Worth Writing

Signs of life

I’m feeling a little different these days.  There are signs of a return to Steph, if not exactly Life, “Life” as in “bursting with energy, creativity, and celebration.”  It may be the result of new medication, but it may also be the result of a new bra.  No, no!  Don’t “pshaw” me!  You have no idea!  I read an article stating that a remarkable number of us are wearing the wrong bra sizes/shapes and wondered about myself.  I had myself all figured out (sorry for the pun there) years ago, but have since gained much weight and changed shape a bit.  Upon redoing the proper calculations I was stunned by how much I’d changed.  Off I went to the store and for a few days now I have been lounging around in the correct bra size and shape marveling over the lack of physical discomfort and wondering how it was possible I ever got so used to it that I never even considered it to be a sign that something was very wrong. 

The only answer I can come up with is that as the changes were accruing around my chest area, discomfort was becoming the norm in my heart and mind as well.  Gradually, it just all blended together and I could no longer identify the sources of various and sundry pinches, pulls, pokes, pushes, or note whether they were mental, emotional, or physical.  Mental and emotional distress always becomes physical. 

Besides alleviating a long-present ache n my back, I have divested myself of another physical irritation in this past couple of weeks: hair rubbing my neck.  Do I hear you laughing at me?  *smile*  S’okay.  Even I have to laugh at the wonder of what small annoyances can do to me given enough time.  Simple, my hair has been too long for too long and I wouldn’t cut it because (1) I believed it was more womanly, and (2) it was the first time it had been long since my mother chopped it off without my permission when I was young.  I felt that the long hair was like having something back that I’d lost, both because of my mother and life circumstances that had recently attacked my womanhood.  The long hair was an act of self-love and of defiance.  However, the feeling of hair constantly rubbing around my neck and shoulders was making me nuts.  I put my hair up in a pony tail every chance I got to spare myself the irritation (not an attractive look for my broad face).  Finally, I had to admit it was only sane to relieve myself of what discomfort I could considering how awful I’ve felt for so long now.  Against the protestations of my hairdresser I got the cut I wanted and I love it.  A week later I still love it.  Most importantly, I sit here with my journal wearing the right bra and smiling as my hair does not constantly fall in my face while I try to write!

But there’s bigger stuff afoot.  It’s a sign of life that even those who have never been depressed can relate to.  It shocked me when it happened.  Right out of the blue!  I had a chill I couldn’t shake and so I went into the bedroom to grab a towel for a quick hot bath, looked around the room and thought, “I’d like to change this.  When I get out of the bath I’m going to rearrange the furniture.”  Just like that!  LOL  Since I was small and figured out I could move big stuff by sitting with my back against big-heavy-thing and pushing with my legs against another big-heavy-thing, I have been The Re-Arranger.  Everyone who comes into my home knows I’m not well when things have sat in one place so long a great blanket of dust has been allowed to descend like a death shroud.  When there is no Life in me there is not Life in my house.  But last night something moved me to move something!  Woo hoo!

I like the new arrangement well enough to be sitting in the room now on the dog’s couch/bed writing in my journal and consoling the couch’s owner who does not like the new arrangement at all.  Okay, so it’s a long way from returning to my artwork, but re-envisioning anything is starting down the path toward it. 

I can try to make this sound exciting or funny, but I have to admit to myself that I’m basically saying, “I got a haircut, I bought a new bra, and I re-arranged my bedroom furniture.”  Big flipping deal.  Well…here’s the way it is: I can choose to compare these signs of life (where there were none at all before) with what an energetic, healthy person does every day including working eight hours on top of the bra shopping, hair cutting, and furniture arranging and let it push me back onto the couch under the enormous invisible weight of hopelessness, or I can try to stop worrying about looking pathetic and put my energy into getting better.  I can choose to point to these signs of improvement and shout, “Land ahoy!  Land ahoy!”  LOL  I have been, after all, forever and ever adrift. 

Last night my mate drew his fingers sweetly along the length of my arm and the sensation made me shiver with delight.  I mean just OUT of this world YUM!  This is not some new move.  We’ve been together for twelve years.  There are no new moves left.  For such a long time, however, that same move that used to make me shiver with delight left me totally underwhelmed.  Most people don’t know that being depressed means often not being able to feel physical pleasure anymore. Many people know we simply no longer enjoying activities like reading or gardening, but how many of you know that food often loses its flavour, that hot showers and other acts of care which used to bring physical pleasure only highlight how numb the body has become to fine sweet touches.  Last night, however, I shivered for the first time since god-who-knows and I was so surprised I blurted out, “I’m gonna live!” and laughed, but I wasn’t laughing because it was funny.  I was relieved.  I was really beginning to wonder. 

The Legacy

Leaving is my legacy, leaving and being left behind, as well as isolation and self-silencing.  I began my study for the aforementioned at the age of four when Mother gave me half a little white pill with the instructions to ‘take it and disappear’, Alice down the rabbit hole.  Many tears, fears, and years later I don’t need any magic or potions to make like Alice and skedaddle. A few doctors have labeled it “depression” and treated it as such, and some others still wonder if it is something more than that; what remains obvious to all is that I spend most of my life with my feet permanently dangling down the rabbit hole ready to leap or fall in for a ‘time out’ of sorts, a frequent ‘disappearing’. 

