Yesterday I spoke to half-bio-bro for the first time. I’m a professional questioner yet I found myself almost speechless.

His grandfather (my bio one) was born on a ship to the US! He and his brothers became farmers. Their father, my bio-dad was also a farmer.

I have four half bio siblings–three younger than I am. They don’t know about me as I was born after my oldest half-bio-bro. Oldest half-bio-bro remembers my bio-mom. He believed my story to be true. I lost any doubt when I saw a picture of his son in his 20′s. He looked just like me. It was amazing!

I don’t really feel comfortable saying more than that right now. It’s a lot to take in.

What a year this has been! On New Years Eve when I ate every lucky food I could find mentioned on the Internet–salmon’s one, kale’s another, collard greens and spinach still more foods–so this wasn’t an unknown me–I had no idea that the next Friday I would randomly be looking at a picture of my bio-mom when an editor from Psychology Today called.

And in early summer I would hear from my birth cousins on bio-mom’s side. I know I will look back and think 2011 the most amazing of years even if most of the time it felt as if the US was drowning in its fluids.

First I have to catch my breath!

You wake up in the morning after a night of incredibly horrible dreams. You brush the dreams off and answer some long over-due emails.

You do something else you don’t usually do. Put a comment in The New York Times. It gets an amazing amount of “likes” though you have told nobody about this.

It doesn’t make “highlights,” just “reader’s recommendations.”

You’re not sure if you like that better.

A person of the people.

That’s you.
Right.
Not.

A few hours later you get a response to one email you wrote.
Info that you have been searching for most of your life.
Actually you didn’t even know you were looking for the info contained in the response.
Maybe you were.

You’re the same person you were a few hours ago.

But you’re not.

You just googled and found your birth-brother.
Using the info you were just given, your absolutely amazing research skills, and $40 to Intellius, a site that finds everything quickly. Tries to rip you off but you won’t let it.

You wonder if he knows about you.
You’re not sure you want to intrude in his life.

You surmise that he’s a super at a school for kids with learning disabilities.

Ironic considering your former obsession with building employees, and your own learning disabilities.

He was born four days and thirty five years after your father; four days after your first love.
Seventeen months, almost to the day, older than you.
This must be meaningful but you can’t figure out the higher meaning.

You don’t know if he has siblings.
Your birth mother told you that there were three kids.

For every one truth your birth mother told you, she told you a few not true things. For some reason this endears her to you. She was protecting her great love and his family.

You don’t know, you just don’t know what to do.

You think about taking a walk wearing your new LED-wrap-around-your-forehead-light. One of eight flashlights, and lanterns you now own.
You would look stupid but have light–and red flashing lights in case of danger.
You could play with moving the light up and down.

Stop it Pia.
You don’t want the four people left who read this blog to think you’re totally immature.
But they know…

Your house survived the hurricane with nary a scratch–after it totally screwed up your vacation.

All those calls, messages, texts, even emails.
You couldn’t muster strength the whole time you were in Cambridge.
You needed the strength for the twelve hours it took you to get home, and the real hurricane prep.

Then the hurricane hit everywhere but here. You know the lesson in that.

You’re so tired. Just so tired.

You wish you could hire somebody to do your thinking for you. But you can’t.

You have birth-brothers address and phone number.

Searching is so easy since the Internet it almost feels like cheating.

You’re not sure that it’s moral or ethical or just wrong to intrude in his life.
Maybe it’s right.
The rulebook hasn’t been written yet.

Your whole life has been about uncharted lands, mountains, bodies of water.
All places nobody ever thought to explore until you did.

Now you have the LED-wrap-around-forehead-flashlight to expedite all the searches.
Or will it make the searches more difficult?
You’ll actually see what you pass.
Are you ready for that?

You have never believed in secrecy.

This story is one of the reasons why.
Secrets lead nowhere good.
Nowhere.

Except for comments in The Times.

I got a comment in one of my old PT posts by somebody who is either a student in mental health, a wannabe or somebody who just likes using language in as complicated form as possible.  I can’t imagine this person is actually a professional yet….

