A Minefield on a Thread

Today I did something healthy… and then I did something really not healthy.

I dealt with what felt like a rejection almost immediately. I started to walk around that rabbit hole of narcissistic injury, making it all about me me me me me, and I stopped. I felt the surge of abandonment and said to a friend, damn, I’m having that surge of abandonment.

I stopped. I looked at that deep stagnant well and remembered stepping in it sucks. I rarely find my way out without a lot of misery and to be honest, it’s been miserable enough lately.

I did. I addressed the rejection to find it wasn’t that at all. It wasn’t about me. Okay, a small part, but not a big one. In the long run, it was a productive conversation. I got clear, the party in question got clear, and all is well with the world.

Right?

Nope. Step into my world where triggers dot the landscape, with barely covered trip wires.

I went and did something really unhealthy. I can’t get into the specifics for fear of retribution. It doesn’t matter. I heard myself take care of someone who has been … well… I’ll leave that part for the book. Let’s just say I stepped into my dead mother’s skin.

It took a while to slowly work through my veins. The first piece was not about me- surprise- I heard myself asking someone who came from a far more abusive past than my own to face an open trench with my own rotting bones in it.

How could I do that to her?

Like poison, it finally clenched my heart. Why was I doing it to me?

It’s an issue my wife has slowly circled, like a cat. She never takes her eyes off it, waiting. Does she rush in and take over? I’ve shouted out lines of furious defense- I will do it my way. I need to take back the power stripped from me. I need to be in control.

I saw today, I am not in control. I think cautiously, and play a game of make believe. I look for permission. I make deals that crush my spirit. And I asked for it all.

All at once I am humiliated again. I am small and powerless. I smell the carpet of my youth pressed hard against my face. The weight on my back. I’m scared and I don’t see doors, only four walls. I feel every muscle grip for impact.

The kids are in the backroom, doing homework. An argument breaks out over who gets to use the pencil sharpener next while they share a snack of peanut butter and crackers. One of my old cats lies at my feet- the dog has abandoned me for hope of a dropped crumb. The carpet is hand woven silk with a beautiful tribal pattern, not olive green shag.


I’m trying to pull myself back through a minefield. Meditate on to the minutia of daily life, searching for the thread to pull me back. In my dreams, I feel the ground, I know I have to find it but I can’t see through the dust. It’s a tiny thread and no matter how hard I try, I can’t open my eyes.

No one can take anything away from me. No one can break me.

Dinner to cook. Baths, practicing instruments and reading time. I keep telling myself I can’t cry. I can’t break down in front of the kids. I can’t let them see this pain.

How many more times can I make it back?

Really Lousy Day

What a lousy day. Awful.

I could list the obvious for having a bad day- the day to day struggle with a preteen was wearing hard on me, the people buying my mother’s condo have ‘issues’ that came up during inspection and my car doesn’t work.

The truth is, I’ve been triggered again by a piece I’m writing. “Triggered” for those of you who don’t know, is when something comes up in day to day life, could be fairly benign to everyone else, that sets off the abuse memories again. For me, it makes it hard to breathe, I feel pressure on my back, and I feel pain in my hip.

Nothing to be done about it, but see it for what it is, go through it, and get to the other side. It is less painful now than it was a year ago. It takes a while for me to realize what is happening, but once I get the pain in my hip I know.

I forget what I went through, on a daily basis. Not entirely, but it doesn’t consume me like it did. I feel as though I am done.

I’m not. I will always hold pieces of the abuse. I will always be triggered by different things. There is the smell of wet canvas, or the sound my father made, and before I understand what has happened, a series of memories and images have begun to unfold.

It leaves me unfocused and I blur the lines between today and long ago. I get edgy, very negative, and afraid. Hopeless. Cramped into a small tent, a tiny apartment and I am caged again today.

I’m not.

I start crying over anything that comes up, like a car not starting. Or the prospect of having to fix a water stain on a wood floor in Florida. Or my son’s anguish spilling out all over the rest of the family in painful waves.

