Today’s evening Solomia went to Onuka’s concert at the Lviv’s Opera House.
- Check
herthem out, the website - or YouTube Channel.
I was not impressed by Onuka first, even when listening to them in my studio headphones. But I was flabbergasted when listening to them in the said Opera House. With accompanion of Naoni, Ukrainian National Academic Orchestra of Folk Instruments, Ukrainian NAOF (Ukrainian Wikipedia). It’s just not the type of music you listen to casually (you can, of course). It’s what asks you of that expensive audiophile gear, or — better — listen to it live in the Opera House with Naoni.
Solomia was returning home, and I’ve been checking whether she’d be soon. As we were reading Karlsson, book 2.
Her location is at my iPhone’s widgets screen, as we use it quite often. That may sound creepy, but it’s super useful in a family setting.
We added my wife’s mother too (we see her location, she doesn’t see ours). That was my idea when I noticed her other daughter did that (a very long time ago), and my wife agreed that’s a good idea to know where she’s at. That was quite useful when we traveled with her by her car.
She’s irrational and creates too much fuss out of nowhere. So, knowing her location independently of her incorrectly or not-in-adance-enough reporting it, is just better and safer.
I’m not in mood to describe the imbecile my wife’s mother is, so I move further.
When I was setting the iPhone for my mother, I activated this setting in Find My. That’s what we use for this, since everyone’s in the extended family on iPhones.
I didn’t share my location with my mother for two reasons: she’d creepily stalk me all the time, all the fucking time. And she’s stupid enough to casually share that info with anyone in her government, which may (or may not, but considering risks, you have to work with negative possibilities) result in me being in real physical danger. The only thing that saves me (potentially) is me being nobody and of no interest to such authorities.
Still, I feel uneasy and not safe sharing that information with the people I don’t trust. If you ever lived in a lawless state, you may know what that’s like. Perhaps that’s what ICE in the U.S. is doing right now too, that even citizens feel in danger.
Or… she can be hacked or even just tricked to share that information with people wishing me ill. In any case, she has zero credibility in having that information.
Me, having that information, with mother being 72… makes sense to at least know her whereabouts. Most times she’s at home, sometimes she visits her local friends.
I never check on her casually, because we’re not really close. But I often check on her when I’m in the same app checking for my wife. It happens automatically, I just notice whether she’s at home or not.
Today, it was half past nine at her place (she has different time zone), and I noticed she’s not at home. Too late to be somewhere else, I thought. And quickly checked what’s that location. Turned out that’s some clinic.
I started being nervous, even despite me knowing all too well I’m too far away to provide any help or support. If she’s to die any time soon, I’m unlikely to come. That’s too dangerous—
It’s weird to realise, considering we’re constantly bombed by Russia, here in Ukraine.
And I cannot accept that risk, for a mother I’m very distant with -vs- my kids who need me right here right now. There’s nothing even to consider.
I called her to check out on her. Called her twice or thrice, she didn’t take the phone. And so I messaged her asking whether she can speak. ‘Go ahead call me’ she says, and so I call again. Turned out there are other people in the chamber, sleeping already, and she’s not . It’s almost ten o’clock after all.
‘How are you? How are you all?’ she asks in her overly dramatical tone of voice, full of the tragical victimhood. She knows we’re fine, and doing well. And she’s constantly getting kids’ photos and videos from my wife. Still, her tone is full of ‘oh no, it’s not about me, only about you, you and you alone! What am I? A mere flash and bones!’
We’re doing great, especially given the circumstances. She knows that, and I’m way too tired of listening to her whines about what she thinks about us, and constantly telling her the opposite. It feels wrong, unnecessary and simply exhausting. I have no resources for that.
I’m way past the point of all the manipulations she has in her arsenal. And I don’t not care, but I cannot care. It’s too expensive for me to care about her feelings and serving her any emotional support.
Especially now. Before, I’ve been saving myself from her. Now, I’m having my kids, and they easily win for the care and support.