It made me realize that no matter how concretely I explain things people are going to think that NLD is a mental health problem not a neurological one.

Do you blame the mother when a child has Asperger’s?  Or do you say that the child is acting up to get love from the parents?  No of course not.  You would be stoned to death metaphorically.  Yet it’s OK to say that about NLD?  I don’t think so.

So much of my life was wasted in therapy trying to find answers to problems that are neurological not psychological.  I can’t stress that enough.  I see the difference between young women with NLD and me.  They are much more confident.  They haven’t spent their lives being blamed for not being able to organize themselves properly or looking at things their parents did wrong yet knowing that can’t be the true problem because they were secure in their family’s love.  Yet maybe this happened or that….No I can’t do this to myself anymore.

Twenty years ago yesterday my father had a stroke.  He died five days later.  I miss him more than ever.

I hope to be out of this mood shortly.  I also hope that during my lifetime people begin to truly understand that the depression and suicide rates for NLD are so high because it’s not a matter of trying harder.  It’s a matter of learning how to work around what doesn’t work properly in your brain.  It sounds so easy!

Childhood dreams is a prompt from Studio 30 plus.

Because the 3WW prompt went I added it!

I stop talking and concentrate on putting fireflies into a bottle.  It’s going to be dark soon and the trapped fireflies will light up the skies.  We’re between ten and six years old and none of us have to be in until the adults unplug the TV’s from the extension cords hanging from the garden apartments in the courts to TV tables.  Some of the men smoke cigars.   They drink Coke and lemon soda, spilling the soda so that bees and flys flock around the tables and TV’s.  I stay far away from the TV tables.  There’s nothing dainty about them.  Plus I’m scared soda will spill into the extension cords and there will be a huge explosion.

It’s summer before my little sister and I go to camp for six weeks soon after my birthday.  Our parents encourage us to stay out late and play so we’ll be tired and sleep a bit later in the morning. Though I try to get up at six every morning of the year to read the encyclopedia.  I’m a word nerd that the other kids like because they can’t remember not knowing me.  My best friend, Ava Altman, is at a hotel for the summer.  My family goes to hotels but most of the families spend two to four weeks in bungalow colonies.

I don’t tell the kids that my family spent summers in bungalow colonies when we lived in Sunnyside.  Maybe my parents laugh at memories of the bungalow colonies when we stay at hotels near Monticello to visit parts of my father’s family.  His sister and her family live in Miami.  Poor me. Doomed to vacations in the Catskills, Miami Beach, and “educational places” such as The Pennsylvania Dutch Country.

We study the region for months before we go. I can’t wait for our first vacation to DC where we’ll see the FBI building which is about the most exciting building in the world to me.  The day we’re going to go we stop at my father’s client’s supermarket first and I throw up all over the entrance way to the store.  We go back to the court instead where I get over the measles in two days.

I like going on vacation. I especially like Florida because I get to spend the morning in the pool and the afternoon in the ocean.  My parents get two rooms and our cousins come and stay with us. We all get along.  My sister and I can still recite our father’s refrain: “relax, we’re going to be here for two weeks.  You don’t need to do everything today.”  Yes. We. Do.  We run through the hotel lobbies and downstairs store arcade.  If we’re in the 40′s at Collins Avenue we run to some houseboats that are on TV.  We’re going to meet some TV stars.  My sister who is two years younger doesn’t really care but she knows I only like the coolest of things.  That we never meet a TV star doesn’t phase me.  There’s always tomorrow.  Or next year.

I like being in the court. I like camp. I’m an indiscriminate life liker. I can’t wait to be a teenager and have a real boyfriend but I spend much time dreaming.  Ava and I have our whole lives plotted out.  Ava looks like a child movie star.  She has long dark wavy perfect hair, and is the prettiest girl I know.

Ava thinks I’m so lucky to be my mother’s daughter.  Unlike Ava’s mother who I secretly think is a witch who will get her coven together for a court haunting, my mother’s friendly and fun.

