Tuesday, January 30, 2007

no it isn't my last entry

the last post was just to say goodbye to my old URL. this is my last attempt of trying to blog somewhat anonymously. truth is i need to write...and somebody needs to read it. why? i do not know. all i know is that I would like to be this person someone I have never met and will never meet. this is what makes it possible for me to write as openly as possible.

ok. now... here i am. sitting in the middle of a half empty room. the bed is gone. the closet has been broken down. clothes are strewn around the house. the movers have picked up our boxes on saturday and we have been emptying out the rest since then. here (in austria) you have to paint the apartment before you give it back to the landlord, so that's going to be my afternoon project. the car isn't sold, yet, and i think i got jerked by the car-dealer when he sold it to me (way too expensive and possibly being an accident vehicle). story of my life.

i am reading Paul Auster's Brooklyn Follies at the moment and there is a passage in which he mentions a troubling story of the Bible (well, ok..they are all kinda troubling...but this one I haven't been able to let go, since I came across it..).

" I was such a moral, upright little person back then. I never lied, never stole, never cheated, never said a cruel word to anyone. And there's Esau, a galumphing simpleton just like me. By all rights, Isaac's blessing should be his. But Jacob tricks him out of it - with his mother's help, no less."
"Even worse, God seems to approve of the arrangement. The dishonest, double-crossing Jacob goes on to become the leader of the Jews, and Esau is left out in the cold, a forgotten man, a worthless nobody."
"My mother always taught me to be good. 'God wants you to be good', she'd say to me, and since I was still young enough to believe in God, I believed what she said. Then I came across that story in the Bible and I didn't understand a thing. The bad guy wins, and God doesn't punish him. It didn't seem right. It still doesn't seem right."

"Of course it does. Jacob had the spark of life in him, and Esau was a dumbbell. Good-hearted, yes, but a dumbbell. If you're going to choose one of them to lead your people, you'll want the fighter, the one with cunning and wit, the one with energy to beat the odds and come out on top. You choose the strong and clever over the weak and kind." (p.53/54)

According to this sh*t I am weak, for I am definitely that kind idiot.
I have to go read the original now (well, not now...cause now I should go paint) but I will check the source and see, whether I agree with the above interpretation (or conclusions) of the story.

Tuesday, January 09, 2007

farewell ....and excerpt of my letter to Maia

this will be my last post here. farewell to my readers and thanks for the ones who always came back. problem is that - even though there are 80 million blogs out there, mine seems to - repeatedly - be found and identified by people I know and if you have been reading my blog for a while then you know that I would like to remain anonymous. after all, this is a vent for all my bitch energy...and I don't want it to affect any of the people mentioned in it - namely, Dario (as much as he drives me crazy sometimes). so,..thanks for checking in. there is plenty of old stuff to read (the first entry on this blog even refers to my very first blog - ...i see a pattern here..).
well, chances are I would have started to repeat myself now anyway.

here now my last post. maia is all recovered now, btw. (she/we spent two weeks in the hospital)

wrote this in the hospital. it is part of an ongoing letter I am writing to Maia (whenever I have time). Maia is turning five
January 7, 2007 1:30am

I am sitting here next to you while you are sleeping. We are in the hospital because you have pneumonia and weren’t able to keep down the prescribed antibiotics. Every time we administered them you threw it back up (together with the little food you had eaten.) By the end of the day (Friday – before yesterday) you were so weak, your grandfather (the doctor in the family) ordered us to take you to the hospital immediately. You were brought back to your strength with an IV (full of nutrition) but you had to stay here to receive the antibiotics intravenously, as well. I stayed the night and the morning while your dad came for the afternoon into the early evening. Nayla is not allowed on this floor because you are in the infectious disease ward for kids – nice, huh? ;)

Anyway, this is your second night. If we were in the US right now this would probably cost us thousands of Dollars – but we are still here in Austria and it is all part of the free health insurance.
However, as great as the social net might be here (education is free, too…that’s gonna hurt once you go to college – and you BETTER go to college!;) ) we are still planning to return to New York City. It’s a long story but to make it short: I have no more job (first I quit, took it back, but then we actually separated in consensual terms), the tenants in our NY apartment are still not paying, and we are out of options (i.e. money).
We were in NY for a few days over x-mas (you and I), for I had to go to court because of the tenant issue (unfortunately, the judge dismissed the case due to a formality and we have to start all over again, trying to get these people, who are feeding off of our savings, out of our house.) Anyway, you loved being back at your old school and seeing your old friends, so I think (hope) you’ll be happier growing up in the U.S.

