pretending.

okay.  I cried.  I know I wrote already, but this is where I vent, right?  my readers in Russia and China and here in Maryland and everywhere...you hear me and you care and your caring and hearing help me feel so not alone...

I feel like to get through this incredibly huge thing, I have to channel the strength of every pain I have survived.  But what a screwed up thing to need...I have to call to the pain of growing up without my dad, of feeling so left out, of believing I was worth nothing but what love my body brought me...of hearing hurtful, searing words over and over from the women who raised me...of losing friends I thought would be there forever, of being in love only to be used as a way to get back at others.   I try so hard to understand, channel, and heal the pain of my mother and her life, my grandmother, my other grandmother and my grandfathers...

when I pray, I pray not to god but to all of you who make up bits of me...

I need strength to do this.  I feel like calling to the ghosts of my past and the past of those who made me is the only way to find the foundation to do this...yet doing that opens way too many cans of worms...so I don't sleep with fishes, I try to find my way with burrowing invertebrates...

I wish I had the strength, or perhaps the weakness, to cut or draw blood somehow.  Because to hurt this large without some visible manifestation seems quite wrong to me.  

Instead, I will make tea.  I will take a shower.  I will try very very hard to channel John's love for me.  I will try very hard to let the love of those of you who have known and cared about me for years, and those of you who have only just begun to know me flow through everything I am....I will try to be open...I will try to let the power of John's smile fill me...I will fight because I loved him, because I love him...because our babies need me...and because I still need to find a way to do better with pain than those who came before me....

Please, help me not feel so broken and alone...please send me strength and love and hope...Hope is a virtue...a practice...something you need to work at, that is worth working for.  I wish so badly I had someone to hold me through this pain.  I will try very very hard to pretend that someone is.