Memories: 20 May 2025

20 May 2025

…

12:49 pm I have deconstructed the badly soldered “arm” on my cuff. Also soldered the other arm properly this time. I am going back in to re-solder this arm. Then all is left to do is clean up, polish then set the stone.

I am so proud of myself. I had a mini breakdown last night of which I made a video about my silversmithing failure last night (after hours and hours of persevering!) I am utterly exhausted from the self-imposed stress but deep down I know I can succeed at this piece and have it all done properly and then I will feel accomplished and proud of myself, knowing that I am not THE “universal schmuck” or an arse-kicked “victim” anymore.

This is more than just creativity…this is confidence building, being good at something I enjoy and setting a standard for myself instead of settling for less and lesser! Like the Pegasus embellishments…symbols of freedom…I need to fly high. Not too high to be destroyed but high enough that I can exist in this world in a different or perhaps better way.

Not accepting my “station” imposed upon me by Abusers: societal and interpersonal but looking down at myself with compassion, with Corazon and with courage. I will persevere so I will make ALL my dreams come true…even if it’s only a silly cuff I worked so hard to “perfect”….Yeah Babies! Rock On Psychedelic Dreamer/The Tanya/Mama T! Let’s do this!

It’s been tumbled. Now to set the stone and finish off with polishing. Manana…à demain….tomorrow. The Tanya is utterly exhausted!

https://youtu.be/-XAfajLaQt4

…

6 hours sleep…successfully made my cuff (which took all day and lots of persevering and re-soldering…arghh.) I cleaned the bird cages. Now eating pizza for dinner as I feel utterly exhausted.

My most creative productive “breakdown” ever…not quite a breakdown…more an epic fucking Breakthrough. I worked hard on the cuff for the past three days.

Tomorrow I will set the stone. Maybe…if I am not too exhausted. lol.

20 May 2024

I had a bad night last night. I had to get up to pee 8 times. Exhausting. So I didn’t do much today. Made my daily vlog. Then took things easy.

This Friday I have an appointment at Mater Private to measure my flow rate. That should be interesting.

It was a lovely sunny day today. Vast blue skies, no clouds. It even felt slightly warmer by midday. I had a walk around the block with Charley. I felt happy.

20 May 2023

8:45 pm not well. Coughing up phlegm. Yuck. I drank some mullein tea to try to drive it off my chest. It’s definitely working. No wonder I felt “off” the past few days.

I considered going out dancing again this evening but I better stay warm and dry and guard my chest instead. I guess working through that bad cold the last week and a half has left me depleted and fragile.

…

39 years ago I was a bride. This began the invidious chipping away at my personhood. It began shortly after the wedding ceremony when my groom insisted I get changed out of my bridal clothes so he could feel more comfortable. I was not allowed even one special day.

I should have realised there and then that I had married a man baby and a monster. But I launched myself into denial and thought that being a wife was “success”. I threw myself into motherhood with great zeal hoping against hope to create the loving family I had never experienced.

I almost succeeded at that. I worked hard to hold my little family together. To hold myself together but like a taut spring it all eventually unravelled.

39 years later….

I am….here. 28 and a half years of solitude. Another 8 years of celibacy. Stronger, taut but no longer unravelling. Like a re-grown umbilicus I am tethered to this world in ways I never thought possible. Holding my own…making my own way. Thriving…even with bad lungs and cptsd.

I was a powerful little spirit to even have survived to be that young trusting-in-the-multiverse Bride. And now….I am still powerful. But shit got real and I can never look at life with such benighted sweetness again.

….

2:29 am home from dancing. I left at 1:38 am having run out of my energy reservoirs. I had a nice time though. I got home and heated up spring rolls and chicken schnitzels for my “dinner”. I was hungry!

Time to drink my tea and wind down a bit before I go to sleep.

Update 20 May 2025: Once I was a bride. A 20 minute ceremony. It took me ten and half years to finally extricate myself from that situation. He continued to abuse me for another ten until my kids grew up (or he did!)

I never ever want to marry ever again. It was an epic hell loop. Yes…there were a few good times…but not enough to warrant being chained to a treacherous sadistic man.

My friend Heather Abramson says he would have been okay if my mother hadn’t been so vicious and interfering. Alas…no. She was a narcissist and he is a dull intellect psychopath. Those types never ever change or evolve.

