Harriet M. Welch

On Friday, before the snow started, I sent J an email with my homework assignment. I was supposed to figure out what a parent’s responsibility is for their adult child. Basically what I said in the email was that I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to write about parents in general, or me specifically. If it was about me specifically, then I feel a lot of responsibility towards my son because of the things I didn’t do properly during his childhood. I gave him a link to a post on my blog where I wrote about my son and the difficulties he had academically, and what I tried to do for him, and how I ended up messing things up pretty badly. I also told him that he was welcome to read other posts on my blog about my son, but he didn’t have to if he didn’t want to.

Then I told him that thinking about this has brought up old bad feelings that I don’t want to deal with. I would rather focus on the problem. And don’t I have responsibilities for my daughter, my family, and myself? I told him that I just wanted to solve the problem without it being about me.

And I told him my son’s name.

And then I mentioned the insurance company difficulties, and how I am concerned that I had to lie to the insurance customer service woman, and now I am concerned that they will find out that I lied because of whatever paperwork J has to send in to them with my claims. And that was about it.

I wasn’t really expecting a reply, since I didn’t ask him anything, and this was just an assignment that he asked me to email to him, and the last time I emailed him he didn’t reply. I’m glad he didn’t send me back an email because I had enough to deal with over the weekend with the weather situation.

But this morning I did get an email from him saying that I bring up some good points and that this assignment was a prelude to coming up with a plan for my son. He said he would be happy to develop a plan but whatever he suggests would be just that – a suggestion, but he wanted to conceptualize my role first.

I felt really stupid once again when I read the email, and I was even more happy that he didn’t send it to me last week, because I would have been thinking about it all weekend and thinking about how I suck at therapy and here I am messing things up again. Of course he had a plan, why would I think he didn’t have a plan? And here I am saying I don’t want this to be about me, I just want suggestions for dealing with the problem and I don’t want to think about my feelings and all he was asking was for me to conceptualize my role in order to be able to make a plan.

And then he addressed the insurance issue – he said that he can handle it with minimal disclosure and he can show me what he submits to them. I don’t understand this at all, I really asked him if I could just pay him, and not deal with the insurance company at all. Why would he be opposed to that – maybe he thinks I don’t have the money to pay him and he’s afraid my check will bounce or something.

He didn’t say whether he read the blog post that I sent him the link for.

This morning I was talking to my husband about how I am “sharing” my friend’s personal trainer. We signed up for 12 sessions – which is 6 weeks – and he asked how much it was costing. I told him it was $55 per session, but it is a onetime thing, I’m only doing the 12 sessions and that is it. He said, “$100 a week???” OK, I guess that is a lot of money, but he has a gym membership that is $100 a month. Yes, that is $300 a month cheaper, but he has been going for a couple of years and I only want to do this for 12 sessions. After that I can do the workout on my own, or with my friend.

This afternoon, right after I got the email from J, my husband finally got around to asking how my workout went this morning, which I was surprised about since he never asks me how anything goes in my life. I told him that I had to pay the trainer the full amount in advance, so could he put $600 in my account. He got really pissed off and scowled and finally mumbled, “Fine.” Then I felt like a real piece of shit. Here I am using my family’s money to work out with a personal trainer 12 times, a real luxury, and how dare I do that? He plays golf all summer, which is expensive, and belongs to a gym, and my daughter has her own horse that we pay for board and lessons and horse shows, etc etc. And I want to spend $600 on a trainer and he gets pissed off. Just thinking about it is making me upset. I hate having to ask him for money.

I really want a new job. I’ve been answering job ads on Craig’s List, but no one ever gets back to me. I guess I have no marketable skills that anyone wants, and I have no way to make any money. The people that I normally work for haven’t been calling me because their workloads have dwindled lately, and they don’t want to spend the money on me. Or maybe they just don’t like me, who knows.

I just really feel like a worthless piece of garbage right now. And I have gained 5 pounds recently. It seems every day when I step on the scale there is another pound. I’m not sure if it is due to stopping the wellbutrin, or maybe I’m drinking more. I do keep track of all of my calories, but maybe I’ve been cheating too much. I really need to get my act together. I even bought some diet pills, but they don’t seem to do a thing. I certainly don’t feel any different or eat any less when I’m taking them. That was a waste.