So there you go.  Now you know where I’ve been since my last post: I tumbled down the bunny chute again.  Usually I’m simply inactive, both creatively and emotionally disconnected while in there, but it doesn’t feel particularly bad, nor like much of anything at all unless my mind decides to ‘ride me’ for not being and active, life-loving member of society.  This last time was just awful because on some level I was enjoying the freedom of the daily writing about my childhood; a story long overdue for the telling.  When I fell in the familiar dark hole where the words won’t come or go, and all I could do was sit and stare up, way, way up the tunnel to the patch of blue where the words and willingness fly I found myself still attached enough to suffer deeply with regret for my consistent loss of energy, of life, of self.  It is like a temporary death, one that I am tired of mourning. 

And so I am on one last great search for a way out, a way up, something more than this constant lessening of myself before I give up entirely on having a life and eating it too.  Yes, “eating it too.”  I’ll mix any damn metaphor I want here!  A woman’s life is supposed to nourish her, fill her up, sustain her, and make her strong!  It can’t do all that if she just stands back and stares at it, for god’s sake.  She’s got to gorge herself on it.  That said; no I don’t.  But I did. 

My life has been chaos to chaos to chaos…you get the picture.  My childhood was mental and emotional chaos.  My teenage years were more of the same kind of chaos with behavioral insanity thrown in.  In my twenties I enjoyed the chaos of breaking free fro active abuse in my life and learning to love being alive.  It was wonderful, but it was high chaos no less.  Then…oh then…came the love of my life and two children of the wildest variety.  Oh my!  Need I label it?  Then very wild years!  Those years were capped off by two of the most heartbreaking and devastating imaginable and my life was totaled.  It has been a while now since the tragic ending of my motherhood, and though I still feel as though I have fallen off the face of the earth and not yet returned, I am beginning to suspect my undoing may turn out to lead to my final salvation from this endless maddening disappearing-down-the-rabbit-hole trick.

My last years with those wild girls in our wild and incredible life together are unmatchable, so totally irreplaceable, that I have not been able to move on with my life since then, since them.  The result is what seems like a terrible depression, but it is also the absence of chaos.  The pattern has finally been broken.  Perhaps now, if someone can de-condition my seemingly permanent Alice-hood, I will be able to choose what life to live next. 

Speaking of de-conditioning, I recall one person suggesting in a comment on an earlier post using the art of distraction as a way of sort of tricking myself out of my frequent forays into rabbit-hole reveries and regretful idleness.  And an “art” it is because having tried it over the last couple of weeks I’ve found it very difficult, often beyond my ability at the time, but worth practicing.  The poor dear took some flak for the mention of it as it accompanied a comment that included the term “self-pitying”, and I am still considering her words.  It isn’t the distant past I feel sorry for myself about, but for this fatigue that won’t let me be, jut be, won’t let me just live my life with enough energy to enjoy it.  But she got me, didn’t she?  She saw it.  She named it.  Smart, brave cookie.

And for my real big trick…!  I don’t have one.  Sorry.  I would have pulled it off LONG ago if I had one.  I’m still working my way out of the hole.  I walked a few blocks over yonder to get a new haircut, baked a meatloaf, and walked the dog.  That constitutes a resoundingly successful day of late, but no ‘real big tricks’ to amuse and delight an audience.  All I can do today is survive some more and keep up the search for something that will spin the magic I need to make it possible for me to once again be able to do more than merely survive my life.  Life with my Love and my girls was chaos and it was painful and it was scary and it was difficult, but it was also hilarious and exhilarating and it made me feel extremely alive.  Is it too much to ask to want to be returned to Life?

In Good Standing

In the comment section at the bottom of each entry people have been very supportive and kind.  I have also received numerous private emails of the same sort in which I have repeatedly been called “courageous” and “strong”.  I’ve been uncomfortable with the complimentary statements about my character but didn’t know what to say.  However, a recent comment, similar to others, regarding what appears to be my generous capacity to love has finally got me on the mats.  It’s time to admit that I can’t for the life of me see why others see me as courageous or strong.  I totally buckled under the stress and pain and became a pill-popping alcoholic avoider of Life from childhood to my mid-twenties.  I managed to quit killing myself slowly at that point, slough off the agonizing self-pity and rage, and put together some semblance of a life.  That was extremely frightening and difficult, but I just don’t see where the courage part comes in.  I simply reached a point where I was either going to kill myself and let my entire existence be pathetic from beginning to end, or I was going to grab hold of some small measure of peace and self-respect before it was all over.

Letting go of the anger was a compromise.  As my sister and parents demanded continually that I behave with gratitude toward my parents ‘for all they’d done for me’ and realize how lucky I was to have them, I finally reached my saturation point of Gall and reasoned I’d meet them half way: they’d never get respect and gratitude they didn’t earn or deserve, but I’d stop seething with resentment and just call the past a ‘write off’, accept that my early years were ‘totalled’ emotionally.  I would not fill the humble dutiful daughter role, but I would halt the dance of anger.  Unfortunately for them it was only then I realized my anger was the only thing holding me to them. 

As for the comment about my capacity to love, from the time I was very young I was bombarded with accusations that I wasn’t capable of considering or caring for anyone but myself.  To this day my sister claims vociferously that I am sick (based on my rejection of my parents), that I have a serious narcissistic disorder and must seek treatment for my sake and for the sake of all others.  (Wow. Just have to say ‘wow’) She obviously grew up listening to what my mother and father were yelling at me but never questioned their reasoning.  My sister isn’t welcome in my life anymore because about three years ago, thereabouts, I simply got fed up with her raving in my face and demanding that I admit to her diagnosis of my social and emotional inadequacies.  The ridiculousness of it alone with the presence of loving relationships in my life was frustrating the bejeezus out of me even if she wasn’t breaking the skin.