My mother has dark hair, large eyes, a huge smile, and is I know prettier than most of the other mothers. Before I was adopted my mother owned a fancy dress store in Forest Hills.  Her mother makes our good clothes.  Ava, my sister and I are the best dressed girls in the court.  Ava’s family has a housekeeper.  I take that for granted until I’m older and realize how tiny the garden apartments, built for returning vets are.  Everybody lives in Beech Hills because it’s on top of the largest hill in Queens, cut off from the rest of the borough, and has a lot of outdoor space for kids to play in.

There are 40 mothers in the court alone.  I’m vaguely aware that my mother’s older because I was adopted but I know this is something that can never ever be discussed.  Most parents and kids think she’s younger.  Everybody looks up to my parents.  My father’s a professional who always has time to talk to the other parents and answer any questions.  He began the first credit union for coop apartments.  I know that’s a big deal only because parents stop me and tell me how great my father is.

I don’t try to memorize summers in the court.  The TV’s, the rock & roll I love that the older kids play; the games we kids play.  It’s boys against girls, run to the trees.  One two three ring a leveo.  I’m not very good at the games but it doesn’t matter and I laugh so hard when I get to the trees.  I’m tantalized by the garden apartments.  The court is a perfect place to live.

Years later Ava and I will find our memories haunting.  No childhood could possibly live up to it.  We tantalize kids with our stories.

Then I never stop to think how good life is.  Why should I?  It’s all I know.  But I will always remember how beautiful the fireflies were when they lit up the sky like fireworks.  Then I opened the bottle and let them fly away into the night.  The other kids didn’t like that.  They liked the fireflies living for a few days in the glass jars with air holes on the jar cap.  But I liked to think of them flying to their true love.

This is the saddest story I have read in a long long time

••••••••••••••••••••••••

Part One

Part Deuce

The other night I watched The Kids Are Alright an amazing slice of life movie that left me wanting more and thinking.   Julianne Moore’s character was empathetic from the beginning.  Annette Bening’s character had to earn my respect and like.  She did an incredible job.  Bening is one of my favorite actresses.

The Kids Are Alright is about a lesbian couple who have two kids.  The older kid, the daughter turns eighteen and for reasons I won’t go into finds the sperm donor.

I always thought of my birth father as the sperm donor.  My birth mother wouldn’t tell me much about him.  They had dated for a long time she said but he was Irish Catholic and that was a big no no.  I know his name was John. She wouldn’t tell me his last name.   Yes my birth father was a John. (As a collector of truly awful jokes I love that one.)  He was born and died in the same town when I was between twelve and fourteen.  After my birth mother told him about me he married somebody else and had three children.  So I have three half-siblings I’ve never met.  I would like to meet them.

But they don’t know about me and even if I could somehow find them I’m not sure I would want to disrupt their lives.  I realized that the major problem between my birth mother and I was that we didn’t live up to each others fantasies.  I didn’t think I had any, yet….

I know subconsciously I was looking for a woman who looked more like me, was a reader, intellectual and had a rapid fire wit.  She turned out to be a nice ordinary woman and I hate my younger self for putting such constraints on her yet I can’t be harsh on me as I had no model or guidebook.  (I’m sure you all figured this out within the first two paragraphs of the first post!)

I know we need more books, movies and all media on adoption, sperm donors, and every other way many modern families are conceived.  Because I still wouldn’t know how to play a meeting with her (if we hadn’t met already,) my birth father (were he alive and I’m not really sure he died but I am cynical) and his family.

I do believe I was absolutely justified in meeting her.  As to the rest I’m not so sure and would love input.  My sister and I have made some preliminary research plans but I keep backing out.

¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶

I will never forget the scene in American Beauty where Bening,  a real estate broker, goes to a client’s house and immediately begins straightening a chandelier and cleaning.  It was so real. American Beauty was also the first movie in a series–well the second time I saw it I went with Lucia, my best friend, and told her to look for something. I didn’t tell her what or that it was an object not character.

