Near and Abroad

In 3 days I get to see one of my favorite bands in concert not too far from where I currently live. A little less than three years ago I saw Shinedown in Concert for the first time. I saw them abroad. Well, abroad from where I currently live, yet it was actually the exact town that is listed on both of my birth certificates. You read that right. I’m one of the priveleged citizens to have two birth certificates. One is my real one, but is the one that was hidden from me until 2 years ago, locked away, sealed, until the state I was born in was one of the ethically just states to pass the law to unseal adoptees OBC’s (Original Birth Certificates). And the other, “official” birth certificate that I use to identify myself for the entirety of my life is a legally falsified document. The only type permissible in our country without penalty. I’d be penalized for using my real one. When I finally obtained my real one it had stamped in red all over it “to be used to historical purposes only.” The duplicity of my innocence and my curiosity, eternalized on documents with different names, born on the same day, in the same city with different parents listed, yet somehow both papers are a representation of my brain, my soul, my physical self. But the one thing I am left with with is dichotomous pain. Welcome to the party that reigns inside my head.

 

My Song of the Day: As I prep to attend my second Shinedown concert this week (which has become one of my top 10 favorite bands of all times within the past 3-4 years), here’s one from their latest album that is apropos to my current state of being these days…

 

 

DARKSIDE

By: Shinedown

Can you hear me? Am I speaking clearly?
Are you starstruck or just made of stone?
Do you need a savior? Some bad behavior?
Or you could cash it all in, I suppose

Because you’re in deep, resist and repeat
Face forward and don’t come unhinged
Block out the actors and all these bastards
That took all the fun out of rage and revenge

Don’t be so quick to judge, reign havoc from above
I think I’ve had enough, time to raise the dead
It’s all subliminal, supernatural
I might be mental but I’ve still got my cred

So welcome to the party, won’t you please come inside?
Where habits have teeth and the words carry knives
You enter at your own risk, so don’t be surprised
Welcome to the darkside

Spare me your sorrow, there’s no tomorrow
That’s an empty promise at best
I tried to play nice, you were baptized in ice
So don’t tell me you’re just depressed

Don’t be so quick to judge, reign havoc from above
I think I’ve had enough, time to raise the dead
It’s all subliminal, supernatural
I might be mental but I’ve still got my cred

So welcome to the party, won’t you please come inside?
Where habits have teeth and the words carry knives
You enter at your own risk, so don’t be surprised
Welcome to the darkside

Your equilibrium has been spun all around
And everything you know turned upside down
The symptoms are contagious so please be advised
So welcome to the darkside

Don’t be so quick to judge, reign havoc from above
I think I’ve had enough, time to raise the dead
It’s all subliminal, supernatural
I might be mental but I’ve still got my cred

So welcome to the party, won’t you please come inside?
Where habits have teeth and the words carry knives
You enter at your own risk, so don’t be surprised
Welcome to the darkside

Your equilibrium has been spun all around
And everything you know turned upside down
The symptoms are contagious so please be advised
So welcome to the darkside

(Darkside, darkside) Welcome to the darkside
(Darkside, darkside) Welcome to the darkside
(Darkside, darkside) So welcome to the darkside
(Darkside, darkside) So welcome to the darkside

https://onedailyprompt.wordpress.com/2019/02/25/your-daily-word-prompt-abroad-february-25-2019/

Real Eyes

“Real eyes realize real lies” –Unknown

Earning my doctorate degree in acting. Hanging on and playing my role until I can get myself in the position I need to feel comfortable with my exit strategy. I’m sure I’m suspected. I’m sure all of the current road blocks we’re strategically planted. I’m sure it’s all a ruse just to delay my intentions, to make it harder, to make me second guess myself, to keep me roped in. News flash. Nothing will work. It might stall, it may derail temporarily, but when my mind is made up, nothing will shake me from my course. It may take me longer to get there. And that is why it sometimes takes me longer to make my mind up with larger life decisions, because once I do decide, I don’t turn back. I see it all, plain as day. There is no pulling the wool over my eyes any longer. Even if I occasionally falsely accuse, I live no longer in naivete. I call your shots before you make them. I predict your moves before you make them. You read like a faithful old book that I’ve read a thousand times. One day I will step in to my new life. I’m on the path. My eyes see through the veil to the other side. I can see all obstacles in my way, but I can still see the other side. Because my eyes are real.

