Wednesday, March 15

Wednesday, March 15

Remember how I waxed poetic about how wonderful my Culver’s fish meal was yesterday?  Well, in the middle of the night, I woke up sick as hell with stomach cramps and acid reflux.  I had rampant diarrhea and copious vomiting from about 2 am till almost 4 am.  I am pretty sure that my body could not cope with all the grease.  After puking most of the stomach acid out, I chewed a couple of Tums to neutralize what was left and sat up in bed playing solitary on my phone for over an hour. 

I sent a late night text to DeAnn asking her if she minded switching out productivity partnership zoom to Thursday as I had been kept up most of the night being sick, and that I would be too tired to be productive.  I knew I would need to sleep in.

Early in the morning, I got a text from her telling me she had a meeting on Thursday, but Friday would work for her.  I have no plans for Friday, so that was fine.  I slept in till nearly noon and just basically sat around all day feeling drained and weary.  I feel much better tonight.  I didn’t eat much today, but I don’t feel hungry.  Tomorrow I will make something healthy. 

I wrote up my grocery list and called in my order today.  That’s about all I did today.  I didn’t even get the litterboxes cleaned.  Ugh.  Well, tomorrow I will start the day with the litterboxes—well.  After I feed the monsters, that is.

The winter storm is supposed to roll in tomorrow.  It’s going to start with rain and switch over to a heavy, wet snow.  Tonight they are saying 2-4 inches, which is better than last night where they were calling for 5-7.  More snow is predicted for next week as well.  This may be one of those never ending winters.

Joni called and told me the workmen were at her house installing her new furnace.  She talked about her first therapy appointment and seems really happy about the therapist and how kind and compassionate he is.  We talked about a lot of things—we were on the phone for an hour and a half.  Usually we don’t talk that long on the phone because Jeff is always there and howling in the background.

We were talking about our fucked up childhood and how she looked forward to hearing the therapist’s advice on dealing with that.  She said something about Mom constantly using their “terrible childhood” as an excuse for Kim’s spawn’s horrible, entitled, lazy, goalless, ambitionless, disrespectful life styles and how their childhood was fucking Disneyland compared to the shitstorm we lived through.

Then she brought up how nasty Kim was in her youth—always violent and mean.  But Mom always defended her by saying that she behaved that way because Grandma Harpel favored me and “hated”  Kim (which was NOT true).  Well, Grandma H did favor me, but that’s because I always spent time with her and helped her with all her projects and house cleaning and prepping for holidays.  She NEVER hated Kim.  Kim just never made time to hang out with Grandma.  Obviously Grandma will have a soft spot for the people who make time for them.

Of course, Mom never saw a problem with obviously favoring Kim over everyone else, especially me, and shit talking me at every opportunity from the time I was a toddler.  Apparently it isn’t favoritism when SHE does it.  Ha.

Anyhow, Joni told me about a conversation she had recently had with Erik, her youngest.  Erik and I are simpatico.  We think alike in so many ways, and we pay attention to what’s going on in the world and can discuss it intelligently.  

Apparently Mom was trying to work on Erik’s opinion of me while he was living there, defending the behavior of Kim and her spawn toward me and accusing me of being a terrible person and “devastating” all of them with my cruelty and LIES.  Erik reportedly said, “I believe every word Aunt Cheryl says.  I saw the way they acted when their dad was dying and I saw the way they lived in their house in Owatonna and how Aunt Cheryl’s house looks when she’s on her own.”

Joni said she hadn’t seen Kim in years since she will no longer attend family events due to being SURE that everyone hates her and her spawn and will attack them.  For the record, no one hates them.  No one has any desire to attack them. People are just sick of their shit.  Especially their paranoia and their constant diatribes about how “everyone hates” them. 

I haven’t seen her for probably four years myself.  She will come down to see my mother from time to time, but never comes when any of the rest of us are there. 

The point of this is that Kim visited Mom a few times while Erik was living there, so he saw her.  He told Joni, “I don’t understand why ‘people’ (by which I am sure he means my mother) are so critical about Aunt Cheryl’s weight.  Kim is way bigger than Aunt Cheryl.”

