Days 0864, 0865, 0866 & 0867

I’m not a huge fan of insults – unless they’re funny. But the worst kinds of insults – much like lies – are the lazy ones.

You know, the ones where zero effort has been applied and all that’s left is the nasty.

Things like: ‘She manages like she’s a police officer’ when the person in question used to be a police officer.

It’s the same aggravation with ‘the easy narrative’.

Just say you had spent five years being strung through court over child custody matters with a man who once and continues to try to abuse you.

Just say he spends all that time telling you you’re a liar. And mental. And completely forensic in trying to keep his child from him.

And the narrative he chooses to tell the tea room audience at work is this: The system is full of man haters. She is just keeping my son from me to cause me pain. She is a vengeful and crazed bitch.

Never mind that he’s the one who took the matter to court. Never mind that he ended up getting less than he’d been offered custody wise the first day he and his estranged wife sat down for free of charge mediation five years and a couple hundred thousand dollars ago.

And ‘Man Hating Crazed Bitch’ is all he can come up with?

Surely if I’m that crazed, I’m worth a much better story than that?

How insulting.

Days 0728 & 0729

I do go on about this a bit but …

Does naming something and then saying that name out loud give you power?

Cutting straight to the chase:

Does saying ‘you committed acts of domestic violence and abuse against me’ to that man in a room of strangers that are part of that blunt tool called ‘court’ empower me? 

Or take away his power over me?

Or does it make me a statistic only.

And him able to use that phrase among certain groups who need nothing more to know that middle class white men have it tough in this world run by man haters and *gasp* strong women?

Days 0722, 0723, 0724, 0725, 0726 & 0727

Horrid people. How I wish they were monsters.

But they’re not. Just people who’ve been broken or twisted.

If people were monsters, I wouldn’t have fallen in love with Halfman: his horns would have been showing even while he ran his long, tree frog fingers through my coiff.

And I wouldn’t have married He Who Shalt Not either, would I? I would Have glimpsed the fangs and the fists and the rage seeping from his skin.

I am not attracted to monsters. 

I don’t choose to spend time with monsters.

I just really need to learn the difference between human faults and monstrous behaviour. 

Until then it’s probably best to stay away from both.

Days 0715, 0716, 0717, 0718 & 0719

Hours and days seem to pass in a haze at the moment. One second things seem to take forever, the next I’ve been sitting staring at the dog’s wet nose for an hour. It took me 30 minutes to figure out how to unscrew and then screw in a toilet roll holder yesterday. As if the concept of counter clockwise/clockwise had abandoned me as I sat with the screwdriver in my hand and The Kid splashing in his bath on the otherside of the wall.

I have one more work related stringing together of words and sentences to do before I can submit to my brain’s increasing inability to think beyond each thought to the next.

Next Weds, it will all be over. I will be fine. No one will have been injured. No wars will have been started.

Today I am upright, dressed and at work. Not functioning perhaps, but here in body. And I’m pleased with myself for that.

The toilet roll holder is also functioning nicely. And attached securely to the wall.

So while my brain is like a jellyfish’s tummy at the moment (ie, everything passes through it like it’s not there), my structure is strong. It will get me through and the two things — body and mind — can reunite once the tension is gone.

This is not fragility; this is strength.

You keep going. And you’re more You afterward than you were before.

And you’ve fought for your kid. And you haven’t given up.

That is what strength is.

Not a facade of unbreakability, but remaining unbroken.

Days 0713 & 0714

I can totally own being frightened, I don’t like being there but my ego can handle it. You’re only truly brave when you’re frightened; when your pounding heart and dry throat don’t stop you from standing up for what you know is right.

Somehow this type of conundrum doesn’t apply to being ‘fragile’. 

People observe us being brave when we’re feeling at the height of anything but.

But they call us ‘fragile’ when they can see us falling apart, not when they see us ‘being strong’.

I have always looked ‘delicate’ – light colored, straight as a die hair, sharp, thin features, a soft voice. But I’ve never been delicate. I’ve always prided myself on being tough on the inside – resilient. 

So to be labelled ‘fragile’, to be ‘diagnosed’ as ‘psychologically delicate’ makes me dislike myself.

Because though I might feel beaten down, knocked about and kicked in the guts at times but by the ‘Still Here’ measure I continue to kick ass.

Could you please start defining that, defining me and my refusal to lie down, as strong?