She started screaming: “they (Annette Bening and Kevin Spacey) have your kitchen!”  I screamed also.  Yes. I. Did.  In the middle of one of New York’s biggest, filled to capacity, multiplexes.  We have no shame when it comes to certain things.

It was a bit embarrassing but I was to come to realize that the white (usually called) Newport cabinets with brushed metal or stainless knobs, and black with gray speckled granite counters and even floors, (mine was)  stood for a certain kind of American 90′s affluence in films.  Of course my kitchen was minuscule but…Lucia and I are house object freaks.  Our homes express us which I guess was the one of the reasons I reacted to my birth mother’s lack of house personality so badly.

Forgive my rambling.  I just wrote the first draft of my second Psychology Today blog post and will let you know….Oh you know I will. Thanks all.  The stats have been above my expectations and I would love them to be higher, much higher. I’m learning the not very subtle art of shameless self-promotion, and actually feel good about it as I know I have a great product.  Thanks me!!!!!!!

Part One

About seven years before I met my birth mother I went to a meeting of one of the adoption groups that were big in the city then.  A young woman walked up to the podium with her very obviously  challenged brother:

Hi, I’m Casey.  This is my brother, Michael. I found him after I found my birth mother who lives in a mental hospital.  She had seven children by seven men.  It doesn’t matter.  I never felt part of my family.  Now my life is complete.”

Standing ovation except from me and a few other laggards. Read more…

I met my birth mother in the 80′s.  I have many great things to say about that decade.  Meeting her isn’t one of them.  It took me years, until I wrote a newspaper article about the experience to remember what she called me the entire weekend.  I was “my mistake.”  “Why hi.  How nice to meet you.  Just call me her mistake.”

The word guilt was invented specifically for me yet I felt no, OK very little guilt when I stopped corresponding with my birth mother.  She had told me how sorry she was she didn’t marry my birth father (I wasn’t as I wouldn’t have had my family) yet she would write me letters listing cities where I could meet Jewish men.

Hello.  I lived in Manhattan.  It was a bit hard not to meet Jewish men but I was looking, half-heartedly, for love and religion played no part in that.  Actually I was in the midst of a two year, get together for sex and fun–friends with benefits, before the name, with an Italian-American character actor.  But I had no desire to talk about it.

We had met at the Iggy Pop concert where I was carried in a rave, and somehow got my friend a job with Iggy who I had never met before the after party.  Being friends with doormen, managers and/or club owners all over downtown had certain advantages.

I’m not proud of a lot of things I did but I’m not ashamed either.  I didn’t expect my birth mother to approve of everything I did nor did I feel the need to tell her.  As I didn’t tell my parents everything.  I was a self-supporting adult who didn’t need a new mother.  Mine, adoptive, was everything I wanted in a mother.

So I let the relationship die a natural death.  I’ve googled her maybe a total of four times in the entire time I have had access to the Internet.   I was shocked to see a picture of her still alive and sharp looking.  She looked very different than she had 22 years ago.  Old but better.  Nothing at all like me–we have totally different noses, eyes, and mouths.  But the face shape, yes.  When I saw her she had a round face.  Mine hasn’t been round since teen years.

If I met her now I would handle the reunion very differently.  But I don’t know how.  It’s something I think you’re never prepared for no matter how “prepared” you go.

The picture stirred up feelings in me.

Feelings of needing family.  Feelings of being somebody’s child.  Unfortunately I can never be her child.  I had two of the best parents, and this year I know I will think of them often.  My Mom’s tenth anniversary and my Dad’s 20th.  Bookends I called them and they were.

I have incredible family and friends.  But I don’t think you ever stop wanting to be somebody’s child.  Even when they’re old, frail and maybe dependent, they diapered you.  They love you for the flaws, not in spite of them.  Well, a bit of everything.  It’s their job to love you!  They even pay you for the privilege.  Room, board, toys, clothes, vacations, college if you’re lucky.  And all the things you take so for granted.

This is an article making the FB rounds on quitting blogging.  Seven to ten hours a week on blogging?  At my height when friends mentioned above called me “lost to blogging,” rather melodramatically I might add, I was spending 70-100 hours a week on two or more blogs.  And paid for mine!!!!!!!!

