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I have been thinking about personality disorders today.  One of our homesteading neighbors just sent me a copy of the 1982 letter she wrote to my mother to ‘disown’ her as a friend because my mother had grown so abusive toward her and her husband.  My mother’s life was such a tragedy.  My mother, in turn, caused me the loss of my own best self and my own best life.  Yet I haven’t been able to write today — and now I am thinking of another woman, another best life lost, and another……

Sometimes I can only observe — all of it — feeling more like an historian without any answers, seeing only the causes…….and feeling so helpless.

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I wish I could think of something light and upbeat to write about tonight, but I cannot.  Better perhaps not to write at all?

I am thinking of a woman I passed by as I left the grocery store an hour ago, having just spent a careful hour shopping for the best buys I could find to make it through the next 30 days without spending more than my $150 food budget for the month I spent tonight.  I included some things to do a little Christmas gift baking.  I want to make the cut-out, colorfully decorated tiny cinnamon cookie people I haven’t made for nearly 20 years.

This woman was standing beside the store’s DVD kiosk with two other women I didn’t know.  I wasn’t even sure this woman was the woman I thought it was until I heard her speak.  She has gained a lot of weight since I saw her last – actually except for one very brief passing, it has been about 3 ½ years.

“I should sell my house and take my accordion and go on a long cruise,” I could hear her saying as I passed by with my cart.  The other two women she was with were busy selecting their movie and didn’t appear to be listening to her at all.  “I’m not in good shape.  I’m not doing well at all.”

I tried to be friends with this woman when I first met her about six years ago.  It didn’t work.  She consumes people’s energy and attention in a continual flurry of drama that exhausts everyone who knows her (I suspect Histrionic Personality Disorder).  About three years ago she sold her big house in our little town and made enough money from the sale to buy another big house in the country, on some land about 35 miles away.  I was surprised to see her at the store tonight, after dark, a long way from home.

Leaving town and living in the country.  I remember that phase when it hit her.  Everything was going to be better then.  That’s all she needed, to get away from all the town people, to be in the quiet, to do her art, play piano, play accordion, garden.  Living in a peaceful place, that would be better she had told everyone.  I have always wondered how she would survive without having an audience to feed upon.  Would she find a new one?

I briefly thought about stopping on my way out of the store to greet her.  A quick thought as I continued on my way past her out the door.  I didn’t dare stop.  It would not be good for me.  I would be overwhelmed.  Being anywhere around this woman is so complicated….

Yet I know about her past.  I know about the years of sexual abuse she suffered as a little girl.  Her father’s best friend, her babysitter’s husband.  Pillar of the church.  Nobody heard the little girl.  Nobody believed her.  It destroyed her.  It destroyed her life.  It still does.

This woman no longer uses drugs, which she did heavily during all the years she raised her children.  The children did not turn out well.  No surprise.  Nearly a year ago her drug using, drug dealing daughter’s drug using, drug dealing son was shot to death along with his friend.  The trial for the shooter just ended here a week ago.  He was acquitted.

I heard about the outcome for the trial from my friends while we ate quiche at the laundromat yesterday.  I was told my (laundromat) friend’s son has known the shooter for a long time and used to buy his winter’s supply of firewood from him.  One time while picking up what was the last load of wood my friend’s son would ever buy from this man, he watched him grab his rifle that was standing beside his front door and shoot an alien he saw outside his living room window.  He shot through the glass.  Everyone local knows this guy is absolutely loopy, but nobody asked at the trial, and nobody could say.

Nobody was there that dark night in the desert to witness when the woman I passed by at the store tonight lost her 20-year-old grandson to his early and violent death not far from his grandmother’s country home.  I think of my own daughter who just found out last Wednesday that she is carrying a boy – my first grandchild.

I can’t go there in my thinking……

There are so many, many places I cannot go in my thinking.  So many, many things I cannot afford to do because of the damage that was done to me through my own history of severe infant-child abuse.  I could not afford to stop and offer my love to this grieving grandmother, this woman I once tried to befriend.  I can only write this much, and no more.

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