This evening I got an email from the trainer asking, “How was today?” That was all he asked, and I started to read all kinds of things into it: He doesn’t want to work with me, he thinks I’m lazy, I complain too much, I’m not strong enough, I’m too fat, I’m too weak. I emailed him back asking, “I thought it was fine. Did you think it was ok? Did I complain too much?” He replied that I did fine and he wanted to be sure he was addressing my needs. Now I’m wondering what he really means, when maybe what he really means is what he really said. My mind is just totally spiraling out of control at this point.

Tomorrow is therapy and I get to go in there and feel like an idiot again. Isn’t therapy supposed to make me feel better about myself? When does that start happening?

It’s finally over. Our power came back on at 8:00am. When we woke up it was 48F in the house! Luckily we live on a main road and we were plowed out, my husband shoveled the driveway (a few times), and I was able to spend the day cooking and doing laundry. I’m almost done with the puzzle. Schools have already been canceled for tomorrow and Tuesday and amazingly more snow is in the forecast for Tuesday night/Wednesday morning. I have so much reading and writing to catch up on, but for now here are a few photos.

I started out by telling J that I was having some problems lately. I’m feeling really badly about myself, I’m cutting a lot and I’m thinking about dying a lot. He asked me a lot of questions about the cutting, because my latest cutting habits are a lot different from my usual pattern. So we talked about motivation, and how I feel during and after cutting, and if I feel that I’m cutting in order to be proactive. It has become kind of a habit lately, more so than as a way to relieve bad feelings. But I told him that I have to stop because a friend asked me to join her twice a week to work out with her. She has a trainer that comes to her house, and it sounded like a really good thing to do, and not too expensive since he’s splitting his fee with both of us. I met them for the first time this morning, and of course I had to wear long sleeves, and it was really hot. If I’m going to keep this up I’m going to have to switch to cooler workout shirts, which means no cutting on my arms.

Then he asked me what’s been going on to cause me to be feeling this way, and I told him that it started about six weeks ago or so and there have been some stressors in my life. He asked if they were “garden variety” stressors and said he didn’t mean to minimize them, but he just wanted to know if there was something else that was more major. There are a number of factors, and I did say that, but of course when I only have 45 minutes to cover everything I can only focus on one or two items. He knows about my weight issues and mentioned that I did tell him a couple of weeks ago that I had gained some weight. He said, “Was it five pounds?” I said, “NO, it was two pounds.” But that is garden variety stress.

There were a couple of things I could have picked as my major impetus for the negative feelings, but I decided to tell him about the situation with my son. I said that at the beginning of January I decided that I would set a goal for myself – by the end of the month I would do “something” about my son. (As a reminder, he is 19 years old, flunked out of college last May, has not gotten a job, doesn’t go to school, stays up all night and sleeps all day, spends all of his time on his computer and playing video games, and doesn’t drive.) So as the end of January was getting closer and closer I was getting more and more distraught and feeling like I was an incompetent parent. I kept thinking I should do “something” but I didn’t know what the “something” was. Lots of people are freely giving me their advice and opinions, despite the fact that I do not ask for their input, but I didn’t feel comfortable with any of these ideas.

As I was talking about my son I said to J, “Have you noticed I don’t use names? I just found out recently that people use names in therapy.” He said that’s normal, he doesn’t use names when he is talking to people who don’t know the names of those to whom he is referring. He said it’s not weird that I don’t use names, that in fact some people use so many names it’s like a soap opera. I told him about a woman that called the hotline the other day, and was using everyone’s names. And it turns out that her son goes to my daughter’s school, they are in the same grade, and all of the names she mentioned were people that I know. That was disconcerting.

We talked about how my parenting issues with my son cause me to feel badly about myself due to how I think I made so many mistakes with him. I asked him what I should do about the situation. I was thinking that this was good, I’ve never really asked him about a specific situation in the year and a half since I’ve been seeing him, so maybe I can actually get help with this. We talked about parental responsibilities and how I need to figure out what mine and my husband’s responsibility is at this point. He talked about how I need to discuss this with my husband, and I can write about it since I express myself more easily in writing.

