NaNoWriMo!

Yes, I am partaking in this madness (2176 words in two hours, right at 0200, go me!). I decided to completely pants this year based on an old post I did, just expanding it and seeing how it turns out. Funny, I hadn't even thought about the context I wrote that in, but in that little "I'm sorry" prefacer paragraph I was all "oh noes, I'm going to give up on NaNo"... and now here I am, expanding on what I wrote last year. Irony is fucking awesome sometimes. And no, I don't actually regret (much) not taking part in last year's NaNo, I had a bunch of shit going on emotionally and it just wasn't a good time.

I just realized I haven't talked about this, so I'm going to talk about it to you lovely imaginaries, see if that makes me feel any better. One of the things that was fucking with my head last year (well, actually, for about the past two and a half years) was constantly worrying about my mother suiciding. See, she had MS (nerve degenerative disease, made lose the ability to walk without leaning on a wall, or a waking stick, or my dad; lose the ability to think coherently when the temperature got about 80 degrees Fahrenheit; lose feeling in her hands and feet), which is a terrible wasting disease that slowly steals your body from you. And she was a very strong woman, took pride in being capable and independent and able to beat up anybody who bothered her, so this was about the worst thing that can happen to her. And of course I had to grow up with her while she was dealing with this every day (plus near-constant migraines, just because life felt like shitting on her), and neither her or me (or my father) have any moral objections to suicide. Really, your body and life is your own, you get to make your own choices, and if you feel you've overstayed Life's welcome then why not check yourself, right? So she gave me a speech, about when I was sixteen and brought it up, that she was seriously thinking about it but promised me she wouldn't until I'd left the house. She gave me another speech when I was eighteen that she wouldn't go without writing me first. So I spent pretty much every fucking day after Basic wondering, in the back of my mind (and then the more forward parts of my mind) "Is today going to be the day I check Facebook and discover that suicide letter from her?"

No, I never did, she died differently. Because drinking made her feel better (she could pretend "Oh, I'm not wobbly and falling on my ass because of MS, it's because I'm drunk", and it also helped somewhat with the migraines), she drank pretty much constantly. And developed cirrhosis. And then decided to fight the disease because she wanted to see me one last time. So when she finally got around to fucking telling me about this (basically right after a visit to a new doctor dad found her after telling her previous quack to fuck off, and the new doctor said "sorry, this is terminal, nothing we can do about it but dull your pain somewhat"), she said that the doctor gave her two months to live (and this happened in April, four months before I separated, two months before I was to be told when exactly I was going to be separated, btw).

So I panicked a bit, bought the soonest flight home I could (which was that Monday, the 14th), rushed home with my uncle (mom's brother who picked me up at the airport), got to talk at her for an hour (because she was too far gone to respond or move or anything, just breathe in painful-sounding rasps; the day she told me she was terminal was apparently her last real coherent day, according to Dad), managed to run out of babble and just started reading to her a short story from our favourite author (Mercedes lackey), and then she died.

At least I got to fulfill her last wish, right? At least I got to stop worrying about when that suicide note would appear in my inbox, right? At least I got half of her decent life insurance policy, right? Fuck all that, it still bloody fucking hurts.

I can't see a cheerful story about how some cancer patient was diagnosed terminal but made a miraculous recovery without getting angry. Sure, the idea of "the doctor gave her six months, but it's been two years and counting!" makes a great headline, but the converse "doctor gave her two months to live, but she only made it a week!" is also too fucking true.

Actually, I'm angry about alot of the shit in this situation. Mom was a good person (not terribly nice, but GOOD), wise and smart and willing to help out pretty much anybody. She got her most of her body, mind, and identity stripped away from her by a stupid disease, died painfully, and... I am so fucking angry at the Powers that Be for doing this shit to her. She didn't deserve it.

Dad told me a story, when I came back home (after I finished my leave, went back to Germany, dealt with outprocessing bullshit, then came back actually separated), about how when I was little I was diagnosed with autism, and this freaked Mom out pretty fucking badly, so she bent her will and decided to make sure that her little daughter wouldn't stay austistic, be able to lead a wonderful and productive life. So apparently the Powers that Be thought that was a good deal, so they gave Mom her daughter, and took herself away. This story kinda makes sense to me (because ever since I realized I had some power as a witch, I kept trying to make Mommy feel better but she wouldn't have none of it), but I really wish it didn't, because I feel I'm really not worth it. Lots of guilt in that, combined with the fact that Mom had two pregnancies before me which she aborted, because she didn't want to have a child at those stages of her life, and I sometimes feel that things would have been better if she had just aborted me too.

This story and the NaNo participation announcement are linked, I promise. I got more into the social swing of NaNo, joined the facebook group, fun times right? Well, one person asked "Hey, does anybody have ideas for a terminal illness that would give a person less than a year to live? Something other than cancer or HIV/AIDS, please"... And of course I had the perfect fucking answer: Cirrhosis. So I started going off on this huge, long rant, realized that it was way too much shit to bog this stranger's day down in, so I ended up editing my response a few times to get most of the feeling out. But I still felt like writing it, so congrats imaginaries, you get to see a little bit more into my fucked-up emotional landscape!