‘I’ll call you tomorrow’ she says, and I’m OKing to that. I have no time to talk to her (nor will), we’re too late to start getting to sleep. With the recent clock change, we’re bound to sleep by that point, not just starting to getting into our beds.
Incidentally, at the very same time, just moments after I return to him, Hnat notices this tiny blood stain on our white bed sheet. Solomia was reading the book to him yesterday, and I’ve noticed the stain in the morning.
Before we were having kids, she was extremely nervous about any women’s blood stains on the bed, and it took me tremendous efforts to literally force her to not care (or at least care less) about such a thing. Aren’t we having a washing machine or what?
She’s having a great deal of insecurities stemming from her childhood with her
incredibleemotionally idiot parents, my wife.
Hnat tries to clean it, the stain, and it stays. It’s long dry.
‘Yeah, I’ve tried to do that in the morning, that won’t go away that easily’ I say. I explain him that it’s from his mother, and it’s nothing to worry about. ‘Once a month women bleed for a few days, if they’re not pregnant’ I explain. ‘That’s normal and nothing to worry about. Their egg cells are leaving the body with some blood. She doesn’t have any wound, don’t you worry.’
‘So, where are kids coming from’ he asks again. We failed to explain that earlier, and I’m telling him it’s from their, women’s, genitalia. They have a special hole for kids to come through, after they spend some time in the belly. That’s the nature’s design.’
He’s satisfied with the reply and he’s not even hysterically laughing, as with the previous attempts of him to ask. They the attempts were not so long ago, weeks or months, but Solomia dodged the question. I dodged it too then, as I didn’t want to lie, but haven’t any proper explanation on me at the moment. This time, nothing changed, I still have no other explanation. But I thought it’s appropriate to unite these two, mum’s bleeding and the childbirth.
Nobody explained me this when I was a teenager. Why women bleed was somewhat a mystery to me. The exact reason of it. I kid you not, I knew women bleed monthly, but I had no proper understanding why. And I didn’t consciously connect that to the childbirth either.
In the same fashion, nobody explained me the hidden magical button thing. Not even my first lover, she told me to fucking google. Without even a hint on what to google.
Why would you even have the relationship like this, if your lover is shy to explain you the clitoris thing? ‘You should know that yourself’ would be her reply.
Seriously, fuck you.
It took me like half a dozen of lovers to properly understand the clitoris and its magical abilities for the woman bearer of said button. I don’t expect that to be taught by the parents, but come on, either some friend, brother, or even the first lover, possibly could explain better, huh.
Here, I’m not too far from forty, with my mother, over seventy, hiding her health issues, not being even able to tell me she had some surgery. The fucking word, surgery. She avoids it. As if me knowing that would— what? Seriously. What?
I’m way too sensitive to people, and I hate it. I smell lies, minuscule tone change, you can cheat me only when I want to be cheated. Otherwise, I see people perfectly clear.
That’s the ability that came from the childhood mistreat, and it’s actually a bug, not a feature. Or the opposite, maybe. An evolutionary feature that helps the child to survive, but that’s actually a bug that bugs me till today.
Her, hiding these issues, isn’t something new. It’s not that she’s trying to protect me from some devastating information. It’s as simple as that: my own mother lying to me. Treating me… like a kid? LOL, what a kid is that? A five years old boy is capable of understanding all the very complex things in the universe. She lies to me as if I’m some diving dog, maybe.
That’s insulting. That’s disrespectful. That’s the reason I cannot see her as someone close. She’s the woman who gave me birth. And considering all the lies Russia produces, all my childhood I’ve been questioning this fact. I wasn’t sure that’s true, because even if you have a document, that’s not a fact in Russia. Documents can be forged.
Hnat likes to listen to random life stories. He’s favourites are of his and his sister childhoods (as if he wasn’t in his childhood period any longer). Tonight he asked me to tell him some story. And I offered him the story of my cousins.
‘My sister and brother,’ I name them. They are indeed like my sister and brother to me, as if they were siblings. I guess that’s my only interpretation. Do they see me as their little brother? The little is for sure, but what about the brother? I guess they’re not.
