Mixing Past and Present

There are boxes in the main section of the loft. My office is full of books, journals, bits and pieces, the guest room has a bed sitting in it, waiting to be used.

Half my things never made it here, they were lost along the way and the movers are all blaming each other but I'm glad we no longer pay for the storage of them.

My whole life is here now.

Looking through all this stuff is a bit disorienting. My journals in particular, are scattershot, disorganized, to me now, they are clearly a sign of fear, even desperation. I tried so hard to establish a life in Canada that would be both "normal" in the context of my family background and healthy.

In reality, the two are irreconcilable.

I realize now that I am in the midst of what will likely be a fairly lengthy healing process and I am humbled, honored and more than a bit awed by Steven's decision to love and marry me despite all my many flaws and scars.

But slowly, I am healing.

When I look at all of this stuff scattered around me I sometimes wish the bulk of it could have all been left behind. It carried with it a palpable sense of sorrow, loneliness, bewilderment and a willingness to delude myself into thinking things could be okay under circumstances where they clearly were poised to collapse into disaster that is embarrassing to read.

So I address the task of organizing all those mementos of unhappiness into my happy life. There's value in some of them; it's nice to have a selection of winter coats. I'm glad to see some of my art again and some of the books are welcome but in the main, the material stuff of a life that never satisfied heart or soul in any meaningful or sustainable way is just like driftwood on the beach; it's interesting to look at but you don't need to bring it home.

Fear (without the loathing)

According to the moving company, my belongings will arrive tomorrow.

I should be very excited.

But you see, I grew up in a situation where any time anything good happened, anytime I got anything I wanted, anything at all, something, very swiftly, swooped in and took something even more important away.

It started with my Grandmother and carried on from there. My family seems to have lived that way too because they have encoded it into their idea of what it means to be alive.

My mother takes great care to remind me, every chance she gets, that things could go sour at any moment. She always has, and fear of her being right made that a self-fulfilling prophecy at least half the time. (At least, it did in the past.)

So today, the day before my things arrive and my whole life is finally in one place with the man I love more than any words or colors or light or air itself, my finally happy and whole life - I am scared.

I turned on the radio and there was a show about "mixed status families" and how, very often, the government pulls them apart and sends the immigrant partner back to their country of origin.

And I cried. I cried a whole lot  because that made me even more scared.

When I first wrote about Steven in this blog his sister found it and told him I was too serious about him. Then an old girlfriend who was still a friend of his found it and brought it up to him. I can't hold things back, in my writing, I never really wanted to. Being transparent is meaningful to me.

But because I was afraid it would hurt the relationship, I took that post down and more or less stopped writing here.

Tonight, it is slowly dawning on me, that fear is the worst reason to do anything.

Fear seldom helps.

And in this case, in my case, fear is not justified.

So for once, I am not giving this life, not this day, not this love, not any part of it - to fear. I am not going to buy into the idea that I must pay for every good thing in my life with something so awful that it beggars the imagination - the death of my Grandmother, my parents divorce, the many moves, far away as a helpless child from anyone who loved or cared for me, the adoption of my only son. I have paid and paid and paid. I have paid more for my life than most people ever endure. I am done paying.

Everyone deserves happiness. Everyone deserves a great love, a home, a marriage to make a family from, whatever that family might look like to each of us, we all deserve one.

And I am not going to be silenced by fear anymore.

I am here. I live here. And I am going to celebrate it, revel in it and love it every single day. I will take every opportunity to sing about it. Because that's what I do. That's who I am.

And I don't owe anyone a single thing for that.

Happily Ever After

This really needs to be written out. I don't see any way of getting past it without going through.

I am happy now.

Happy at last. Happy in my life. Comfortable. Free. Safe. Happy.

For the first time in my life, I am loved and wanted without perimeters, without conditions. I am married and happy and done with Victoria and Canada and all the terrible, sour things that held me down and made me miserable and you know what?

It is making me mean.

Far from having the freedom to forgive the people in Victoria who bullied me, the rotten family - don't even get me started on how destructive and horrible it was to grow up with them, the mediocre jobs, the lack of care and concern from nearly every person who was supposed to help. God, in the end, looking back, now that I'm happy - could there be a more bitter and miserable life? No. Not really. I was thwarted at every turn, usually by the people who were supposed to be helping me.

So I find myself asking the universe why someone who tried so hard for so long would have to work, struggle, scrape and suffer for half their life, literally, just to get to what most people would consider to be a state of normal.

I know you're supposed to forgive. Living well is the best revenge, being proven right is supposed to be sweet - all of that stuff but I spent my youth suffering. My life was wasted. My only son, given up for adoption in order to get him to safety. And when I finally found my happiness? When I found my husband and my life? It turned out to be in another country and so of course the "powers that be" are doing their damnedest to make that hard too.

I know I should be grateful and most days I am. After all, I have health and a sound mind, I was smart enough to know, all the time I was there, that something was deeply wrong. I was strong enough to try to fix it. There are many, many people who don't get this far.

How many people find their "happily ever after"? Not many. And how fucking sad is that?

Still. I hear about the successes of Victoria, people coming from there and their lives were easy, their hopes realized young. Friends of mine go and visit the place, (for reasons that completely escape my understanding) and they find it charming, beautiful, wild and lovely and you know what that does to me? It makes me hateful. I hate them for it.

Short of cutting everyone and everything that ever had anything to do with Victoria out of my life, I don't know how to handle this. It's making me a person I don't want to know. But how could a whole community allow a man to abuse his daughter and then blame her for it and carry that blame into her whole life? My father was popular. He was clever. He knew what he did and he told everyone about the "wild stories" I might tell them about him and how he abused me long before I even had any conscious memory of it. He set up a preemptive depth strike that still resonates.

If you were tortured somewhere and if your torturer found a way to get everyone there to believe it was you who was crazy or evil or something just fundementally bad, how would you deal with that?

Once you get out, get very far away and finally find your own, clean happiness on your own terms - I tell you, you just want the dead to stay dead.

It doesn't seem to me to be so much to ask.

I live 3055 miles from Victoria. I live in a whole different country. And yet the place finds ways to intrude into my life on a near daily basis.

I just want to erase it. Where do I have to go to be free of this? Why won't the dead stay dead?