Yesterday I found a recent picture of my birth mother on the Internet.  (She looked good for 87 : She wasn’t young when I was born) As I was emailing and phoning various family and friends, the phone rang.  It was an editor at a major magazine, one I have read forever and turn to for mental health issues. (I had a friend in college who read it for the art work) offering me a try out as a blogger.

I was planning my bio and first post this morning while walking on air.

And wondering about my birth mother. My birth mother means something I don’t quite understand to me. I was thinking about how differently I would have done my meeting with her knowing what I know about people now.  I was frantically cycling on the Exercycle.  My plate was full.

( I only have one real mother.  I called her mommy despite the laughter of her friends.  I called my father by his name in public.  He thought it more professional.  I believe this began when I was in elementary school and would go with him to his clients on school breaks. The are, were two of my favorite people anywhere and I missed them a bit more since Friday evening.)

Then I found out about Gabrielle Giffords,  Judge John M Rolls who was just there to say hello, and so many others.  I thought from the beginning the gunman was one alone sick male.  Those variables fit the profile for this kind of shooting.

Still I blame Sarah Palin.  No person has a MAP with gun sights, innocently.  That’s an overt or subconscious rallying page for sick people to take action.

I live in Horry County SC which actually has more than eight Democrats.  You would never know it at street fairs or events where there are signs dissing President Obama everywhere.  There are no Democratic tables as they’ve been made fun of too often and the table was turned over or so I was told.  I don’t believe that any sane rational person here would do anything to another person.  But so many people are no longer sane in any sense for so many reasons.

I was going to watch the documentary about Facebook, Catfish, and go to sleep early as I didn’t sleep that much last night.  Once I fell into a deep sleep the landline rang at Three AM.  Going to turn off my phones on Friday nights I think. Developing a pattern here.  Now I have to wait for Keith Olbermann’s special report, and then I’ll probably–no I will watch Catfish.  It won’t play on my DVD player or computer.  Tried straight out of the box…..

I feel so so sad right now.

It took me a year of Sundays and weekdays to find this apartment. I never e_pected it to go up 300% in value in eleven years. I was lucky, and I saw many many toads on the road to the prince. Buying a house is scarier as I know the Upper West Side well and feel comfortable everywhere in Manhattan though I can live without the crowds and the prices so I will.
I’m looking for a patio house on the East side of 17 in North Myrtle Beach in specific hoods that I won’t say here. I know I will want to do the floors, bathrooms and kitchen over so I don’t want to pay much. I do have some specific houses in mind but new ones come o the market often. I did let the house of my dreams get away….but there’s always a new dream or house
I wrote a post last night when it was pouring that was pretty good but I deleted it. This isn’t a reconstruction but a reaction to what seem to be general feelings.

In a quick look at non political blogs that talked about Sarah Palin people say not to judge her based on her values. One even said she has good family values implying most of the rest of us don’t. I don’t think that’s what the blogger meant to say judging by other parts of the blog

The New York Times (a paper I will read on weekends forever or until my dotage) public editor was slightly defensive in his defense of the paper’s coverage of her. He did say the FBI hadn’t vetted her before the announcement. Actually only one person asked questions about her before the announcement

By choosing a running mate unknown to most of the nation, and doing so just before the Republican National Convention, John McCain made it inevitable that there would be a frantic media vetting. It turns out that Palin was for the Bridge to Nowhere before she was against it, that she sent e-mail complaining about a lack of disciplinary action against a state trooper who was going through a messy custody battle with her sister, and that she never made a decision as commander in chief of the Alaska National Guard, one of her qualifications cited by McCain

.

There’s enough in that paragraph alone to wonder about her qualifications. I don’t care that Todd had a DUI over 20 years ago. I might care that he was a member of a separatist party. Yet if Norman Mailer and Jimmy Breslin’s plan for New York City to succeed from the state had taken off I might have joined it. That I was only eighteen wouldn’t have mattered in the long run and some people (well, me) remember Mailer not only for his brilliant writing but for his championing of a killer who killed again when Mailer got him out. That’s two things people could use against me before I even hit 20–there’s more but I’m not running for office and understand that we live in Google forever now.