Towards the end he asked how I was feeling about this. I told him that it seemed overwhelming and that my husband is basically useless in matters of this type. We talked about whether my husband considers this my responsibility and I said that no, he doesn’t, but I think I consider it my responsibility. He asked if my husband would be willing to join me in carrying out a plan, when and if we develop a plan, and I said that I thought he would as long as it doesn’t cause him any conflict.

So my “homework” is to figure out what my responsibility is for my son. He said I could email him, or bring it next week, or I don’t even have to do it (I supposed he doesn’t want me to feel pressured).

Thinking about my responsibility for my son is causing old bad feelings. I posted on my facebook asking for input in what a parent’s responsibility is for their adult teenage child, but didn’t get much feedback. I think it is definitely a gray area.

My son is capable of working, he doesn’t have any kind of disability that prevents him from doing so. J and I talked about theoretical things like charging him rent, or kicking him out. He said if we kick him out of the house we are making that decision, but if we charge him rent and he doesn’t pay it, he is making the decision to be kicked out. I said, “So then I don’t have to feel guilty?” And he said I didn’t need to feel guilty either way. That’s great in theory, but what parent doesn’t feel guilty about things like this?

I think it may be fairly easy for me to determine what a generic parent’s responsibility is for their generic adult child. But since I feel very strongly that I caused many of my son’s problems regarding his ability to function in the world, I think my responsibilities are different than the generic ones would be. Imagine that a parent was driving drunk with their child in the car, and got into an accident that left the child with permanent disabilities. I would think that parent would feel much more responsibility for the care of the child than a parent to whom this did not occur.

Now, this is a very extreme example, but sometimes it takes an extreme example to get people to understand what I’m talking about. In the past I have felt that J didn’t really get the extent that my actions, or non-actions, had on my son over his course of his childhood. So I don’t really feel very comfortable discussing this with him.

I felt conflicted when I left the session. J didn’t even acknowledge that I said I think of dying a lot, but I have heard of therapists who don’t discuss death and/or suicide with their patients. I don’t know why that is exactly, I’ll have to do some research.

But later on, I realized that perhaps he could really help me with this situation, that it is a tangible real life problem, unlike nebulous things like self esteem or body image. Maybe this will get me to feel more positive about my therapy.

But later on still, I realized that thinking about the homework assignment is bringing up painful feelings, and I’ll probably have to discuss those with him, and then we’ll be back to the nebulous issues again.

So I’m not sure where I stand now, but I do want to think about the homework, at least in regards to the responsibilities of a generic family. I’ll work on that first.

Today is the day I was supposed to meet my mother, my sister, and my sister’s friend for lunch and shopping. My mother already backed out, and yesterday my sister said she can’t go either. So it’s just me and her friend, L. L is the one who gets messages from dead people. Other than that, I like her, and she is easy to be with. I really need to get out more, so it should be good. I also went out to lunch with another friend yesterday, and that went well. I think know I spend too much time inside of my own head. I also haven’t been working enough hours, I need to work more. Especially now that I’ll be paying full price for therapy. Hopefully therapy will end soon. How do you know when it’s over anyway? My t once said that he works with people for an average of 6 months, and I’ve been going way longer than that.

Thank you for all of the kind wishes about my father. Yeah, I miss him.

I ran along a different part of the river yesterday. It’s the part with the rapids and waterfalls and it is really dangerous. There is a bridge built over the wildest section and I stood on that for a while. The water was so crazy it was making me dizzy. Here is a photo, I didn’t take this, but it shows the intensity pretty well:

I saw four people carrying rafts down to the water – I can’t believe anyone would raft in that ferocious water. And the water must be incredibly cold too. It was even too intense for me, I would not want to die that way. Not peaceful at all.

