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Guilty

So, I got a letter from my oldest brother a couple weeks ago.

In it, he offered to resume our relationship more or less on the previous basis.

I wrote a reply in which, once again, I tried to explain that if NOTHING HAS CHANGED, why would I do that?

And today I had kind of a brainwave.  And with it, maybe, just maybe, I can explain, in a way that just might get through, the situation as it stands for me, now, 2025, a full THIRTEEN YEARS after I told them what the problems were, and everyone refused to listen, or do anything about it, or even admit that there were problems — other than the obvious one, ME.

It was pretty clear from the letter that my brother is starting to worry that he just might feel a little guilty about all this after I die.  AS HE SHOULD.

Okay, here goes nothing.  I’ve tried to write kind of an elevator pitch for each person:

When I say, “We have a problem in this family” — what I mean by that is, there are systemic issues going back 50+ years, involving our mother’s mental illness, impacting every single one of us six siblings, that although having more than adequate information & resources to do so, no one else will talk about or even admit, much less work on, neither directly with each other, nor in therapy.

While they affect us all, these issues negatively impact me more than anyone else.  And by “we” I mean that ALL SIX OF US are involved in the problem, and therefore ALL SIX OF US need to agree to work on solutions.

When Bob says, “We have a problem in this family” — what I believe he means by that is, “The problem in this family is that the FIVE OF US think things are fine and the problem is YOU, and if you would just go back to the way things were and we don’t have to change anything or take any action, well, we could probably find it in our good Catholic hearts to forgive you for your disruptive behavior.”

(This is known as the “identified patient” bias.)

When Bets says “We have a problem in this family” — well, she’s apparently said out loud that “I ruined her senior year of high school” and for her, MY VERY EXISTENCE IS THE PROBLEM.  Needless to say, this is fucked up in a whole lot of ways, but the most basic is that she simply prefers not to have me as a sister.

I mean think about that.  Really think about that for a minute.  She wants me not to be part of the family, and her reason for that is something I had absolutely no agency in.

In fact, I have no agency about it EVEN NOW.  What am I supposed to do, apologize to her for having been born?

When Joe & Susan say “We have a problem in this family” — their version is probably something like, when our father died, I grievously wronged Susan when I asked her to leave the room that night for her inappropriate laughing, and again when I brought up her refusal to do so the next day, and I’ve never apologized for having thus made it necessary for them to yell and spit in my face.  Also that I won’t just “let it go” but instead made sure everyone at least knew about it.  (Which I only did after I made that disastrous attempt to work it out with them.)

When Henry says “We have a problem in this family” — my best guess is that his definition is kind of an amalgam of the above.  He dislikes my existence because with me not there, he gets to be the baby of the family, with all the attention that gets him from the older siblings.  He hates that I go “digging up the past” because of course that threatens the status quo, which again he likes because of his special position.  Again, the five of them are fine; it’s me that is the problem.

I don’t honestly have enough knowledge of my brother Charley to know where he stands on any of this.

Now.  Let’s talk about what COULD have happened, over a decade ago.

1) Someone could have told Joe & Susan that they were WAY WAY OUT OF LINE, that Susan’s thoughtless and egregious behavior, plus her refusal to take responsibility for it, had created a huge family rift; that they both needed to apologize to me sincerely and publicly, for what she did the night Dad died, and for what they both did the next day; and never act like that towards me, or any other sibling, ever again.  AND MEAN IT.

2) Someone could have talked to Bets about her cold behavior towards me at the reunions — which I have to figure if my husband could notice it, others could too.

She once emailed me a laundry list of 9 or 10 items, I think, explaining why it was impossible for us to have any kind of relationship.  Things like the age difference between us, our different views of our parents, of politics, of religion.  (One of them was downright hilarious — she insisted that as a child, I would not have understood that Dad was “brainwashing me”.  Um.  Exactly the same argument goes for her and Mom, but she truly can’t see that side of her own argument.  And she’s supposed to be MENSA smart.)

Maybe they could have suggested that for the next reunion, Bets could come up with a plan for some activity that she & I could do together, go out for lunch or something.  Or maybe they could have suggested that Bets could call me, on the same frequency that she probably called other siblings, and we could start to build a better relationship that way.  The point is, there are lots of constructive ways to build a relationship — if you want to.  SHE DOES NOT WANT TO.