 

 

Pageant

Beauty only my eye beholds now.

6 word story. December Reflection

 

 

https://onedailyprompt.wordpress.com/2018/12/09/your-daily-word-prompt-pageant-December-9-2018/

Transgender origins

I often have pretty random thoughts, that I personally think are insight from another realm. These random thoughts are often not based on any research, and when I do research them, I often find nothing to support my idea. Meaning that it has not been researched or possibly even explored or thought of. While that may make it seem like my ideas are far-fetched and caused by my eccentricity, I beg to reason that every time tested theory began as a wild idea at some point, something that people thought was completely far-fetched and impossible.

I often receive many of my answers to life’s questions in the same manner that I download these random thoughts. While I have no background in science and the medical field whatsoever, I feel that there are some things that I have an innate ‘knowing’ about. Perhaps, if you believe in reincarnation, I was in the medical field in a past life and have carried over some of the natural logic in to this life with me. My husband often makes fun of me for “over-diagnosing” everyone and everything, but I am often right. While many of the things I have proven to be right on have not been proven by scientific tests, after I have come up with a medical diagnosis theory on someone, I have ended up having a doctor confirm those diagnoses or some other piece of hard evidence favor my opinion. For example, years ago I began to suspect I had ADHD. While I know this is a very over-diagnosed syndrome, I found definitive relief in taking medication for it. Years later when I found my birth family, I found out that ADHD ran in my genetic line, one of the few things that my birthdad mentioned when I asked about any health concerns on his side.

So, this particular random thought of which I speak is regarding children/people who end up being transgender. My daughter has Asperger’s, and often with Autism and Asperger’s, many of the children end up being transgender or more comfortable dressing as and acting more in the role of the opposite sex than the one they were born in. This is mentioned in what is considered by many to be “The Bible” of Asperger’s research, the book by Tony Attwood about Asperger’s Syndrome. My daughter started to show many signs of feeling more comfortable with boys toys and speaking of wishing she was a boy as early as age 5. She is now 11 and cut her hair in a “boy cut” 2 years ago. Most people who don’t know her refer to her as a boy when they first meet her.

While I know that her propensity towards transgenderism is linked to the fact that she has Asperger’s, the thought ran through my mind one day that I had a miscarriage only 3 months before I got pregnant with her. I was 11 weeks and 5 days pregnant with twins when I miscarried. I had a D&C. Because I have a negative blood type, I always had to get the rhogam shot with each pregnancy, miscarriage and delivery so as not to affect any subsequent pregnancy. So, if a former pregnancy blood type can affect a subsequent pregnancy, and there is research that cells do stay behind and affect the mother sometimes and subsequent pregnancies, is there a possibility that cells from former pregnancies could affect gender tendencies. I wasn’t far enough along to find out whether the twins I was pregnant with were boys or girls. But I wonder if perhpas they were boys and the male hormones were left in my body and perhpas absorbed in my daughter once I conceived her, thus giving her a higher percentage of male hormones, especially if both of the twins were boys, it would have been an even higher concentration.

I thought of this again today because a friend of mine sent me a video about chimera twins. I was always obsessed with twins as a child. Being adopted, there was always something in the back of my mind wondering if it was a possibility if I was a twin. My adoptive parents told me that of both twins were put up for adoption that they would have adopted my twin as well. At one point I read a statistic that 92% of all people who were born left handed were originally conceived as a twin and that the other twin was absorbed before being detected if they werent born as live twin births. I was born left handed (and switched because my adoptive parents were raised Catholic and under the spell that left handed people were the mark of the devil). When I went for my sonogram and found out I was pregnant with twins, the first thing they asked was whether I was a twin or whether there were twins on my side because twins usually run genetically on the mothers side. There is one set of twins on my birthmoms side, two of my first cousins are twins. But the video today about chimera is about the absorbtion of twins and having two sets of genetics in the same person, which my best friend sent me because she knows my obsession with twins and how I’ve felt that maybe I was a twin. One of the things included in the research about chimera was also about the cells left behind from pregnancies as well and how they can affect the mother and subsequent pregnancies, which reminded me of my theory of transgender and whether it might be due to previous miscarriages of opposite genders.