It’s why I get very leery or reactive when I see similar behaviours in men. I’ve put in 30 years of therapy. 5 years self help books initially, then 25 years with three different psychiatrists trying to heal my own childhood trauma which was immense and cumulative.

This is as good as I will ever be. 9 years (in June) free of psych meds…constantly setting myself free of abusers and abuse dynamics up to and including the Covidian Insanity.

Some days are just harddd and I wish I had a real love in my life. Then I remember the enormous sacrifices I made for my peace, my safety, my well being. A life lived alone…even at 60 is not so bad. Preferable to living with fake evil superficial cruel people. I almost didn’t survive “Them!”

But here I am…holding my Sacred Space and my shit together. Staying free, wild and happy.

20 May 2022

Reviewing my memories, I am struck by how far I have come in 38 years. A long hard agonised road. A miracle that I even survived so many attempts on my life. The physical, the emotional and even the demonic destruction wrought by knaves.

Yesterday I had a strange kind of stoicism, an equanimity tinged by a kind of bathos. It’s like my whole body was somatising old trauma memories and the grief of losing Harry Arons all those years ago. I rarely think about him now but the 18th May was his Yahrzeit so he was with me in thought all day.

A few days ago I found myself ruminating about my nephew Mark Cohen. It had been lovely to reconnect with him in 2019 but we are estranged again.

I was reminded of him telling me in all sincerity that he had loved me so much as a little boy (he was 9 years old when I married his uncle, myself only a month older than 19) as I had been so nurturing to him and that when I migrated to Brisbane four years later he cried for months as he felt bereft and abandoned and left alone with his awful callow unsupportive parents.

My heart bled as I know how that feels. To have idealised another human as some kind of protector or saviour only to discover that I too was discarded or left behind or simply forgotten in the hustle and the hurdy gurdy of life.

I more than anyone understands the grief of a child who craved love, support and genuine care only to have that ripped away, time and again.

I thought about reaching out to him again but it seems inappropriate somehow.

I can’t be there for him. Some days I still struggle to be there for/with my self. So I send him love and fortitude.

He was not the only person to tell me they felt utterly shattered when I left NZ and grieved my departure for many months. I must have made some kind of big impression on people in my teenage years and early 20s. Astonishing!

Me…who even at that time was just emotionally treading water with an already defunct marriage and two small babies.

Fuck! What a nightmare…what a curse. But I have been loved even if only from great distances, or lateral squarings off as not many could handle a closer connection with me. Hell, even some of the worst of my enemies (eg David Davidson) would not leave this mortal coil without a very determined long goodbye. A haunting or a hunting from the Void!

Well Mama T is a zombie no more. She is a fully fleshed out cognisant living entity with so much love yet to give in spite of her residual scars and trauma issues. She is full of Joie de Vivre and a twinkle in her own eyes that she developed with wry mirth and circumspection at all the two bit players in her life.

She is in constant communion with the gods now. Old age is not for sissies. Writing this at 4:25 am because my Frankenstein bladder demanded release and my sleep deprived brain had to comply.

Mama T is a walking automaton most days but the lights are on and I am home. I see what I need to see. I live in harmony with what is/was/and always shall be and sometimes I laugh at all the ghastly horror and regurgitated spiritual lessons that hit me like a flying fish in turgid seas.

Love has found me. I have found Love and it has been both a blessing and a curse, a hope, a desolation and a constant respiration. Holding my heart together after every rebound, every attack and still beating its weird little cosmic song for my long lost beloved ones.

The ones who died, the ones who failed to love me in a healthy caring way, the ones who turned love to ash and yet from those ashes sent forth the rose of my new blossoming burgeoning creative self.

Sigh.

Back to sleep I go. Sayonara sweethearts. Love everyone and everything but love for real. Suffer no fools or fakes. The heart heals but it takes eons. It bears strange fruits and even stranger calibrations.

I prayed for healing. I prayed for truest deepest love. It is coming in perfect timing and perfect alignment. Faith and that freckled digit dodger of fate have had their fun. Time to get serious. Life is slowly slipping me by.

Good morning! I love you. I see you. I hold space for you.

20 May 2020

I was beset by an intense emotional heaviness yesterday. This morning my memories of my youthful folly.

How life has evolved since then! I can even taste occasional happiness. Mixed with Victory. It took 36 years. To Become. I am glad I made it. I never thought I would see this day.

Crystal is visiting me this afternoon. A treat! So I need to get out of bed and get ready!

