The Bible says that one of the first things God did after He created the world was separate light from darkness.

I realize that yesterday’s post was cryptic and leaves a lot to my readers’ imaginations. And that’s how it will just have to stay because bloggers must have boundaries lest they become crazy attention-seeking sensationalists who exploit their lives and the lives of their loved ones for stats and Amazon affiliate ads.

I believe that at the end of this series there will be hope and light and joy, and everything that’s happening now will make sense.  But first we must go into the darkness and blindly fumble our way around for awhile trying to find our way out.

As you can likely guess from previous posts, in my past lies much darkness. I’m going to take you there, but I will forewarn you; where I’m going, there be dragons.

When I was sixteen years old my father dragged me into the hallway of our house, held me up against a wall, and beat me up. As he physically assaulted me, he screamed in my face, “You are such a SLUT! Not even the Pope would be safe with you.”

What precipitated this vicious attack, you ask?

I’d come home from a date with someone I barely knew. I wasn’t haven’t sex with this guy, but my father thought I was.  (Being vastly ahead of my time, I was actually having Friends-With-Benefits-Sex–which in the 1970s didn’t have a name–with someone else, but that’s besides the point.)

When my date drove up to my house to drop me off, my father was standing in the driveway wielding a bat.  I jumped out of the car (don’t ask me why, but I’m pretty sure it had to do with my date wanting me to get the hell out of his car so he could get away) and the date–who, shock upon shock, I never saw again–sped away from the scene.

At the age of 50, I now understand that my father’s attack was more about him than it ever could have been about me, but at sixteen I did not possess the wisdom and insight necessary to understand this. All I knew for certain was that my father was a violent, crazy madman, and that I was trapped with him in that hallway with no way out.

Although I have considered suicide a few times in my life–which is probably only natural for a child raised by two parents who openly pronounce, often and loudly, that your very existence is the cause of their mutual abject misery–I’ve never truly had the level of hopelessness needed for such a drastic action.

No. That’s not entirely the truth.

The truth of why I’ve never committed suicide is this: I have this belief (not backed up by any religious texts that I know of) that life is this learning thing and we’re supposed to be here learning shit and figuring stuff out. If you off yourself in the midst of a lesson–especially a hard one–then you go to hell, and the punishment of hell is that you are forever trapped in the pain of the lesson you refused to learn.

Since I’m sure you can easily understand now–knowing what you do about just this one past experience with my dad in that hallway–being trapped in any way, shape, or form is my absolute, ultimate worst nightmare. Therefore, the thought of eternal entrapment has been more than enough to keep me from taking any final fatal steps, no matter how desperate or hopeless I’ve ever felt.

This terror of entrapment follows me everywhere I go, even into the most innocuous places.

Most people desire to park their car close to the supermarket front door, but not me. I’m the sort of person who willingly parks far from the door into the supermarket and walks because I always want to make sure I can get out of the parking lot.

Anyway, back to the main point. Today I’m going to tell you One True Thing.

During my time up against the wall, I made one key life decision:

I would never be held up against any wall ever again.

This one decision has informed most of the choices I have made from that point forward. The moment I feel trapped is the moment I run. And just about anything can make me feel trapped.

I can now tell you One True Thing. It is very exhausting living your life like a crouched animal always on the brink of fight or flight; always checking to make sure your way of escape is clear.

…Along with my life.

The past fourteen days have been among the longest, hardest, most horrible days of my life.

The problem with being a blogger like me–one who writes about her life–is that when my life goes to shit then so does my blog.

I write because I am. Writing is the way I process what I’m going through, and through the medium of blogging I get to have lots of other people interact with my thoughts.  By and large, blogging is an amazing modern art form, but when a serious problem comes up in my life then I’m in a quandary. I still want to write, but I am not necessarily ready to toss my heart and soul out onto the internet and let the forces at large have at me and mine.

Before I can write in any coherent manner, I need to stop the hemorrhaging that is going on in my life. I need some perspective on what’s happened and why and what the fuck I’m supposed to do now.

The reality is that I can’t live in a place where I’m depressed six months out of the year. The toll this has taken on mylife is inestimable.  I’ve been trying to cope with a psychotically fucked up work situation that will never improve and weather that isn’t conducive to my mental health by throwing myself into my blog and all that goes with it. And while I was doing that my life was tanking behind my back.

So here I am.

Just to show you how depraved and hedonistic we are, Jeff and I spent nearly an entire day swilling champagne, donned in our new flannel Christmas pajamas.