3) Someone could have talked to Henry about the lecture he felt entitled to give me at the last reunion I went to, and the disrespectful conversation we had later that same weekend about sexual harassment in the workplace, where he said the whole idea was stupid and I countered with examples that I personally had experienced, which made him mad and he started telling me not to say what I was saying… Seriously, that happened.

And to be fair, Bob & Joe tried to do something about that one — but it wasn’t to make him apologize to me for it.  It was, once again, to try to get me to “be reasonable” and “let it go”.

At one point Joe was trying to explain to me that a person ought to “get one chance” to hit on someone at work, because what if she was really hot like the sales rep Francesca? **  And I was too flabbergasted at the time but I dearly wish I’d had the wits to ask him, “So it would be okay if the guy in the next cube said you had a hot ass and he’d like you to suck his dick?”

But the one person who could have done all those things would have had to have a very different mindset.

Instead of

The five of us are fine, it’s you who is the problem

It should have been

There are big problems in this family with the way everyone treats Tess like a second class citizen, and if Tess has a problem in this family, then WE ALL HAVE A PROBLEM AND WE NEED TO FIX IT.

Otherwise, we’re not a family.

It should be clear that the very fact that this line of thinking apparently did not ever occur to my brother Bob means that indeed, he too treats me as a second class citizen.

But even if he had thought this way, what would have happened had he done any of those things?

1) If he had held Joe & Susan’s feet to the fire, Susan would have thrown an almighty fit, refused to apologize, and would have insisted that Joe back her up.  She would probably have refused for either of them to come to a reunion as long as that expectation was being upheld.  And we can’t possibly let JOE go out of the family, now can we?  Not when keeping Tess in the family is the reason.  Keeping Joe, and even keeping Susan (not an actual sibling) is more important than losing Tess and Don.

2) If he had tried to talk to Bets about constructive ways to improve our relationship, I am pretty sure she too would have thrown an almighty fit, and then simply refused to discuss it.  She might have gone so far as to threaten to not host the reunions any more.

She PREFERS to hate me.  She LIKES IT THIS WAY.  That’s clear from the fact that she’s never once tried ANYTHING constructive to improve the relationship, in the past decade plus.

I say “constructive” because, for example, there was one occasion where she sent me copies of some letters written by Mom to her when she was in college — and I reacted badly, because my experience of communicating with our mother when I was in college was that my OWN MOTHER refused to speak to me for a year and a half over something I said that she didn’t like (she complained about my “tone”).

And my sister apparently shared my response to the rest of the family, without my knowledge or consent, and made herself out to be the wronged party because she was “just trying to show me a side of Mom that I probably never knew” — i.e., she was trying to show me how wrong I was about her — and sighed, “but I guess no good deed goes unpunished.”

Poor Bets.

Did you know that when someone wants to manipulate you, one of the first things they do is get you to feel sorry for them?  Our mother was a pro at being the martyr, and I suspect that means my sister is too, because she’s so enmeshed with Mom (I won’t say “brainwashed”) that she’s basically a carbon copy.

(But in a way, she’s right.  I never knew our mother when she was mentally healthy.

Of course, I’m not sure any of them ever did, either.)

But this negative attitude of hers towards me is what trickles down to everyone else’s view of me, so it most certainly IS everyone else’s business what she has done, or refuses to do, with our relationship.

At the very least, what could have happened is some kind of agreement brokered between her and me about what our relationship would be like, perhaps polite but distant, or whatever — not her unilateral decision, based on nothing I ever did.

3)  If he had tried to tell Henry that he was out of line to lecture me, that it was my right to try to understand our family history if I thought it would help me, and that maybe he should have tried to understand my experiences of sexual harassment over a dozen years of engineering?

Henry might not have thrown a fit, but he would have cracked some jokes about sexual harassment, and made Bob laugh, as the baby of the family does, and then Bob would have been unable to hold him accountable for any of it.

What Henry did instead  — when I finally had had enough and left the industry which incidentally was quite a painful decision to throw that hard-earned degree in the trash, but the alternative of staying was WORSE — was to double down and tell me that “you gave up too easily” and “our father would be disappointed in you”.

Obviously, none of THAT happened when it should have happened.

And Bob is smart enough to make the same predictions I did about how any of it would have turned out.

BUT THAT DOESN’T MEAN HE WAS OFF THE HOOK TO TRY.

