m1n3f13ld

[m1n3f13ld]

My COVID Nightmare:

Being married to an anti-vaxer, while you yourself are a firm believer in science and vaccinations, is extremely challenging. It’s a long, exhausting tiff that never ends. I tend to take my aggression out on Twitter strangers rather than respond to my husband’s goading because I want my marriage to survive this trying time.

My grandfather died of COVID in Dec 2020 and I lost my source of unconditional love in this world. I lost the man in my corner. I lost someone I cared for. I lost one of my purposes in life. I fought hard not to lose myself in my grief.

When I got my first vaccine, I cried in the parking lot for an hour. I wish I could explain to a tee what I felt, but it comprised of loss and deep anger and wishful thinking and so much grief.

From the day it was made available, my husband refused the vaccine. His years in the Marine Corps have left him jaded. He doesn’t want to be injected with things anyone. He’s done that too many times.

Over the last year, we’ve fought about it repeatedly. Every time, I cry. For him, it’s stubborn pride. For me, it’s heartbreak it’s very, very personal heartbreak. When I think about him not being vaccinated, I picture my dying grandfather the first time they let me see him. I was dressed head-to-toe in full PPE. When we walked in he looked somewhat peaceful, but as he was roused from sleep, he tried to scream. In a very raspy voice with little volume, he screamed “help me!”

There was nothing I could do. I tried to hold his hand, to comfort him, but he didn’t know who I was, didn’t understand anything except that he couldn’t breathe, that he was dying. And he was raging against that dying light.

When you’ve mutually cared for another person for 25 years and you watch them rage against that light, hopelessness floods your brain and body. The knowledge that there is nothing you can do, no comfort you can bring, is soul crushing.

And so when I think about my husband being unvaccinated, I am instantly transported to that memory, but rather than my grandfather laying in the bed in front of me, it’s my husband. A man I have spent loving since I was 14 years old, the father of my children. I picture him raging, I picture myself helpless, I picture my sad, scared children. And I know there’s nothing I can do. He won’t be vaccinated. His vaccination status cannot be bought or bribed (trust me, I’ve tried). It cannot be forced, it cannot be logically won. There is nothing I can do.

And so I have sat with this fear for a year. Every time he coughs, sneezes, feels slightly warm, sleeps a little too long, worry consumes my brain.

My nightmare scenario is this: My husband will get COVID. He will unknowingly expose my father. My husband will die. My father will die. I will trudge through grief a completely changed person with so much anger in her heart that it consumers her mind, her every waking moment. My children will suffer because they will have lost their grandfather, their father and their mother all in one go.

Alternative scenario: My husband will get COVID. He will unknowingly expose my father. My father will die. My husband will live. I will never be able to forgive my husband. In grief and anger, I divorce my husband and I am universally hated for it, but I can only ever see him as the man who killed my father over stubborn pride. I can never look at him again and I must grief for my father, my marriage and the life I thought I would have.

Alternative scenario: My husband gets COVID. My husband gives COVID to my children. My children die. In their loss, I am lost. I also die. He lives with the knowledge he killed his family, miserable and alone until he dies.

Alternative scenario: My husband gets COVID. My husband gives COVID to my children. One child dies. In my grief, I cannot look at my husband. We divorce. My surviving child losses their only sibling, their only hope for having more siblings in the future, their stable home life, their sense of family, everything. They grow up angry and resentful. They wouldn’t understand how I let loss consume my life, they would reject me. And ultimately I would die alone, with only my anger and grief to accompany me to the other side.

Now, if you don’t have debilitating mental illness-level anxiety, those 4 scenarios probably sound crazy. I cannot acknowledge that. But the problem is, I do have mental-illness-level anxiety and these four scenarios play thought out my head daily, they have for a year. I carry them like heavy, heavy weights strung around my neck. They make me slow, nearly immobile. They make it hard to breathe, let alone think. I fall down the rabbit hole and the despair I would feel in any of those scenarios consumes my brain. I wish I could explain this to my husband.

I wish my nightmares were enough for him to get vaccinated, to wear a mask, to just protect himself, to protect our babies.

But he sees vaccination differently and I am begrudgingly trying to accept that.

For all the mental anguish I feel, I love my husband. He is a warm and sunny spot in my deep depressive episodes. He is often the only person capable of saving me from my own brain.

And now he has COVID. And my dad has symptoms and my children have symptoms and the nightmare feels so close. I cannot live with any of those scenarios. My throat is burning and all I can think is how much my grandfathers’ throat must have burned.

[m1n3f13ld]

“Is $10,000 a life changing amount of money?”

I saw this tweet a few months ago and my answer was immediate - absolutely.

When I was 21, I got approved for a credit card with a $10,000 limit. Sure, I had outstanding credit, but I also made little more than minimum wage and had to pay nearly $1,000 a month in rent. It was absolutely absurd.

