I’m really doubting myself right now. Doubting my abilities as a writer, as an employee, a wife. I feel like I don’t have much to offer. I don’t know why these people keep me in their lives — maybe they feel bad for me and know I’d be alone without them. My counselor would be wow-ed by this statement. What is the source of this feeling? I’m not going to immediately point to my mother on this. So let’s just look at my past in general.
Earliest memories include playing in boxes on Christmas, having a life-sized Mickey Mouse cutout show up at my door (and his arm waved), my mother thinking I was putting the cat in the dryer when I was playing in the laundry room one weekend morning, getting spanked because my mom thought I was eating candy and she wouldn’t listen to me but she somehow realized I wasn’t eating candy and I just remember her hugging me and telling me how sorry she was. I suppose that’s a fond memory I have of my mother. It’s not all gloom and doom with her. I have good memories with her, I just have awful ones, too. Visiting my father growing up wasn’t fun. He smoked in the house and it bothered me, truly. And I told him just this during one visit when I was 8 or 9 years old maybe (I’m bad with remembering ages). He told me, “Then go outside.” I saw him one weekend a month, or one weekend after a few months, and he couldn’t just smoke outside those two days because it bothered me enough to say something about it. But he legit told me that I could go outside if it bothered me. Logistically, it would have made more sense for him to go outside. So factually he was wrong. As far as what his response told me about myself was that I didn’t matter. Expressing my true feelings doesn’t go too well. It’s better to be silent and uncomfortable. Not even your own father will change his behavior to help you feel better. But I was just his annoying child with an even more annoying baby’s mama. I was a burden. He had to put up with me for whatever amount of time until my mother got mad and swore off visitation, which I’m sure he was happy to do. Did he even want me to exist? Did he ask my mother to have an abortion? Did my mother consider an abortion? She was 20 years old when she had me, so possibly 19 and pregnant. My father was 18 when I was born, so potentially 17 with a baby on the way. What were these two people doing having a child? Why wasn’t I aborted? My mother, according to what she told me, had an abortion before she got pregnant with me. But she also told me that she wanted to have a baby so bad that she took fertility treatments to get pregnant with me. She obviously didn’t have trouble getting pregnant before me, so that makes no kind of sense. So you’re telling me you got pregnant, had an abortion and then a year or so later started fertility treatments so you could get pregnant again? This is what my mother needs to understand. She needs to take accountability for feeding me such bull shit. All this lie tells me is that she didn’t want me and I wasn’t supposed to be here. She had an abortion, continued to make the same mistakes (in this case, have unprotected sex) and wound up in the same pickle she was in just a year and some change earlier. So, if I’m a mistake and not really supposed to be here, does it make sense that I might just think I am nothing, I have nothing to give, nothing to offer this world? I mean, I’m not even supposed to be here.
If someone were telling me this same exact thing, I would think this has nothing to do with them. This is all about adults (barely adults) making really poor decisions. It is just sad to think I was merely a bad mistake.