His struggle with his own demons leaves him angry and mean. He shouted at Jake yesterday that Jake sucked at art. That he would always suck at it and he was stupid for trying.

Jake came running in, crying, I’m going to throw everything away…

Oh, I get it. Ben’s jealous of Jake, Jake’s getting Ben in trouble. I know. I see the weave, I understand the pattern. I simply feel helpless to change it.

Today. I need to remember it’s today. The nightmares for the last few nights, the tears, the hopelessness, will fade. It’s not forever. The piece I’m writing is worth it. I have to get through to the other side.

If I throw my hands up and say I can’t, then I am the one who loses. No one else.


The condo will sell. The car will start, eventually. Ben is going to be okay. Jake will never give up art; it’s in his blood, just as is tattling on his older brother. I might suck as a parent some days, but not every day, and I try to learn from my mistakes.

I will never be in a canvas tent again. No one is pushing me down, holding my face to the ground. I can breathe. The pain is from years and years ago.

I will not let the trigger rule my life.

AND… it was a really lousy day today.

Open Doorway

I said there were a few moments of real clarity for me while I was away in Costa Rica. Some was inspired by the beauty around me. Some, from my friends, some my family. I would catch a glimpse of a look of astonishment on one of the kids faces, or listen to us all sing happy birthday. It moved me.

I keep going back to Elizabeth Gilbert’s book, "Eat, Pray, Love." A few lines stood out. One that did was a description of a soul mate.

“A true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that’s holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life. A true soul mate is probably the most important person you’ll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then they leave.”

I don’t think it’s about a soul mate, completely. I’ve had people- a very few- in my life who have shaken who I am, what I see, so intensely, I had to change. While being infatuated with each and every one of them., I didn’t necessarily sleep with all of them, so the soul mate description misses a little- I think of it as a mirror.

And when I think of a mirror, I think of someone very recent in my life.

My mirror was someone who had the same stories to tell, different characters, some different scenes. Played together, they were a symphony of discordant sounds, perfectly engineered, mathematically entwined and awful to hear.

We were both abuse survivors. She had recovered her memories years before. She pushed me- like a jackhammer on cement, a great force against an unrelenting object- to remember mine.

She told me a story about her grandfather’s basement, and I was in my own grandfather’s basement, with the tools and the workbench and the deer carcass, at times, waiting to be butchered.

The terror rose in my throat while I listened to her own. The rage was my own, it was hers, it was going back and forth so quickly I had no idea where it started and where it ended.

She would say to me, this is an incest thing. You don't even know, you haven't done the work. True at the time. It's like an out of body experience, I would explain.

She would nod knowingly, You need a level of intensity other people don't...

At a certain point, I stopped being afraid and simply let it happen. Everything was so out of control, why bother?

It was destined to end horribly. We were like fire, pushing each other, unable to draw boundaries, fighting like we’d known each other for 30 years.

We consumed each other’s pain.

I knew she needed someone calm. Rest. Peace. She needed someone to love her with kindness.

I knew because it was what I needed.

The connection we had shook me so hard, the layers it revealed bled uncontrollably. It was fucked up. It was about unbelievable understanding, a golden light of acceptance and searing images neither one of us could stand.

We cared too much about each other. We cared too much about ourselves.

I never want to go back. It was like a storm on the ocean, the waves beautifully crested with whitecaps, rising ten, twelve feet off the ground. You can ride them in, with a tremendous rush, but eventually, one is going to crush you, take your balance and leave you sucking in seawater.

It was a mirror reflecting all my fears. I saw a person who was unable to change, afraid to open her arms to any lover, chased by her demons every day of her life. I saw someone in the same place years after her memories came back. Someone who would hold her hand up and say STOP. NO. I CAN’T.

I couldn’t bear being that person. If I had to remember all these things, I had to be able to come out on the other side. I couldn’t live my life with the dreams every night. I tried to throw her on my own back and make her see she could, she had to…

Because I did. I had to. I had three kids and I could not be broken forever. I could not be afraid of their touch or to touch them; I could not eye every person who walked by wondering which one would hurt a child.