And what we learned is that after you drink enough champagne, it starts to sound like a good idea to make a video and put it on the internet.

We bought the little music box Jeff’s playing at a tourist shop on our last day in Paris.  Jeff loves that little music box, and he plays it for me several times a week. I just love this man.  

I tease him that when I’m dead, he’s going to be just like that old guy in Up.

Today’s post is brought to you by the letter “S” for Slut.

Late last night, exhausted after a frustrating day fiddling with my recipes here on my blog , I finished re-reading The Scarlet Letter.

After the steady diet of Mind Twinkies® I’ve been gorging on lately, i.e. Charlaine Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse novels, I figured I’d do my dilapidated brain a favor and feed it some real classical food. And what better than THE book–after The Holy Bible, of course–that spoke to me most deeply during high school?

Forsooth, I cannot indeed separate the confluence of effect that The Holy Bible, coupled with The Scarlet Letter, had on my formative years, so profoundly did they both inform me; emotionally, spiritually, and sexually.

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See that sentence? Nobody writes like that anymore, because people today only skim what they read.

But Hawthorne wasn’t a blogger; he was a genius. His book is filled with convoluted sentences, and lots and lots of adverbs.

I feel muchly improved after reading it, like unto one who has imbibed a strong paranormal romance novel purgative.

But for you, dear Reader Skimmer, sadly, this meaneth that thou wilt haveth to skimmeth through adverbeths, today.

The value for you is that you will soon begin to understand why I’m so messed up.

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So settle did I, forthwith, down for a long winter’s reading of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s great classic, The Scarlet Letter, to revisit once again whether or not could I, perchance, glimpse the meaning that I once saw therein?

And glimpse it therein, I did. Only now from the vantage point of a woman full-grown, with a lifetime of experience behind her.

I am in awe of what my 14-year old self discerned, and yet so deeply saddened that she perceived it so starkly true with what should have been, by rights, innocent and uncomprehending eyes.

I can easily see that, first and foremost, the Girl Who Would Be Me related most acutely to Hester Prynne for she also was a social outcast in her society, which will henceforth be known as High School.

I know. Isn’t everybody an outcast in High School?

But like unto Hester, I was outcast for my sexual transgressions; some real, some imagined, and some unimaginable to those small minds.

We can congratulate ourselves that today’s modern girl does not wear a visible crimson letter “A”.  But we should not think for a moment that such a girl gets off scott-free.

Today’s girl must needs wear the hidden letter “S” thereon upon her back because that’s where everybody talks about it: behind her back.

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To be completely honest, I wasn’t entirely outcast. I did have two girl friends. One I loved, but betrayed, and the other was a beautiful girl who departed right after high school for an exciting career in prostitution. (She tried to talk me into it by telling me, “The sex is just the same, only you get paid for doing it.” Even in my foolish youth, I knew she was grossly mistaken.)

Over the years, I have searched in vain for these two women, but have not found them. Hopefully, just like me, they have simply changed their names.

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As I wrote before, I went to high school with Tawny Kitaen.

She was a sex goddess, and I was a nobody with a bad reputation. And somewhere therein that true tale lies the metaphor for the double-edged sword that is a woman’s sexuality.

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I wish I could say that my comprehension of the agony of The Scarlet Letter begins and ends with Hester Prynne, but I’m afraid that isn’t so. Sadly, I almost more closely sympathize with Hester’s illegitimate daughter: her little Pearl.

Conceived from the ill-fated embrace of two passionate–if woefully mismatched–teenagers on a bunk bed in a Housing Project, I know well what it is to be illegitimate. Even though I wasn’t.

No. My father married my mother to protect her and me from our shame of illegitimacy, and then proceeded to NEVER let either of us forget it.

But my sympathy with little Pearl does not end with my own narrow brush with ignominy. Oh, that I wish it did.  But it gets worse. Much worse.

At the tender age of 7, while my father was off valiantly fighting the good fight in Viet Nam, I stole into my mother’s bedroom one night to find her engaged in my parents’ marital bed with another man. A man who just happened to be a fine, upstanding, married man from our Church.

Now is a good time to remind you, kind Skimmer Reader–for surely if  thou hast gotten this far in my woeful tale thou art deserving of that vaunted title–we were Mormons.

The lovers did not see me, but I saw them.

Realizing with abject horror the threat to me and mine this unholy tryst represented, I did the only thing I could think to do: I lay in wait, and when the opportunity presented itself I called my mother out on her adultery. Publicly. At a Church meeting.

Yes. You read that right.