I would really love to do or see some research done on this. If you are reading this article and are transgender, or know someone who is transgender, if you could comment with whether you were born after a miscarriage that your mother had, that would be really awesome. And ifiyou were and know the gender of the miscarriage that your mother had and whether it was opposite to the one you were born as, that would be even better. This is all just to placate my whim of a thought/idea  and to see whether it would even be worth pursuing any further. Even if it just strips the varnish off my idea, I’d still rather know whether it’s worth thinking about any further. Thanks in advance if you do comment with any info that could help, in either direction. I am always willing to be wrong too.

 

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/varnish/

Mystery Date no more

I guess there is no more mystery as to when it will happen. He thinks he’s calling the shots by not coming home tonight, but he’s got another thing coming when I tell him the next time I see his face today that I want a divorce. If he thinks this is a scare tactic, or that he is leaving me with this maneuver, he is sorely mistaken. The only reason I have even hung on for this long is because I have been trying to buy myself some extra time to get things together to make a smoother transition for all of us involved on my side of it. But I guess he is going to make that an impossibility. Because that’s what sociopaths do.

And I’m already anticipating all of his moves in the aftermath of this. And since I figured out that he is a sociopath, I have been able to predict with scary accuracy his every move. I see every gaslight, every headgame and how they will play out in the end. I know if I respond to his moves a certain way exactly what his counteract will be. I have had 40 years in training with a Narcissistic Personality Disordered Adoptive Father to be wise to this. My Cluster B husband underestimates my intelligence and grossly overestimates his own. I think he must be a Narcopath since he thinks he is much slicker than he is.

I have allowed him to think he hasn’t been caught in a good majority of things. He has NO clue the amount of things I know. I let him know some of the things I know, so he knows I’m on to him and that I’m not completely ignorant. But I hate confrontation. Always have. And I just don’t have it in me to fight over every single little thing he does. And God knows it’s a daily thing. And I shouldn’t have to. Not when he always tries to turn everything on me anyway which only plays on my self esteem. It’s just not worth it anymore.

Today is the day my life starts to begin again. One of the scariest yet most liberating days all at the same time. For anyone reading this, please keep me in your thoughts today. I will need all the good mojo I can get. I know it will be better when I’m on the other side, but it will be a tough ride for a while. And I’m scared for my 11 year old….

 

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/mystery/

Sunny Day Sweepin’ the Clouds Away

Sunny days sweeping the clouds away, on my way to where the air is sweet, can you tell me how to get, how to get to Sesame Street?

The busy bee….sniffing around for which flower smells the sweetest on any given day. Only the youngest flowers waver and turn towards the sunny direction. The wiser, more mature flowers stand their ground and stay facing one direction. For they are confident that each morning the sun will rise in the East and they will get their due, but they also welcome the shade as the earth moves direction and the sun then provides shade in the latter part of the day. The wisdom of the older sunflower knows that it needs rest and shade from the constant heat and scorching ray’s of the sun.

As I was watching episode 4 of Smallville that I just started as another series to binge watch, one of those darned synchronicities happened while I write this. Image upon image upon image of sunflowers appeared throughout the episode. In copious amounts.

I know I had taken quite the hiatus from writing here, but I think I am reminding my niche again. So hopefully this means I will be back with a vengeance (and you will see that word pop up also in my song of the day-lol). I have also been engaging in very stimulating conversation in the past week with one of my.former college professors on Facebook (the evil social media that pushed me towards coming here as I felt completely unheard and unseen in that platform). Though the people I used to expect to engage with me there still generally aren’t, it is interesting to see who creeps up out of the woodwork as I started to go through one of my meme tangent diatribes. It engaged that former professor of mine and he and I have really had some wonderful conversation and he has pulled some great things out of me in the past week, so that has been refreshing as well.

Please excuse the flightiness of my post here. My mind is still a bit raw and a gaggle of rampant emotions and ADHD thoughts that can’t be suppressed by my normal meds because what I’m dealing with right now is above and beyond the normal maintenance. So I may be a bit scattered for a while. It’s a step to get myself back here, never mind the editing or collecting my thoughts to be sure I am putting together something perfectly cohesive right now. So you will have to deal with the raw and mentally naked Alice in Wonderland right now. Hope that’s cool with y’all! And, can anyone tell me how to get to Sesame Street? I need to go back to someplace where life was a bit more simplistic…

 

My song of the day: Much in a similar manner as yesterday, it very much follows the daily word prompt (from last year on this day) and it also follows the theme of this post and what’s going on in my life right now. It is all melding together quite seamlessly, the daily prompts, the quotes, the songs, what I’m living through. Funny how things align some times and writing comes effortlessly at times.