Just do me one favor, darling …. Please, please don’t become one of them. What do I mean by that? I mean, please don’t become a statistic. Please don’t become the "average"(?) teenage girl, driven by superficiality and the pressure of what other kids might think of her; who gives sex as if it doesn’t matter at all, who has no self-esteem and doesn’t consider oral sex – well, sex, who cuts herself, tries any drug because everyone else is or who lies as if it were an athletic discipline.

I highly doubt that you will be any of these things, for you are already very defined in who you will be – a strong, sweet, very smart and independent woman. However, I did want to bring to your attention of what fears I carry around with me already (and you are not even five, yet). What I have to remember, and you, too, is also that…NO MATTER WHAT….I will always love you. But, I tell you one thing: honesty is one of my most highly valued principles and that will really always win you the big plus points.

I am probably not supposed to tell you this (especially, since I have no idea when I will be giving you this letter) but just so that you know, I have also been young once and I have learned some things the hard way (or sometimes, I just got lucky….and not everyone can be lucky all the time, so I’d prefer you’d be smarter than I).
One of the worst things I probably ever did was to have unprotected sex. “Just got carried away in the moment” (and mind you, I was 19 already, when I lost my virginity).
Giving in because there is no condom available at the moment is probably THE DUMBEST thing you could do, for the consequences are life-changing. I realized this afterwards, when I was scared to death about pregnancy (your grandmother got pregnant when she was 15 - granted she was a hippie, too...you know...free love and all - but I always was under the impression she felt like she missed out on her youth. Heck, I feel like I missed out and I got pregnant at 26…intentionally! ;)). Anyway, what scared me even more, of course was the fear of having caught AIDS. I was lucky but I didn’t forget those months of fear and that horrible week of waiting for my blood results.
One night is enough. And I could have thrown it all away in that one night.

Ach, it all sounds so dry and cliché when I am writing it down like this and, I guess, you have to learn a lot from your own experiences but just USE your brain and always try to THINK AHEAD, when you do questionable things.

I probably don’t have to tell you about any of these things, for you are a lot like me (careful, thoughtful, never forgetting what you have learned or are being warned of). Unfortunately, growing up without my mother, there were a lot of things I wasn’t warned of, so I had to figure that out by myself. Men and boys for example. A whole story to itself. [I wonder, if my mother has figured that out herself, actually...]

Other things most teenagers think about (but the smart ones hopefully will not consider seriously, for it’s almost as dumb as having unprotected sex):
> suicide (there was a brief time in my life when I thought that would be the easiest way out (until I lived through the suicides of several other friends and realized how sad it would be to throw a life away, which surely won’t always be this dreadful and bad).

> running away (I had whole trips completely planned out – my favorite escape route lead to Canada).

> dropping out of school (I was sixteen when I fought my dad about that issue – I wanted to become either an auto mechanic or a carpenter – HA!) ….

Things I (thankfully) wasn’t ever weak enough to get into: any drugs other than a bit of pot (never got drunk, never took a trip, nothing…and no, I am not a lame prude. Well, what can I say - I am a control-freak, which I am sure you know by now. ;) ….Losing control of my body and mind, would just have been a nightmare for me.
(so, if you ever think you have to do any of this sh*t – make sure you do your research and don’t do it alone….but I prefer, you DON’t …and I can tell you loads of stories why you shouldn’t and why I ultimately didn’t do it…. But to give you a quick glimpse: I once knew a guy who walked around talking to his darts…and all he had done is taken one trip that just messed up his brain somehow…and he kept on having flash-backs.) But given the fact of how much of a control freak you are already (at the tender age of 4), I think, I might not have to fear you going into this stuff either.

