Category: Missing Connection

Who she truly is

Posted on by The Trapped Butterfly

The Trapped Butterfly is feeling at a complete loss again. In April, she and her husband are going to be celebrating their 20th wedding anniversary! 20 years of marriage and love have made it through so much shit. From her abusive dad’s disowning to his sudden death almost four months after they got married. The marriage has survived her mental health issues and his issues from being on antidepressants. It’s survived losses that have made them sob. And it has survived the realization that her mother is a narcissist. Being physically disabled as well as all the dysfunction of her family has made their relationship harder than most. Not to mention their age difference has made people feel weird. Their problem!!

Now it’s surviving the ongoing pandemic that everyone is trying desperately to ignore even more, therefore, making life miserable and dangerous for everyone who is high risk and immunocompromised.

The Trapped Butterfly is incredibly proud of her marriage. She never thought she would ever find a man who would love her the way he does. She means wiping someone’s ass several times a day isn’t exactly romantic, but it’s a way that he loves her through doing all the care she requires 24/7. He has said many times that “he gets to care for her.” It’s his choice to do this.

So naturally she wants to do something special for their wedding anniversary. But Covid doesn’t make it a easy. They used to be able to plan stuff and go to concerts and stuff, but not anymore. Without Covid, they would probably find a fun event/concert to go to or take a day trip to explore a city or town. Yeah, they still had to think about how her needs would fit in with the plans and just plan it out, but they were able to go have fun with just the “normal” complications of having a severe disability.

Now they can’t do anything without a major plan to stay safe from Covid. She can’t bear not to be “normal” and celebrate her anniversary. She came up with a vow renewal and a small simple celebration. But trying to find a venue that would be totally private and safe from Covid isn’t easy. Her former professor, now friend, is trying to find a place. They still need a photographer that will wear a mask correctly.

Why can’t this be easy??

Yesterday she was feeling really overwhelmed and was listening to music when the song, “I Don’t Know You Anymore” by Savage Garden came on. That song is about ex lovers, but for her it reminds her of her family and friends that have hurt her to the point of not being able to have them in their life anymore. She misses them so much, which is confusing. Why does she even still love them so much?

The lyrics below are words she wishes some of her family and friends would say to her since she has always been willing to apologize and accept the part she played in the hurt.

"I know I let you down
Again and again
I know I never really treated you right
I've paid the price
I'm still paying for it every day."

But it’s highly doubtful that that will ever happen because it would have already if they were healthy emotionally.

But it hit her in the moment that she absolutely craves healthy, peaceful relationships with people. Her parents didn’t teach her how to handle her emotions. She is a hot head and lashes out. However, this has improved since she started meditating with the Calm app. She is human. She doesn’t have it all figured out yet, and living in ongoing quarantine to avoid getting Covid that’s killing people even if the death isn’t right away has made her struggle with her anger, anxiety, and depression like she never has before.

She now realizes that she has craved peace since she was a child. Yes, she had time when they were enjoying stuff. She loved, for the most part, being at her grandparents’ house when they took care of her in the summer. She loved being with friends and going out. All the normal kid stuff.

Still, at any given moment, her dad could get angry and the yelling would start. If it were one of the kids, sometimes the hitting soon followed. If it was with her mother, the yelling would get louder and louder and sometimes things got thrown. She remembers this from her toddler years. She would cry and scream because she just wanted it to stop. She also was left in her room to cry so she has trouble with self-regulation.

She can feel herself now when she’s upset saying something that she doesn’t really want to say but she can’t always control it. She beats herself up for not being able to stop it. But she’s truly a peaceful person. Not a submissive person. Fuck that! She will always stand up for herself and fight for causes. But she desires peace.

She often wonders who she would be now that it’s been almost four years since she wrote that heartbreaking letter to her narcissistic mother to get her to get help for a year and went no contact. Sadly, her mother proved she was, indeed, narcissistic and did a bunch of horrible shit until they finally blocked her on the phone. Who would she be if Covid never happened and she was able to really work with her therapist to cope with life without her mother and family? She knows that she would always have her anxiety, depression, PTSD, and CPTSD, but would she be happier? Would she be more able to cope with it?

It’s sad that she will never know the answers to these questions. All she can do is try to keep hoping that a true breakthrough for Covid will come in the next few years to let them live their lives again before age catches up with them even more. May she remember that she desires peace. And may they be able to safely celebrate their 20th anniversary in April with a few friends. They definitely deserve it!!!

