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What Mother’s Day is like when you’re estranged from your mom

“Mother’s Day is always uncomfortable for me, ever since I was little,” 36-year-old Sally* said in a Gchat interview. Last year before Mother’s Day, Sally decided to cut ties with her mom, who left home when Sally was a child but sporadically reappeared throughout the years without explanation. 

For people like Sally who have toxic relationships with their moms, Mother’s Day can be an annual reminder of their pain and loneliness. But there are healthy ways to get through Mother’s Day. 

Follow @this-is-life-actually

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sometimes you say or do bad things while you’re in an awful mental place. sometimes you say things that are rude or uncalled for or manipulative. and i’m not going to hold that against you. mental illness is hard, and no one is perfect. but once you’re through that episode, you need to take steps to make amends. you need to apologize.

“i couldn’t help it, i was having a bad episode” is a justification, not an apology.

“i’m so fucking sorry, i fucked up, i don’t deserve to live, i should stop talking to anyone ever, i should die” is a second breakdown and a guilt trip. it is not an apology.

when you apologize, the focus should be on the person you hurt. “i’m sorry. i did something that was hurtful to you. even if i was having a rough time, you didn’t deserve to hear that,” is a better apology. if it was a small thing, you can leave it at that.

if you caused significant distress to the other person, this is a good time to talk about how you can minimize damage in the future. and again, even if it is tempting to say you should self-isolate and/or die, that is not a helpful suggestion. it will result in the person you’re talking to trying to talk you out of doing that, which makes your guilt the focus of the conversation instead of their hurt.

you deserve friendship, and you deserve support. but a supportive friend is not an emotional punching bag, and mental illness does not absolve you of responsibility for your actions. what you say during a mental breakdown doesn’t define you. how you deal with the aftermath though, says a lot.

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How To Keep Loving Someone

You have to love someone in the cracks between the big moments. You have to grab their hand when you’re sitting on the couch watching Shark Tanktogether and you have to give them a little knowing look that says, “I see you and I love you here in the mundane moments of our life.” You have to understand who you are, to dive deep into the wounds of your past so that you don’t bring those wounds into the present. You need to know when it’s about you or when it’s about them. You have to carry your own pain.

It’s easy to fall in love with someone, to bask in newly-minted intimacy and lose yourself in the romance. It’s easy to start a love. It’s the staying part. The keeping part. The difficulty comes in the life plus love part, when you’re trying to squish two people together to make a unit.

When life enters the picture — bills and payments and jobs and stress and divided attentions — that’s when love starts to feel less like a romance and more like a battle. This is when the best of intentions fall to dust, when two people who used to spend a day in bed with their bodies intertwined are arguing about the dishes — as if the dishes ever matter all that fucking much.

To keep loving someone is an art. The start is the easiest part. To keep loving someone, you have to suspend the present moment in your mind and remember why you decided to love this person in those first glittery months of newness. You have to be in love when you don’t feel any particular tenderness, when bills are late or the trash hasn’t been emptied or you’re feeling underappreciated or when the ugly monsters from your past have convinced you that what happened then — whatever heartbreak exists in your memory — is here and real and will happen again. You have to pretend to be in love when you’re terrified of disappointment, of trusting someone, of believing that the person you’re waking up next to won’t ruin you, because they could.Love is being acutely aware of how quickly someone could ruin you.

To keep loving someone is to know yourself and to know how your past weaves a story in your present. How the relationship you did or did not have with your parents informs the relationship you have with your partner — regardless of whether you want it to or not. To keep loving someone you must examine yourself. You can’t blame again and again and again. You cannot be a victim to your life. Sometimes you have to realize the problem is, in part, you.

To keep loving someone is to be exposed to a mirror image of how fucked up you might be and to have to keep facing that image over and over and over. To keep loving someone is to fight to deny the part of you that will always secretly believe you are unworthy of love, to not let that insidious little worm of a belief make its way into your consciousness and lay flame to your love, to your life.

To keep loving someone deeply and truly is to see your own self nakedly and to — as crazy as it is — show that naked self to another person. To expose that person to who you are, underneath the masks and the defenses and the walls. To so intimately and bravely say, “This is me. Take me as I am.” And then hope they do not walk away from that, from you, from the real you.

To keep loving someone is an act of bravery. While it deals with matters of the heart, it is not for the lighthearted. There is nothing weak about loving someone. Nothing timid about it. It is for the strong, the ones willing to let love ruin them.