Admittedly, however, I struggle with fears that I am as selfish and greedy as I’d been defined by my family.  Yes, I have been giving and unselfish, but have I been that way often enough?  I have fears that the moments of greed and selfishness collected are greater than time spent behaving otherwise.  It pains me to think my family’s lack of respect or feeling for me has any basis.  These fears are – I realize – all caught up with the argument over my parents’ supposed sacrifices and generosity toward me in later years.  I am always concerned that my gestures of love and support are as trivial as their gestures were in the grand scheme of things. 

It is important to me to be as honest as I can about who and how I am and it disturbs me greatly to be seen as greater than or less than that.  At the end of the day all I really have to call my own is my character, the real foundation for me life regardless of where I live, who loves me, or what I own.  It matters most that I behave like the kind of person I can respect.  Yes, it is sad that I am constantly questioning whether I have achieved and maintain that goal.  Taking stock of one’s life is a matter of awareness; ceaselessly going over the same stock is a lack of faith. 

Family ties

When my mother returned home from PEI where she witnessed her brother’s death I sat on the end of my parent’s bed as she unpacked and waited for her to cry.  When she didn’t show any signs of tearing up after a while I made some remark about her not crying, though I can’t remember what it was now.  I do remember her response being that “there’s nothing to cry about.  He’s gone.  It’s over.”  I was not about to accept that.  Not after Geordie.

When we were in grade one or two, around there somewhere, the next door neighbour boy about my age, Geordie, was hit by a car outside the school.  When he died later in the hospital my mother came to inform me of the (to her) solemn news.  I was sitting at a small desk in my bedroom when she came into the room openly weeping, a confusing sight I’d only seen once before.  When she sobbed, “Geordie is dead,” my gut reaction was relief and I said simply, “Good.” 

Oh. Man.  Wrong answer.  Her face contorted in rage and she clocked me on the side of the head so hard I fell of my chair onto the floor.  I remember looking up and seeing her through blurred vision obviously yelling at me but hearing it like it was way off in the distance, but mostly hearing just a loud buzzing sound.  I got the gist of what I couldn’t hear though: you cry when people die, no matter what.

I utterly loathed and feared the kid.  To this day I maintain there was something seriously wrong with the boy.  He used to hide behind bushes to catch me unawares, then knock me down and shove dirt and grass in my mouth.  If he saw me on my bicycle he’d chase me and push me over.  I would go home crying to my mother with skinned whatever and bloody something, tell her what he did, and she’d say that she didn’t believe me, that he wouldn’t do such a thing and I’d made it up.  Time and again.  I learned never to ride my bike when I was alone except in circles on the driveway.  He would also collect his dog’s poo off the lawn and throw it at me, or smear it on me with a stick if he could sneak up close enough.  Whenever I wasn’t ready on time to leave for school with my brother, the neighbour psycho-boy was absolutely guaranteed to catch me and shove me painfully face first into one of the many stands of bushes on the way to school.  Yes, I thought it was a very good thing for me that he was suddenly gone.  It was like a gift from the universe. 

I was thinking about the unfortunate events of his death announcement as I poked and prodded my mother for information about her brother’s death, determined to make her cry.  I was a teenager at that point and used to her rage if she should happen to snap that way instead.  But she did cry.  He was her younger brother and she loved him very much.  It turns out that he was an alcoholic that died of cirrhosis of the liver.  “He used to be a big man,” she wept.  “He used to be a great big strapping 300 pound man!”  She told me he was tall, but I forget how tall.  “When he was dying [another brother] picked him up in his arms and cradled him like a baby.  He’d just wasted away to nothing.  He was just skin on bones!”  She wept bitterly as she told me how he’d asked for more alcohol even on his hospital death bed.  She kept saying, “I’ll never understand!  I’ll never understand!”

So I got the tears out of her I was looking for, but I got more information than I expected.  She told me next that her father, who died the year my sister was born (as I recall), had been an alcoholic as well, a violent one who used to beat her mother.  Gramma?  She was so tiny!  Anticipating a statement of hatred toward her father to follow for treating her mother that way I was totally confused when she instead expressed hatred and disgust for her mother for being weak and beaten.  I could tell when Gramma was still alive and lived with us that my mother resented her mother and barely tolerated her presence but could never understand why because my grandmother never argued with her and always seemed to do what my mother wanted (from what I can recall).  My mother said she would never forgive Gramma for being so pathetic and weak.  Years later, my mother further complicated my confusion on the matter by telling me how very much she loved her father and that when he died she “wanted to crawl in the coffin with him.”  My stomach lurched when she went on to say how much she admired him for being such a strong man that made people listen to him.  It had always been my grandmother that I admired for being soft spoken, gentle, accepting, and never rising to my mother’s bait. 

You can learn a lot about a person by looking at their heroes, but it kind of depends on what you look at, doesn’t it?

No ready comfort

All day I have been revisited by a particular heartbreaking and frightening image of my mother.  It is the picture that comes to my mind when I need to remind myself that my mother was not well when I was very young, that she was terribly tormented even while she tormented me. 

From the family rec room in the basement where I was playing at my chalkboard I could hear my mother shouting angrily in the next room which was the laundry room.  I went to the doorway of the rec room to see who she was arguing with but she was alone.  I was shocked when she reached up and slapped her own face hard and snarled, “Bitch!  You stupid BITCH!”  She then proceeded to pull her hair mercilessly and pinch her hands.  Then she strode over to the washing machine and slammed the lid down hard on her hand.  It was horrifying to watch her face twist with pain when she did it, a face that was red and welted from the slap, her hair a wild mess from the pulling.  Terrified that she might turn on me next I went back into the room and hid behind a chair.  Then I realized I’d get a spanking for sure if she came looking and couldn’t find me so I came out again and tried to carry on as though I didn’t know anything was wrong with my mother. 

