6. Dollywood & Disbelief

Living with Clara was mostly fine. Rent in the south was cheap, and we both had jobs. Most of our time was spent smoking weed, drinking, and fucking. 

Although I would never admit it at the time, our relationship was very transactional. She wanted to move on from her love of her life ex girlfriend, and I needed somewhere to live not near my family. I constantly felt compared to her ex, and when I brought it up it became a problem I needed to work on.

I also couldn’t ask her to do anything fun. All I wanted was for her to go with me to a minor league baseball game, and she set out to make sure that wouldn’t happen. I was being “too much”. When I say all we did was smoke weed and drink in that apartment, that is seriously all we did. I still didn’t mind it, though. I enjoyed all those things. However, we did go to Dollywood! Her friend was visiting and wanted to go. It was a blast I highly recommend it.

I broke up with Clara after I got back to Vermont, which was one of the hardest things I had ever done up until that point other than telling my dad I didn't want to see him. She immediately apologized for living in my dorm room and being a shitty girlfriend. I was making sure she was okay, but couldn’t help but think - this entire time you knew that was not okay? And you did it anyway? This relationship opened my eyes to just how much people will take advantage of you and manipulate you in the process.

I moved back in with my mother for the fall semester and had plans to live with a friend from high school in the spring. The situation with my mother’s midlife crisis and treating Susie like a live-in maid only got worse over the summer.

Susie was at her wit's end with feeling mistreated by my mother. She complained to me so much about how emotionally stunted my mother was and how she felt like she couldn’t express her true opinions about how she is treating my brother, men in her dating life, and Susie herself. Perhaps this wasn’t the healthiest relationship for a middle age woman to complain to the 21 year old about her mom. But I think I was the only one who listened to her during that time of her life. She told me many things about my mother.

My mother, her friend, and Susie went out clubbing in Burlington to a club called Red Square, where a young man asked them to dance. My mom and her friend were all giddy while Susie declined and became the designated driver. My mom ended up having a sexual relationship with this young man. This man was 22, and went to my high school. Susie said they looked on facebook and saw that he and I had many mutual friends. She wouldn’t tell me exactly who he was. Maybe she felt guilty for telling me in the first place and wanted to keep some confidentiality with my mom. Susie told me she was feeling a huge burden because my mom was cheating on her current boyfriend, a friend of Susie’s, with this 22 year old. Apparently my mom told Susie she didn’t feel any guilt about it. 

I was livid. My mother was fucking someone I went to high school with, knowingly. I thought about all the times I stuck up for her to my dad when he was yelling and ranting about the affair he believed she was having and calling her names. This was how she was paying me back, by actually doing the things my dad was accusing her of, with someone I grew up with, in my own dating pool. I was all for her exploring her sexuality, and if she felt the need to sleep with a boy half her age she didn’t need to do it with someone in my peer group. I was terrified he would find out, but Susie told me my mom was careful to make sure he didn’t know she was my mother. 

I felt no loyalty, and was a bit humiliated for believing her when she said she was the victim in my parents relationship. It’s funny, I also saw everything my father said he observed in her behavior towards other men, but she insisted that my father was crazy, delusional, and she couldn’t believe he would ever accuse her of these horrible things. So I decided maybe my feelings were crazy too, and I defended her.

At this point I was taking two buses to get to school, working 30 hours a week, and trying to play rugby and have some semblance of a “normal” social life. I went to all the rugby practices I could. These women mesmerized me. I felt so lucky I found a group of women who wanted to do more with their bodies than look pretty. I wanted to be accepted so badly. They also were extremely kind, however my life was so different from theirs. During the parties I tried to pretend that I fit in, and could relate to everyone there. In reality I was more of a fish out of water than I was freshman year. Looking back, I want to hug that 21 year old me, but at the time I was filled with so much self hatred for not feeling like I "made it" socially. Needless to say my grades were plummeting. I wasn’t failing or on probation, but they were not great.

Another thing Susie told me was something that still causes a riff between my mother and I to this day. Susie told me my mother “got a promotion” at work, and my mom told her that she “was not stressed about money.” This didn’t make sense to me. My mother told me she couldn’t afford to pay for any more of my tuition because she was paying for the house herself. 

Apparently years of working her ass off for the same company finally paid off. She was now the CFO. This was why I lost all of my financial aid my Sophomore year of college. Not because the university was pulling their scams as she led me to believe, but because she was making much more money than she used to. Despite what she told Susie, when I confronted her she began to deny that she could pay more than the $5000/per year that she previously agreed to when I was in high school. She even denied getting the raise and promotion at all. I felt sad, betrayed, and lonely. My mother was purposefully giving me a hard start to life. She could have made it easier for me to graduate with less student debt, but something inside her was holding her back. I told her if I find out she pays more for my brother's college that it would tear me to pieces.

I also shared a lot of my feelings with Susie. I’m sure she felt like the family counselor. I tried not to take advantage of her, but I think the dynamic of the living situation put her in an unfair emotional dynamic from the start. There was one thing my mother did with her boyfriend and I that I feel unsure about to this day. When I told a later therapist about this, she didn’t believe me. She said Susie must have made this up because she was feeling really angry towards my mother, no mother would knowingly do this to their child. Sometimes my mother would insist that her boyfriend (also in his late 40s, early 50s), drive me to school. Even if it was out of his way, or if I wanted to take the bus. Part of the reason I would decline was because he made me feel uncomfortable. He would sometimes stare a little too long, make comments about how I look, and would make remarks about intergenerational dating. He would also talk on and on about how corrupt the government was. I didn’t like any of it. I told Susie about this, and about my mothers insistence he drive me to class. Susie’s eyes got wide and shared that one of her previous friends told her “he would make her daughter uncomfortable” and that my mother knew this. This distraught me. Is my mother trying to set me up with her boyfriend? Is me being hit on by him somehow helpful to her? Or the possibility of me liking him validates her choices? Was she trying to set me up to seem “crazy”? I wasn't sure.

This was all impacting my mental health. I was constantly on edge, and every second I felt a stinging dread that the world knew who I really was. The world knew that I was incapable of relationships of any kind, and unlovable. I also became extremely thin. I was down to a “size 2” which I hadn’t been since I was about 11 or 12 years old.  I’ve always had depressive symptoms throughout my life, but this was the first time I became so anxious and depressed I started having suicidal thoughts. I told my mother this and asked about starting medication, and her response was that my living situation is temporary and I am making everything a bigger deal than it needs to be. This was a common tug and pull between my mother and I. I was upset about something, and the problem was ultimately that I am too sensitive; she does so much for me, has given up so much of her life for me, and there are worse mothers out there; how little awareness I have, and how dare I begin to make her feel so guilty?

I owe so much to the counseling center at UVM. I started seeing a counselor during this time and a doctor who could prescribe medications. I was diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder. There was a word for what I was feeling? I met criteria for a diagnosis? It was Anxiety. This changed everything for me for the better. It gave me a sense of self awareness and made moving through the world a little bit easier. It took a few months and med changes to find the right SSRI, but Prozac and I eventually found each other. I wasn’t as down on myself, I started gaining weight, and had hope for the future.