I’ve never changed.

 When I read what I wrote in this blog from almost 10 years ago, I’ve realized that I have never changed. 

I need to keep writing.

Overwhelmed by raising an autistic child with ADHD, an autistic husband, borderline autistic younger son, abusive work environment, having zero friends, loneliness, exhaustion, depression, anxiety, chronic fatigue, short breaths. How did I get myself here?

I’ve been working so hard since I was a teenager, all for the hope of having a happily ever after, which turns out to be just a fantasy. In so many different cultures, people value hard work at a young age in exchange for an easier life at an older age. However, it does not exist for me. Life has been equally hard at every stage for me. Just when I thought my life would become easier, Little O’s disability throws me off the boat; sometimes I really want to end my life when he throws a tantrum whenever I carefully plan a new experience for him to learn and expand his sensory, cognition, and language. He loves to travel but he goes ballistic nonstop when he travels. He’s already 6 years old and physically I can’t just lift him up and stop him from rolling on the floor. But every time when he travels, his language expands so much and his drawing becomes much more advanced. I go through the pain of taking him to places for his sake only; when he throws a tantrum I just wanna die and I believe he’s better off living in an orphanage or some mental institution where he can do the same thing repeatedly every day. That way he’d be happy and throw no tantrums.

My marriage is almost non-existent at this point. Nobody shows me care; nobody listens to me anymore. I am absolutely back at ground zero. What’s worse is that I am trapped in a marriage for family duties; I believe staying married is better for the kids no matter what unless there’s violence between us. I am sacrificing every piece of myself that’s left. There is no more dream, no more hope, no more freedom in me.

I wish there’s someone who can listen to me; I do have a psychotherapist but I still feel that’s very different from someone who listens to me because they love me. Angel claims he loves me but he doesn’t really hear what I’m saying and he doesn’t not perceive my feelings. To me that’s just not love. I truly have no one who I can connect with. I love my children and they love me, but they’re too little to know how I feel. I am destined to be the feelers of others but no one can feel me.

Sometimes I wish I could speak to Jes again, because even though we’ve never met but every time we talked, we could feel each other. We didn’t have to be blunt and we could just know how the other person was feeling, despite all the denial. Sometimes I wish I could go way back in time and be a teenager with Ian. I wish the circumstances with our schooling could be different so that we could just fall in love freely. Then he would be my first love. Obviously it didn’t happen when we were only 15 and he was my first crush and I think I was his too. And life had to send us apart. The first time we kissed the circumstances were already too different in our lives and we were already 24. If it had happened when we were 15, how different would our lives be?

I’ve been binge watching some romcoms lately and I’m starting to feel really jaded. I don’t believe in most things in those movies and dramas anymore. Nobody would love anyone as much as in The Notebook, or Purple Hearts, King the Land, The Titanic, or even just Ted Mosby and Robyn Scherbasky. Angel doesn’t really make an effort in sex or in treating his impotence. He’s just in an absolute denial. In our 8 year marriage, we’ve only had sex less than 10 times and we haven’t had sex or done anything sexual since I conceived Little N, 4+ years ago.

Being in a sexless marriage is kind of a deal but not a deal breaker for me, because 1) he’s terrible and he’s never made an effort to try to please me, 2) I’ve never had sex with anyone else in my life so I don’t know how good sex can be if it was with other men, and 3) my vibrator and imagination have always satisfied me since I was a teenager; if I would live that way when I was single then I can still live this way today. 

On the other hand, what bothers me is that, if a man truly loves me, would they want to please me sexually too? Out of the single digit times of sex we’ve had, most of them were done to conceive. In the end I still had to use a vibrator to suck in the sperm to conceive because he was impotent. He couldn’t penetrate me fully. Other men have told me that if they were having sex with a virgin, they’d go an extra mile to relax her and do foreplay but it just never happened to me. Angel doesn’t have the physical stamina to do those things because he can barely function even if a tiny bit of sleep is deprived from him. He’s tired all the time, and sometimes bedridden when there’s an issue with his spine.

As I think about this, I begin to feel sad and pathetic. As I am almost 38, middle age, I have not experienced the most basic biology in human, and I’ve given birth twice already (both via C-section). Is this right? Do most women have the sexual experience that makes them feel loved, rather than sad? After most sexual intercourses with Angel, I usually felt angry and sad. I’ve never had the serendipity to be with a man who wanted to make my first time special. If I were impulsive enough and just flew to Kansas to meet Jes, would he have given me the best summer of my life, like The Notebook?

That sharp pain is back in my heart. The sharp pain of a broken heart. I met Jes at the age of 18, and he told me when I was 26 that he really did love me back then, but the distance made it too painful for him to tell me that. And he was already getting married back then. And I think they’re still married, and possibly no kids.