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/sunny/

Suffocate to freedom

Another day,

Another dollar,

Another dish,

Another holler.

 

Is this to what I’ve been reduced?

 

Where are the floodlit stages,

The music filled pages,

The circumstance and pomp,

The willowing womp?

 

For it is mine that takes a

back seat,

lack street.

Just because it doesn’t earn as much

cash flow,

roll in dough.

 

But at least with mine I

stretch it out,

fetch it out.

With yours, you only

hide it,

snide it.

 

I’m sick of all the

secrets, lies,

vices, ties.

 

It makes me cringe,

come unhinged.

 

Once I learn to free myself,

I can be myself.

I will suffocate no more.

 

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/cringe/

Stranger than Fiction: From Birth to Eternity in Wonderland

I started the process of writing my book a while ago. People who’ve known me well and heard all of my life stories have told me that I needed to write a book because my stories are just so outlandish that people would think that they were made up, but they’re not. Many people, close friends even, have thought me to be a liar because of my Narcissistic adoptive Dad and how great he is at making everything seem so wonderful on the outside but no one lived with me behind closed doors. So I had no one to vouch for me. I believed I was the crazy one until 3 years ago.

But it was about 5 or so years ago that I had begun to write my book. That was before I made contact with my birth parents. And once I did, I stopped the writing process, because I knew there would be alot of changed details from what I had been told and thought to be true. And recently I decided that I wanted to pick it back up again, but I was blocked as to how to restart the process. I was originally planning on a novel that was written in a fiction style but that was generally autobiographical, with names and such changed. But how to link together all the main events that I wanted to touch on and make smooth transitions with was the challenge.

And then, by a miraculous stroke of insight, the idea for a complete change of format, something completely unique came to me.

Once I found out my birth name, Mary Alice, I began feeling a kinship to that name through the name Alice in particular and seeing parallels of my life to the tale of Alice in Wonderland, as you have all seen through the theme of my page. Each character in the Alice in Wonderland story easily represents someone in my.real life story and many of the allegories that have been made about the Alice tale are quite fitting as well to my journey as well.

The way I am now writing my book is a very unique format, one that has not quite been done before. And that could be a good or a bad thing. But it will definitely catch attention either way. And it won’t be the same ole same ole. I am hoping that it will be something that would be so fresh that publishers would want to run with it.

I am sort of telling my autobiography still, but I am telling it through the Alice characters now. But the Alice characters will represent who they represent in my life, which also means some gender changes for the well known characters. I am telling the tale in snippet like sections and interspersing it with my own pre-written quotes that sort of summarize the philosophies and things to be learned from each section of the stories. I am going to do my own drawings of the revised characters and use my own artwork. The Alice (young and innocent Alice-there might be morphing Alice pictures through the decades) character at the top is just a play with an avatar making app to get some ideas before I start sketching them out.

There are several other components that will make it unique, but I am hoping that it will be a cool mixture of using a whimsical fairytale as a catharsis to tell a droll tale of my life in order to help others see perspectives on things they wouldn’t have otherwise seen, or to help people who are going through or will go through situations similar to mine with my appropriately timed inspirational and anecdotal quotes interspersed throughout the retold fairytale. And retold fairy tales are all the rage these days among adults as well. So, I am really hoping that this will be a smash hit. It is writing itself so easily. As soon as I got this idea, I already wrote through my birth and adoption and am starting my first decade of life. I am super pumped.

The White Rabbit-who is female because the White Rabbit is my birth mom….

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/miraculous/

 

Emotional Rollercoaster

I know I’ve been MIA a bit…with my stepdaughter moving back in after her break up with her boyfriend and subsequent stay in the psych hospital, my life has been turned upside down again. I know this is the time I need to write the most, but I just haven’t even been able to pull myself together enough to do that. This is why I’m just trying to even drop this little note to get back in to it, even if only the first step. At least it serves as a reminder of what I need to do to keep sane through a time I can already feel myself sliding down a slippery slope, very quickly. As things start to settle in, I will make it a priority again to get back to writing here. It is essential for my well being. I haven’t even been able to express myself through my music, because the school year came to a culmination and I hadn’t even been able to get myself together enough to email everyone about scheduling, especially since I teach a decent amount out of my house, and my house has been a holy wreck for a month now due to my crazy end of the year recital stuff and my step daughter moving back in, which entails a whole ton of moving things around within our house to get a room ready for her again and moving a lot in to a storage unit. One big ball of chaos and in flux again. I just don’t know how much more of this life (style) I can handle. I’m tired of my life being shaken up by everyone else. It might be time for me to do some shaking of my own…