I was pretty responsible initially. I only used it for it’s intended purchase (to buy plane tickets to see my husband and earn miles.) But emergencies popped up - the car we just bought needed work, the dogs got into a bottle of arthritis medication, etc. And it eventually began to feel like an alternate savings account - like money I probably shouldn’t use, but still had. Over the course of a few years, I reached the limit. And then suddenly that monthly payment was $300.

My first thought when I read that tweet was how different it would feel to have that $300 payment free, back in my pocket every month. Is it life changing? Absolutely. If I freed up that money, I could easily utilize that money to pay extra on my car payment, or my house. (I had done it before - paying off our first car two years early.)

Last year I started a new job and as part of my sign on, I was granted stock options. I really didn’t know what that meant and we weren’t a public company so the value of the stock didn’t occur to me. Then we went public and the value was in big bold numbers in the stock app, but none were vested so I couldn’t buy or sell and it felt fictional still. Yesterday I sold 10% of my vested stocks for $36,000.

Life changing. Credit card debt, paid. Husband’s car, paid. Medical debts, paid. 30% put aside for taxes. And we made sure it wouldn’t push us into another tax bracket. I feel stunned. And so grateful.

[m1n3f13ld]

Goodbye Old “Friend”

We had been friends for 22 years when you sent me a TikTok video about the cycles of abuse in long-term narcissistic relationships. I was a little thrown off to be honest. You had been single for more than a year - a span of time that seems long to me, long enough to move on from the relationship that started you down the path of narcissism research and wisdom. I thought you must be sending it about my husband because you miss no opportunity to berate him these days.

And when you do, I just bite my tongue because I think it would be rude to tell you my honest thoughts, which is that you are projecting. Your last “boyfriend” was a 30 year old man who had no interest in settling down, who physically abused you, gaslit you, hid you from the world while you put off your big dreams and poured your money into dressing his children, taking them to school, watching them in all your spare time, etc. You ended it on many occassions, but even more 500 miles wasn’t enough. You still returned.

TikTok helped though. It gave you so many resources and opened up your eyes to his narcissism. You see all the red flags. You’re a new woman these days. You will never settle again.

And thus, my confusion. Why is this TikTok relevant to your life at this point? And if it’s not, as it doesn’t appear to be, you must feel it would be relevant to me. I watch it again. The cycle - love bombing, discarding, etc. She says it goes on and on until the couple divorces. Divorce? Hmm. This is not fitting my situation and I cannot see how it applies to yours and so I simply say, “I don’t see the applications of this message in my marriage.” You don’t respond and I don’t think much of it. I know you hate my husband and its been a sore subject as of late so I let it go.

A few days later I’m scrolling and see a video by creators we have discussed in the past. I hit the share button, but your image does not pop up like it normally does. Confusion. I go to our conversation and see the message “due to this user’s privacy settings, they cannot see videos you send.”

BLOCKED.

I text you, but it’s late and I don’t hear anything so I go to bed. At first I give it the benefit of the doubt - maybe it was an accident? In the morning, I ask my brother to confirm my suspicions. He can see your videos, but I cannot. When I go to text you again, I see that you’ve stopped sharing your location with me.

BLOCKED.

Hmm. I text you anyway. I’m blown away you would block me, but I wish you the best of luck with a peace emoji that really means fuck off.

I think I originally thought this was just a dumb disagreement, but after a little while I knew: It was the death of 22 years of friendship.

Since then I have felt anger, sadness, frustration and oddly relief. That last one threw me off, but now that it’s here, I am ready to acknowledge it. You see over the course of our 22 years of friendship, you have been impulsive, dangerous. You have taken an endless amount of unnecessary risks. You have caused me so much stress and worry. And yet, I have stayed and sought your approval.

Despite the fact that you turned on me at the end of elementary school and contributed to mockery of me throughout middle school and we didn’t really reconnect until senior year, I still felt some bond to you. A strong bond. You grew up one street over. You knew the pain of separated parents. You were at my house so much you were one of the few people who saw my dad wielding his voice like a weapon. You knew more about me than I ever let most people see. And so I wanted you to see I was a person of value.

You went from telling me over and over (in the same breath you used to berate my husband) that I was an amazing person with no flaws for you to think of to being so adamant that you will not sit with negative feelings that you blocked me, without even telling me I was giving you those negative feelings. After the initial denial wore away, I got angry. But let me explain.

I respect the decision you made. I see now that it’s the right decision for us both.

I used to love that I felt like I could talk to you about anything without judgement. It was a space we created for each other, but it doesn’t exist anymore. It honestly hasn’t existed in a while. We each do things that the other would not and for a while our friendship was a place to acknowledge that, but I sense we’ve both grown frustrated with the pretenses of the “judgement free zone.”