Such an opportunity did not tarry. While at a Church meeting the very next day, I queried my mother quite loudly, and surely within the hearing of all present:

Why was Corky* in bed with you last night when I was supposed to be sleeping?

This did have the desired result of ending the affair right then and there. Corky, very soon thereafter, moved away, and my mother claimed that they never spoke again.

But the unforeseen effect was that my mother became branded in our Church as an adulteress, and this had some lasting implications that a seven-year old simply could not have predicted.

My mother was called before the Bishopric to answer for her crime, and it was decided that my father alone would be allowed to make the judgement of whether or not my mother would be ex-communicated when he returned home from the war.

My father’s decision was again to spare my mother her humiliation, but not her punishment. He never forgave her, and for the rest of my childhood my father openly–at least to my pricked-up ears–derided my mother doubly so for the faithless whore she was.

He blamed her for enticing him into her bed in the first place and ruining his life at the start, and then he blamed her for being a faithless whore who continued ruining his life by humiliating him as a cuckold (my word, not his).

I suppose in retrospect I think I should have kept my mouth shut.

And far worse for me–socially and, most assuredly, spiritually–a record of  her unfaithfulness followed us in our family’s Church records henceforth. Never again was I to know pure acceptance in the Church. I always felt that I was looked upon suspiciously, as though everyone knew that I masturbated.

I later learned that, while I was still just a flat-chested child of 11 or 12, my mother was approached by certain other women in the Church and warned that I was “too sexy”.  She was asked whether she wouldn’t do anything about it?

But then I suppose the acorn falleth not far from the tree, right?

But you’ve suffered enough. I’ve already used twice my allotment of words a blogger is allowed on any given post, so I’ll have to leave the telling of that tale to another day.

*Yes, Corky is his real name. I only change the names to protect the innocent.

For those just tuning in, I’m a labor and delivery nurse. Since fertility, like death, never takes a holiday, yesterday–on Christmas Day–I had to work 12.5 hours at the hospital.

If people would just read my daughter’s gut-wrenching account of what it is like to have a Christmas birthday nobody would knowingly do this to their child. But apparently people aren’t thinking about how badly it will suck for their kid’s entire life while they’re getting all jiggy wit it in March. I know we certainly weren’t.

Since I was told, off-the record, that being on bereavement last year–because my mother died–constituted a HOLIDAY for me, I was obligated to work this Christmas.

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I was also told that I should seriously consider not having my hysterectomy over the Christmas holiday this year because, and I quote,  ”people will talk”. I’m not sure what they’ll talk about. Maybe they’ll say, “That Chloe!  The depths of her depravity know no bounds! She’ll kill off her relatives; schedule major surgery. That bitch will do anything to have Christmas off!”

But I’m not bitter.

And just for the record, the patient doesn’t schedule their surgery; the surgeon schedules the surgery. That’s the way it works in the Big City. My surgeon didn’t have an opening until the end of March, 2012. I’m very excited. I’ll be spending my 25th Anniversary with a “Closed for Repairs” sign hanging over my vagina. Maybe people will talk now about the lengths I”m willing to go to have my 25th Anniversary off. Sheesh.

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As my luck would have it, two women decided to go all Little Town of Bethlehem on me and have babies for Christmas.

Hey, the money was good, right? And I served humankind, which was really Christ’s point anyway, right?

The hospital, out of its deep pockets of generosity, offered a free turkey dinner, with all of the trimmings, for those of us unfortunates who were spending our Christmases working instead of at home in the loving bosom of our families.

I don’t mean to be ungrateful. There are people starving in this world who would kill–if they had the strength to–for a meal like we were given, but the turkey was so dry and the stuffing was so salty that they both could have survived the crossing of the Mayflower and been served at the first Thanksgiving.  But the gravy was pretty decent, so I slathered it all over everything.

Then there was all the stuff lying around.

I don’t know what it is about hospitals, but for some reason people feel the need to bring in the absolute unhealthiest food possible and plop it on the community tables for doctors and nurses to plunder.

There was a veritable sea of boxes of cheap, Russell Stover® candies, bowls filled with aluminum-wrapped Santas and Christmas bells, bags of Hershey’s kisses of every race, color and creed, plates of homemade cookies (by now looking a little picked over), canisters of butter toffee popcorn, industrial-sized tins of Moose Droppings®, and at least two ginormous Mason jars filled with homemade Chex® Mix…with cashews.

No salad was served with our free lunch, and there was not a Cutie® or a veggie platter in sight.