Love is for the ones who will risk being rejected in the hope of being seen. These are the warriors, the ones not willing to give up on another person. The ones who will not hold their partner to an impossible standard without analyzing themselves first. The ones who will not blame, but will solve — together. The ones who, despite living in Disposable Culture, will not dispose of a person for some far-off idealization of a perfect person.

The ones who say — you are my person — and who will fight to make it work because love is worth fighting for. The ones who do not put their lofty ideas of happiness onto another person’s shoulders, but vow to make themselves happy first and then share it with a person who does the same. The ones who know the difference between a love worth going all in for and a love that is unnecessarily dampening them, a love that is depleting the both of them. The ones who will know when to walk away and when to stay. Who will walk or stay when it’s needed. The ones who will tell the truth — to themselves, especially, because it starts there.

To keep loving someone is a challenge for the strong-willed, the ones willing to stare down fear and best it every time. It’s a badge of honor — to keep a love alive. It takes all you have, but the beautiful things always do.

- Jamie Varon

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Labrador retriever + pug =

(his personality is 4000% pug tho)

crossbreeds are so cool

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I cut an old shirt up and I’m feeling pretty cute about it ~

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Why is the “historical realism” thing always rape?

A couple weeks ago The Mary Sue announced they weren’t going to cover “Game of Thrones” any more after yet another female character being brutally raped. The thread is still being invaded by trolls periodically, and there are more than 12,000 comments on the article, which is a site record and probably an internet record. (12K comments because a single website said “We’re not going to recap or promote this show any more.” Baffling.)

Tons of trolls have thrown out the “but THINGS WERE JUST LIKE THAT BACK THEN!” argument ad nauseum. Which is total bullshit, of course. Now with the season finale of “Outlander” (which, spoiler, also included rape) the trolls are coming back.

I just want to ask, why is it whenever producers/directors/writers want to demonstrate “gritty historic realism” it’s ALWAYS RAPE? It’s always sexual violence toward women/girls.

You know what would be gritty historic realism? Dysentery. GoT has battles and armies marching all over the place. You want to show “what things were like back then”? Why aren’t we seeing 500 guys by the side of a road puking and shitting their guts out from drinking contaminated water while the rest of the army straggles along trying to keep going? Or a village getting wiped out by cholera? Or typhus, polio or plague epidemics? 

You want to show what it was like back then for women? Show a woman dying of sepsis from an infection she caught while giving birth. Show a woman coping with ruptured ovarian cysts with nobody know what it is. Breast cancer that the audience will recognize immediately but the characters think is some mark of the devil or some shit.

But no, it’s always rape. And we all know why that is. Because these douchecanoes that do this, though they’ll deny it, think rape is sexy. Because they can’t make a modern set story where women get raped in every god damned episode without being called monsters. So they use “but but historical realism!” to cover their sexism (see “Mad Men”) and misogyny. Then they tell us “That’s just how it was back then!” with the clear implication “Shut the fuck up bitch, because that could be you  and you should be thanking me that it’s not.”

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My feminism has nothing to do with men. It is not defined as “equality for all genders”. It isn’t even about equality. I don’t want to be equal with men because I don’t like or want this patriarchy men have. My feminism is about liberation for all women, and an end of the oppression of all women, including women of color, immigrants, lesbians, and trans women. It is about equity- doing what is necessary to ensure everyone has a quality standard of life, has their human rights respected, and is free from oppression. I am not into definitions of feminism that are aimed at making feminism appear non-threatening to men. It IS threatening to them, and it should be.

Havlová commenting on this article. (via pneumode)

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Reaching myself how to make gifs without Photoshop. This isn’t anything special but it took me like 3 hours to figure out. I’m glad it’s of Buffy’s “I’m about to kick your ass” smile. 

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“My masculinity is NOT fragile!!! I’ll prove it!!!! I’ll BEAT UP WOMEN!!!!”

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And, at the end, when you’re in love, no matter what happens, you forgive each other. (insp)

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my future 9 year old child reading Harry Potter: I love this mommy me: great but stay open minded and critical and don’t take everything at face value. I have prepared discussion questions

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Don’t apologize for your dog coming up to me, that is exactly what I wanted

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The Day Beyoncé Turned Black SNL Skit

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by Find Chaffy

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I love seeing men gush about their relationships and the women they love. It’s time for the whole trope of men hating being married/ viewing relationships as things holding them back. Amen for men uplifting their women and their relationship. Amen for men getting choked up and ready eyes thinking about the one they love. Amen for men thinking of the woman they are with as their best friend.