk about it. So what good is a shrink?

I'm beginning to think that my period of gung-ho "let's fix the house, our life, etc" was nothing more than mania. I do that from time to time. I think I'm going to change my whole life around, get it all together, etc....and I start doing it, all with the best of intentions. And then, for no reason, it all crashes. I get apathetic again and all my changes fall by the wayside. And then I'm depressed again, and feeling even more like I'm a failure.

I don't know what to do about it. I don't know if I WANT to do something about it. I know that others expect me to be different than this, though. But I rarely care about what other people want from me. Does this mean I'm going to live an unproductive life? I don't know.

The complete lyrics for my post title line are as follows:

"Lithium" by Evanescence

Lithium, don't want to lock me up inside
Lithium, don't want to forget how it feels without
Lithium, I want to stay in love with my sorrow
Oh but God I want to let it go

Come to bed, don't make me sleep alone
Couldn't hide the emptiness or let it show
Never wanted it to be so cold
Just didn't drink enough to say you love me

I can't hold on to me
Wonder what's wrong with me

Lithium, don't want to lock me up inside
Lithium, don't want to forget how it feels without
Lithium, I want to stay in love with my sorrow

Don't want to let it lay me down this time
Drown my will to fly
Here in the darkness I know myself
Can't break free until I let it go
Let me go

Darling, I forgive you after all
Anything is better than to be alone
And in the end I guess I had to fall
Always find my place among the ashes

I can't hold on to me
Wonder what's wrong with me

Lithium, don't want to lock me up inside
Lithium, don't want to forget how it feels without
Lithium, stay in love with you
Oh I'm gonna let it go