The point is we live in an age when every little decision we make at every stage of our lives can both boomerang and come back to hit you in the face. Only the decision Sarah Palin made not to talk about her daughter Bristol’s pregnancy is neither in the past nor irrelevant to her future. It has everything to do with her “qualification” to be VP and probably President if McCain wins because just look at him.

I’m not Christian. This doesn’t mean that I don’t believe in “Christian values.” It does mean that Palin presented her daughter’s pregnancy in a way that was a slap in the face to everybody who has different beliefs than her. The public doesn’t have a right to know usually. This isn’t “usually.”

As an adoptee I might have liked to have heard her mention discussing adoption with Bristol. I would have liked to have known that her daughter knew about safe se_ because if Palin and McCain do win they will do everything in their power to stop that from being taught to teenagers and any study will show that abstinence only doesn’t work.

People keep telling us to “play nice.” Ask the Democrats who saw themselves portrayed on Recount how they felt as being portrayed as decent, honorable but inept people.

This coming week will be the seventh anniversary of 9/11. Maybe it wouldn’t have happened with Gore as president. For proof of that one only has to look at the 8/6 memo that Gore wouldn’t have slept on.

Bloggers were told during Katrina we couldn’t cast blame and help at the same time. We could and we did.

The USA is one giant mess. We all felt so good and became complacent as we believed that the radical right was a dead force. To have to live with the consequences of that belief is beyond my comprehension.

I and most”liberals” don’t care what kind of mother Sarah Palin is. That’s none of our business. It is our business to care that she’s trying to foist her values on us.

I’m not going to dredge out the original draft of The First Amendment again–the one that very distinctly spelled out that church and state shouldn’t meet. When people haughtily talk about how “under God” was good enough for the founding father’s they should remember that Madison and Jefferson cared more about separating God from government than anything else.

We can’t and won’t give Palin a free pass. We did that to Bush after 9/11 and suffered. If we say anything negative about Palin, we’re talking se_ism.

I have never defined myself as a feminist but I married young and kept my last name at a time when that entailed walking around with a marriage certificate for banks, apartments, even some hotels. The only male I have ever been dependent upon for money I called “daddy” and that kind of went with the job description.

I’m buying a free standing house and one of the reasons I think I’m so into this is because i am an economically empowered woman and owning a house represents the final challenge. One day, in the townhouse, I thought “what responsibility is missing here? Roofs,” and I realized that I could dial a roofer with the best of them. Though my nail tips (long story) keep me from doing anything nail related with the ease I once knew, I can be both the girliest woman and the most strident of feminists in one breath.

Don’t call me “se_ist” when my entire adult life has been about challenges.

Don’t think that the choice of Palin is going to go over well with moderates who were sitting on the fence or leaning toward McCain as too many of them have children. And they want their children to learn about responsible se_.

And if people weren’t around when abortion was illegal, it’s up to those of us who were around to tell them that many women chose to have illegal abortions in unsafe conditions. The daughter of close friends of my parents died of sepsis when I was fifteen. It’s something that stays with you for life. So needless. The parents were affluent, but the daughter felt she couldn’t confide in them. By that I mean the daughter could have gotten a safe abortion.

We can’t go back to those days. There is a very real possibility that if McCain and Palin win we will. I understand that many girls chose to be teenage mothers but in the world I come from that was not an option–just as abortion isn’t an option to Palin.

I believe that it’s up to the individual who is pregnant.

By saying talking about Bristol’s pregnancy is off limits we’re closing ourselves to a much needed debate. No not a debate–we have to keep abortion legal as girls and women will always have them.

We’re letting them win once again by being nice and we can’t be. The future of our country in every way is at stake.
Here’s the unrequited love of my life Frank Rich.