It was after that that I was truly scared of my mother, but I always felt sorry for her too, even when I hated her, because I walked in on or overheard similar meltdowns over the years.  I can’t tell you how I processed what I saw, then and other times, because I was too you to know what to think about behaviour so bizarre.  I know that, as I said, I took it as a sign of her being dangerous.  Who wouldn’t fear someone who would even beat themselves up?  It was around that time that she had started talking about killing me.

One of the ways she said she was thinking of doing it was by pushing me down the stairs so that I broke my neck or “bashed my brains in”.  She said people would say it was an accident and I would be gone and she could happily go on with her life and never have to see me again.  Being so young I was still processing what exactly “death” was, but I understood it made you disappear.  And so one of the things that my mother did to me that was not considered terrible by my family but drove me out of my mind because of her death wish on my behalf was that she shoved me. 

She would reach out suddenly when we were walking somewhere in the house and shove me from behind.  Because I never saw it coming I would usually stumble and fall.  If I cried she would get very angry with me.  In front of others she complained that I was moving too slow and was in the way.  I seriously doubt she ever shoved a stranger or a friend in that manner.  I don’t know if she shoved my brother and sister quite so often or rudely, but I don’t remember them on the floor where I so often found myself.  But so it went that my mother would shove me down the hallway, up the hallway, onto the kitchen floor, up the stairs, down the stairs…all over the place. 

The stairs were the worst, though, because that was the way she talked about making my death look like an accident.  For all of the fuss she made in front of others about my not getting in her way all the time, when we were going to go down the stairs she always insisted I go first (again, this is when I was very young).  She would become extremely angry if I tried to run away.  She’d then have to go get me, drag me back, shove me in front of her and shout, “Go!”  Each time there was nothing I could do but reach up for the railing and try to get as firm a grip as possible.  Still, she would reach down and give a mighty shove when I’d gone down a step or two and my feet would be off the tread while one hand clung to the railing for dear life as she slapped at it.  If I let go of the railing I fell flat on my back; if I didn’t I twisted around pulling my shoulder painfully and ended up losing my grip anyway and landing on the stairs on my ribs, something especially painful I assure you.  I “slipped” on the stairs far too many times to count, sometimes from the landing instead of the top and ended up making it all the way to the bottom with a resounding crack of my head on the linoleum covered concrete floor.  The head injuries were only every minor though.  I still won’t go down even the shortest flight of stairs without a firm grip on the banister and am always very careful.

The worst thing about being shoved when you’re holding onto the railing is that when you land on your back and skid down a ways it leaves bruises and scrapes off skin so that you can’t even find comfort lying down curled up with your bears for as long as a week or more afterward.  There’s nothing but the awareness of insult and ache and the knowledge that it wasn’t going to stop happening to you any time soon.  It is no wonder that by age 10 I had become so permanently tense and anxious that the family doctor started prescribing sedatives for me to take during the day to help control panic attacks and soon after adding sleeping pills at night to combat insomnia and night terrors.  He was, of course, a negligent idiot for not sending me to a specialist – or anyone at all – to find out why someone so young was in such a terrible state, but that was many years ago and hopefully not something likely to be overlooked today. 

Fading Away

When I was about the height of the dining room table they sat at on bridge night my “Uncle” and godfather asked me in a boisterous, booming voice, “So!  Tell us!  What do you want to be when you grow up?!”  I smelled a set up somehow but answered honestly; “I want to be a zoologist.”  At that the whole table of adults burst out laughing, but none as heartily as my “Uncle” who, wiping tears from his eyes, fairly well shouted, “Well it’s nice to have pipe dreams!”

I burned with hatred for him right then.  I knew what I wanted to be and was well capable of becoming an explorer, a knowledgeable documenter of fascinating wild creatures and their behaviours.  I think I’m doing that now in a way.  It was a desire inspired by the encyclopedia sets and National Geographics I pored over to fill myself up with knowledge to make myself valuable.  It was a desire born also of shows like Mutual of Omaha.  I dreamed of being far, far away with other people in other cultures very different from what I was experiencing right then.

I started practicing for my career of documenting what I saw on my travels through remote forests, jungles, and deserts by writing stories about animals and exploration.  My stories, far from being fraught with the excitement and adventure I intended to practice writing about, read like bible parables focusing entirely on morality and comforting the fearful, understanding the embarrassed.  I graduated to writing stories of survival, but always exploring motive and morality issues with the strongest emphasis on compassion. 

I began to dream of growing up to write stories with the point of encouraging loyalty, honesty, compassion, and the courage to tell one’s deepest, scariest secrets in order to be free and safe once and for all.  It is a desire that has not died in my heart over the decades, but in my early teenage years it became obvious the dream would remain only a dream as addiction, drinking, and the inexplicable exhaustion that began years earlier completely drowned me.  By the time I entered high school I had become largely disengaged from life on a core level and have never fully reattached myself, not even when I was raising two children myself.