I imagine the reflection would have killed her, too. Too much pain to hold, barely limping along and watching yet another copy of herself limping along… I brought back all the dreams, the fears. My stories made the wounds new again, stirred up images put away in order to make it through each day. My held out hand was a ticket straight back to the deep, dark hole she had worked so hard to climb out of.

When I read the passage by Gilbert, I put down my book and started to cry. She wrote what I knew. It was too painful. It could never have lasted.

It wasn't meant to.

And I was so grateful. A gift, I realized. I no longer am walking through the world with my hand held up saying STOP. NO. I CAN’T.

For a long time, I missed my mirror. I missed being able to share the stories- not just the awful ones, but the good ones. The success.

And I read on, to this part:

“Send him love and light every time you think of about him, and then drop it. … If you clear out all that space in your mind to obsess about this guy, you’ll have a vacuum there, an open spot- a doorway.”

Instead of feeling like a failure for not being able to hold on, or that I needed her to know I was OK, how I made it through, I found that part of me filled with love and light, the part so grateful, the healed part, from my hammock in Costa Rica.

I closed my eyes and sent out my love. A joke I knew would make her laugh, and then I let it go. I didn’t wait to see the reaction, I didn’t imagine the response.

I just let it go.

I had let go of so much in the last couple years. The rage, the hurt, the betrayal all faded. But there was something so different in that moment.

I felt the doorway.

And I felt free.

Christmas Exorcism, Part II

I'm sick of it. I want it over. I want it gone. I am no longer a little girl. I am a parent. I am the mom. I don't want my kids to be writing this essay in twenty years, "and then my mom, unable to let go of the past..." I want them to have the joy I never did.

Screw joy, I just want them to have some semblance of normal. Of waking up too early, opening gifts, eye rolling at ugly gifts and then, before the sun is up, it's over. A day about them, not about my doom and gloom.

After all these years, that's what Christmas means to me. A single, once a year shot at family love that is destined to fail. I've long since given up trying with my family of origin. My father is still alive, somewhere and can burn in hell as far as I'm concerned. The unmentioned sibling remains unmentioned. My sister and I are close but we've carved out new traditions in an attempt to wash away the past etched on us like tattoos.

I want my family to be happy on June 6th. And February 20th. And a lot of other days in between. The china comes out when a crowd gathers for Sunday night dinner. Or Thursday night dinner. Or not at all and we eat on paper plates watching the Red Sox together.

My mother is dead now. There is no one left to please. No more family to pretend to be, no more forced smiles.

I always felt alone while doing my dance as a child. It was me and me alone that could make everything better. I'm sure each of my siblings thought the same; it’s the nature of being a child of an alcoholic. I never expected, after the final act, I would feel so abandoned.

Enough already. I have a full house, a full heart. The Fates only win if I let them. I need to take off the shawl of misery because it doesn't fit anymore.

It can't fit anymore.

Otherwise, my kids will end up chasing after the same unachievable dream of making their mother happy.

I may not be able to break all the cycles I grew up with, but I will break a few. My children will never be physically or sexually abused by their relatives. They will not feel responsible for my happiness or my sadness.

I will never be drunk in front of them.

And they will always remember me holding them.


Okay, that was REALLY depressing. Please remember? I’m sipping a pina colada in Costa Rica right now.

Really.

Sorry.

Christmas Exorcism, Part I

Christmas was always about my mother. I’m furious that it still is- she's been dead over a year.

I'm chasing a ghost's love. My mother is dead. And still, when the image of a mother holding a child is shown, about 8 million times a second this holiday season, all I think of is my mother holding me.

Or, in reality, not holding me.

I find it amazing that even after twenty years, twenty years spent in healthy, positive celebrations, I hate Christmas. I hate it more than any other time of the year. It brings me back to being a little girl pulling out the china, and polishing the silver. How I would set an elegant table, arranging the greens with ancient holiday decorations pulled from an old chest in the basement. The napkins would be folded carefully, my small hands pressing out any lumps or creases.