Now nobody made me eat this stuff. I have no one to blame but myself. But eat it I did. The horrible free lunch (proving that there really is no such thing as “free” lunch), the cheap candies, (I passed on the cookies because they had all glommed into a congealed mass of melted chocolate, nuts and once-bright rainbow sprinkles), and an untold number of handfuls of Chex Mix…with cashews.

Which brings me to the point of this post.

Here it is.

The point?

Throw it away.

 
Finally, realizing that I was powerless to stop eating all of this crap that was just sitting there within arm’s reach, I began to simply throw it in the trash. I overturned a half-full jar of Chex Mix…with cashews into the trash followed by my half-eaten chocolate Santa Claus.

I’ve heard of people doing this and then changing their minds and foraging into the trash to retrieve the goodies, but nobody is desperate enough to go dumpster-diving in a hospital trashcan. Nobody.

And now you are going to say something about the poor other people who wanted to eat this stuff?

I was doing them a favor.

I wish I could say that I felt better right away, but I didn’t.  At least I couldn’t eat any more of it.

Today is a Daniel’s Fast sort of day for me. Fruit, vegetables and water. And Shredded Wheat & Bran® because I have to eat Shredded Wheat & Bran® every day or the world spins off its axis and we all plunge to our deaths. You can thank me with anonymous cards filled with small, unmarked bills.

The secret to staying slim isn’t dieting or obsessive exercise. The secret is knowing when to stop.

Just stop. Throw whatever you have left over in the garbage right now and walk away.

If I can, you can.

Throw it away and stop now.

Christmas is over.

Today I have a guest post over on Aiming Low. You really ought to head over there and read it. It’s about a very sad funeral.

I get paid like a million dollars per comment so be sure to make one over there.

My birthday was pretty terrific. I started off the day getting a massage from the lovely and talented Nicole.

Like all good massage therapists, Nicole began our 1.5 hour session asking me if I was having any issues.

Before I could get more than a handful of words out of my mouth–something along the lines of, “Today’s my 50th birthday and my mother died!”–tears were pouring down my face.

Hmmmm.

What me? Issues?

HA! I say in the face of issues! HA!

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She congratulated me on my birthday and then we spent some time talking about grief and how sucky I am at it.

Okay, Nicole didn’t actually suggest that I’m sucky at grief. I just instinctively know it.

Grief takes being vulnerable, and feeling sadness, and admitting that you don’t have control over anything.

I hate all of those things with a fiery passion.

I prefer feeling invincible, being angry, and acting like a control freak.

Despite my deep flaws as a human being, Nicole gave me an awesome massage anyway. God bless her. It was marvelous. If we lived in a Utopian society ruled by sanity instead of Goldman Sachs there would be way more massage therapists than doctors, and health insurance would routinely cover their services.

I’d scheduled the massage for noon. After my massage, I should have planned on going home and sleeping the rest of the day, but instead I’d made a 2 o’clock hair appointment. I should have at least taken a Powerbar with me, or a bag full of crack, or something to tide me over, but I wasn’t thinking ahead.

I was somnolent throughout the whole hair thing, barely uttering five words. I’m not even sure I looked at the finished product clearly. By the time I got out of the spa it was 3:30pm and I hadn’t eaten since breakfast. I was starving and bone-deep weary.

I paid everybody and, in a deep fog, drove home in a daze.

I arrived home just as my husband was waking up, (for those who’ve forgotten, Jeff works night shift). Jeff was doing his best to be all lovey-dovey (not easy for him when he’s just waking up), but I was irritable and bitchy.

All I wanted to do was eat and lay down for a nap. Is that too much to want for your birthday!?!

Jeff backed off to let me sleep, but Raynor wouldn’t let me. He has this little thing he likes to do where he goes and gets a big slurpy drink of water and then, with a mouth and muzzle full of water, he comes over to me and presses his face up against me so water dribbles all over me.

He doesn’t do this to Jeff.

I fell asleep twice only to be woken up with a big sloppy wet muzzle in the face.

Now I was pissed and yelling and carrying on. Jeff tossed him in his crate and I finally caught a little nap.

Part of me really just wanted to stay asleep. Not out of birthday depression. I was just very, very tired.

The day before my birthday was the worst workday a labor and delivery RN can have. Death isn’t uncommon in labor and delivery, but it is ALWAYS unwelcome. As sad as I am this Christmas, my grief can never compare to two parents who will never be taking their baby home. Nothing like a cold splash of harsh reality to wake you up, huh?