I’ve been thinking about how the act of suicide affects those left behind. I know someone whose mother committed suicide when she was teenager, and I’ve been doing some reading. Apparently, and judging by this person I know who is pretty screwed up, suicide of a parent or loved one has a lasting impact on the survivors. What isn’t fair, though, is that these people don’t generally show appreciation or gratitude for the suicidal person when she is alive. But after she is gone they get all fucked up. I guess one can’t really expect the people in one’s life to be constantly reassuring them that they are needed and valued though, especially when that person acts like nothing is ever wrong.

My dad died 12 years ago today. On the one hand it seems like just yesterday, on the other hand it seems so long ago. I’m so grateful to have had a wonderful father, because I know that there are many out there who are not so lucky. My father had a terrible childhood, and he wouldn’t talk about it. But rather than grow up repeating what happened to him as a child he seemed to take the opposite approach. My sister and I also suspect that he had Asperger’s syndrome, as my sister’s son does. He was a kind, gentle soul, we called him a “likable guy”. Everyone liked him, and I did too. You know how there are guys who everyone loves except their wife and kids? They put on fake front to the world, but at home are horrible people? Not my dad! He was likable everywhere to everyone. It really sucks that he was ill his whole life, and ultimately had to quit working at age 53. He was sick for the next 8 years, and then passed away. It was really awful, and no one as likable as him deserves such a death. I wouldn’t even wish such a death on anyone unlikable.

Moving on to the here and now, something my shrink, J, said on Tuesday is that I tend to take other people’s comments and opinions as true endorsements of myself. This is true. I believe the reason that this is, is because I cannot trust my own feelings about myself and what I perceive in others. I am too sensitive, and because of this it makes me wonder if my feelings are justified. So if someone tells me something, or makes a remark about something I do or say, I take it to heart. They must be right, because my feelings are unreliable indicators due to my sensitivity. I think this is a realistic attitude.

J himself does this. For example, one day I was telling him about something troubling that I was dealing with, and he said, “Sounds like just anxiety to me.” That made me feel minimized, like what I was frightened of wasn’t worth being frightened of. It’s just anxiety. So I am giving his remark more weight than my feeling of fear. I now feel minimized, and confused, and not sure why I was so frightened if it’s such a minor thing. Then my reaction is to withdraw. Well, I must be wrong, so why bother even continuing with this conversation, or continuing to try to explain my feelings? He has already made his judgment, and it must be correct, because my feelings are so unreliable. Add to that my insecurity about my idea of self-worth, and forget it, I can’t even go on. He is so much smarter than me, so much better adjusted than me, so much more objective than me, that he must be right.

So my feelings take a waaaaay back seat. I’m not sure if this is good or bad, I don’t even know what to think. I’m not even sure if I am making any sense. Time for another glass of wine, I think.

J asked what we are talking about. I said, well, whatever. He said he would like to talk about my email from three weeks ago, since last week I talked about wanting to talk about that. Unless something happened this week that I would prefer to talk about. I said nothing happened this week, but in his email to me last week he said he wanted to talk about my thoughts that he is sick of me and frustrated with me. He said he didn’t remember what was in his email to me last week. I said, well, you said you wanted to discuss this particular item, and the reason I wrote about it was because I thought I did a good job reframing my thoughts and I wanted to let you know that. But then you said you wanted to discuss it and it made me anxious all week and I was wondering why you chose that item as something to discuss. He really couldn’t remember any of this, so he went to his computer to see what he had written. He claims that this particular item stood out for him because it was larger than the other items since I wrote it in list form rather than paragraph form. Oh.

How could I get so anxious about something, and he doesn’t remember saying it at all?

We did discuss how when someone makes a comment or remark to me I tend to believe it and think that they are judging me and then I hold onto these thoughts and this leads to feeling bad about myself. We’ve had this conversation before, about 99 times before. What it comes down to is knowing something intellectually, but not being able to feel it. I asked him how I do this. He doesn’t know. He tried to come up with an answer. He said if I think logically about things eventually the logic will win out. That kind of sucks as an answer, but maybe that’s the way things work.

Then he asked me if he could tell me about a personal situation he encountered last week, that had to do with this type of logical thinking. I said sure, I’m always happy to talk about the other person rather than myself. He told me his story, and we talked about it for a while, and it was so much better than talking about myself. I wish we could talk about him every week. He was still talking about it when I got up to leave.