Archaic Diagnoses/Archaic Parenting

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As she asked to print more pictures to color after yesterday’s batch for the ride to the amusement park tomorrow, she originally said 1-3. Then she said it might be 4. Later on when she started to actually look them up, I specified no more than 4. As I said it, I knew she would ask for more. Because I know my daughter has Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA) in addition to her extremely high functioning Asperger’s Autism. Sure enough, within 5 minutes she said, it might be more like 5, and I said gently, no, I said no more than 4. I had already let her increase the 1-3 up to 4. Even though PDA is currently only recognized in the UK, it is starting to gain more clout in the US. She is not officially diagnosed with this, but I know without a shadow of a doubt she has it. She is officially diagnosed by her pediatrician with Asperger’s Autism. Technically, it is now Autism Level 1. Asperger’s is now an archaic term since they released the DSM-5. All Autism diagnoses are just a spectrum and divided in to 3 levels. Level 1 is High Functioning which is where those who would have formerly been diagnosed as Asperger’s are now placed. I personally still prefer the term Asperger’s and continue to use it.

Giving children sentences with multiple directions to follow is an actual developmental milestone. It is one for the age of 3 year olds. But children with PDA are overwhelmed by demands that are thrown at them at the same time. Any instruction is processed as a demand, and thus, this developmental milestone becomes a hotbed for attitude because it puts these children in a pressure cooker. Today when I told my 10 year old that it was time to take a shower, and then followed that up with the sentence of to make sure she also cleans up the mess she had left downstairs from her homework, she answers with an attitude how she knows she knows…When her father comes down, all of her stuff is in front of his seat and he comments how he sees a tornado passed through. I told him how I told her to do that part after I told her to take the shower so of course she has to do them in order. But when she comes down the stairs, for how much attitude I get the “I know, I know” when I remind her earlier of cleaning the homework mess up, do you think she goes right to cleaning that up? Of course she doesn’t. She tries to avoid that demand altogether. She goes right in to the other room to color and begin making another mess in there. It’s a never ending battle. And I know in many ways this sounds like typical child behavior, but it’s the constant attitude that I get when I ask daily for the simple task of her to clean up after herself. You would think I was asking her to move a mountain. You would think I had never made her clean up after herself before. You would think I had never held her accountable for herself before the way she speaks to me when I ask her for a simple request. And that, my friends, is definitely not a typical 10 year old.

Still, at 10 years old, even with no wait at a restaurant, she has no patience. When we are done with our meal, she wants to leave so badly and is so bored that she is blowing bubbles in her water and playing with it like a 3 year old. Before we were ready to leave, because she was ready to go (as in, showered, dressed etc, far enough in advance) she wanted to leave 15 minutes earlier just so we could get to the parking lot and wait, just because she didn’t want to wait any longer at home (which is honestly a better place for her to wait where all of her stuff is to occupy her). But the idea of waiting in any way is torturous to her.

I have definitely learned to allow a few minutes of leeway whenever I need her to be ready to do something or go somewhere because when I give her a warning or tell her it’s time to go to bed, or to stop what she’s doing because it’s time to go, I often get told to wait till she’s done with this game or this video or this episode etc….And I know that if I don’t, she will have a fit. And while I understand that children need to know how to not get their way, this is a little different because if it is a real time constraint and I can explain to her a real reason as to why she must stop right then and there, I’d rather save those demand times for important times when it is absolutely necessary and have her cooperative on those days rather than force her compliance every single time.

Many people disagree with the way it is recommended to parent children with Asperger’s and PDA. But I know for a fact that the old school hard knocks version of parenting was NOT working with mine. And although mine can still be a handful at times, I think all in all she has done much better, and I think the times she is at her worst is also when we are and that we need to remain calm and model for her the way we want her to act in a situations so she can learn by example. It just makes more logical sense than to instill the fear of God in her with something like spanking. That just teaches her that when our level.of frustration rises that it’s ok to hit and that’s not the proper message to send her. Just my personal opinion.

 

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/archaic/