‘We lost contact’ I say.
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know. That happened. People lose contact. We have nothing to talk about. My sister is having three kids and she has no time (energy, interest) for me. My brother has goats, he produces milk, he sells it and lives off that money.’
I live the detail that my brother supports war. The unprovoked war of aggression. The genocidal war. The war that wants to slaughter my very own five years old son for the fact that he speaks Ukrainian and knows no Russian, living in fucking Ukraine, not fucking Russia.
Sounds so absurd! The fuck Ukrainians are expected to even know Russian? Apart from the reason they were occupied by Russia for centuries.
My sister — his very own sibling, a twin sister! — does not support war, wholeheartedly. But she’s not having any resources for me. I don’t really want to make up excuses for her, and live the illusion that she cares. She never calls me, never writes me, she never gave me birthday wishes as well.
I wonder the fuck why all that is so fucked? Great Russian culture, no less. They have never been interested in how I am. None of them, my very own mother included. (And gloriously leading that pack.)
I’m re-reading quotes from that Drama of the Gifted Child book, and while everything is about my wife … it’s also about me.
Me, I’ve spent half of my life living without all of them, my relatives. And actually having all those issues (mostly) resolved. I’ve made a tremendous work (which is not finished, but still), with almost nobody being able to actually see that work being done.
My wife… fuck no. Mommy mommy mommy mommy. Mommy mommy mommy mommy. She’s still at it.
Fucking mommy. I’ve spent eight years tolerating that bullshit.
The fact we haven’t separated is her having that child, and then the child turning out to have autism. I won’t like seeing my child with the imbecile her mother is. She destroyed Solomia, and at 35 years old, it’s her fucking problem. And mine too. Very much so.
But destroying
myour daughter, I cannot allow that abuser-in-law bitch to succeed here with the same dramatic success she got from destroying her own daughter.Odd is that when we married, my wife was nowhere to be pregnant, contrary to what others may think. But she was quite quick afterwards, within three months of our marriage. Ironically, it took me about four to five months into the marriage to realise the catastrophic scope of the wife’s mother problem. Her mother is fucking abusive toxic degraded imbecile. A pathetic loser of a gold-digger type of a woman.
Kids, they change this perspective on marriage. I am not being very satisfied with the marriage, kids aside. With kids, and you cannot lightly brush them off, it’s a happy marriage, mostly. I enjoy spending my time with my kids, especially when we’re not at home all the time.
Fast forward to this year, me telling her mother that from that point on, in she doesn’t understand the concept of personal bondaries (which she constantly cross) there’s no relationship between me and her, and she can fuck off.
She sincerely replies — in a toxic way though — that she does not understand that concept. To which I reply that she’d to be forced to understand it then.
That was a week or weeks before Nadia’s birthday, late July. I’m feeling quite lighter and much better after the toxic person fucking off my life.
Solomia is not sleeping too— it’s half past midnight, new time, otherwise it’s almost 1:30 am. An hour or so before, she’s belittling my revelation that our sleep is a disaster. ‘It’s fucking catastrophe’ I say. ‘It’s one thing or another. Either Nadia making loud noises, Hnat’s kicking me in my sleep, fucking Russians bombing us. Me having my own sleep issues. Your fucking mother.’
Here is when I realise I’m too tired of giving her constant moral support with her mother. She never does anything to actually change that. As she’s always given that moral support. Previously by some random people, now her husband.
I’m done doing that. Things changed only when I stopped being tolerant to her idiot of a mother, and told her to fuck off. Not politely, and not pretending to be polite. I’ve been perfectly sincere, I’ve been speaking my mind, and I’ve meant it.
It’s been only three months, and they were very different. I’m still mostly unhappy in this marriage, but I’m happy with the kids, and I’m happy on my own too. When I got to sleep. When I’m not, I’m just too tired to think to exist.
With that said, I’m making my attempt at sleeping, at 1:31 am (old style).