When will I ever get this monkey off my back? All the dreams, hopes and memories of Christmas, that mock me every year, taunt me into a stupor when now I have my own family, my own children to celebrate?

I want someone to shake holy water on me or chant Gaelic phrases until my brain is finally clear of old longings. I want to sit with my family- my children, my wife, my kids dads, my friends- around a beautifully decorated table, laugh, and tell stories. I want love to fill my home without the old shadows. I am loved and celebrated in my family. My kids are fairly normal and healthy. I have good friends who know me and still love me even though I send too many emails, whine too often about my wife's work schedule.

I look at my family of origin and it's not exactly a Norman Rockwell painting. It’s not even a Budweiser commercial: my father a paranoid schizophrenic, my mother an alcoholic of prolific proportions. My father sexually abused my sister and me and there is another sibling who will sue my ass off if I mention anything specific about them.

Family love. I have had it hurt so deeply I wanted to die. My father's creepy insistence I get into the bathtub at his apartment while he watched etched noises he made into my mind that cannot be scrubbed away. Being held face down to carpets long enough to have imprints on my face and smells of feet, dog pee and mold forever in my nose until I cried out in humiliation are gifts I received from my family.

Thanks.

But there is my family love. My kids. My beautiful boys who believe they can be rock stars, or inventors, or scientists. My wife who drives me nuts on a daily basis and still makes me smile when she puts her icy feet on me in the middle of the night. Walter and Allan, who eagerly signed on to be the kids dads even though there would be no legal recognition and every single person they meet would feel free to ask, "But are they really yours?"

That's my family. Not the past ghosts. Not my mother. Out, out! I want to scream. Leave me alone!

I wanted something beautiful. I wanted my family to love each other. Mostly, I wanted my mother to be happy. And to hold me. Not because of what I saw on advertisements or television shows but because my very core depended on it. Abandoned by my birthmother, I could not risk being anything less than loveable.

My mother adopted three children from three different birthmothers, all disgraced by society for being pregnant without rings of at least promise and handing over their newborn infants to complete strangers. Three children with empty holes for early memories, filled with fear. If we could be given up once, we could be given up again.

The table would be set, the gold leaf bone china an elegant off white, sparking in the candlelight. Every year I would set it on Christmas Eve, ready for the next day. Every year, from the time I was very small to the time I finally left home.

In perfect synch, my mother would get drunk on Christmas Eve. As my table would wait for the promise of laughter, celebration and cheers, my mother would pour another bourbon and water. She would cry and tell us with slurred, elegant words about how much she loved us, what a failure as a parent she was. We would all sit, terrified she'd turn, never knowing what we could do to make it all right. To have her feel loved so she would not be so sad.

It was the only time of the year she ever said anything kind about my father. She would acknowledge, only for a brief moment, there was a time he was a kind and gentle person. Before he was sick. Before the voices in his head took over and instructed him to do horrible things. She needed us to know she would not have married such a broken, twisted man.

We would go off to bed, finally, when she had enough liquor, when her tears were dried. She would playfully remind us no presents until the first cup of coffee was made, and we would all run to bed, giggling, as if we believed in Santa Claus.

I fell asleep every Christmas Eve filled with hope. I hoped when my father showed up in the morning, he would not fight with my mother. I hoped my mother would not find reason to hate him again until the end of the day. I hoped we would all sit around the table and love each other. At least for the day.

We never did. By morning, my mother would be spitting fire before my father even walked in the door. He was always late, always brought snow in the house on his shoes, always had something disgusting stuck in his moustache.

It was clear no family love was going to happen before the first cup of coffee was finished. But I still had my mother to please.

I would plaster a smile on my face and be the master of ceremonies, crawling under the tree, handing out gifts to everyone. I would refill coffee cups for both my parents, I would ooo and ahh over even the most ridiculous gifts. I smiled even when my father would buy little girl gifts for me that made my skin crawl.

And then my moment would finally come. We would sit around the table, my father would say a blessing as was required when he was at the head. For a brief moment, I would squeeze my eyes shut and pray.

Please. Please let Mom be happy.

Every year.

She never was.