It was my desire for your approval that lead me to bite my tongue. It’s why I only defended my husband and didn’t go as far as to tell you that he was not the same man you were talking about.

My husband has many flaws and he is fighting a hard battle against mental health. He had a bit of a mental break after the Corps. He was checked out. He was drunk and he was depressed and there was no room in his brain to see or support me emotionally, let alone our newborn son. Every day felt like pressure building until one night when it exploded. He was physical me that night, the only time in our 14 year relationship.

I see the similarities in our relationships, the drinking, the abuse, the loneliness we both felt. But the difference is progress.

It happened on a Friday night. By Monday, he had sought the help he desperately needed. He started and completed an individual therapy program through the VA and then joined group therapy. When it became clear he needed more, he did an inpatient stay in the VA psych ward. He started medication, together we have completed couples therapy and he lived sober for nearly two years following that event. These days when he does indulge, he never allows himself to get drunk. He fights his demons (those he was born with, those he inherited and those gifted to him by the Marine Corps) every day. He is faithful to me. He is supportive of my choices - whether it’s to buy a house, change jobs, get a new car, take a trip to see a friend, etc. Despite annoyances with the division of household chores and his enthusiasm for sleep, he is still my person. He may be impulsive and forgetful, but if I ask for help, he gives it to me.

He is not your boyfriend. There is no cocaine in this household. He hasn’t had an issue with the law (aside the occasional speeding ticket) since he was 20. He works hard to be present as a father. You may not see our children appear across his social media, but he tucks them into bed each night and makes sure to tell them every day how much he loves them. When we’re out with people he never hides how proud he is of my accomplishments, he tells everyone how lucky he is to have me. When we went to that wedding earlier this year, a buddy of his took the time to come share with me that my husband talks about me constantly. He loves me for the person I am, for the mother I am. And despite our challenges, I feel that.

So no, I didn’t take kindly to hearing you rail on about mistakes he made in high school (while completely glossing over the fact I had made the same choices). I didn’t care to hear about how I should leave him and how things never get better and he will always treat me like shit because I allow him to. I got off the phone, I changed the subject, I ignored the videos. I can see now how that probably felt like such an abrupt change from the girl who listened to you talk about your boyfriend for hours and hours. And how rude it must have felt to have your knowledgeable advice ignored. How it probably seemed like I thought I was better for some reason, that I couldn’t handle this role reversal among us.

I’m writing this to you now because I don’t want you out there thinking that I needed you to be subdued to be your friend. It’s not that. I’m proud of you. I’m proud of you for leaving. I’m proud of your persistence in your pursuit of higher education and a career. I’m proud of you for the closeness I can see now in your relationship with your son. I’m proud of you for finding guidance and strength in the TikTok community. Proud of you for taking the mistakes of that relationship and making them a lesson. You won’t put up with that again. And this time, I believe you. Or I did. But I’ll get back to that.

You see, it wasn’t your power that put me off, it was the judgement and self righteous tone that I couldn’t stand. And it wasn’t just directed at my marriage, but also my children and my parenting - how I communicate with my children, how I treat their illnesses, who I allow to care for them, the rules I set for them. I do not need your judgement. Just as you don’t need mine.

And thus, I return to that relief I mentioned. I will never have to hold intimate details of abuse in my mind while I sit inside his living room, I will never again have to bite my tongue as you berate my husband as if he is the one who left you scarred, and I will never again have to defend myself or my family to you.

My emotions have been all over the place. At first I had to fight petty instincts, even now I will surely erase parts of what I’ve written here. I spent time in confusion and denial. I have felt betrayed. I have felt sad. But, I also feel angry.

Relief was my primary emotion, until I told my brother the story and he informed me that you have returned to facebook, that you are still friends with that abusive ex, that he liked your “return” post - the post that was made to sound triumphant and completely ignored that you have been on and off, but mostly off social media for two years because of your ex, that you moved 500 miles away just to end that relationship, that you can’t even come into town without feeling a desire to call him.

I can’t help but wonder if you’re together. I hope that you’re not. I hope that you hold true to your newfound standards and that you don’t unfriend him because you want him to see how much better off you truly are.

But the idea that my response to a few TikTok videos made you uncomfortable and you blocked me rather than try to talk to me “because [you] don’t have to,” but you allow him to stay in your life? That makes me so angry and so sad for you. It fluctuates, honestly.

What it comes down to after all this rambling is, I hope I never see you again. I hope you stay far from him and this rotten town. I hope you live a beautiful life and you accomplish all of your dreams. I hope your son grows tall and strong and finds happiness in whatever path he seeks. I truly do wish you all the best.

I may write a post into the void, but here’s what I won’t do. I will not chase. I will not beg. I will not reach out. I don’t need anyone in my life who doesn’t want to be there.