I do know that my mother has been telling everyone that it was a disgrace that I had lost so much weight after the appendix/hospital adventures but had gained “every bit of it back.”

First off, that is NOT true.  I had lost almost 100 pounds over that ordeal and I ALMOST DIED.  Over the course of all the hell that I went through with the spawn and Kim and my mother attacking me constantly and accusing me of lying about the spawn’s behavior in my home, I did regain around 30 pounds.  And in the recent months, I have been slowly losing weight as a result of medication changes and regaining strength and stamina as my body is returning to normal after all the trauma it has been through and being more physically active due to that.

Apparently, Kim and the spawn have been gaining weight—both of the “boys” have really gotten pudgy.  They were always extremely slim when they were younger.  It isn’t surprising since they live on junk and fast food.  Of course, my mother never says a word about that.

She has shamed and attacked me about my weight since I was just a little girl.  The thing is, if you looked at pictures of me back then, I was NOT fat.  I just wasn’t skeletal.  Both Kim and Joni were extremely thin throughout their entire childhoods.  I was shorter, softer, and more “rounded” when I was young.  The constant attacks on my physical appearance made me believe that I was enormous.  I can still hear my mother telling me that she could not buy me clothes for school because “they don’t make clothes that big.”  I literally believed that I was so enormous that they did not manufacture clothing big enough to fit me.  There were plenty of fat people in my life, yet they all had clothing that fit them—so in my child’s mind, I believed that I was much larger than them.  What a fucking terrible thing to do to a child.  There probably wasn’t more than 10-15 pounds difference between my weight and the weights of my sisters. 

It makes me sad to think how much my mother must have hated me.  And how she did her best to insure that the rest of the family thought horrible things about me too.  Disgusting.

Since Joni and I were talking about her first experience with therapy, I told her about mine—I joined a Gestalt Growth Group which was moderated by the nun and priest who ran the Newman Center at my college.  They were wonderful, so loving and supportive.  They probably saved my life.  My perception of my self improved dramatically as a result of their influence on my life.  I had never felt lovable before in my life except by my Grandmother. 

Of course, my mother found this completely horrifying and spread the news far and wide that I was “having sex with the Catholic priest in Winona.”  Sigh.  She was and is so fucked up.  I was in my early 20s at that time, and the priest was well over 60 years old.  Seriously.  WTF was/is wrong with her.

Ah, well.  Life goes on.

Not much else happened today.  I talked to Lily for a while.  She was feeling a little better today.  She said she ate breakfast and lunch but that supper was inedible.  Even the Jell-O was inedible.  But she drank her Ensure, so she should not be malnourished anymore.

Arg.

I watched an older Robert Duvall movie this afternoon, Tender Mercies.  He was very nice looking when he was younger.  It was about a country singer who had been a raging alcoholic for years but got a second chance at life and love with a young widow and her son.  It was quite sweet, actually, without being nauseatingly sweet.  I was impressed that he sang all the songs himself.  He has a very pleasant singing voice.

Later, I watched one called Vigilante about a domestic abuse survivor whose husband had killed their son and left her for dead.  Looking for a reason to stay alive, she began saving other abuse victims by beating the hell out of their abusers and threatening to kill them if they ever went near their victims or anyone connected with their victims again.  I didn’t know who the actress was, but her presentation was chilling.  She made that little speech to one of her victims, then leaned in close to his ear and said, “You don’t understand.  I WANT to kill you.  I WANT to.”  Her eyes and her voice were just as cold and dead and vicious as venom.  I believed her.  If I had been that abuser, I would have immediately pissed myself.

She was a good actress. 

Most of the violence was implied through most of the movie. 

Now, it is almost 11 pm, and I am just going to finish up this entry, post it, and go to bed. 

Keeping up with these entries daily was one of my New Year’s goals.  I feel I am doing pretty good with it.  Not perfect.  But who wants to be perfect?