Beautiful...NOT!

I write and photograph sports for the local paper....freelance for now, tho I would love to go full time (the paper comes out once a week, so full-time is a bit of a misnomer). I'm enjoying getting the chance after being a SAHM for 20years to use my 'gift' such as it is. But being out and about more than I have in the past definitely puts me outside my comfort zone. I'm a decent photographer, pretty good writer, fairly good sense of humor (well, not ALL the time) but I get discouraged dealing with what any idiot past the age of 7 can tell you....none of these things is as highly valued in our screwed up world as is beauty. And to quote Coach from Cheers...I am "not exactly comfortable with my looks". Ok, I'm unattractive...maybe not scare-small-children ugly, but certainly not pretty as the world views it. When my husband says I'm beautiful I actually cringe. In the movie Shallow Hal, I can totally relate to Rosemary in this scene.....


Rosemary: Hal, do me a favor and stop saying that I'm pretty and that I'm not fat, ok? Cause it makes me uncomfortable.
Hal: Umm, ok. Do you have a problem with compliments?
Rosemary: Look, I know what I am and I know what I'm not. I'm the girl who, you know, gets really good grades and who's not afraid to be funny. And I'm the girl who has a lot of friends who are boys and no boyfriends. I'm not beautiful, ok, and I never will be. And I'm fine with that. But when you go around saying I'm something that I'm not, it's just, it's just not nice.

I know my husband is a dear for thinking I'm attractive and I'm thankful he is attracted to me....but I know what I look like, I've seen myself in the mirror, I'm not an idiot. If I was asked to give up my talent and my sense of humor for beauty, I might just jump at the chance....how sad is that? The truth is, I'm mad that I can't have both. I don't even want to look like Sandra Bullock (or someone you think is beautiful) ...heck I'd take average, plain Jane, funky looking....just to not be this ugly old lady I see staring back at me in the mirror.
I hide behind my camera...it makes me invisible; I can hardly go anywhere without it as my shield. I guess I should be thankful that at least I have that to protect me.

It's only 8th grade!

Valedictorian does not mean 'exclude all'. It does not give you permission to make a speech extolling your virtues, bragging about your grade point average and telling your class, rather condescendingly, that you are "no different than any of them". Being first in your class gives you the opportunity to speak FOR your class, not TO them, and not completely negating them.

Geez!... did she even run this by her parents or are they so blinded by the stunning achievements of their first born that they've lost perspective.

As my brother said afterward....I'm surprised she didn't break her arm patting herself on the back.

Broken

My sister, whom I love dearly, is going thru one of the worst, most depressing periods in her life right now and I feel helpless to encourage her in any way. She has lived a life of drug abuse and eating disorders after being sexually abused as a child and raped as a teenager...and all of this went mostly unnoticed in our fairly normal, slightly dysfunctional family.

She was the 5th of 7 kids (I'm the second) maybe there was just too much going on at the time...maybe it was her nature of turning everything inward that allowed her to disappear in the crowd....but it kept her from reaching out to anyone around her. We were too busy with our own realities to be overly concerned with the wall-flower who drifted along in our wake. She has grown up to be a broken, sad, incredibly funny (yes, that's there too) tormented individual who at this point can find little reason to get up in the morning. She is seeing a therapist, thank God, she has started a blog, for better or worse, and she does have an incredibly caring partner (they are gay but abstinent Christians who have decided to break away from the lifestyle...whole other post there).

I am frustrated because I don't know what I can do to help her and I feel guilty for not noticing her while I was growing up...not protecting her from the bad guys. My childhood was happy, normal, fun....and hers was a nightmare. How could I have missed this sad little creature living down the hall from me....why didn't I take care of her....and where the hell were my parents?

Meet my Sister-in-Law

narcissism
noun
1. Excessive love or admiration of oneself. See conceit.
2. A psychological condition characterized by self-preoccupation,lack of empathy, and unconscious deficits in self-esteem.

There's one in every Family, Two in Mine

This anonymous blog is going to be great for my home life. I can vent all my family crap and my dear sweet husband doesn't have to listen to it any more than is absolutely necessary...and since this one involves his side of the family (we'll get to mine later:) I get to be honest about my feelings without hurting his.

Since Feb. we have been dealing with his crazy-ass sister who (long story short) I annoyed/pissed off to the point of her exploding and attacking me with things from as far back as 7 years, calling me names, cursing at me, and eventually when I was weeping from the onslaught and begging her to tell me why she was so mad at me... hanging up on me. Since then, she has written several vicious emails outlining my flaws, including my mothering (ouch). My husband has called several times (and was too nice in my opinion....not that nice isn't a good thing but she takes nice and twists it around to imply that you agree with her....she seems to only understand mean and nasty...which we have tried desperately to NOT be) and I have emailed (she won't talk to me)....mostly just to say that we need to work this out, we need to get together and find out why she is so upset about things that happened so long ago....but she sees "no point in going thru the past again, no good will come of it".....HUH??? ... I'm in an episode of The Twilight Zone.

Anyhoo, this is one of the letters we got after I wrote and sent her a photo I was working on for her (part of the long story) as kind of a peace offering and to keep the lines of communication open....

For what it is worth, I am really sorry about all of this. I am sure it has been very painful for you as it has for me...

She sent this to us again last week as 'Proof' that she had apologized …..She was incredulous when we finally told her that we needed a break from her and she wanted to know why....why we couldn't just "move on"....??? I love when people leave you cut and bleeding on the floor and wonder why you can't just "get over it". I made a statement to the effect that though I had not asked for an apology I just wanted her to stop saying that she had, "apologized over and over" because it wasn't true.

Now for those who think I am being picky in what kind of apologies I will accept as genuine, let me first say that when we got this letter, both DH and I thought that it was a start (albeit a fairly lame one)... it was by far the kindest thing she had said to me in months and I took it as the beginning of a softening in her attitude toward me. She seemed somewhat contrite. Tho it ends with poor pitiful me, it does seem to express some kind of remorse and at that point we were hanging onto whatever little morsel of hope we could find. BUT (and it’s a big but here) the very next day… not 24 hours later, before we even had a chance to formulate a response….she wrote us the most scathing attack letter to date (and it came on Steve’s birthday). What happened in that space of time to make her go from a teeny bit conciliatory to outright hostility? At this point I’m watching the Judy Miller show (Gilda Radnor, SNL ...spastic, ADHD, talking to herself and responding to her own rantings) I'm thinking that she's re-read the nice letter and decided it sounded wimpy. So when she holds this up as evidence of her "many apologies” ...I find it a bit disingenuous….she was obviously just reloading the canons.

“ I’m really sorry about all this” ….MY sister made that very same statement to me (and she loves me) because she saw the pain I was in…..it’s not an admission of any kind of responsibility, it’s what you say to commiserate with fellow victims.

“I am sure IT has been very painful for you” ???????

IT has been painful…. ….I wasn’t in a car accident, SHE caused the pain and she’s talking about IT as if it was some sort of entity.