I come from an abusive home: physically by one stepfather, sexually by another, and my mother didn't protect me from any of it. So that's a whole pot of shellfish, but I'll address a few things that fermented in me from that time.
Trust No One: I am the Fox Mulder of relationships Men in authority obviously were not people I respected, and I felt I needed to always protect myself, trust no one, and had no fcuking clue what a decent Adult Relationship/Marriage looks like. Outside of Hollywood that is, which sets up an enormous amount of unattainable expectations.
Leading us to:
If it's not exciting or dramatic, something's wrong with this picture. I'm a closet drama queen. A lifelong issue. I have been so caught up in 'being pursued' that I would get in my car after fighting with boyfriends in college and 'make' them chase me down. What a nightmare I was. I could always tell that the end of a relationship was imminent when he would no longer chase me. I think my passion was initially great in a relationship, and then backfired completely long-term. I'm not sure what the attraction to drama is (as if the absence of it would be bad?), but it has surrounded me forever. Grew up with big screaming adults, fists in walls, on people, etc. Good times.
So we move from here to:
Keeping Score -my apparent 'competition' in relationships. Yeah, I worship you in the beginning, as long as you worship me too ... and then it gets tricky. I tended to want to 'win', not ever admit to being wrong, or God-forbid really be vunerable, or emotionally intimate. (although, physical intimacy is just fine with me. Every day and twice on Sundays, thankyouverymuch. I guess it was my way of feeling validated/loved, as that's how people always showed interest in me: physically. I modeled and did pageants - all that kind of stuff - for 'surface' approval as well). Then there was the whole sarcasm issue, or veiled verbal daggers in lieu of outright disrespect. Just non-supportive; more to falsely elevate myself to feel better. Because somehow if my boyfriends (and later my husband) were All That And A Bag of Chips, then I couldn't be? It's something convoluted like that, but I don't have it all worked out in my head as to what exactly was going on, obviously.
Organ Harvesting Every time my husband (the only non-surface male in my life) pursued this strange new type of relationship ("real", "let's strip bare and come clean" were some of the scary-to-me words he used), it was so dang FOREIGN to me, I felt like he was asking me to hand him my pancreas. I'd do/say something to appease him, or in general avoid it, and then go back to my surface status quo. Because frankly I didn't know what the hell he was talking about.
Shadow Dancing I can come across as almost manic at times, with a mile-a-minute ongoing self dialog. "If I dance fast enough, you won't see how screwed up I am". Not how I wish to be perceived, but completely understandable. It's funny how the things people like about me in public (enthusiasm/passion/fun, etc) didn't translate well into my marriage due to some of it being a masquerading dance that doesn't work well in a deeper-than-surface world. And we all like to skim the surface don't we?
SO! To recap! X-files, Hollywood Drama, Scoreboard, Organ Donation, Dancing with the Stars. Discuss.
I intend to post about crap in my past that led to crap in my present, but I just want to say upfront that we are all driving along in our SUVs or soccermomvans or whatever, and glossing thru life. Ya'll. I know. I was one of you.
Then the cosmic can opener jaggedly pried open the surface lid of my life and exposed the real sh!t underneath. Sh!t I was ignoring, and the sh!t you are, too.
