I remember going to Niagara Falls on a whim to show my kids how you could have a rainbow without rain.

I remember when Miranda told me she had a bug in her ear and I said impossible. So I got a flashlight and shined it in there and out crawled a winged ant thing.

I remember the silly quaky duck I bought for Christmas and wrapped it and put it under the tree. Every time someone walked past, it talked. I said it was a talking toilet.

I remember buying a stuffed toy in the UP that looked and sounded like an ewok. Hidden in a bag while driving down a shady road, every time the sun hit it it made noise.

I remember Miranda writing her last will and testament (and then hiding) after getting scared in the house while I was out.

I remember driving to California with my kids in that big moving truck and listening to Achy Breaky Heart endlessly and staying at a place called Grumpies.

I remember Melissa saying to me when she was just a wee thing; “Mom, did you know I’m naked under these clothes?”.

I remember Rolling Rosie and Diaper Deb. Miranda lip syncing and dancing to Free Falling while on roller skates and poor Melissa running around naked.

I remember Melissa stealing the hobby horse somewhere in Arizona and disappearing and scaring me to death. (yeah, it’s funny now)

I remember taking Melissa for a horseback ride and her saying it was too bumpy.

I remember walking out of the bathroom with a naked me and Melissa after a bath and there was my neighbor standing there. Miranda kindly let her in and neglected to tell me :p

I remember reading kids books until I had them memorized.

I remember Miranda looking at her messy bedroom after the Northridge earthquake and say “Oh no, look what it did to my room (or something to that effect), when it looked the same as always.

I remember Melissa painting outside at her easel.

I remember my girls dancing in the rain.

I remember building Melissa the most awesome playhouse ever.

I remember Melissa’s letters she wrote me in kid code after I sent them back to Michigan.

I remember building endless Brio railroads that covered the entire living room.

I remember when a bat got in the house and I told Mir to take Lis to her bedroom and shut the door. Then I ran outside, slammed the door and locked myself out.

I remember endless days and nights of Raffi and dancing kids.

I remember Mir trying to pick the lock on our house with a stick and breaking it off in there.

I remember being woke from a dream (about work) because Lis had a sore throat and I saying “Great, now I’ve got to get the screwdriver, open the control panel and…” while Lis is clutching her throat and staring at me.

I remember so many nights of the three of us in my bed.

I remember treasure hunts.

I remember the tooth fairy getting caught with her hand under Miranda’s pillow.

I remember the hammock in California and the time Mir and I were laying in it and we crashed to the ground.

I remember giving Melissa some bread to feed the geese and they were all coming really aggressively and taller than her. At the last second I swooped her up because they weren’t looking too friendly and stood there laughing with her in the air and geese pecking my pant legs.

There are three essential parts to self-forgiveness. First of all, one must acknowledge the commission of an objective wrong and accept responsibility for that wrong. Secondly, one must then experience feelings of guilt and regret. Finally, one must overcome these feelings (i.e., self-forgiveness), and, in doing so, experience a motivational change away from self-punishment toward self-acceptance.~http://blogs.psychologytoday.com/share/320

I take full responsibility, I’m full of remorse and shame, it’s the overcoming part I’m having trouble with. So let me voice my regret; To my dear daughters, I’m sorry for all you lost when I became ill. It eats at me that I could not keep it together just when I needed to most. Melissa, it was worse for you. At least your sister was old enough to remember a time that wasn’t like that and a me that wasn’t like that. The worst is, that if I had to go back and do it all again, I don’t think I could have changed the outcome. The outcome has changed me irrevocably as it has both of you. I have always wanted only the best for you, you are my heart.

Just to let you know I’m not a complete angel, I don’t forgive my “friend” with the prosthetic leg who stole my car. I still swear if I ever see him on the street I’ll knock him on his ass and steal his leg and see how he likes having his transportation stolen.

Perhaps I find it easier to forgive unintentional offenses, but then do the others really deserve forgiveness? I know it’s supposed to be for your own peace of mind but I’m not sure I’m capable of that. If they expressed regret, I could forgive easily. If they have no remorse, no they aren’t forgiven.