Doing the right thing, taking the side of your LITTLE SISTER when you know she’s right, and the alternative is losing her from the family completely — it’s not something you just blow off and make excuses for not doing, because you don’t think it’s going to work.

At least, not if you have any integrity.

And no one in this so-called family EVER TOOK MY SIDE, on ANY OF IT.

And you know what?  It’s too late to do it now.

There was a time when people could possibly have changed, if the right actions had been taken.

But it’s way past that time, and it’s too late to be worried about what you should have done then, and try to make up for it now, ONLY BECAUSE I’M DYING OF CANCER.

What that is, is SELFISH.

They all should have felt guilty for over a decade — the minute I said “there’s a problem, and it’s not me”, and they refused to do anything about it.

And to be completely honest, I hope they all feel guilty for the rest of their longer-than-mine-by-a-long-shot lives. *

* I’m going to guess that anyone reading this far will now seize upon this single sentence and say, “well this here shows that she’s really not a good, forgiving, Catholic person” WHICH IS BLAMESHIFTING SO FUCK YOU

** this woman ended up marrying Mike Judge, the creator of Beavis and Butt-head and King of the Hill — so like my brother would have had a chance in hell, BUT HEY GOOD NEWS JOE THEY ARE DIVORCED NOW

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Explanatory Notes

“We seem to prefer a comfortable lie to the uncomfortable truth. We punish those who point out reality, and reward those who provide us with the comfort of illusion. Reality is fearsome … but experience tells us that more fearsome yet is evading it.” ~~ Bill Moyers

“Your mind will believe comforting lies while also knowing the painful truths that make those lies necessary. And your mind will punish you for believing both.”

― Patrick Ness, A Monster Calls

And of course, the header for this blog.  What it’s always been about.
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So Not Normal

It would be funny, if it were not so sad, to reflect on the fact that my siblings have — through their actions, as well as their inaction — proven me to be right about all this shit.  Inadvertently, I’m sure, but they have.

If you think about what might have happened instead, in a normal, healthy, functional family, it’s obvious.

Just for starters, take how this all started — or rather, the crisis that precipitated me figuring out what was really going on in this dysfunctional collection of siblings:

Upon finding out that I was upset about the disrespectful way Susan acted towards me when my/our dad died — specifically, her ignoring my reasonable request that, if she and the hospice nurse were going to continue their casual, shop-talk, LAUGHING conversation, could they please do it in a room other than the one with his still-warm body shoved in the corner? — well, the normal thing to do at that point would have been for Susan to apologize — and, in the event that she resisted doing so, for my siblings, especially Joe, to make sure that happened.

The hospice nurse did apologize.  She wrote me a sincere, heartfelt card.  This is the appropriate level of contact for someone who is virtually a stranger.  It’s simple, basic politeness.

Susan also wrote me a card.  That in itself is telling.  She didn’t talk to me the next day, nor did Joe (they yelled AT me, but they sure as hell didn’t talk, let alone LISTEN).  Nor did they call me later.  There were emails between Joe and me (and probably shared beyond that, without my knowledge, but that’s just par-for-the-course disrespect for me, hardly worth mentioning) — but as for Susan and me, we’ve actually never talked about it.

I assume that is because it would be far harder to avoid apologizing in an actual conversation than in a very carefully written piece of bullshit that attempted to pretend that she didn’t know how upset I was, and to share the blame for the incident equally, claiming that I didn’t know how upset SHE was.

Well, no, I didn’t.  That’s because 1) she had only known him a few years, as opposed to her whole entire life; and 2) SHE WAS LAUGHING.

The next abnormal thing that would not have happened in a normal family was everyone blaming me for being upset about it.  Because what she did was SO FUCKING EGREGIOUSLY AWFUL THOUGHTLESS RUDE BEHAVIOR that it’s kind of insane that anyone can say that Susan’s behavior was fine, and mine was not:  for politely asking her to leave the room, which she and Joe graciously agreed that night to “overlook”, bless them — and for the apparently truly unforgivable sin of bringing it up the next day, just to Joe — not knowing that Susan was around the corner, and came into the room like a screaming banshee.

This isn’t even taking into account that she was clearly not invited to be part of that conversation, and she should have not have been eavesdropping, nor should she have butted in, even if she overheard accidentally.  The adult, respectful thing to do would have been to go away, where she could not overhear, and let Joe and me talk.

