The Mansplainers Need to Stop Telling Me to Calm Down

I’m not going to lie.  I’ve been down.  Seriously rocked over what happened these past weeks.  I took cover the day the FBI reopened the email bulls*&t and I stayed down for a while.  I hid from all news sources for two days post-election because I couldn’t stand the sound of “his” voice, gloating and threatening and making my skin crawl.  Then I read a few headlines…but still remained off social media.  I knew the haters were hating and the trollers, trolling and the spewers of filth loving it up. And I knew I couldn’t handle it. As a victim of sexual assault I cannot properly adjust my working view of this country. It does not compute. We just elected the most unqualified person ever to the Whitehouse.   But that is not the real problem for me. For me, he is a vile misogynist, who from his own lips admitted to assaulting women and who simply does not deserve to be anything but arrested. And when the women came forward to tell their stories, he tortured them. He accused them. He called them ugly liars.

For probably a week after Election Day, PTSD was still controlling my life. But because my freaking husband can’t deal with me not dealing with the world, I have to get up and get moving. He actually threatened to quit his job to stay home with me if I didn’t “get over it.” He didn’t vote for the new Grabber in Chief. But he just doesn’t think my stress over the election is warranted. Great. My own husband, my “protector” has decided how I should deal with my fear and grief over this horror show. So I’m shaking, but I’m standing. Because now I know I can’t count on anyone to protect me.   I have to get my act together and get past the debilitating fear. Drugs, biofeedback, therapy, yoga…I’m using all the tools I can find because one thing that’s happened concurrent to all of this is now I’m PISSED OFF. And that is motivating.

The anger at having my feelings dismissed in such a way is pushing me up and out of my house. I don’t know if my husband realized how much his words hurt me or how truly angry with him I am, but he sure has gotten me up. First I got into my regular routine for a few days and now into writing for the first time in weeks or maybe it’s been months, I’m not even sure. I even went on my social media accounts. And I saw all the friends out there still fighting the inevitable. Still hammering away at people for choosing a truly hateful and detestable man to lead us. But that was not all I saw. I saw the mansplaining. I saw the disgruntled white men who voted for that man, all over social media telling us (in my case victims of sexual assault, but also all the other minorities our president-elect* has abused over the last months) we need to “calm down now.” The election’s over and we need to settle down and accept the results. Kind of like what my husband said, but this time mansplaining Trump to me. And they’re telling us why, no matter what, he’s better than HER. No, NO he isn’t. HE IS WORSE IN EVERY POSSIBLE WAY, so stop telling me how I should freaking feel about it.

I’ve unfriended almost every single one of them. I actually told one of them first that he was a freaking lunatic (after he called HER the devil incarnate) and then I unfriended him. And now I WON’T CALM DOWN. I think I like being pissed off instead of scared all the time. The fear is exhausting. The anger is exhilarating and motivating. I’ve decided to start school again in the fall. I’m going to finish my degree in counseling and work with trauma survivors. Something tells me they’re going to need a lot of help the next few years. I will not allow myself to be a victim anymore. My husband is not happy with me right now. I hope we survive this. But he just doesn’t get it anymore. That’s the really awful part. He will never get it.

*Quick note:  I disrespectfully refuse to use the capitalized version of the word president, or any of its derivations when it references this person.  It’s still frigging America.

 

I got “Mean Girl’ed” by My Own Daughter

I know adolescence sucks.  I remember trying to be cool and popular and get the boys to like me, even at age 14 when I wasn’t even allowed to have a boyfriend.  I know it sucks starting 9th grade in a new school where you’re the newbie and the seniors scare you, although I honestly don’t remember why.  I do remember it sucked though.  I’m not an antique, YET…  But my husband and I do have rules and while my 14 year old daughter gets pretty much everything she wants, she just wasn’t allowed to start dating 1 on 1 yet.  That was it.  She’s really into sports so I actually believed her when she told me she didn’t yet care about boys.  And, up until this year she was a great student.  So I took her at her word on most things.  Dumb.  Very dumb.

But this Spring insanity overtook our home.  Like something from the depths of Hell, puberty broke loose from it’s normal retraints and my daughter, my beautful, loving daughter starting lying.  And lying, and lying some more and even lying about stuff she didn’t have to lie about!  She would look me straight in the eye and tell me things, like she didn’t have a date to the shool dance and oh how angelic she looked when she did it.  All the while of course she did have a date with some boy I never heard of.  And guess what, if she had come to us and told us the truth, and we met the kid and if they were going in a group, we could have worked it out.  But no…the lie was easier.