So, now that I’ve gotten some of the sex and drugs (I am leaving out Rock n’ Roll) talk into this letter, I guess, I am going to have to give this thing a PG rating. I wonder what this will have to be. Judging from all the stories I hear it would have to be a PG-13, as much as I would like it to be a PG-17….or let’s be honest, a PG-21. ;)

And just so you know where this is all coming from right now: I have been like a sponge about teenage girlhood ever since you were born. Books and movies that have unsettled me: “Thirteen” (movie), “Queen bees and Wannabees” (book – and “Mean Girls”, the movie it was turned into), “The Tenth Circle” (book, I just finished), and countless articles, stories from friends and colleagues, and real-life encounters with today’s teenage kind. ;)

So, dare to be different, baby. Be who you are and not who others expect you to be.

Love you. Love you. Love you.
(and for now – at this moment – get well, so that I can take you home!)
PS: can you give that whole (unprotected) sex, drugs, and other stupidities section to your sister, too? I might copy it over to her letter later but right now it is getting really late and my eyes are falling shut (the doc is going to wake us in a few hours – to give you the next antibiotic shot).

Sunday, January 07, 2007

relationship going downhill

a few months ago, Dario and I were having such a long-lasting good phase that I wondered, whether it could ever go bad again. From experience, I knew that it was bound to happen but I just couldn't imagine how it could go so far down from so far up.

I don't know when exactly we went over the peak but I get the feeling that Dario still has no idea that we are near the bottom now. At least, I am.
And this time it is really bad. For me, that is. He seems to think, like always, all is jolly and dandy. Men...
It is really bad because I have actually become friends with a term called divorce. A term, which has scared me for most of my life. In fact, one of the many reasons I never wanted to get married was because I didn't want to get divorced, which I thought was an inevitable fact of life (with a few exceptions).

I am just soo tired.
I am so tired of his bad habits and the predictability thereof. I hate the fact that I can predict every unreliabilty or inconsiderate action of his, with almost no error of assumption.
Of course, he is still affectionate and tries to do nice things when he thinks about it...but these nice things are not balancing out the bad stuff anymore.
I am tired of being ignored (everything I say just goes in one ear and out the other. He simply does not care anymore, about what is important to me.)
I am tired of having to carry all responsibilty.
I am tired of having to make all the decisions by myself.
I am tired of living with a husband that acts like a 3rd child (or the first, if you wish).
I am tired of being the one, who has to take charge in trying to fix or improve our relationship.
I am tired of being disappointed.
I am tired of understanding.

The biggest problem I see for a salvation of this, is that I have just given up hope.

I want to stop turning into someone I don't like, and that's what I see happening here.
Also, soon enough he is going to be the one who will look at me and realize that he's had enough of my bitching and my sadness (if he will realize that he is the main source of this, is another question).

My mother (the family-therapist) says a temporary break (which I am yearning for) is definitely not the way to fix a relationship (but do I even want to be in this relationship anymore? If I would want to fix it it's because of the kids, I think.)
She suggests to take more space from each other, to designate own rooms in the house, for example...and to then "visit" each other (but return to one's room again). This should bring back some spark, should take out the rut and the taking each other for granted (but that will mean he'll still be messing up the rest of the house, play videogames to no end, and let me organize our life.)
The other thing she pointed out as important is to take time for oneself and to go on dates together (at least once a week)...to get back couple's time....where we are not mom and dad. - Sadly, I am so fed up, I don't even want to spend time with D alone anymore.
This is what worries me the most.
I am burnt out, I think.

To break up would probably be very very difficult. Not only because I am used to being with D. 11 years isn't nothing. Most problematic would probably be the fact that he won't leave. Knowing him I would have to get down-right nasty to get him to leave and I don't think I have the energy for that.

Only way for me to reconsider this: if he organizes therapy for us and gets me to go there (instead of me trying to get him to go ....but unlike him I would be willing to cooperate and find a way if I see he is trying.)

:/
life is kinda at a sucky point at the moment.
oh, and did I mention Maia is in the hospital with pneumonia?
yup. going back there now to spend another night there with her. poor little thing was crying so badly, when the doctor ordered another IV and told her she had to stay yet another night.
I'll post more on that later (already wrote it but no internet in the hospital, so will post later.)