No matter what, no matter how hard you try, at some point your kids will (rightly) think 'I don't want to be like my parent'. I've had a pretty thorough obvious nervous breakdown all summer. The kids have seen it. If they hadn't, and I'd have gone fine-crazy instead, they'd have seen that. Either way I'd have to think if I were them: that's fucked up, I don't want to do any of that..

I love my parents. They're quirky personally pungent forces, each of them. But in the relationship department, I want to be nothing like them. Which of course has led me right into traps of doing so repeatedly. And back to therapy and introspection and transformation I go, until I'm somewhere down the road, some road.

Now I'm just wandering around in the wilderness. No roads, no paths even. These are not my people, I don't understand them well enough to reject them except for their actions, the psychological sources of which are obscure to me. I mean, I don't LIKE my mother-in-law, at all, for how she's acted. But who she IS? REALLY? I have only an intuited idea of that. She must be somebody. And whoever that is, is carved across the mind of the man in my life, who has done things I hate but for reasons that are probably fathomable, even perhaps sympathetic, in a certain light, a light source I don't have, in terrain I don't know, stumbling around.

So I guess which way to go: He says, I love you. I think, as word sounds floating in air, I understand what that means. But words to you are iffy, unreal. They are much
realer to me than they are to you. So, tattoo my name on your ass. Make it a THING. Then in your terms it will be real, a physical and thus not malleable statement. He says, Seriously? And I say, Yes. (armscrossy)