The detaching started with the incidences of my mother shutting me up alone in the dark that so utterly terrified me.  Those were times when I was too young and short to reach the light switches to turn the lights back on or when I was in the basement because the light switch was at the top of the stairs.  I would cry and beg her to turn them on again and she would either come rushing back in beating me wildly all over demanding repeatedly, “Shut up!  Shut up!  Shut up!  Shut up!  Shut up!” before she rushed back out leaving my aching and sobbing in the dark, or there would be utter silence.  In the silence I would be sure I heard monsters and madmen moving toward me so I’d clamp my hands over my ears and concentrate on the sound of my breathing. 

I continued to turn to my breathing after upsetting clashes with my mother.  I would lie on my bed with my bears pressed tightly against my ears or with a pillow pulled over my head, listening, concentrating on shutting out every feeling, every thought, every other sound except my breath.  I became so in tune with my breath I started listening to it all the time out of habit.  In time I started getting in trouble for doing ‘nothing’ too often, just lying on my back on my bed staring at the ceiling, or sitting on my desk staring out the window for hours at a time.  I would just stop caring about anything and everything for large portion of each day wherein it would take a bomb under my chair or bed to get me to do anything except be still and listen to the sound of my breathing.  I did not choose to be like that.  I did not know why it was happening.  And today, at age 39 (almost 40) I am begging someone to make it stop happening now so I can have a life.

It may be depression, it may be something else, but my lack of productivity was complained about vociferously by my family right up until we parted ways.  My mother and sister attacked my character viciously and repeatedly over the issue, attacks that drove me deeper and deeper into a state of real physical exhaustion that I have never understood.  I have said often, “I am too young to be this old.”  This blog entry comes very late in the day because every time I got up off the chair, couch, or bed to try and do something ‘productive’ today I merely staggered somewhere else to rest and listen to myself breathe for a while longer.

Perhaps, you might say, this is taking too much of a toll on my and I should stop for a while, but the years of profound anger and heartbreak are behind me.  I’m so tired so much of the time anyway that in a way it actually feels good to have a reason to feel drained, and I do feel this draining me.  What I know for sure is that nothing changes if nothing changes.  For a while anyway I plan to be tired for a reason.

Expensive Dreams

Last night I dreamt that I crossed paths with my brother at a hotel, but it had been so many years since he’d seen me he didn’t recognize me.  I wasn’t surprised and felt both relieved and sad.  Then suddenly he turned to me as he walked past again and sneered that I was going to deeply regret his representation of me when he wrote his own book about our family growing up.  I woke sweaty with a pain in my stomach and a fluttering in my chest.

Don’t read that to mean that I worry about anyone telling stories of me being a jerk or a flake as a child, teenager, or young adult.  It’s been done.  I already admit to becoming “neurotic as hell.”  The dream was about my fear of him coming across this writing someday and hating me for it thinking it all mean lies.  I adored him as a child and still do.  I very seriously doubt he will ever look in any direction in which I might be found, however, because I’ve been quite ‘written off’, surely since I broke ties with my father. 

The thing is that the really abusive stuff, the crazy stuff that crossed way over where any sane or decent parent draws the line, neither my brother nor sister knows about.  I know that for a fact and it had been a raging point of conflict between my parents and me that I never dare tell them.  When enough years passed I was mocked, “Tell them!  See if I care!  Do you think anybody’ll believe you now?!  Just shut up and go away.”  I resented my mother very, very deeply and it showed, but without any obvious reasons for the resentment I came across to my siblings as a pain in the ass who was always arguing with my mother over nothing much at all.

For two members of the mutual resentment society, however, we spent an inordinate amount of time together.  That was the part the others didn’t understand.  If we didn’t get along, and particularly if I didn’t like her, why was I always with her?  It was because we had a lot in common.  We talked a lot, calmly.  We were each other’s entertainment (until the conversation descended into argument).  We talked a great deal about feelings and fears.  Huh?  Am I kidding?  Isn’t that a bit odd?  Oh no.  Love and hate go together like peas in a pod.  We had a very sick and very intimate relationship.  I was the confidante for her many fears and she reassured me that it wasn’t my fault I was a jittery over-anxious person afraid of my own shadow.  “Some people are just born that way,” she told me often.  “You will always need to lead a sheltered existence and you’ll never cope like other people do.  There’s no shame in it.  It’s just the way you are.  I’m the same way.”

That leads me to a very big part of our secret life together.  On my brother’s first day of school I stood on the landing of the back stairs with my mother right after he and my sister had left and looked up at her with great anticipation.  It was the start of our new routine of a lot of alone-time together.  Excitedly, I asked her, “What are we going to do now?”  She looked at me for a moment and then took a brown bottle of pills out of the pocket of the dark blue terry cloth robe she wore.  She opened it, gave me half a pill, and said, “Take this and disappear.”  So I did.  At least that’s what it felt like I did.  I woke up to the sound of my brother and sister coming home from school.  The little white thing she gave me made Time vanish.  It was magic!

Mom gave me magic quite often.  After a while I got used to it enough to be able to stay awake after I took it and lay dazed on the dark brown couch curled up in a blanket watching tv for hours.  She would go berserk if I peed myself and the blanket without even noticing.  I would be spanked and screamed at and stripped naked on the spot, but it never upset me or scared me at all because I’d taken the pill first.  It was magic that way too.  It worked if I was given the Magic afterward to make the upset go away.

Many times (How many?  How many is enough?  Three?  More than once…) my mother stomped toward me yelling that ‘this time’ she was going to kill me, ‘this time’ she’d “really had enough of you, you little bitch!”