We still don’t know a lot about Palin except that she’s better at delivering a speech than McCain and that she defends her own pregnant daughter’s right to privacy even as she would have the government intrude to police the reproductive choices of all other women. Most of the rest of the biography supplied by her and the McCain camp is fiction

Fiction–in an era where everything can be vetted–fact checking is a life style, people look something up on the Internet and call it “research” Palin thinks she’s above the rest of us and can re-invent her life.

I went, not willingly but to support a friend, to the modern version of est the other night–actually the night Palin was giving her speech-and they said you can reinvent your life. I thought how wonderful to live in a world you make that has no basis in reality–reframe yes, see through different lenses, but reinvent? Apparently est and Palin have much in common.

Cooper this post is for you. I think Cooper the secret prognosticator should be the tagline of wonderlandornot, and once a week you should tell some aspect of somebody’s future. Or not.

It’s past time for all Americans who truly understand the Constitution to take a stand. We can’t give this country over to bigots who will do our deciding for us.

I was much moderate, but too much is at stake now, and I live in South Carolina most of the time where I don’t feel free to e_press my views. I will, I need time.

I thought the Writer’s Island prompt on Helen Hunt’s new movie rather serendipitous. I love Helen Hunt–except for the year there seemed to be only three actors–her, Kevin Spacey and Nic Cage
Then because writing this thoroughly depressed me and it’s cool and very windy out I wrote using the other prompt “outrageous.” But for me that’s commonplace.
She was expecting me to be married not divorced. She was expecting me to have children not be childless. She was expecting me to complete her. To be the one to live the life she could only dream of.

She refused to understand that the life I was living was one I had chosen. Unlike her I had degrees, and a life not centered around parents wants and wishes.

I didn’t just have desires, and dreams but plans and action. I had a professional career. One that had stopped being satisfying. I needed as much love as I could get from as many people who were willing to love me. I sort of understood that my semi-breakdown the year before and the resultant tests that typed me “learning disabled to the max” had knocked some life out of me.

Still I tried. Still I functioned. I wanted desperately to like her. I wanted desperately for her to like me. I didn’t act needy. That had never been my style. Neediness made and makes me uncomfortable. I might have acted the opposite. No guidebook told me what to do. I had no experience in matters such as this.

Unlike today there weren’t coaches who guided you through every step. My luck–to be a pioneer in the modern age. It’s a constant battle and I’m never truly sure why. It was the 80′s. Oh sweet beloved 80′s, so much of my life happened then. You weren’t sweet, really but beloved–even the horrible was good. I was young and pretty. Looks counted with everybody but her; she made it clear she didn’t like my looks. She refused to be seen in public with me. Not because I was ugly but because I was the image of her mother. But her mother was pretty and I was…..

She would find me selfish for running into and then out of her life. It wasn’t me she desired but some perfect creature I could never be nor aspired to be. She was the one who lived in a dream land

I had a choice. I didn’t have to call her “mother.” And so I didn’t.

The woman I called “ma” to be sort of snarky or “mommy” most of the time had that honor. And she was honored to love imperfect me.
Uh, dear email, radio, TV and more–since Easter I have been bombarded with Mother’s Day ads. The only mother I care about is dead; I have no children, and usually don’t care. But I spend a lot of time hanging out with and giving presents to other peoples children. I have gotten one present from one girl–ever and it was lovely, but Mother’s Day is a day I suppose I should sleep through.
People are looking at my apartment though it isn’t selling. I will take it off the market in June if nothing happens.
I just looked at my Technorati for the first time in many months. I have no screen shots of when I was a 2,500-5,7000 rated blogger, so who would believe it? Guess you had to be there.
Is this “outrageous” enough or is just me as usual?
I was never physically addicted to cigarettes. Basically I liked having them around and holding them and sometimes lighting them and sometimes smoking them. I would feel dirty and scuzzy if I gave into this urge but….. This is me with my parents when they were old and I had late 80′s hair as opposed to mid 80′s hair which was bigger. We had just had a Passover for about 40. It was to be our family’s last one but we didn’t know that then