splice & merge

This morning I was laying in bed, still thinking about the “passing around the baby” thing.  Actually, I haven’t stopped thinking about it all week, I’m still just that angry. (It’s got something to do with boundaries and a lot of psychological mumbo jumbo, but apparently the fact that I’m so angry is a good thing, because it means that I realize I have boundaries and recognize them, and they should be respected.)

It occurred to me that part of the reason I’m still so angry is that I’m not even close to these people. I mean, they’re family, yes, but I haven’t had much to do with them for more than a decade.  I’d occasionally show up to family gatherings, but I was off in Prague or doing my own thing.  Not because they’re particularly horrible people, I mostly just had stuff going on in my head & had withdrawn from this type of thing.  And yes, even had I not withdrawn, I’d still have been (and would still be) the black sheep.

So it boggles my mind that people I barely know, who really don’t know me at all, would find it acceptable to manhandle my child like that.  He’s part of me.  When you talk about a person having space, or personal space – he is part of my personal space.  And as he got passed around, no one treated him like a person, and individual.  No one asked me about him, his personality, the birth – he was just another cute baby for those who love babies to clutch at.

I’m not down with that.  If there’s one thing that I will instill in my son, it’s that he is an individual and that he has every right to his own personal space & to enforce his own boundaries.  He will never be treated as “just another” anything.  And no one should be.

All this time, I thought that I really was the odd one out, that I’m the strange one.  Then I realized, perhaps I simply, really am more considerate than most of the people I know?  Or at least, this bunch.  If someone I knew had a baby, if I were genuinely interested, I would ask (ASK!) to hold him, and while holding him, I would ask a zillion questions of the parents.  I would ask about his personality.  I would ask about the birth.  Is that just me?

Of course, no one who held him asked me a damn thing.

And if I weren’t genuinely interested, well then – I wouldn’t care about holding the kid.  I would say the usual polite things and move on.

This further led to me thinking about my “personas,” so to speak.  I made the leap (because I thought that now, having a child, family might be more important) to accepting “friend requests” on Facebook from a couple of family members.  Truthfully?  I weighed it in my mind for WEEKS before accepting and I’m still tremendously uncomfortable about it.  When they arrived at my parents’ house, we made a few funny remarks about Facebook, but I was anxious and kept thinking about how they know me in “that” way now.  They know that I rant & rave about home birth and raw milk and spend A LOT of time on Facebook and they probably think I’m a talkative person now.  (I’m not.  Only online.)  And somehow, I feel embarrassed for all this passion, embarrassed for being so loud about things I believe, strongly, in.   Silly, right?  Except this is something I’ve done for as long as I can remember.  I’ve always kept myself very compartmentalized.  Which came first, chicken or the egg? Does this family not know me because I cut them off and wouldn’t let them, or did I cut them off because I felt like such a black sheep & like I’d never be totally accepted?  Regardless, I made efforts this last visit and they feel like wasted efforts.  More so than that, I felt so disappointed & painfully vulnerable afterwards that I have no desire to make the effort again.  I’m ready to go right back to “never being around.”

Truthfully, if you’ve read this blog for the past 8 years, or even just the last 3 or 4, you know me better than any of the friends or family, or, quite possibly, even better than my husband.  That sounds awful, right?  It’s the compartmentalizing thing.  I’ve finally figured out why I’ve kept a blog all this time and it’s because it’s the only place where I’m completely & totally 100% uncensored.  I’ll rant & rave about the things I feel passionate about without coming off as weird or whatever.  I’ll talk about my therapists without worrying that it’ll get back to the wrong people.  This blog, dear people, has been my greatest confidante.

And I treasure the real friends that I email & talk to on the phone & send cards to that I’ve made because of it that much more because those are the ones that really know me.  They are the only people who even read this.  Well, them and complete strangers.  None of the friends I’ve made in “real life” know of this blog.  None of my family knows of it.  My husband… well, I gave him the link once, in a fit of bravery, but he didn’t understand the import and didn’t read more than a post or two and forgot about it… and I was kind of relieved.  Plus, being a web developer, myself, I know how to keep things OUT of search engines.  I actually check stats regularly and make sure that no one has gotten in.  So to speak.  If they did, I would move again.  I’ve tried, I’ve made a few attempts here and there to bring all these pieces of me together.  It causes the worse kind of anxiety, all that vulnerability.  And so far, it hasn’t worked all that well, so it’s hard to want to keep going.

Is that sad?  Or really weird?  Or common, maybe?  Or just the biggest piece of evidence that I do, indeed, need that last decade plus of therapy that I’ve had?  Well, my therapist finds it interesting.  (She probably has to say that.)  She doesn’t necessarily find it all that weird or worrisome but then again, she also has some understanding of why I am this way and not even my blog readers know that. Imagine that.