Then over the summer she lied about having a “Finsta.”  If you don’t know what that is and you are a parent, find out.  It’s a shadow Instagram account where they post what is “actually” happening in their lives.  Not the account you follow…a secret one.  And it takes some hacking to find.  I found my daughter’s on accident.  I found it because I found her best friend’s Finsta and of course with all the teenage stupidity that comes with the lying, comes my girl’s genius decision to follow her friend’s Finsta with her own Finsta, USING HER REAL NAME.  Well the good news?  There were no naked pictures and and a minimum of foul language, etc.  Somewhat all to be expected I guess.  Result:  She lost her iPhone for a week and cried like we locked her in the dungeon for a month.  But she swore up and down that was it…she would never lie again, especially about something as important as internet safety.  I begged my husband to switch her to an Android so I could sufficiently monitor the phone (iPhones are notoriously hard to mangage…just ask the FBI).  But he felt bad for her.  SuperDad wanted her to have all the cool stuff and he believed her… “she’s a good kid,” he said   “She won’t lie again.”  Can I just say LOL MOFO!!!

Then just this week it all blew up.  Since the start of the school year she’s gone from a straight A student to C’s and some B’s.  So, she lost use of her phone again.  So next, I found her on my younger daughter’s iPad.  Using an app she has been expressly forbidden to use:  SnapChat.  BTW, if you think Finsta’s bad, SnapChat is a parent’s nightmare packaged as a free app.  In that account (again my formerly brilliant child used HER OWN EMAIL ADRESS), I found that my daughter has no less than 3 different guys she “hangs” with, 2 of whom she snatched from her so-called friends who seem to not be willing to do anything about it.  She’s 14 for God’s sake.   I also found out she curses like my Dad who WAS AN ACTUAL TRUCKDRIVER.  And the worst thing of all, for me anyway…in order to get attention from one of these boys, she was bitching about me.  She was saying that because I have PTSD and depression, that I yell at her and take her phone and even though I apologize if I get very upset, it’s all just too much for her to handle.

You see,  I told her all about my illness last winter so in case she started feeling sad or anxious she’d come to me and her dad about it.  Instead I’m reading about it on the app from Hell.  I’m surprised she didn’t take pictures of me when I was being cruel by making her empty the dishwasher, which is her only damned chore.  I love my daughter, but I know depression and anxiety and she doesnt have either.    She does have a huge case of hormones though.  And she used me and my illness to get attention from this boy I never heard of, whom she’s been meeting behind our backs and from God only knows who else. Every Mom in the school probably knows I’m ill.  Given my social anxiety, this is a very bad thing for me.  The idea of spending time with any of these cliquey women (guess what… it’s the same in high school with the Moms as it is with the girls) had always caused me some anxiety but now, I’m getting panic attacks about it.   And all because my daughter is boy crazy…and a Mean Girl apparently. She Mean Girl’ed me into bed for the last few days and I feel like I’m the one in 9th grade.

Without a tear, she apologized for hurting my feelings.  You know when she did cry though?  When she heard she’ll never see that damned iPhone again.  Now I know what really matters.

The Vulnerability of Depression

I cannot believe it’s been a month since I’ve posted.  But depression can make you lose track of days and weeks in a blur of mindless activity between the blissful periods of unconscious sleep.  I try so hard to walk the walk with my kids and enjoy every minute I can with them but sometimes it’s just beyond my capabilities.  And of anyone out there whom I though understood, I thought my husband did…but he really doesn’t.   Not totally.

Last month we had an awful fight.  The kind that erodes a small bit of your relationship.  If you have too many of these kinds of fights I suppose that’s how you end up divorced.  Luckily (and I hope it stays this way), we don’t ever fight like this.  He said things that night out of frustration that I know he now wishes had never escaped the filters he normally uses with me.  I understand that my moods make him “crazy” sometimes, but he has to shield me because I’m so vulnerable.  I have no natural protection from hurtful words.  PTSD does that to me.  But this time he couldn’t help it.  And now I feel just a little bit differently about us.  He was my biggest protector and my best friend and he used my trigger points against me.  I’m still somewhat shocked even a month later.

It started as simply as this:  He’s working insane hours lately.  And when he’s not at work he is going to my daughter’s softball games.  Every weekend, non-stop.  I go sometimes…when I’m up for it and when the other two kids want to go.  But not all the time.  Otherwise the whole family would be living at the softball field.  But one night, I was really down and feeling so lonely that I told him I feared he was spending so much time with her to avoid being with me.  He went nuts.  Not only did he accuse me of being a poor mom for not participating in my kids’ activities enough, he said I was just like my mother!  Isolating myself and hiding away so I could wallow in my depression.  He said I was also being like my father by refusing to foster friendships with new people…softball moms especially.  I couldn’t believe it.  If there were a list of “the worst things you can say to hurt me,” these were the top 3.

I cried for the next several days despite his apologies and claims I misunderstood.  He even took two weeks off from work to spend time with me.  But it took about that long for me to be around him again without getting upset.  His words kept bouncing around my head so badly that they were drowning out everything else.  I’m just now, a month or so later, coming out of the fog this fight caused.  Mother’s Day was nice despite him being with my daughter at a softball tournament all weekend.  Her team won the tournament so I just decided to be happy about that.  But something is different now.  I’m a little more broken than before.  Something has changed in the way I see my husband and I’m not sure it will ever go back to the way it was.  I am praying not for forgiveness…I have forgiven him.  I am praying I will forget the words.  I wish there was a way to erase that memory forever.  I want my best friend back.  And I’m the one keeping him out.