I didn’t tell him about the cutting, or the suicidal ideation, or the constant feeling of hating myself. Maybe I’ll tell him that next week.

I talked to my sister yesterday, and she told me that the reason my mother doesn’t want to come to lunch with us on Friday is because she doesn’t want to drive an hour to my house with my sister’s friend because she doesn’t feel comfortable with her. I didn’t quite believe that. I talked to my mother today and she said she isn’t meet us on Friday because we “young girls” don’t need an “old lady” like her hanging out with us. I told her that we would enjoy having an old lady like her with us. I said, “I thought you didn’t feel comfortable driving here with L.” She said, “No, I never said that, that’s not a problem.”

My aunt called me and told me that my mother called her and told her she isn’t going to my cousin’s wedding. My aunt says she doesn’t believe the reason my mother gave, she wishes she knew the true reason why my mother isn’t going. I know the true reason, but I’m not telling my aunt. I don’t want to get caught in the middle between the two of them.

Then I had to call my insurance company. We switched to a new provider on January 1st, and I checked my claims online and saw that they didn’t pay for my last three therapy sessions. So I called them and they said I needed to get these pre-authorized. They said they could do that on the phone, but they needed to ask me a couple of questions, that I didn’t have to answer if I didn’t want to. The first was if in the last two months I have drank too much or taken drugs. The second was if in the last week I felt like hurting myself. Huh? Who the hell would answer yes to these questions? And if you choose not to answer isn’t that just like answering yes? I lied. Well, the first question I told the truth, I haven’t drank too much or taken drugs. Not illegal drugs anyway. And prescribed drugs are ok, I’m assuming. But I did lie about the second question.

Everybody lies, and you never know who is lying, and who is telling the truth, and what the truth really is. That’s life.

I told my husband that I hate this new insurance company and they would only approve 10 visits of therapy, and then the therapist has to apply for more visits for me. Huh? I’m not going to ask him to do that. I told my husband that they were asking me intrusive questions that were none of their business and we are just going to pay out of pocket once the 10 visits are up. With the amount of money we spend on insurance every year (we pay for our own insurance) I don’t feel like I have to justify my therapy to them. So there.

Tomorrow morning is my meeting with Mr. IRS Seal. I don’t know what to wear. All of my business-y type clothes are too big. I’m anxious about the meeting, and I’m anxious about what to wear.

I’m still cutting. It’s like a compulsion now, I have to do this almost every day. I wrote that post yesterday about thinking rationally and logically about what is going on, but once again, although I know these things intellectually, I can’t feel them. I can’t feel better about myself. It’s just really hard.

I would like to end the pity party. I am going to think rationally about what is happening here, process my thoughts and figure out what is logic and what is my irrational thinking. I think that a lot of my feelings of unworthiness and stupidity this week resulted from my therapy session and email exchange with my therapist, J, last week, as well as from my upcoming meeting with Mr. IRS Seal. I am not happy that therapy has this much importance in my life that it can cause these strong feelings and lead to a ruined week. Six full days of crap, feeling like a loser, cutting, isolation, crying, etc. How can a mere 45 minute session cause this? I went into my session last week with the intention of talking about my suspicions that my therapist was searching for specific words on my blog. I was unable to come right out and say what I wanted to say, and thus I never got an answer or the information that I was looking for. I also spent the whole session thinking about what I wasn’t talking about, and none of the session actually talking about anything productive. I got very frustrated and I could feel J’s frustration as well, although he would probably never admit it.

Then I wrote him an email full of everything I should have said in session, and in the previous session as well, when I also did not say what I wanted to say. The words are in me, the feelings are in me, the thoughts are in me. I don’t know how to get them out orally. This is making me feel like I am a helpless loser. Yes, I can express myself in writing, but that is not how therapy is supposed to be. Didn’t someone, maybe Freud, call therapy the “talking cure”? Not the “sit in silence during your session and then send your therapist a three page email that he has to read on his personal time cure”. But my therapist says that he doesn’t mind the emails, that he likes them because if I am not expressing myself in the session, how else will he know what I’m thinking? So I have to believe that it is ok for me to send these emails, because he says it is. I know there are other people who have therapists who don’t do email. So if J says it is ok, then it must be ok. It’s me who has a problem with it, not him.

