Katie Doyle, Girl About Town

Monday, Jun. 05, 2006 - 12:34 a.m.

Whew. I have had 4 days off, and it was nice. I did absolutely nothing I was supposed to do, and frankly, I don't care. I only wish I'd gotten more sleep. I haven't been sleeping well the last 2.5 months or so. I wake up a LOT, either from foot and leg cramps, the ridiculous heat, or just for the hell of it, because apparently, my brain has declared war on my body. It's been swell.

I go back to my old job today...the one with Sybil. I opted to go back at night and work from 6 to 12, primarily because I'm mostly assured it will be nice a quiet. I don't like driving back home that late at night, because that's the same area in which I was attacked a year and a half ago on the way home from work, but you do what you gotta do, and that's one reason I won't be working a full 8 hours and going home at 2am. The other is I just can't stand the job and don't want to do it that many hours a day. I was planning on only being there 2 weeks, but the show I wanted to roll onto at the end of that time won't actually be in production then. So it looks like I'm waltzing back into hell until I leave for France. At least it's money. I can not afford to be without income until I leave; I'm seriously planning on working every single day I can until I leave on July 12. The exchange rate took a dive, so the trip is costing me 10-15% more than was planned. Did I say that already? Sorry.

My mother is coming out the last weekend in June, to teach a seminar. After that, she has decided to stay out here another week, to help me find a new apartment. Why she thinks any apartment I find will still be available 4 months later is beyond me, but she insists on helping me find a place.

Now. Those of you with...uncomfortable relationships with your mothers will understand the level of dread, ire, angst, and sheer frustration already building in me just to know this event is coming. Those of you with manipulative mothers who make everything about them and cry at the drop of a hat understand still more. And those of you with mothers who absolutely refuse to either listen or to take no for an answer will grasp the rest of it. I can't spend 20 freaking minutes with my mother before she starts harping on the past and how she did her best by me and my brothers and can't I see that and won't I tell her what an awesome job she did and let her off the hook, and then she starts crying.

I'm not kidding. I so wish I were.

Being around my mother for any length of time at all beyond about 15 minutes is one of the most destructive activities I can engage in. It's almost worse than my father, because while he just pretends he wasn't a huge, abusive ass, so everything is wonderful, she wants me to tell her it doesn't matter that she was a bad mother, and that it's okay she failed me and my brothers. Failed to protect us, failed to support us, failed just being there. That she was emotionally abusive and withholding, not to mention immature enough to still blame her 6 year old daughter for her failure to divorce my father. I know that sounds angry, but I'm not mad at her. She did the best job she could. Unfortunately, it wasn't good enough to help us. And I can't keep telling her every fucking time I see or talk to her that it's okay. It isn't okay. I'm barely fucking holding it together. She's really gonna have to let *herself* off the hook for this and quit asking me to pretend it's all good. Because it isn't all good, and every fucking time I have to pretend it is, I want just that much more to open myself up with a really big knife. Just fucking once, I wish my childhood could be about me and not my fucking parents. If it were about ME, we could all just fucking stop talking about it, my parents would realize what a shitty job they did, and they'd leave me the fuck alone to figure my own shit out without having to help with theirs.

Um, bygones.

At any rate, I have that to look forward to, and I'm trying to figure out how to get out of it gracefully, without earning myself a year's worth of "punishing" bullshit from my mother. That means lying, which I hate. But I have recently come to decide that when people in your life refuse to hear "no," they make it okay to lie to them. They invite the lies. If the only answer you will respect from me is one that drips crap, then that's the one you're going to get. I used to go the whole honest route, but frankly, it just takes too much fucking energy, and I don't have that stuff to burn anymore. So I plan on telling mom I already found a house to move into with a friend of mine and another girl she knows. Which is sort of true, since we're planning on doing that when I get back. Which my mother knows already, but just seems not to hear. So I'm just going to tell her it's already done. I managed to dissuade her from helping me pack by telling her my stuff is all mixed up with the housemate's. Which is utterly untrue, but while she doesn't mind offending me, she fears offending the housemate, so she gracefully backed out of that offer. Which hopefully means I will only have to go down to San Diego, to the aunt and uncle's for 3 or 4 days, where hopefully the other people present will dissuade her from too many discussions about the past. Hopefully.

But I'm not holding my breath.

Peace out,
Katie

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