Days 0706, 0707 & 0708

I feel like I have a very large, heavy breathing rottweiler attached to my head, his jaws clamped tightly over my brain to just above my eyes.

If people could see him there my stiff expressions, hesitant decision making, and inability to think more than an hour or two into the future would become more understandable. The wallet left on the bench at home instead of taken with me to the doctor’s appointment, the odd, unmatched socks, the forgetting of friends’ birthdays and meetings …

If the Drooling Rottweiler of Anxiety was visible, the fact that I am dressed properly and standing upright would be seen for the superheroic effort it feels like at the moment.

In three weeks it will all be over. The court process will have hit its end point. I will have survived listening to He Who Shall Not Be Named pleading his case, telling me (and the court) how much he loves his son, how he has attended a yoga class and therefore is not stressed any more.

And I will have to decide I can live with whatever the decision is.

That I can either welcome my son’s engagement with his dad on a cautious and incremental basis or that I will have to face the reality of even more heavily arming my little guy to defend himself from the self-crushing reality of life with his father.

Days 0692, 0693, 0694 & 0695

when I stop writing, when I stop responding to emails, when I busy myself with mundane tasks, that is when my ‘crushing down and avoiding unpleasantnesses to come’ strategy is reaching critical failure levels.

I can feel the worries and anticipation right there just below the surface: like if I used an exfoliant on my T-zone, it would be enough for me to leak my anxiety publicly.

But for now, I am keeping a thin surface around it.

Court is coming. 

Days 0572 & 0573

I lament how easily he can still turn me into a pretzel.

Still I remain straighter than I once was and I unbend much faster than I did three years ago.

But it still happens. He can still tangle me up into a place where I question whether my gut and my principles are right.

I’m extremely lucky to have people in my corner who can see clearly through the bends and tangles.

Although that is, in some ways, worse. Because it says to me that I still exist within that tiny him-focussed, him-centred universe he built for me. And that, if my brain wasn’t so bent to its requirements, I would see clearly that he’s a dickhead trying to blackmail me through my son or push my buttons to make me do what he wants.

I had some of the best legal advice I’ve yet had a week or so ago. It was legal advice because it came out of the mouth of a lawyer and this is what it was.

“You can have relationships with creeps, but DO NOT breed with them.’

Amen to that.

Days 0523 & 0524

Three years ago I sat across a custody mediation table for the first time and made an offer.

Today, almost exactly three years later, sitting in a family court safe room this time, the same offer – give or take an extremely minor detail or two – was accepted.

I know it was entirely grudging — one might even call the acceptance ‘enforced’ by the fact that refusing it would have made the other person involved look exactly like what we’ve had to explain that person is: controlling and interested in me, not the child.

So … there I finally have it. In a week, the custody arrangement of three years will change slightly.

I asked my lawyer about four times if that was correct: it had been accepted?

And I was lucky to have a third person present to confirm it.

But there was no feeling of relief — of finally getting somewhere.

Instead it’s a feeling to total anxiety and trepidation.

Will my child be ok? Will I be ok?

I am frightened back into that spot I was in before I left except I am in control of this situation. And he still scares me. His anger scares me even though I’ve managed to duck it for quite a while now with no non-lawyer communication and picking my child up in a supermarket carpark.

And yet I still feel that fear that I’ll have woken the anger in him: that steam will be coming out of his ears when I have to see him in the carpark tonight. That I’ll be called selfish. That my child will be frightened.

How long does it take for the Fear Mechanism to grow rusty?

Day 0513

Ugh. Not just Halfman ooze trying to seep across my borders now … He Who Shall Not Be Named fungus and Family Court Flagellation as well.
Am I impermeable in my new Partially Fledged Pretty Dayum Happy state?
Well, no.
But at least I’m not pretending I am to myself or anyone else.
I think I’ll leave that habit on the scrap heap of mystory.
Nope. It feels pretty unnerving and shithouse to know an affidavit’s been filed with letters attesting to the greatness of his parenthood, the non existence of his stress, and complaining that I’m a big Mentalcase Meanie.
So I just keep telling myself: the truth is Here and you know what it is. Pieces of paper with words on them don’t diminish that.
But it is hard.
Because words on paper are what I believe in a lot of the time.
But some words are crap aren’t they? And some words are very untrue. And some paper is made to disintegrate.
Like toilet paper. And the poo wiped on it.
There we go: that’s how to think about it.