The Gate

Posted on by The Trapped Butterfly

The Trapped Butterfly is still in pain after the horrific fall that her husband and her took a week and a half ago. Not fun when you have no choice but to sit in a wheelchair for hours in order to live. She is finally getting better as is her husband. But she is still struggling with the anxiety of falling again despite her ability to count the number of times that they have fallen in the past 24 years together on one hand. The story of the fall is for another time when she feels ready to write it. Not tonight.

Tonight she finds herself feeling depressed, sad, angry, exhausted. She is an open book anyway which often gets criticized because others are much more private than she is. Don’t tell her not to post something that is directly related to her. She feels so triggered because before she had to cut ties with her narcissistic mother and other family, her mother would be controlling and criticizing of some of her social media posts. Bull shit! She has a right to post whatever she wants as long as it doesn’t violate someone’s outright privacy. They do what they want.

However, The Trapped Butterfly is currently seeing why it may not always be worth giving details of her life online. Yet, she wants to be supported and encouraged especially when she is going on three fucking years of not being able to just be around people. God damn Covid. God damn the people that won’t do everything to help keep it as low as possible!

People who mean well were giving her ideas from getting an aide to getting a lift to help her husband with her care. She knows that they want to help them, but only one person recognizes that she and her husband have been talking about it and trying to get help but they don’t qualify for the type of help they require. They’ve tried many times. The second she got married almost 20 years ago she lost all her disability benefits. The fucking USA expects the disabled population to live way below the poverty line in order to get the help they need with extremely expensive adaptive equipment and services that will allow them to live independently and comfortably.

And now Covid has made it pretty much impossible for them to even try again because they are so high risk. She had a very telling dream the other night that they were going to a made up mall. When they got into the parking lot, there was a huge cement gate with the name of the university that she had went to and it was closed. The Trapped Butterfly looked at her husband like, “what the fuck?” The door of the gate was metal and dark while the rest of the gate was cement and brick.

Somehow her husband was able to find a way around the wall but when they started walking around the mall, every store was being packed up. She doesn’t remember but she doesn’t think anyone would interact with them.

It was such a weird, short dream but her husband said that it is obvious that she felt trapped and rejected. Basically, unseen.

Bingo! As people have brought up things that have been hard for her her whole life…Getting someone who is willing to do everything for her (feed, lift, take her to the bathroom, physically help with her schoolwork) wasn’t easy even when the damn school district was hiring and paying for them while she was in school. Thankfully, her parents found her a perfect babysitter until the babysitter moved after she finished her first year of high school. Then there were a couple other people that cared for her after school and on days off.

She found one aide after a first try when she graduated high school and the state was paying for them. That aide was with her for a few years before she had to quit. They had to get an agency that could provide aides quickly. The main aide was great. But a sub didn’t understand that she was talking when she talked. The Trapped Butterfly had to get a teacher to explain to the aide that every time she spoke, she wasn’t just “making noises.”

When the state decided that they couldn’t use the agency anymore and had to hire someone independently, they, again, looked through lists of people who wanted to work with in home care for people with disabilities and put an ad in the paper. But The Trapped Butterfly was in community college and her mother had to keep working, so her wonderful husband, then boyfriend/fiancé eventually quit his job and became her aide.

They were lucky that the university helped with aides for certain things that her husband didn’t want to do. Besides, she wanted to prove herself with other people helping her out. Her husband was still her primary caregiver and aide at the university.

After she graduated from the university, they went through the degrading process of trying to get the state to pay for someone to just sit with her for a few hours a couple days a week so her husband could ride his motorcycle but they didn’t qualify so they had to pay for the person who wasn’t always reliable. Thankfully, The Trapped Butterfly’s friend offered to have her over for free just to hang out.

Now the ongoing pandemic has limited her ability to do anything. There’s a fucking closed gate in front of her that unlike her dream, there’s NO WAY TO GET AROUND SAFELY!! Trapped AGAIN…

Dream about her Brother

Posted on by The Trapped Butterfly

She wakes up with the dream still fresh in her mind. It was about her brother, technically her half brother but they never called each other “half,” showing up out of nowhere with a girlfriend and apologized to her for all the hurtful things that he had done to her and her husband. He hugged her and promised her that he would be back soon.