Once, back when my depression was a minor thing and I still believed in myself, I could handle anything thrown at me. Need to work 12 or 16 hours to earn my paycheck? No problem. Need to do it while dealing with a screaming baby? Still no problem. Squeeze in an hour to take my four hour math final? No problem! (I even maxed it). I could do anything. Now I have to portion myself out, physically and mentally. No more just seeing what needs to be done and working on it until it’s finished.

The physical part is my complete lack of muscle tone (even after a few weeks working out at the Y) and the fact that for some reason I get hypoglycemic every time I get a bit too strenuous, even at the Y. I’d love to know what’s up with that. I can eat a nice high protein meal first and still get that way. The mental roadblock is the harder one to deal with though. It’s such an effort to push myself out there sometimes, especially when out there means outside my house. Getting to my groups, the store or even mowing my lawn takes extreme effort on my part. I’m probably the only one freaking out about voting because of all the people that will be there.

Let’s just look at inside my house for now. Since someone came and played with my furnace and I now have heat for the first time in over a week, now there’s the dirty dishes, the dirty laundry, the cat hair everywhere, the unpacked boxes, the dirty litter boxes. The clear priority is the dishes and if I have a good day hopefully the laundry. Oh to have the ability I used to have to completely clean my house from top to bottom and have everything in it’s place. In fact, even though I’ve been here over two years now, everything doesn’t even have a place yet. That’s another challenge that seems beyond me. My sense of overwhelm is much lower than it used to be.

Today is Sunday. That means that I most definitely need to do dishes and laundry so I can eat and have clothes to wear the coming week. My cats would love me if I manage to take care of their litter boxes too. Never start with the little things because it’s a sure thing you won’t get the big ones done. Three slices of me right there.

Tomorrow I see my therapist and go to the Y and hopefully I also get up the courage to go vote. Three HUGE slices. Anything outside of my house and dealing with other people is a major effort.

I was reading a forum about disabled people and invisible disabilities, where I found a link to this post. I feel like a fraud that I feel the same way because of my mental state and not a legitimate physical problem, but I can so relate. I realize that I do exactly that. Need to make doctor appointments? Spread them out, never put two in the same day. I will say that I’ve gotten to be expert at prioritizing and knowing just which things can be put off indefinitely. I’m even better at rationalizing that I don’t need to deal with it at all.

I am in a serious slump again (as if you couldn’t tell) and crawling back out of the hole is always so hard. The slump started because I have been sitting here freezing my butt off for days. Impossible to do anything when chilled to the bone and huddling with my heating pad under a mountain of blankets. I am so annoyed at how hard it is to jump back in and me take a slice of life. In fact, it’s been years since I have been able to think of it as me taking a slice of life instead of life taking a slice of me. I hope I reach that point again someday and then my sun will surely be shining.

Edit: I didn’t think it was possible to be even more annoyed but by golly I am :p I skipped the Y this morning just to get home and call the furnace guy. Then, because my phone is a computer program, I sat down here ALL day in the cold waiting for him to call me back. I did hope I wasn’t going to have another freezing night. Bah! Heading to bed with my trusty heating pad.

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Back a while ago when I was offline from Comcast and tried repairing my windows, it wouldn’t even let me log onto my computer because I was not online to activate windows! That is just plain bad management.

This is a new computer. As in a year ago on my birthday I bought all the parts at Newegg to build myself a great graphics computer that will last me forever (it’s going to have to). Unfortunately I apparently had no idea how to build it, so it sat here for over a year. I finally took it to a place in town and said just get it to boot. That was pretty cheap and I came home and installed everything. Other than that one validation glitch we were working like a charm. But I hadn’t gotten around to installing a lot of my graphics programs yet. So a couple of days ago I tried installing one of them and I got the message that I must close Internet Explorer first. What!?!? I don’t even use Internet Explorer but sure enough there it was in my processes. Simple enough, I terminate it. But wait! It pops right back up again. I decide to delete the darn thing. Oh carp, do you know if you have sp3 installed on Win XP you cannot delete Internet Explorer?