If I could go back in time, I would tell myself to escape from all the circumstances created by myself and just be selfish. Kiss Ian at the age of 14. Date him. Fail classes. Fly to Kansas to meet Jes. Drop the illusion of getting higher education and having a better life. Those do not exist. I now have more money than most, but my life is hard as hell. Everything I was told was a lie. You marry someone with some money, and then you get an autistic child that just burns your money quickly. There is just no happily-ever-after.

Nowhere to run

 Recently I’ve run into a situation at work where I have to work with someone who is extremely difficult and potentially emotionally unstable. I used to run my one-person team, but due to some fucked up shit at our company, I ended working with this guy and it is destroying my life. Even when I’m on vacation I can’t stop repeating the insulting and toxic things he’s said to me. I want him dead. I want to make him pay for what he’s cost me. But these require me to be patient and to collect evidence and for him to show his schizophrenia in front of not only me. I really hope bad things can happen to him soon so that me and my children are not suffering from his presence.

Why am I still working at this stage of my life? My dream had always been a stay at home mom. I hate to deal with people at work, unless they are my fans. These ignorant losers can’t really drop dead.

The unnecessity of friends.

 I don’t have friends. I used to have friends and they’re mostly male and single, and after I got married to prevent jealousy from Angel and his mom, I cut off all my ties to them. Also, Angel cannot hang out with my friends because he can’t speak our language and he wants all of us to speak English with him, which would just make casual chatting very burdensome. As a result, I’ve given up on maintaining friendships.

Now as my children are becoming socialized, the issue of having friends keeps resurfacing between me and Angel. He thinks I’m too anti-social so that our kids don’t have enough play dates, but I’ve always told him to feel free to take the kids to playdates on his own without me as frequently as he’d like, and he has never done that because that’s just not culturally American. The truth is he cannot handle taking both kids anywhere on his own. Every time when we had play dates, he can enjoy adult conversations with his friends nonstop, and his friends would just leave their kids to me and I’d have to play with my kids and their kids simultaneously. I could never have any adult time and I prepared all the food and gifts and toys. This kind of arrangement just makes me feel disrespected and used so I refuse to go to any playdates and he can take the kids on his own. 

On the other hand, I also wonder who they can find support from when they grow up. I grew up with my cousins but as they started their families, we decided to part ways in our lives and never talk to each other again. I have two brothers who don’t have kids, so my kids don’t have any cousins on my side, and their cousins on Angel’s side only see us once a year. Little O doesn’t know how to make friends at school and Little N just doesn’t like people or other children. I do worry if their company of each other alone is sufficient. In my case just texting my brothers every day is sufficient. If I have emotional pain from my marriage, I just write it down, wishing that X can hear me and take care of me. I just don’t find superficial conversations with so-called friends that worthy of my time. I do sometimes want to go to my alumni gathering, but the school I went to is super superficial and given my current powerless job and my fat body after giving two births, I don’t have the courage to hang out with them anymore.

It makes me sad that after working so hard and still working so hard I cannot escape my fate. I am destined to take care of everyone in my life, and no one can take care of me. I must have owed too many people too much debt in my past life so I’m using my current life to pay them back.

Feel again.

 We’ve got five weeks off from work for the winter, and we’re traveling with Angel’s family at the moment in the City of Sakura. It’s nice to fly again after 3.5 years.

Child rearing has been tough. A lot of things have happened since I last wrote. I can barely breathe. In the past six months, we moved, took Little O to 3 different kindergartners and now it’s somewhat settled. Little O’s behavior is getting more and more difficult and I’m under tremendous stress because we just bought this house and we can’t just move away again to find Little O a better environment. I am drained inside out. I’ve been binge watching romance dramas during the break and I’m finally hearing some voices inside of me.

Who was my first love? I don’t know. A crush didn’t count. Mutual crush didn’t count. It was always Jes who came to my mind, but we’ve never met. He was the first person who I could open up to and I could feel that he could feel my pain, even though he didn’t say so verbally. With all the other men I dated, I opened up to all of them but I never felt that kind of empathy from any one of them, including Angel. They could listen, but they couldn’t feel. It made me feel that that was it; the problem is mine and every man is that way. Just choose one who won’t hurt you.

Then, the one who won’t hurt me is someone who can’t feel me, someone who loves himself more than anyone else, someone who talks a lot and monologues a lot. I want to feel love again. I want to feel that someone cares about me again. I have been giving my whole self to everyone in this family that I have nothing left. I often wonder, if I had the courage to run to Jes when I was 20, to fall in love in person with him, to live a simple life with him and never got any of those fancy degrees, would I be happy right now? Would our kids be healthier than my kids now?