Facts:

It is difficult for me to express myself in my therapy sessions
J says he welcomes email
I can write about my thoughts and feelings better than I can talk about them
It is ok to do therapy in a variety of ways, one size doesn’t fit all

This is going well.

I am also feeling badly because of all of things in my email J chose #4 as the item he says he wants to discuss. I feel badly because first of all, that was the one item in the email that I thought I was doing well with. I wrote about it to tell him that “Look, I did something good!” I also feel badly because just last week we had a discussion about my previous email and how there were things I thought that were important in that email, and he chose not to discuss them, he chose another item that I didn’t think was particularly important. So we had a discussion about how I should be the one to determine what is important, and here he is again making a decision about what he wants to discuss. Why couldn’t he say in the email, “You raise some good points here, what would you like to talk about from this email next week?”

Facts:

I wrote an email expressing my concerns, as well as a couple of things that I think I am doing well as a result of therapy
J said that I did a good job of expressing myself in my email
He did reconfirm one of the items that I thought I was getting better at, and said that he would like to continue working on that
He did say that he would like to talk about this email next week
He said he specifically wants to discuss item #4

I’m not sure these facts are making me feel much better about this particular situation.

As for Mr. IRS Seal, I am comparing myself with him and seeing that I come up short. He is a professional financial advisor, and that is something I have no idea how to do, therefore my conclusion is that he is better than me, smarter than me, more professional than me. However, I am good at what I do, I have had many clients who think I am some kind of goddess for helping them get their stuff organized and getting them set up with systems that help them in their daily lives. I have to remember this.

Facts:

Mr. IRS Seal is a professional financial planner
I am a professional organizer
He helps his clients do things that they can’t do alone
I help my clients do things that they can’t do alone
I am perfectly capable of sitting down to have a conversation with him in order to figure out how I can best help his clients because this is what I do with my other clients

As for my mother, well that just happened yesterday, so it didn’t have an impact on my week until yesterday. But to think logically about this we have these facts:

My sister was passing on information that may or may not be true
My mother is really not enjoyable to spend time with
This is a great way for me to out of doing something that isn’t enjoyable
Rather than feeling hurt that she doesn’t want to spend time with me, I can feel relieved that I don’t have to spend time with her

This is going well. If I can just keep remembering these things it would be helpful. I would like to be a person who doesn’t have all of these thoughts, who doesn’t ruminate on things, who lets things just slide, who doesn’t let crazy thoughts ruin her week, who doesn’t have to go through this complex mental process in order to get through negative thinking patterns. I know there are people like that – I know a lot of them. They don’t go through all of this. Frankly, it is tiring, it is mentally draining, and do I really end up in a better place after the process is over?

Sure, I have analyzed these situations and come up with logical facts and I see how my thinking can be skewed. Intellectually I have come to some positive conclusions. Am I feeling better? I still have to work on convincing myself for some reason. Why do feelings trump logic? Something is wrong with that.

Last night I had a dream kind of experience, you know when you are not really asleep and not really awake? I had an image of a movie projector in my head, and the film was going around and around and around. And then a really big scissor appeared and cut the film. It immediately stopped going around. That film is the thoughts in my head, and the scissor is the tool I need to make them stop.

I was trying to take a break from the blog over the weekend, but too many things are going on inside my brain. Want to hear about what a loser I am? Here are some search terms that people are using to find my blog:

I was a pathetic child
Painless and effective suicide methods
Is suicide painless
Can’t think of anything good about myself

By the way, although there are effective suicide methods, I would venture a guess that there are no painless suicide methods. However, living may be more painful than dying, so I would suggest weighing your pain level prior to attempting anything.