I spent some time late last night updating details on Harry and Hilda’s ancestry. I honour their memory as the grandparents of my daughters even as I acknowledge the harm done to me by their son. It’s not all his fault. He lacked capacity and I lacked the will to be a submissive ground down Victim. Totally unsuited to each other. Also he truly slavishly served as my mother’s henchman. Sick evil shit.

But I got two daughters out of that fucking travesty and one still strives to maintain some sort of relationship with me so that is a positive.

I wasted my youth and my 30s and 40s on Abusers. But somehow along the way I got Me back. A miracle.

20 May 2019

I am haunted by the Holocaust and my German ancestry. Not just because I am a Jewish convert but that I am a second generation survivor of my monstrous abusers, my mother Gisela Eva Margaretha Phillips (later Scherer but I refuse to acknowledge that conman’s marriage) and my de facto stepfather Cornelis “Cees” Van Der Greft.

He who survived Mittelbau-Dora in Nordhausen only, almost 2 decades later, to constantly threaten yours truly with molestation and rape from ages 9- 15 and then again with inappropriate attempts to touch me when I was pregnant at 20. Both him and my progenitor. Vile abusive men.

Then I was expected to help him die with dignity in his last weeks and months. Expected to tell his hospital bedmate that he was my father. No father to me. Not even my own father deserved that moniker.

But I was a merciful young woman so I lied and claimed him as “father”. Sickened to my core so he could die “happy”. I vowed never to protect anyone’s sensibilities again. I had a breakdown shortly after his death. I cleaved to my Truth. It almost killed me many times but ultimately it also set me free.

So it is a tad disturbing and ironic that a younger man at the Casino frequently approaches me and hugs me and tells me “I love you”. I had thought he was Irish but I found out he is half-German. Like me he is Wild and joyous in his style of dancing. He is affectionate and sweet. A kind soul. Or that is how he has presented himself to me.

So he sat beside me on Saturday night to have a brief chat. A younger woman sat beside us and he turned his head, almost reflexively, and with much amusement I told him to chat to her. “No” he says “No, it’s you I want to talk to”.

I told him, “I hear you are German” delivered with a smile. He replies “Half-German”. I nod. “Father or mother?” He replies “Father!” I reply “I am half-German too...my mother”. He looks at me. Not particularly surprised.

I ask “where was your father born?”

“Hamburg”

“Wow, my mother was from Hamburg too!”

He says “Oh wow”.

I asked him how old his father is. He tells me he is 65 and married to his Australian mother. I nod. I tell him my mother was much older as she had me late in life at 38 and has been dead for 9 years now.

I refrain from telling him she was a fucking monster to me. Too much information but he sensed the sadness seeping out of me anyway.

I tease him about his eagle tattoo. I tell him it’s the symbol of the Reich. “No” he replied “I researched it well. It is much older than the Third Reich symbol”. I nod. Not sure if he is correct but not willing to fight over a fucking tattoo, especially as I proudly sport the Burning Bush with Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh “I am That I am” on my left arm, where Tefillin would be worn if I had been born a man and kept the faith.

Suddenly, stoicly, with my Germanic mannerism of pushing out my chin (because you know fucking genetics and mannerisms are often imitated by our children lmao) I tell him firmly “you know I am a Jew, although not a very practising one any more”. He nods. Says “I love you”. I nod.

I was not sure how to take that as a response but authentic kind love heals all divisions: gender, class, religion, race, and really, really there should be more Love in the world, even now in 2019 no wonder I cleaved to my Love for that Machiavellian English wiglet. I wanted more from Love. I wanted someone not with ancestral alliances with murderers and/or rapists or child molesters. I want someone real and safe and pure of heart.

But I look into the black mirror and I carve my own heart, wasted on illusions of a life reconfigured and blessed. It’s an ancient 54 year old agony.

20 May 2017

I really overdid things yesterday. Oh my! I wish I had power surges of energy that last most of the day and night more often but the price is too hefty. Mama T gotta accept she is not able to sustain that.

I had a nice night dancing with Karen and Tichsia. I came home at 3 am, took a hot bath, ate some yoghurt and hot tea, took my Seretide puffer and that upset my delicate little flower of a stomach. I was quite ill. So hit the hay and passed out.

Now awake at 11.31 am, dressed, let chooks out, Charlie on back table.

Ready for whatever life's adventures have in store for me again. Sick or not, The Tanya Tempest must Roll on.