Or just possibly, apologize for eavesdropping, acknowledge that I was clearly still upset by her behavior the night before, apologize for that, and then either go away, or join the conversation if invited to do so.

Or for Joe to tell her to please leave the room, or for him to drag me and our conversation outside or elsewhere in order to have some privacy, or… the point is made, the possibilities are numerous.  And none of them happened.

Because it was ME confronting JOE — like we were equals, can you imagine the NERVE! — it became okay, probably imperative, for her to attack me for it.  Screaming inches from my face, just hours after my father died.  This was not only allowed to happen, in front of my brother — he joined in.  Until, with my husband, I finally fled the house.

To my knowledge, no one has ever held her or them accountable for that bullshit behavior, either.

The next normal thing that should have happened is that when my oldest brother tried to talk to me about what happened, he should probably have figured out that he was getting an earful of only one side of the story — because he started telling me how I should have approached that next-day discussion (I should have approached Joe on his own) and I remember yelling at him THAT’S EXACTLY WHAT I DID.

But beyond that, what I realized later was that he was only “listening” to me because he was desperately looking for a way to interpret my actions in a way that would allow him to BLAME ME, in order to avoid holding Susan responsible, and by extension, Joe.

And this was really, really difficult, because my actions were in fact not the issue, and again, it’s pretty insane for anyone to try to justify what Susan did.  Hell, the best even Susan herself could do was to imply the blame should be equal.

But, this is classic behavior for a dysfunctional family with a handy scapegoat.  Find a way to blame them, and it doesn’t actually have to make sense.

Another normal thing that might have happened, but didn’t:  the secondary black sheep brother once told me that he too was upset and annoyed at Susan’s behavior that night, and he was almost ready to speak up himself, but I beat him to the punch.  He could have spoken up as well, and backed me up, that night.  That would have been normal.

But he decided to stay silent, at that point and apparently forever after, rather than voice his agreement with me.  In all the ugly aftermath, he just let me take the fall.

Such is the very strong taboo against sticking up for me, in this collection of wounded, dysfunctional siblings.

More normal family behavior:  if, at any time over the past dozen years, any sibling, or even in-law, had felt sorrow over my estrangement from them, they could have expressed it as such.  They could have called or emailed or texted or sent a card that said they missed me.  That they were sorry about all that had happened when Dad died.  That they would like to talk, or even more appropriately, listen.  That they were willing to start over, as adults, and try to build a new relationship, on whatever terms I could accept.

Needless to say, the calls, texts, emails, and cards that I did receive were not of this nature.

I ended up blocking just about every mode of communication I could — which of course was seen not as a failure of theirs to meet my relatively basic conditions to have a relationship with them, not as their refusal to treat me at least as well as they would treat a stranger — but as proof that I was unreasonably rejecting them.

As has been stated before, I was not rejecting them — I was rejecting the way they treated me.  I was always willing to have a relationship with anyone who had the guts to reach out in an adult, respectful, honest way.

No one ever tried that.  Maybe once or twice, early on, but the one person I can think of who did, probably got pressured into quitting that radical behavior in order to be allowed to fully join the club.

They will claim, as an excuse, that I “told them not to contact me”.  Which is, technically, true, but only as far as it goes.  What is more accurate — the whole truth — is that I told them not to contact me unless they were willing to treat me differently.  With respect, as an equal.  And clearly, they aren’t.

Another abnormal thing that happened was that my sister FORBADE ANYONE IN HER FAMILY TO DO THAT, and possibly that prohibition extends to all the siblings.  I realized that when her husband tried to meet with us once, but he said it would have to be in another city because he couldn’t fly to our location, and I realized this was because my sister must have actively forbidden any contact with us.

I appreciated his willingness to try to resolve things between us, but unfortunately I believe he was hoping to work with the reasonable person, because of the impossibility of working with the unreasonable one.

The last abnormal thing I’m going to write about — far from the last one that’s happened — is that when the news of my diagnosis of terminal, stage IV triple negative breast cancer reached them, it might well have caused some people to re-evaluate their actions and inaction and reactions, what they’ve done, how they think about me, what they blame me for, and maybe try to make amends before it’s too late — but that’s clearly not the case, either.

Word has gotten back to me that my sister’s response to the news of my TERMINAL CANCER DIAGNOSIS was something like,

“That’s HER problem.  She ruined my senior year.”

OF HIGH SCHOOL.

Pathologically, not to say pathetically, abnormal.