Want to hear how else I’m a loser? I talked to my mother last week and asked her if she would like to spend a day together. She suggested next Friday. We decided to go out with along with my sister, and my sister’s friend (the empathic one). Today my sister emailed me that she now has to see some clients on Friday, but she can squeeze in a quick lunch. My mother, however, would prefer to stay home and play cards with her friends.

What does it mean when my own mother doesn’t even want to spend with me?

I don’t know what is wrong with me today. I woke up feeling like crap, not physically, but in all other ways. I’m hating myself because I’ve gained a few pounds. I know that is because I stopped logging my food intake on livestrong, and I immediately went over there today and will have the website up at all times and on the homepage of my blackberry. It’s so easy to lose track of calorie intake, for me anyway. I’m either obsessive about it, or I gain weight. There isn’t a middle ground.

I don’t know if that is why I’m feeling this way, it doesn’t seem like that big a deal, I know it won’t be hard to get back on track and lose the weight. But I was so irritable today, my daughter came home for lunch and I was just feeling so cranky and I wanted to be alone. Luckily I spent a few hours at work all alone, then went to my new hang out, Starbucks, to drink decaf coffee and read. I’ve been spending a lot of time there lately, it’s like being alone while being surrounded by people.

I’m also annoyed at my mother, because we were all going to go to Atlanta for my cousin (her niece)’s wedding in March. We booked the plane tickets and hotel for my husband, kids and me, and today she told me that she isn’t going. She claims it is because she just discovered that her investments lost money in 2009 and she doesn’t have enough money, but I know that isn’t true. She has been looking for an excuse not to go. She is upset that my cousin converted to a religion that isn’t ours, and she is upset because my cousin ignored her when her husband died, and she is upset at my cousin’s mother, my aunt, because she sometimes seems indifferent to my mother. This has all been going on for years and years. And since my mother isn’t going to Atlanta, my sister and my niece aren’t going to go either. I really thought it would be so nice for all of us to be together, we have such a small family and we never spend time together, except at weddings and funerals. Oh well.

And back in December a friend of mine emailed me and asked if I could go to lunch with her on January 15th. How am I supposed to know on December 8th if I want to go to lunch on January 15th? But I couldn’t say no because it was so far in advance. Now January 15th is four days away. I don’t want to go to lunch with her, I don’t really want to go to lunch with anyone. I don’t want to talk to anyone or be with anyone. So I’m going to email her and tell her something came up. I don’t even really feel badly about it. I don’t feel anything actually.

A bad night’s sleep again last night. Is it too much to expect to sleep well two nights in a row? The dog threw up again. I think the treats I got her must be disagreeing with her sensitive stomach. Then she was crying to go out and I had to have a talk with her to let her know that it is the middle of the night and she can’t go out. Then she was crying for water, so I got up to fill her water bowl. Then at 6AM my shoulder started dislocating (I think I’ve mentioned my dislocating shoulders before haven’t I? It’s a common occurrence while I’m sleeping) and I woke up suddenly clutching my arm. Not sure exactly of the order of events, but I felt it slipping out of alignment and managed to grab it and put it back together, and woke up somewhere along the line. It’s not a good way to wake up. But the pain only lasts a few minutes and then I was able to go back to sleep until my alarm went off. I’m the only person I know who has to get up earlier on weekend days than on weekdays, but Sunday mornings I work on the hotline.

And I left the dog vomit for my husband to clean up – and he actually did it! He’s the man.

Remember a few weeks ago I wrote that I had a caller who affected me a little too much emotionally and I cried on the phone while I was talking to her (she didn’t know I was crying, it was the silent kind). Well, I have talked to her since then and I was fine. I haven’t cried while talking to anyone else since that day, so I’m feeling more confident again.

I’ve been thinking about love, and how many people I love and who loves me. Have you ever thought about how many people love you? How many people tell you that they love you? I tell my kids that I love them, and they usually respond by telling me they love me. My husband tells me he loves me, but only after we….well, you know. So there are strings attached. And last week the woman who has cleaned my house every week for the last three years gave me a big hug and said “I love you.” I didn’t really expect that, but it was nice. So that’s it, my kids when I say it first, my husband when…you know, and Maria. Well, I know my mother loves me, but she never says it. But I know she does.