(The memory of these instances makes my scalp tingle still today when I write them down).  She grabbed me by my wavy blond hair and began dragging me down the hallway yelling that I was an “ungrateful lying little bitch” and that she “hates my guts” and it ‘makes her sick to have to look at my face’.  (She said those words to me right up until the time she died.)   And then instead of killing me like she said she would, like I expected her to, she swung me into my bedroom by my hair like a rag doll and turned out the light.  That was an important part of the punishment.  I was psychotically afraid of the dark.  It was pitch black before I hit the floor and she slammed the door shut so loudly it echoed on and on in my ears.  I was completely disoriented.  Even though it was my bedroom, I had no idea where exactly I landed in it and where anything else was.  Though I had just been thrown through the door I could not locate it to save my life.  And so there was nothing else for me to do, time after time, except lay on the floor in the dark where I had been discarded like unwanted and non-valuable garbage and cry until I couldn’t cry anymore and just fall asleep and stop caring that I didn’t know where I was. 

Eventually the bustling sounds of my father and siblings would be heard and then my mother would open my door to tell me to come out and play or to come sit at the dinner table or just carry on in some normal manner.  Sometimes I would just lay there looking at her with the “not gonna play along this time ‘cause you went too far” face, and other times I was so frazzled by the experience I just stared off into space not caring if she came in and beat me some more for not getting up when she told me to.  Regardless, I remember being determined each time not to forgive her, not to do as my parents told me after my mother ‘went off on me’ like that and pretend with my brother and sister that nothing had happened.  I was hurt and I was determined to let the hurt show this time no matter what they did to me.  But then she pulled out the bait.  She would go away and come back with the little brown bottle and silently place either half or a whole sedative on my night table and just leave knowing I couldn’t resist them, knowing too that they would make me not be upset anymore or even care at all.  Like Magic.  But they were never Magic enough to keep me from hating her.  I hated her deeply for having something I couldn’t resist when I wanted so deeply to reject everything from her forevermore.  And I hated myself for taking it.  That confused self-hatred lasted throughout my long addiction to sedatives that lasted from age 4 until I was 24 years old.  By the time I was in kindergarten they were just a normal fact of my life. 

So here’s where the story is now: two drug-dependant neurotics spending a lot of time together.  Do they have some rough moments?  Yeah…a few.

A Hard Bath To Take

When I finish writing this today I’ll get into a hot bath.  One of about two or three I’ll take in a year.  The tub is scrubbed out and waiting for me but I haven’t been able to work my nerve up to it yet.  I think it will be good for my aching body after this long bout with the cold and flu and the tension of beginning to write publicly. 

It is a common suggestion for women to pamper themselves by relaxing in a bath.  It was suggested to me this last week and though I told the person, as I tell each person who suggests it, that “I am not a bath person”, I was told to “try it anyway”.  There is no easy way to tell them why baths are not my idea of relaxation anymore.  They were once my idea of heaven.

When I was small enough to fit I would snuggle up under the spout and let the delicious warm water splash down over my body as it filled the tub.  My mother turned the taps so that the tub filled slowly to prolong my joy and relaxation.  I loved everything about it: the roar and echo of the water filling my ears flushed out all resistance to all things and all memory of pain, fear, and sorrow drained out of my body as I held my hand up to the miniature waterfall.  For a time, God was in his heaven and all was right with the world. 

My mother and I both seemed to enjoy bath time.  She brought the newspaper or a book with her and filled the tub with tumblers and Tupperware for me to play with for as long as I liked, even draining some of the water from the tub when it cooled to fill it again with warm water again to prolong our stay.  I played and she read until I was tired of my games and she put soap into the clear water to wash my hair and body, carefully placing a folded wet cloth over my blue eyes to make certain no soap ever stung them.  She was gentle and efficient.  Until.  I don’t remember anything special about the time it happened.  I don’t remember acting up or her being impatient for any reason.  Like so many other incidences in the earliest years it just sort of…happened. 

I was floating on my back in the clear water that she had not yet put any soap into.  I was small enough still that I could not yet reach both ends of the tub with my hands and feet at the same time, I remember.  I loved to shake my long blond hair in the water playing Mermaid like the beautiful character in the book.  My mother was watching me.  Just watching me.  And I was watching her.  Then she reached into the tub and pushed me down under the water with one big hand on my chest and the other on my stomach.  I continued looking up at her through the clear water wondering what the heck she was doing.  Then I began to thrash my legs and arms grasping for some hold or way to push myself but found none.  She continued to hold me under and reached one hand down to keep my legs from banging on the tub.  I will never forget the deafening sound the banging made while my head was under the water or the squeaking of my hands trying to pull up the sides.  And then my chest and head hurting, and the blackness like I was going to sleep.

Like a movie film, next frame, my father held me on the bathroom floor next to the tub and I was puking up water while he yelled at my mother, “Goddamn it, Pat, what the hell were you thinking!?  What the hell were we gonna tell people?!  Did you stop to think how much trouble something like that would cause me?!”  Yes, it was a very long time ago, but like the creaking of the threshold, there are some moments in your life that just burn themselves into your memory as a whole, details and all.  I was very much a peripheral element in that little drama.  I remember my mother not saying a word.  Just walking out. 

My father wrapped me in a towel and took me to the bedroom I shared with my sister and told me to get ready for bed.  I started to cry and he slapped me.  Stunned I stopped and looked at him.  He pointed his finger and said, “There’s nothing to cry about.  Nothing happened.  Do you hear me?”  Hearing my brother and sister coming down the hall he added, “You don’t tell them a THING, do you hear me?  Or I’ll finish what your mother started.”  They walked in and he walked out and I never told them a thing. 