I head to Google and spend hours trying to find out what is calling it and forcing it to run, with no luck. I tried renaming it, nope, it just makes it all over again. So I did what any sane person would do, I reformated my drive. Now I have Windows reinstalled, my programs reinstalled and I am NOT going to update to sp3! If that makes security a problem on my computer, have at it.

Now if I can just find out how to make all those idiot speech balloons go away on my desktop and start menu. I did several solutions I found online but I am still getting some. Plus there’s that annoying messenger that won’t die no matter what I do. I told it not to load, I have the service disabled (which ought to be enough by itself), but no, every time I open my email program there it is. I think I am going to try deleting it, but I won’t be surprised if that’s not allowed either.

I don’t mind Microsoft making a program that even the ignorant masses can use but come on, give the rest of us a break!

A memory to get me through the winter

I’ve heard that depression can change your brain. I wonder if Borderline Personality Disorder does too? I read this article at NIMH (National Institute of Mental Health) that says studies have shown that the grey matter functioning in BPD patients is impaired in an emotion regulation circuit (I can vouch for the fact that mine is faulty!). Since I’m a believer that our upbringing  causes this disorder, then I have to assume  that the trauma we under went caused changes. Either that or we were born with this shortcoming which in turn caused our caregivers to be so totally annoyed with us that we ended up with BPD. I have to give that theory some weight because I was surely more intense and high-strung than anyone else in my family. My problems go back farther than my memory does so I have no way of really trying to analyze that. Not that it makes any difference in the fact that this is something we have to live with but maybe it gives me a sense of legitimacy. Maybe I can let go of some of the shame of having such an untreatable, horrible disorder that even the mental health community looked at me with disdain.

While I’m at it I’ll mention another article just to show that untreatable myth is slowly changing. Age is supposedly on my side too. I wouldn’t really know since for the most part I live the life of a recluse. It’s not Borderline problems that cause me to isolate, it’s my complete loss of confidence in myself. I can tell you that is a hard thing to get back. When I was in my twenties and bouncing from one problem to another, I still tried. It took a huge toll, having to project the image that I was okay and had things under control (when I clearly didn’t). I used to be so much gutsier than I am now. I am not flighty like I was when I was young, I am more stable in some ways. As far as emotion regulation? I spent over two years in DBT (Dialectical behavioral therapy) supposedly learning how to regulate my emotions, and I still have no clue how to actually do that. What sends me off the deep end?  Well, the DSM-IV-TR puts it this way “Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment.”, I say rejection (or perceived rejection) pure and simple. Some times it’s real, many times I believe it’s only in my head. I don’t frantically try to avoid it, as I did in my youth, I avoid getting close enough to risk feeling that way in the first place. Not a great solution but it does keep me stable and out of the hospital and even non-suicidal.  That makes it worth it to me because I hate it with a passion when I get that traumatized, out of control, awful feeling.

I believe the day will come, if we don’t manage to destroy ourselves first, when they not only will know which areas in the brain cause or contribute to certain mental illnesses, but that they will know how to treat them much like they treated my brain tumor. In fact, I’d volunteer now to have those faulty areas rewired or removed!

So my informal review of Chipin is that it could be pretty darn cool and generate you some income if you actually have a blog people read. Yeah, I know, that was totally obvious.

For those of you who contributed, I offer a heartfelt thank you! As for the furnace. I could be in trouble here but I will do what the furnace guy did in April when he came for the third time last winter, set fan to always on and set the furnace to emergency heat. Guess that’ll run the electric bill up but I have no choice. If natural gas goes up the 40% I’ve seen predicted, I’m in trouble anyway. I’m already bundled up trying to be warm and I don’t think it’s below 60 degrees. I may try a solution I saw on CNN, although for that to work I think I need to be foreclosed on first which could take months. Then I can save my mortgage payment money and by my calculations I can then afford a furnace in 12 months! Awesome :p

Just so you know your money isn’t being squandered, it’s going to sit there in the furnace fund until I actually get one. That could be a while but I’m not touching it!