The Trapped Butterfly has three half siblings from their dad’s previous marriage before he married her mother. Some of them were close when she was a little girl but they were older and had been through a lot of horrible trauma from their mother who had given them to Dad. And Dad was abusive. The boys had it so much worse than the girls. She still sees the horrific wooden paddle with holes in it that her dad made for “spanking.” Even though it was never used on her, she was terrified of it. The boys were beaten with it often in the basement because they got into trouble a lot due to the ongoing abuse and trauma. Finally, the oldest brother, the one that the dream was about, was old enough to leave and went to his mom’s house until he got a place and eventually got married only for him to cheat and have a child with another woman. More on this in a minute.

The day he decided to leave, he was supposed to take the 7 or 8 year old Trapped Butterfly fishing. It was going to be the first time she ever went fishing. She loved her oldest brother. He took time to play with her and do things with her and her other siblings. And when he found out that their brother had stolen her money that she was saving for a Cabbage Patch Kids “baby,” he beat him up and got her money back. She was so excited that day and told everyone at school that she was going to go fishing with her brother after school. But when her school bus dropped her off at her babysitter’s house and he wasn’t there, she was confused. Her babysitter said that he was probably just a little late and she got her some juice while she waited. Soon her sister came walking down the street to pick her up. The Trapped Butterfly asked where Jay was and her sister said that they would talk about it when they got home. It was a confusing, sad walk home as her sister pushed her in her wheelchair a few blocks from the babysitter to their house.

The Trapped Butterfly’s mother was home and she can’t remember if her dad was home too. But Jay had packed up his stuff in a big garbage bag and left a note saying he was moving to his mother’s house because he had had enough. Later she would find out that he had been planning this for a while. He was gone and stayed away for a while before he started visiting. Then when The Trapped Butterfly became an adult they entered into an adult sibling relationship.

She was heartbroken the day he left day. She sat in her special table that was supportive enough for her to sit there alone and look out the window. From that point on it wasn’t long before her other older brother and sister also took refuge at their mother’s house.

All her siblings are fucked up from the horrible childhood that they had. Some will never admit it and others are addicts. But Jay and Lynn tried to make time for her and have a relationship with her. Unfortunately, the fucked up part kept getting in the way of a healthy relationship.

She knew that everyone struggled with alcohol and drugs and she was worried that Jay was an alcoholic too. Unfortunately, she was right but she and her husband continued to support and help him. Sadly, he took a lot from them. But she felt like he was the only one who “got” it about Dad. Plus, she loved being an aunt to her niece. Yes, cheating was wrong, but seeing her brother be so good with his daughter made her hope that the cycle of abuse would stop with him.

Tragically, the alcoholism got worse and worse. They actually bailed him out of jail a few times. Then the mom took his daughter and he didn’t fight for her. Slowly everything unraveled and they lost touch for years and then reconnected on Facebook. Nothing was the same anymore. She has no idea where he is now or where her niece is. She is so afraid to reach out to him because of everything that has happened with her narcissistic mother and has blocked out most of her family. It’s not safe. She doesn’t know what bull shit is being said about her. Would he be like her sister and take her abusers’ side?

It’s ironic that her mother witnessed the abuse, and yet, they don’t blame her for not doing anything about it. Hell, it’s only been in the past few years of therapy, after the shit really hit the fan with her mother that she realized that she was a part of the abuse. Just because she rescued The Trapped Butterfly when she heard her crying with her dad as a child doesn’t mean her mother was not a part of the abuse. In fact, she let The Trapped Butterfly go to her dad’s house every other weekend and for a week during vacations after her parents got divorced. She knew she was hit and verbally and emotionally abused by him. She saw signs that sometimes The Trapped Butterfly didn’t want to go to her dad’s house, yet, she didn’t do anything about it because she needed a “break.” Her mother sure had everyone fooled.

So Jay is out there (hopefully) somewhere and so is her niece, but she doesn’t feel safe trying to find him. And why hasn’t he reached out to them to apologize for everything? She hopes that the dream wasn’t his spirit reaching out to her because he is not on the Earth anymore. Only time will tell. But she cried that morning when she told her husband about it and wondered why she was crying. Obviously, she misses connection with people. Covid, narcissism, abuse, and natural death have taken way too much from her. Will she ever get any of it back?