Splat!!urday Mournings
Sometimes you have those conversations which spark realizations and things can never be the same again.
This happened this morning when I was sitting with my sister and we were talking about me and my tendencies in relationships with just about everyone–friends, lovers, and family. She looked over at me and said something about my fear of abandonment being the one driving force behind a lot of my actions and reactions. She mentioned the fact that adopted babies have a lot of these problems and cannot commit and have issues making decisions, and are always motivated by unseen things. I knew that, but now I know it.
So I looked at her and the more she talked about it and used her own experiences to convey the ideas to me, the more frustrated I became with myself. She was totally right. I started seeing that line connecting everything around me. I mentioned a certain young man some weeks back I took a fancy to, and I realized my frustration with him and the way things have gone down is all related to this. He was all there and available to me for the first month I was here, and it seems as soon as I let myself trust him and how I felt he went poof, gone. I have been beating myself up about it for the past few weeks, wondering how it was that I just let that happen, let myself feel for him and then he goes and does what everyone else eventually does with me.
They leave.
I guess it’s kind of a running theme in my life, given that’s pretty much how I started. My mother left me the day I was born, and I was scooted off into foster care for the first six months. It was the most formative experience of my life, being adopted. And it has done things to my trust (or mistrust) of people that I have never been able to fully realize entirely until now.
This same woman (my birth mother) I got very upset at recently for leaving me again. I sat up against a tree waiting for her for an entire hour, cursing not having a car, almost in tears because I was so frustrated. Why? Because I like to be the one to leave, actually. I despise being in situations where I have to depend on other people to direct the events of the day, so not having the power to leave is something I guess I have not ever been comfortable with–I hate it, in fact. I have mentioned many times that I used to leave bars without saying goodbye, just disappearing into thin air. And though it is not exactly a normal reaction, I do realize I will exert this power when I feel threatened or that I am in an unstable position:
I will leave you before you can leave me.
I always have a backup plan. I always have a way out, because I can’t be left if I find my own way out. It is a massive problem I am starting to realize. I don’t trust anyone anymore, and it’s just not something I can wish away, though nothing would make me happier. You can go back through the years and my mention of taking off has more to do with me manifesting my own fears of being left, therefore I have to be the first one to go.
My anger at my friends back East is tied into this as well. I have felt completely ignored and invisible for months now. Nobody is there for me, and I only have me, once again. My birth mother tries to tell me that I have family, and I told her that I resented the idea of family because I have always felt very isolated and singular. This is how my friends became closer to me than my family has ever been–and it’s crazy, because they all leave in their own ways eventually anyhow, becoming less available, or just disappearing altogether. With the exception of recent events, I have never cared much about it–when your friends are your family, they are always rotating faces. But you never really learn to trust anyone when you look at people like this. Perhaps the only friend in my life I feel I can trust entirely is E. The only one. We dated and when it ended, it was due to some of these issues. He kept threatening to throw my out of the apartment we shared, and obviously one’s home is supposed to be a safe haven. Mine didn’t end up being much of one after he started that. Abandon me to the point of removing my only stable point of existence? No way. But you know, after all the dust settled and everything was said and done, he still goes wayyy out of his way to help me in any way he can. He is good.
When I was first sick, I was also largely abandoned by all of my friends. Many of them refused to come see me in the hospital because they “couldn’t see me like that.” Apparently they neglected to recognize that I was the one unable to leave, while they could happily continue on with their lives as soon as they walked out my door. I have always said I could never deal with anyone who would be so cavalier with me to the point where I would have to worry about being sick and being ignored–but these were friends I had for six years, some of them, when the shit first hit the fan. I was probably not as surprised and upset as I should have been, because it was more of a given then than now, when you expect that the time and care and concern you put into other people will give back greater rewards when dealing with adults. And though not all of my friends came to see me when I was sick over the past few years, they definitely were a lot more available to me than when this all first went down. I suppose it is one of those things people understand about being friends with me–I’m sometimes not well, so if you want to stick around and be one, you might end up being expected to see me all sexy in my hospital gown–riiight.
I spent the morning helping my sister and this whole idea starting vibrating madly in my head. Everything is all motivated by a fear of abandonment? Sounds kind of crazy, but I talk way too much about leaving all of the time. Hell, I even had a recurring nightmare where my mother and sister would leave me at the grocery store, laughing as they drove away. I had this dream for many many years.
So you take an adopted baby and then move it around 17, 18 times over 12 years, always moving the ground beneath it so it will never know what to expect? So what does she do when she grows up? She moves around 17,18, 30 times too. She gets used to leaving because leaving is kind of what we did. And so I am leaving, and people are leaving me, and I am really all alone. Alone.
Man, I have been single and alone a very long time at this point (coming on two years, actually). And the two potential suitors I had for a while also pulled some leaving stunts. One was a man who liked to stand me up allofthefuckingtime. This same man asked me to marry him twice. By text message (oh, I know some good ones, I know.) Once last week, and once in the middle of it all. Like I am going to go trusting someone who liked to make a game out of abandoning me? No way. The second was someone who was all there and available to me until one day he wasn’t, of course after sending him business start-up money and turning into a sucker of the highest order. I even went to go see him in Canada (twice!), and he abandoned me the second time entirely and then proceeded to claim a certain photograph he saw of me having dinner alone made him weepy. Right.
This is really not a good issue to have at all. It has frozen me from being able to feel like I can count on anyone or trust anybody. In fact, I can count maybe 3 people I know now who I feel I can trust. And two of them are blood relatives, who have never hurt me, and have been there for me when I needed help. The other is E. That’s it.
I think I have always blamed my solitude on me not being able to respect the lack of integrity from the people around me—say what you mean and mean what you say. But I am starting to think it’s just that nobody gets what it’s like to be me, always waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the next one to go.
I’m done leaving, done running, done being left…though this is completely insane to expect, my life here is supposed to bring me different things. And if not, I can leave again (kidding!). But yes, obviously I am not out of my mind to expect this won’t continue to happen–people change and move on, of course, as even I have proven. I would never want anyone to be stuck and not free–I’m all about that actually. But I would like my relationships to solidify in some ways where I would feel comfortable trusting people and not expect the worst, all of the time.