At least the sun is shining again. They forecast 3 days of rain. Yesterday drizzled all day but not too much. I knew it was baloney as the ants were not moving house to higher ground.

I am glad Townsville finally got wet!!

20 May 2014

9.40 pm just got woken up by a phone call from Sydney. Some drunk woman saying "Hello World" then she hung up. She sounded a tad like my sister.

Please tell me she is not visiting Heidi in Sydney and prank calling me. That would be just sick shit. Lmao. Hopefully my foggy brain that is utterly exhausted misheard the voice.

Hello World!!! Indeed! I am going to get up, pee, and heat up some soup. I’m starving!

…

So still not asleep, 6.07 am. Car goes in at midday. Queen of Sabotage here! Oh well, 50 mgs of Seroquel should do it. Then I will have to hope I wake up! I am hungry too. Maybe I should just get up and make semolina pudding. Stodge might make me soporific.

…

30 years ago today I got married for the first and only time. It wasn't a very joyous day. My father in law had died 2 nights before. We were all very sad and traumatised from his quick demise with stomach and bowel cancer.

I had grown to love the old man. He was and still is, more of a man than his son. He taught me hebrew prayers and blessings in his strongly accented Ashkenazi with his Polish accent. He told me stories about his childhood in Baranovich.

He was high on morphine for the last 4 weeks of his life and he flirted with my german mother, telling her stories about his kids in Yiddish which she managed to understand well, somehow.

My mother in law Hilda got jealous and threw us out but it was funny as I had never seen Harry so happy and animated as when he talked to my mother in Yiddish. My mother had a way of bringing even dying men back to nostalgic life. I had a fight with my fiance at the time as my mother in law had lied and said we were disturbing Harry.

Hilda insisted we get married according to plan as it was what Harry wanted. I had dressed in my wedding gown a week or so before so he could see me in it and I was a bit perturbed when he said "It’s a lovely dress but pity it's not green!" His favourite colour. So I promised him there would be plenty of green in the bouquet and he smiled and nodded, satisfied with that.

I promised I would give him Jewish grandchildren and he was both relieved and delighted. It is a great shame he did not live to see his beautiful granddaughters. Especially Jasmine who looks so much like him and Crystal who at times, looks eerily like Hilda.

Anyway 30 years has gone like a blink in the eye. I have endured so much suffering at the hands of my former husband, his sister and brother in law, and my own family. All I have left of that original core family is Crystal.

Harry thought I was someone special as I was intelligent, courageous and determined. I think I was the only member of that family, new or old to have stood up to him and he loved me and respected me for it. I think he would have been proud of my efforts to keep my vow to him, and raise the girls Jewish.

It wasn't easy, after the divorce with no money to educate them at Sinai College and I had to turn to friends for help, without whom, I could not have kept the car registered to drive the kids to school each day. A 40 minute round trip to Burbank and back, twice daily.

Those were very fraught, hard times made harder by so much maliciousness on several fronts that I had a breakdown (the first of several) and in many ways have never fully recovered.

So I will never regret leaving that marriage, or my former family and it is sad that I never found a real love partner again.

I know Harry would have wanted the best for me and his granddaughters. I think deep down he knew I was too strong and smart for his son.

In the hospital, before he died he bought me a lovely perfume for my 19th birthday and his eyes sparkled with delight when I said how much I loved it. I have never been able to bring such simple joy to a man's eyes, not then and not ever since.

Well, after men trying to kill or destroy me for the next 30 years it is hard to trust the sparkles in their eyes.

I hope one day a man will love me with such kindness, respect and adoration as my father in law did. He was a wonderful 'father' to me, unlike my own father, de facto step-father, and godfather who were all such creeps.

Men have come and gone in my life and I am sure many more will come to tease and tantalise and then abandon me but Harry. He was a rare breed. A real man.

20 May 2012

My former Wedding Anniversary today. 28 years ago. So much for the better from that determined but naive young woman of 19. Married into a family of Sociopaths almost Wicked enough to be a Match for my own Sociopathic narcissist mother. I was basically out of the Frying pan and back into the fire.

My first regret... Not leaving earlier when Micheal let his brother in law Jacques attack me in my newborn daughter's Nursery, and not cutting permanent ties to my rotten mother when she threw me down the stairs two weeks before my wedding. Being a good kind decent daughter and one-time wife has brought me no good. None at all.

Copyright Tanya Désirée Arons