My mother continued to be in charge of bath time, but I never again let her close the door.  I would throw a bloody hissy fit if she tried.  I wouldn’t even let her close the door when I used the toilet.  In fact, I wouldn’t even close it when I used the toilet alone.  My siblings poked merciless fun at me for it for years, but I just could not bear to close the door for years after that.  I tried a few times but would panic to the point of having trouble breathing and have to open it again.  God how I was tormented over that open door, but I just could not begin to explain. 

The bath incident was perhaps a year before she told me of her desire to kill me, and so when she did talk of wanted to get rid of me I sincerely believed her and felt she was able.  But most of the time she made tuna fish sandwiches for lunch and served them with milk and was a normal Mom who just washed the clothes and swept the floor and listened to the news and just kinda did stuff.  Then we had a REALLY bad incident of some sort which I survived and then we carried on while I waited for the next REALLY bad thing I wasn’t going to like which I wondered if I was going to survive.

I obviously survived because I’ll be 40 in June.  I’ve never stopped having nightmares about drowning, nor have I ceased having nightmares about the people and pets I love being drowned.  Just last week I woke in a panic at 3am and couldn’t get back to sleep after I dreamed that two men broke into my house and drowned my beloved dog Kelly in my bathtub.  My story is not, as I wrote early on, one of commonly written about abuses like incest and does not include broken bones.  That is my sister’s first argument, that I was not raped nor were my bones broken.  She complains that she knows many girlfriends who had incestuous relationships with their fathers but who had forgiven them for being sick and still had relationships with them as adults.  Her argument was that any transgressions I might have suffered at my mother’s and father’s callousness was surely less serious and therefore I had no excuse not to carry on having a fine relationship with them today.  I was not allowed to be angry or to cut them from my life. 

Well.  My mother has passed away.  I will never be forgiven for choosing to leave her life before she died.  She never admitted to anyone that I broke down and called her sometimes during that last year and we talked about why we needed to be separate from each other.  We were non-blaming, just two people at the ends of their ropes saying, “Yeah, we never could not tear each other to shreds, could we?”  And I did tear back in later years.  I was tired of the anger from all angles and that’s why I left.  Dad?  Being an adult comes with privileges.  I don’t have to put my arms around people and feign love for people I don’t respect.  I don’t have to allow people into my home I don’t trust.  I don’t have to pretend a relationship isn’t over when it has been over for a long, long time.  When it’s time to leave, I’m allowed to leave.  When I don’t want someone to come back, I’m allowed to ask them not to come back.  Being old enough to see our parents as just people, fallible human beings, is a two way sword and they have to accept that.  They are held to the same basic relationship rules as other people: if I get absolutely nothing positive whatsoever from having any contact from you, especially if I get something negative instead, you’re gonzo. 

It’s time to live free.  It’s also time for me to take a rare hot bath. 

steph

Word Missionary

I was always chattering away quietly to my bears, toys, and self about I-don’t-know-what as a young child.  But I was always talking.  I remember that clearly and god knows no one in my family has ever forgotten.  In my life my greatest family sin of all time that will always be remembered is that I would just never shut up.  At one point or another everyone in my family has wanted me dead simply because I would not shut up.  I talked until I drove them f’n nuts because I believed my life depended on it.

Don’t bother me with your petty demands, World, I’m busy talking as fast as I can and I can’t stop now.  I’m talking like my life depends on it because I’m pretty sure it does.  I was on a mission.  From the time my mother declared her wish to kill me I became a Word Missionary.  I had to find the right words to change her mind even if I had to travel all over the whole proverbial world to find them.  I took up the weird pastime of reading dictionaries and thesauri, and I read Time Life picture dictionaries and Funk & Wagnall’s, and I became a gatherer of knowledge.  My mother was always reading and so I determined that she respected knowledge.  If I could store enough words, which she respected, and enough knowledge inside of me then she might change her mind and decide to respect me enough not to kill me, even though she could still secretly wish I was dead. 

The plan was to put valuable things inside of me to make the outer Me valuable enough to keep.  So I started stuffing words and knowledge inside myself to make me valuable and went around telling everyone what was inside of me that made me valuable to try an save my life by making them think I was valuable too so they wouldn’t want to kill me either, but it didn’t work.  Constantly correcting other people’s spelling and telling them how much you know is the world’s best way to make them wish you would disappear.  Small error in reasoning on my part.  So my mother still didn’t respect me and other people still didn’t respect me and I was never safe.

The more I tried to pull the right words out of me to change people’s minds and make them think I was worth keeping, the more I irritated them by talking too much, by pulling out too much of my guts, and ended up showing them how to really, really get to me good, right where it hurt the most.  And the stupid, stupid thing is that I never caught on and did it all of my life.

And that was what the jelly-fish girl called “fighting back”: when I was old enough not to fall down with one slap I started talking back…until I was a bloody limbless idiot.  I wasn’t smart enough to find somewhere else to be like the rest of the family, and I was too young anyway to wander the streets like Cain.  But I didn’t have to take the bait.  Oh yes but I did, really.  Because she used the kind of bait I couldn’t resist: words.  My mother had a lot of words and I always respected her for that.  I couldn’t help myself  I loved words.  She didn’t deserve respect for the way she treated me, but she was the keeper and honourer of a large vocabulary, and I could respect her for that.  And so she came at me with words.