And if you ever try to talk to me again, I will politely decline. We will never be friends like that again. I will never trust you with my thoughts or fears again. Your betrayal is so hard because I never saw it coming, but I will work through my feelings and move forward. I will live a beautiful life. I will pursue my goals, I will support my husband in his path to recovery, I will raise strong-willed, passionate children and I will take this as a lesson. From here on, I will keep an eye to fight my instinct to people please and I will address it head on because I value the friendships I have left and I don’t want to lose them.

Goodbye friend.

#grieving #friend breakup #goodbye friends

[m1n3f13ld]

Breakdown Imminent

This morning was challenging for the babies. They cried all morning, they didn’t want to get in the bath, didn’t want to get out, didn’t want to get dressed, didn’t want to have their hair or teeth brushed, didn’t want to put on shoes or get in the car, definitely didn’t want to go to daycare.

Why is daycare drop off so fucking hard? I’d like to tell the world that “mom guilt” is really just engrained misogyny (men don’t worry about ‘dad guilt’). But even if it’s true, it doesn’t change that I feel it. Every day when I drop them off, I want to cry. My heart hurts. When my son screams “Mama!’ he sounds like a child from tv being ripped out of its mother’s arms. It’s heartbreaking.

When I left, I called my husband, distraught and fed up with this daily torture ritual. Instead of a safe respite, I found judgment. I found someone who is tired of being told the problem, someone who just wants me to do what I’m supposed to and quit fucking crying about it. In short, I found disappointment.

When I walked in the door, the dogs had scattered trash throughout the entryway and I was done. I didn’t want to be in this home anymore. Fuck the neighborhood we live in with our loud ass neighbors and the lurking danger. Fuck the flies that congregate around the diaper trash. Fuck the clothes spread through the entire house, the unmade beds, the stale air. I couldn’t breathe there, let alone work.

I left. All I wanted in the world was to drive to the little green and white house where my grandmother lived. I wanted to fall onto her comfortable couch and let my toes sink into her shag rug. I wanted her to smile at me and tell me there was candy and Coke and the fridge and offer to make me 10 different meals, knowing I would turn them all down. I wanted to hear her take a phone call and narrate to one of her siblings exactly what had brought us to that moment and exactly what she was watching on some HGTV show. I wanted to tell her all my pain so she could tell me how she had felt it before, but worse, and she had survived and thus, I would survive too.

But she’s gone. Cancer killed her. I cannot go the little house because a new family moved in and filled the home with their things and it will never smell like her again, she will never laugh there, she will never answer the phone or make me eggs or hug me or sleep or cry or eat or anything, ever again.

This grief is overwhelming. I don’t know what to do with myself. I had no idea how much I would miss her.

And all of it is spiraling together and I am so alone.

I feel like I need help, but who do I go to? Where do I go?

#grief #grandma #im having a breakdown

[m1n3f13ld]

For anyone trying to discern what to do with their life, pay attention to what you pay attention to. That’s pretty much all the information you need.

Amy Krouse Rosenthal

[m1n3f13ld]

COVID Killed My Grandfather.

When I think of COVID, I think of standing at my grandfather’s bedside in full PPE. I think of the pure heartbreak that filled the room when I tried to hold his hand, only to have him pull away and cry out for help. 

I have never felt more helpless or scared or sad in my whole life. 

This is the man who raised me. He gave me popsicles on hot summer days, taught me to count and do math with pennies at his kitchen table, taught me to bake with the patience of a saint, made sure that I always had access to books and stories and computer programs that would further my education. He cared for me when I was sick, he comforted me when I cried, he taught me to bite my tongue and manage my emotions, even at my angriest. He was my confidant and my example. He taught me above all to help others whenever I can, to be respectful always.

He was undoubtedly a pillar of strength and stability my entire life, even as his health declined, even in the moments where he forgot names or places and was overcome with confusion. 

For him to die alone in that room. It has broken me. 

I have never felt so angry with the world. Everyone on facebook, my own brothers, my own husband - they laugh about COVID, they refuse the vaccine. I try not to take all of this personally. Rationally I know it is not an act of defiance aimed at me or my grandfather, that it’s not an act of hatred. But I cannot shake the feeling that it is still an act of cruelty, of uncaring. It is the opposite of what my grandfather taught me. I feel that in my bones. 

It feels like a slap in the face. It feels like a statement being made: “I don’t care enough about you, about children, about the immuno-compromised or elderly in my life. It’s not enough to make me take a small risk for myself. I don’t care.” 

And that’s something I cannot wrap my head around. How do you go through life only thinking of yourself?

I just want to shake them sometimes. I just want to scream. He may have been 92 and yes, he lived a long full life, but he died alone, frightened and unable to breathe. I don’t want that death for anyone. 

#covid #grief