My conclusion?

Life is hard, and I don’t like death.

Somebody tried to comfort me recently by telling me that death is just a part of life. Well, so is stubbing your toe and getting sand in your eye, but I don’t like those either.

In the end, because my husband was standing there all handsome in his suit and tie, and I knew my daughter and son-in-law would be arriving soon, I hauled myself out of bed and got dressed up to go out to the special dinner my family had pain-stakingingly arranged.

I’m glad I went. Dinner was wonderful, and I got a Kindle Fire and some other really lovely gifts from friends who went to lots of trouble.

People called to wish me Happy Birthday. I received several cards and texts, and tons of birthday wishes over on Facebook.

I am a very rich woman indeed.

I had hoped to sit around mopey, feeling sorry for myself, but it is not to be since work calls.  Apparently, there are other people in this world suffering real loss over horrible tragedies far beyond the death of my mother and my youth, and I must go attend to them instead of spending the day navel-gazing here with me, myself, and the ever-popular I.

I do feel much better than I did the other day. I got the tree decorated and the presents bought. I feel accomplished. Christmas comes whether we want it to or not, and we can either embrace it or not. The choice is ours.

I wanted to tell the heartwarming story of the time my daughter’s lab, Fatty McButterPants, and my bichon, Doo, ate my mom’s marijuana brownies, but I seem to have misplaced the video. The story will have to wait for another time. It’s a goody though.

Just for today, I’m going to go and act like there is a good God who does love us, and that doing good matters somehow. There is a family hurting today who needs your prayers. There are nurses and doctors who will need those prayers, too. One of them will be me.

God bless. I hope.

It is the weekend before Christmas and I have no time to write today,  just as you have no time to read anything I have to say.

I haven’t written anything for four days because I don’t have anything uplifting to say.

And it is YOUR Christmas, too, after all.

So please be warned.

Abandon hope all ye who enter here

There will be no good cheer today.  There will be no angels singing on high. There will be no Story of the Magi that ends with a tearful exchange of a useless hair comb and a worthless watch bob.

For Jeff and me, I fear  that this will end up becoming the Christmas that never was.

AGAIN.

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The last REAL Christmas Jeff and I had was the year he sang this song at church on Christmas Eve. I wish I had a decent recording of my husband singing it. Instead, we’ll just have to suffer through Jackson Browne’s version.

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Last year, my mother was dying. Everything about Christmas this year reminds me of that. And what doesn’t remind me of that reminds me of the fact that I turn 50 in three days. And I’m just not very happy about that either.

Last year–in my desperate attempt to compensate for the dying person laying in the guest room–I over-decorated. There were reindeer to left of me, reindeer to the right, and here we were, stuck in the middle with FOUR CHRISTMAS TREES and her.

This year there isn’t one ornament on the tree. The ornament box has sat next to the tree for a week, and at this point I’m fairly well tempted to haul it back out to the garage and pronounce Christmas “DOA”.

Both Jeff and I work Christmas this year, so it doesn’t really matter anyway. There is always next year.

I just realized that I think I’ve forgotten to take my Wellbutrin for that past two days. Maybe I ought to go take one of those. I feel a crying jag coming on.

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Okay. I’m back. I went and took my Mother’s Little Helper. Berating myself for being such a wimp.

The old Chloe wouldn’t have taken anti-depressants.

The old Chloe would have gone on a flying rage spree while secretly fantasizing about putting a gun barrel in her mouth.

I think my family would agree that the new medicated Chloe is better.

Certain factions of the internet would also agree.

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Depression is fucking depressing.

See why I haven’t written?

I don’t want to write this shit, and sure as hell, nobody wants to read it.

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Long-time readers probably already know that my use of profanity increases proportional to my fucked-up emotional state.

There’s some sort of algebra equation in it, I’m sure. Like:

If X equals Chloe’s emotional health, and Y is the level of her total frustration with this stupid universe that may or may not be driven by an all-knowing, loving God, then Z is the sum total of how many profane words she uses on any given day.

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Speaking of God and the crazy way he runs this stupid universe, in case anyone is wondering, I am not very happy about God’s stinginess towards my daughter and his refusal so far in giving my little girl a baby. What’s up with that anyway? Do you know how many worthless pieces of shit parents there are in this world who are fertile?

Don’t even get me started.

I try not to think about how upset I am about this, and how sad my little girl is, because I’m afraid I may just chuck whatever faith I have left. I think she’s afraid that’s what is going to happen too.

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Anyway.

Ho. Ho. Ho.