But fate never let us be together. We were living so close to each other for two years but couldn’t find each other. By the time we found each other, he was already engaged after giving up on looking for me. Maybe it wasn’t real after all because we’ve never met in person. Maybe we felt connected because we couldn’t see each other, and it was all filled with fantasy. Is he a good father now? Are his kids dependent on him the way mine are on me? Does he make his wife happy?

I feel like a failure. I gave up on my previous career to pursue a family. Now I’m stuck in my current job that pays well but drills my body and mind. I finally have my own children but they have so many problems that are unacceptable in this society. I don’t know how to teach them to camouflage except that I try to hide them from most people. My husband poops three times a day and pees ten times a day; he spends most of his time in the bathroom, eating, phubbing, or sleeping. Jes, do you do that?

I try really hard not to think, not to cry, and not to feel. Now I’ve realized I’ve been so pathetic. I am so fat and ugly and old now. I’m not healthy. I’m not happy. No one would take a look at me. I don’t wear clothes I want to wear anymore; I can only wear comfy baggy clothes with animal prints that Little O chooses for me. I don’t get to sleep through one single night without disturbances. I have no one I can talk to. My younger brother has acquired his immigration status so he’s moved thousands of miles away. I am all alone. 

Dear X, can you hear me? Can you read my writing? Are you there? If you are there, can you let me feel you? Can you hold me? Can you tell me you love me and that you’ll take care of me?

Why can’t you just take care of me once?

 I had my physical exam, 4 years after the previous one, yesterday and my main problems were obesity and severe dysautonomia; it’s so severe that my nervous system’s functionality is equivalent to a 75 year old’s. No wonder I cannot lose weight because my body isn’t working. I want to break down and cry for a month. I just don’t want to live like this anymore. 

Recently we have discovered that Little O is on the autistic spectrum, or has Asperger’s syndrome. Then I realized Angel definitely has it too. Then I realized I’ve also developed Cassandra Affective Deprivation Disorder. This explains everything. Little O is 4 years old but he still cannot poop in the toilet nor ride a bike. Angel has no life skills. My whole life I’ve been looking for someone who can take care of me, and this is what I’ve ended up with. Maybe I already had CADD in my upbringing. I just want to feel comfortable again; I’ve been feeling pain all over my body for the past 5 years and I really want to feel comfort. I can’t be dealing with all sorts of stubborn requests by Little O anymore. I need to breathe. I need to feel myself. I need to cry.

There’s no one else in the world who can take care of me. I’ve been living in my own fantasy. That kind of true love I’ve always wanted doesn’t exist. X doesn’t exist. No one can hear me or feel my pain.

Where are you?

 Dear X,

Where are you? I need to be held now. I need to be felt. Angel bumped his head on the TV screen in our car yesterday as he entered the car, and now he claims that he has a concussion and has been resting all day in his room without fulfilling any duties at all at home. I have never rested this much even right after both my c-sections. He bumps his head all the time because he’s stupid and clumsy and has slow reflex.

I am so fed up with this. He is just not a good father. He can barely perform his fatherly duties let alone a husband’s. Why didn’t you show up to take care of me, X? Why don’t you love me? Why can’t you take care of me? I am so exhausted and burned. My whole body hurts. My hormones are messed up. I want to be able to sleep all day too, but that’s not an option for me, and yet Angel can easily have that option because I am a superhuman. I don’t want to be a superhuman. I want to be a pampered woman. Why is it just not in my destiny to be one?

My kids pamper me though. I think I understand why mothers always say that their sons are their boyfriends or lovers from their past life. I get it now. Maybe they are my X’s; we are destined to be together this way. 

I’m depressed and I want to cry very much. I feel layers of sadness burying me. I wish for one day I could feel comfortable and pain free. I want to be slender and soft and effeminate. I wish a strong man could drive me and the kids for a nice meal, and he’d be the one feeding the kids without me asking him to. He would just say, “go ahead and enjoy your food. I’ve got everything in control.” Then he’d feed me a nice spoonful of strawberry ice cream, like I was also his baby. While he was driving, we would all fall asleep and I could lean on his shoulders. After we got home, we could all take a bath together with the kids in our giant jacuzzi. Then we all went to bed together with his nighttime story and my singing.

I want to be taken care of so bad; I want to be pampered. I do feel loved by my kids but not by my husband. I want to feel felt; I wish he could understand how I feel. But of course he doesn’t because he’s narcissistic. Why am I so stuck here? If this is the price the universe wants me to pay for my two kids, then I’ll happily take it. This is the only way I can convince myself that I can live like this.