But first she looked at me.  My mother could do shit with her eyes you wouldn’t believe.  She could make you feel things with her eyes.  Make you know things.  Bad things.  She should have been an actress in the movies.  She would have been famous for her close-ups.  She could just look at her victim and then when she gritted her teeth and sort of did that little snarl thing she did with her lips, without saying a single words the whole audience would know what she was going to do next, what was inevitable no matter what kind of a fight was put up, no matter how good the argument, and no matter how long it finally took for her to break down and cross the line and do that mean, unspeakable thing that everyone would later deny she did, and say that anyway I was such an asshole I probably had it coming.

Worse than knowing what she was going to do was knowing what she could do, what she was capable of doing, and what she just might end up doing to this poor stupid character sometime later in the script.  And the poor stupid character knew it.  After she primed me with the look and the snarly lip thing she came at me with words, and that’s when I always f’d myself up.  I thought there was still some hope for me because of the words even though the eyes told me that for-sure-for-sure she hated my guts.  I respected my mother for having words and at some point early in my life she had respected me for having words too.  So I thought there was hope but there wasn’t.  So when she came at me with accusations thinly disguised as questions, clever questions, I whipped out a bunch of words and threw them up into the air.  I whirled them and turned them around like a pro and made ‘em do fancy loop-de-loops before her very eyes.  Her very hateful and increasingly enraged eyes.  The more I talked, which is what I called “fighting back…defending myself,” the more surely it sealed my fate. 

Mere words were so powerless then.  They’re more than enough now.  It is a shame the words and stories do not come with numbers to tell me in what order to show them.  There are far too many words, far more than are necessary.  What to leave out?  Where was the light? 

Who was I?

I was ‘normal’ and also not.  I adored my brother and assumed he existed for the purpose of being my companion.  He was on 18 months older than me and so we played the same games and shared most toys, but when he wanted time away from me I could be either heartbroken or outraged.  My mother was required to intervene then and save him from my lashing out.  I have already said that I was very content to be on my own, and that was true, but it was true when the spirit moved me and never happily at the request of another.

My world was very small before I was in school.  The only child I played with besides my brother and occasionally my sister, five years older than myself, was the Mormon Bishop’s daughter two houses down.  The daughter I played with was one of six children and I was confounded by the lack of yelling and shoving in the house.  I begged my mother to let me spend time there as often as possible even though she kept telling me they didn’t really want me, that the mother was just being polite by requesting I return soon.  Fortunately, my friend’s mother was insistent with my mother and I enjoyed a lot of time in the Bishop’s home until they moved away when I was in grade two. 

That haven made all the difference in the world to me in the early years.  The interactions between the parents and children gave me a contrast and a lot to think about, but nothing compared to what my friend’s mother, who was also my bible class teacher, taught me about the basically decent ways we should treat all people lest we be doomed to lives of bitterness and turmoil ourselves.  I believed her with all my heart and soul then, and I still do now; surely I had my mother as a lifelong example that she wasn’t exaggerating. 

You may be tempted to think, “Oh, how wonderful!  Steph learned to be a spiritual, moral, compassionate human being at such a young age.  How lucky to have found a teacher like that in the middle of such turmoil and confusion!”  I say, Wow, what a setup for misery: a soft-spoken, gentle-handed bible class teacher to compare my own mother to with her depression and anger and unnamed issues that were playing peek-a-boo.  It has been important in the long run that I understood very young that what my mother was doing was abusing me and that my father was wrong to be an accomplice in his own ways, but at the time it was a hell of a torment that such unusual awareness disallowed me the denial into which most children like me retreat.  And so I quickly became like my mother: a typical person in a lot of way, and neurotic as hell in others.

For years in my adulthood I couldn’t accept the truth of just how simple it was to completely destroy me.  I was like a jelly-fish child.  I had almost no natural defenses whatsoever.  I just floated in the mercilessly bright sun until the gulls had picked clean what they wanted and the rest of me baked dry and hard like a scab or a scar.  The maddening thing about it was that I didn’t know what made me do it, just float like that.  I didn’t even try to defend myself.  I let most of me dangle below submerged in the cool, soothing water until the most important parts of me, undefended, were rotted or gone altogether.  And I really still don’t know why I didn’t fight back in a way that mattered. 

I did fight back, but not the right way.  Every time I fought back I sacrificed too much of myself in the effort and became like that guy in the Monty Python movie who’d had all his limbs hacked off and was lying on the ground screaming, “C’mon then!  C’mon back!  I’ll bite yer ankles!”  I fought like an idiot.  A raging loser.  In the end that’s all I was: an outraged loser.

In a family like mine the only right way to fight was to not care.  But you couldn’t fake it.  You had to really not care.  If you could get to that place, detach yourself enough, no matter what part of your humanity you had to hack off to get there, then you would be fine.  I couldn’t do it.  Of everyone in the whole family I was the one least able to adapt to that way of living.  My mother was the second person least able to detach from her humanity, and that is why her behaviour became he most outrageously inhumane of all.

It does makes sense if you think about it she knew what was right an what was wrong, what was good and what was bad.  It was her intensity that was the problem.  The problems was how wrong she perceived any wrong to be, and how bad she perceived any bad to be.  The same thing with the right and the good.  She sacrificed a hell of a lot of decency and logic for the sake of what she perceived as the sacred right and the sacred good.  My mother would fly into a rage and could kill you for a transgression, and it was her sense of humanity, her bizarre inability to detach from what other people were doing, a bizarre inability I have always shared, that drove her to do it time and again while – it felt to me – the whole world was watching and said and did nothing much to my humiliation.  It confirmed in my mind that I wouldn’t find any salvation outside my family or in it.  Strangers would be no better, so I might as well just stay where I was and take it.