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epitome of incomprehensibility
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I had a stressful month and a half, so I've been rather absent from here lately. First I kept getting into arguments with my supervisor at work. I suppose he was treating me worse than he should have. I suppose I was also being noncompliant and stressing him out. Admittedly, I don't take instruction well enough. Admittedly, he doesn't dish it out very well either, at least not to me.
Then my mother, after more than a month of insomnia (not NEVER sleeping, but sleeping very badly) agreed for my father to take her to emergency, and they were there on Sunday, April 17, and I was tasked with going to church to fill in a spot. To sing. So I braided my hair, put on a red and pink outfit with a skirt, and hauled my shaking nervous self north of downtown (1 hr 30 minutes by public transport). I brought one of my repeating pictures in order to have something to draw, to keep me from exploding in fear or anger, but it didn't work.
You might laugh at this, but it was very horrible: after the service, and the singing, and me trying to play piano for one of the songs but not well, I slapped the pastor in the face when we got into an argument. She is about my height, too, and about fifty years old, so again not a person to hit: authority figure, so bad; supposedly weaker, so bad (but she is not weak). She hit me back but not hard, because she was shocked and angry, and of course I started to cry again. I think I was already crying.
Before, I was just sitting at the computer in the hall and thinking, "I can't stand this, I have to talk to somebody," and I started trying to talk to her even though (I realized later) she was on the way to a meeting. Of course she was impatient. She also told me to stop feeling sorry for myself and it wasn't her fault that one of the people asked me to play a song on the piano and it wasn't like they were asking much of me and it wouldn't hurt to be a bit thicker-skinned sometimes, plus I have a bad temper to get angry at such a little thing...
All of this is very sensible and I don't hate her. I admire her, mostly. She is my favourite Presbyterian minister who has ever offered me rum cake and ginger fruit punch. It was just the thing that set me off - that inside I felt desperate, and here she was lecturing me - and I tried to ask for help. Oh yes, it was then that I started crying, and she found that more pathetic and raised her voice more.
I don't think I hit her hard, it wasn't like with S., more like with L., but it wasn't fair at all.
After a while, another person drove me home because I felt too trembly to walk.
Of course people who do bad things should feel bad, but after a few days I stopped thinking about it much. I mean I stopped feeling guilty. The next day, I said sorry over the phone when she called to ask me where my mother was, and she hung up on me, and when my dad called I told him that she deserved being slapped in her face at least once in her life, serves her right for being constantly insensitive, etc. - which wasn't true, but I still felt angry.
My mother, on the other hand (who still doesn't know that this happened), was in a deep depression fuelled by feelings of guilt. Guilt at what? Failing God or something. It didn't make sense to me, but there's depression for you. She hasn't done anything that terrible except for some garden-variety hypocrisy and grumpiness (runs in the family) and making prejudiced comments which her version of god might agree with, but there's depression for you. On Monday, April 18, she was transferred to the Douglas Hospital in Verdun, and that under a court order not to leave for a month. They do that for suicidal people. I don't think she would have killed herself - she had been talking of was not living much longer, but her idea was that it would happen on its own (and if she'd continued to get that little amount of sleep, maybe she would've gotten seriously sick soon, I mean with something other than depression). Anyway, they took that as a warning sign of suicide.
I didn't see her until the end of that week. Her eyes were still baggy and her face hollow-looking. She was happy to see me. The next time she looked a bit better. She'd been sleeping more. The sleeping meds had some side effects, making her hands tremble and causing her to be randomly drowsy during the day, but she was calmer.
When my brother got back from college out of province - coming back to this unexpectedly miserable situation - he came to visit and we all sat in the visiting room together for supper.
It was going well until Mom mentioned something about God and I said, "God doesn't exist."
She told me not to say that, that it was the wrong thing to say.
I said, "Well, I wouldn't be offended by somebody saying I didn't exist. I'd just laugh. If God is God, presumably they're MORE reasonable than me, not less."
Soon I said sorry for upsetting her, which I was, but my brother was upset with me and left. Why am I always doing the wrong thing?
The next couple of weeks had me being responsible: buying groceries for my dad who was too busy to, cooking food, planning tutoring lessons. It also had me irresponsible: being late, asking my dad to drive me to the bus stop several times, blaming religion instead of depression for Mom's problems - I don't usually believe or disbelieve things; I flow in the space in between, as unhinged said, although I do it rather ineptly.
When I saw Mom I tried not to upset her, and I think my visits made her feel better. But it's a slow recovery. Now she is home more of the time, the court order having been truncated, and she is doing more of her crafts again. Before she left she had put all her beads in my room, and when I said no those are yours, she said she might never use them again. (Loss of interest in things: textbook case. Loss of temper for things: gender-atypical, but not to the Law of Large Numbers. I don't know what I'm talking about. I'm sorry.)
Then, for May and June, my supervisor said, I would only work half-time, not as a punishment but because of the decrease in business during the summer.
So I've had the past few mornings off. And it's better. I have more time to read, to write. But I'm disappointed in myself for being lazy. I knew if I worked afternoons, not mornings, I'd stay up late and sleep in.
My problems don't seem to require a psychiatrist with prescriptions, though a cognitive-therapy thingy, like the oft-mocked scenario of an anger management group class, might come in handy for the future. One should not slap Presbyterian ministers who've made one ginger-infused fruit punch in the past, even if they do believe different things than one and yell at one for crying.
Meanwhile I'm lazy and I'm writing surreal stories based on dreams. My mother is making a quilt. Both of us are doing better, I hope.
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