cold dark space

am i even still alive? i feel as if i am watching a film about my life, and i have no remote control...i am just watching helplessly as bad joke after bad joke happens. i teeter back and forth between wanting desperately to fight and wanting to lie down and quit. i never want another christmas like this again. i am fighting so many battles, i don't have enough energy to continue. my job, no baby, my dad, my mom, especially my mom. i have a strained relationship with my parents. i basically have to do everything to culture a relationship. which is hard, because when i'm around my parents, i am forever a teenager in their eyes, and sometimes in my own too. sometimes i fall into the pattern of fighting with them, which is rediculous b/c i want so desperately to be taken seriously, to feel approval from them. why do i bother? i'm still a little girl trying to get attention and love from them. and i don't know when or if i'll ever grow out of that.

my parents don't deal with difficult subjects. they blow it off, hope it will go away. i remember coming home sobbing everyfuckenday from 8th grade. my mom would pick me up, ask what was wrong, i'd say nothing (duh, i was 13) and my mom would say ok. i'd go home and cry and contemplate suicide and other horrible ideas in my room. i dealt with it ALONE. my parents didn't try to help, or didn't know what to do. i was labled the problem child, i disrupted everything in their lives. when i went away to college, if i visited, i was told life was more peaceful without me there. i always felt like an outsider. why didn't i go to med school? why do i want to just be a nurse? anything that tore at me, that was hard for me, i had to figure out how to deal with it ALONE. and when i finally conceded to see a doctor about my "problems" i was labled as depressed, put on a medication, and given no counseling. the pill "fixed" me. it was all MY problem. nothing that they did wrong, just me. and i felt ashamed. my mom secretly told my roommate behind my back that i was on "medication." how was i to feel? i still do feel ashamed to some degree to even talk about my medication. it's just fucking paxil, goddammit, half the fucken world is on it. but somehow, i was a freak. and now that my mom and dad are sick with cancers, i feel so guilty about this stuff, this stuff that will NEVER be resolved. having an honest open conversation does not happen with them. they refuse to.

and now, they tell me they are not going to tell the other kids what is truley going on. ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? they are not babies, they are 16, 20, and 22. they know something is up. all they know is that it's breast cancer. not that it's in her spine. and possibly more places, i don't know how honest they are even being with me. dad kept the secret about his prostate cancer for a month or more, and hannah was very pissed when she found out. how do you think this will go? she is going to have such trust issues. this shit is hard enough without throwing all this complicated who is telling the truth bullshit on top of it. this makes me so angry, i cannot describe it. i tried talking to dad on christmas eve, i just asked if i could tell him from a medical standpoint, a class about death and dying i had to take, some books i have read on this subject. he refused to listen to me, said i was just trying to argue. are you kidding me? ok, i find out my mom has a really shitty likelihood of surviving this, and i want to argue? god, my father does NOT know me at all. he interupted me, refused to let me talk. i just felt like i was slapped in the face, the door slammed shut. seek no comfort here. some families cry together and comfort each other. i am ALONE. brigid is ALONE. james is ALONE. hannah is ALONE. after hannah learned the biopsy was positive for cancer 2 weeks ago, dad told her and left her room. i went in and hugged and held her, and we talked about how much this sucked. but even she isn't used to that reaction. she tried really hard to start joking around. it's like we are all islands instead of one land. no one knows how to cope with difficult things b/c we've never been taught to. so apparently i get to carrying around the knowledge of how bad this is, but i cannot turn to my parents for comfort or my siblings, b/c they can't know. i feel so heavy. do my parents not realize how hard this is for us kids? BOTH OF OUR PARENTS HAVE CANCER. and not stage 1 for either. this is very scarey. we have no strong parent to lean on. neither one knows how to reach out to us, to hug us, to cry with us. it's so lonely.

my parents honestly don't know their own children. it is so sad. why do you even have children if you don't want to know them? the last weekend when they visited, dad looks at me and says "you looked relaxed for the first time." is he FUCKING BLIND? i had not been sleeping, crying for days, nearly had a few panick attacks in stores while shopping, feel as if god is taking a royal shit on me and my family. i felt so beat down, like i don't want to wake up in the morning, and he thinks i look RELAXED?????? billy almost laughed at how absurd that remark was. and of course, it made me cry. because here i am 27 years old, would love to be able to have real adult conversations with my parents, get to know them, and we are perfect strangers. any time i visit or he visits, he reads the newspaper, a book, a magazine. he doesn't engage in conversations with us, unless it's something light or he's joking around. it is so frustrating. my uncle, my dad's brother, knows me better than my own parents. he and billy were the ones to comfort me on christmas eve as i sat sobbing in the car after the "conversation" with my dad. i stayed over at my uncles house after that and didn't go back to grandma's where mom and dad were staying. i felt so rejected, so pushed away. and i guess that is the way it will stay for them. if i want to have closure for myself, i'm going to have to be the one to push for everything. i'm gunna have to insist that i go with mom to her chemo sessions. i'm gunna have to make sure that brigid and james and hannah have someone to talk to about this. because i our parents don't have it in them to do this. this sucks.