And I hate to break it to you, sis, but you’re wrong.

It’s Mom & Dad who did that — not me.  They failed you — not me.

Hope you’re happy having lived your whole life taking all that out on me.

I know I’m not.  And I know that doesn’t bother you in the slightest, good Catholic girl though you are, or pretend to be.

I didn’t deserve that.  None of us deserved the trauma and dysfunction we got, but boy, you really put your heart into punishing me for it all.

If only she had gotten some therapy after that stressful year…
If only she had been able to vent her rage and frustration appropriately…

But the damage is done.

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Weddings and Funerals

“Weddings and funerals.”  Those are the two important events in families, according to both my mother and my sister.

My sister referred to them when she replied with a histrionic email to the prospect that my husband and I were not coming to the sibling reunion one year.  She took it as a permanent abdication, which it wasn’t at that point, but that was probably wishful thinking on her part.  And she wrote, “What are we supposed to do about weddings?  And funerals?”

My mother referred to them when she was staying with me in Texas, when Joe & Susan were getting married.  My then-boyfriend, now-husband of 27+ years had to ask me why, whenever I went somewhere with my mother, I came back crying.

It was because of the awful, hurtful things she kept saying to me.  One was, “I like Susan better than you, because she’s nicer to me.”

Naturally this has been excused by my siblings — as “that’s probably when she was starting to get sick.”  No, she was already sick for a long time before that.  What kind of a mother says that to her actual daughter, about a woman who was practically a stranger?

But two other things she said during that visit were so revealing.

One was when he picked her up from church, and then had a talk with her about her horrible, destructive behavior towards me.  She offered a few excuses, one of which was something like, “Well it’s only [when we’re all together] at things like weddings and funerals.”

Clearly, these were the most important events in families.

At another point she grumbled to me that “if she never set foot in Texas again, it would be too soon.”  I said, “What about if [BF] and I get married?”

She replied that she wouldn’t come to my wedding.

And that right there shows that I was never “in the club”, never really a part of my mother’s family, and where that idea came from.

Weddings and funerals are IMPORTANT FAMILY EVENTS — yet here she was saying that she would not come to mine.

It’s shorthand for saying, “YOU DON’T COUNT IN MY FAMILY.”

Her attitude towards me — and statements like this one giving it away — gave my siblings Mom’s permission, maybe even Mom’s encouragement to treat me as a second-class member of the group.
—————————————–

Well, I have been told by my oncologist that — while no one knows for sure, of course — her best guess is that I now have one “good” year left, before I get really sick and die.

One funeral, coming up fast.  Way too fast.

And will any of my siblings do anything about that?  I mean, it should be IMPORTANT, right?

hahahahahahahahahahahaha

Of course not.  It’s ME, so it’s totally NOT important.  In fact I am pretty certain it will be a relief to at least half of them.

They will say that I rejected them, of course.  Which is not true:  I rejected their TREATMENT OF ME.  I have always said that I would be happy to have a respectful, two-way relationship with any of them.

“Set the boundaries… and leave it to the toxic person to decide which side of that boundary they want to stand on… If the relationship ends, it’s not because of your lack of love or loyalty, but because the toxic person chose not to treat you in the way you deserve. Their choice.

“…The choice to trample over what you need means they are choosing not to be with you.  It doesn’t mean you are excluding them from your life.”

That’s exactly what I did, clearly stated even in the very first thing I ever wrote to them about this whole fucked-up mess.

And they made their choice:  not to treat me in the way I deserve, as an actual member of the family, on an equal footing with any of them.

I asked my husband what he thought would happen now if I had not broken up with my siblings.  He imagined that my BIL would probably cajole my sister into visiting me ONCE, in order to forestall any guilt on her part.  She would drag the two brothers of The Triumvirate with her, for backup.  The three of them would do their familial duty as perfunctorily as possible, probably for a weekend.  And that would be that.

I think he’s pretty spot on.  And if he is, clearly I’m not missing much in actuality.

But oh, how my heart aches for the reality of a healthy, unbroken, loving family that could, that should have been.

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Black Sheep

Almost a perfect, 1-minute summation. The only thing that doesn’t fit is that I was never the “peacemaker”.  Also, fortunately or unfortunately, I didn’t “break the pattern” except for myself.  Future generations of this “family” will have to do that for themselves.

The black sheep of the family has felt alone or misunderstood their entire lives.

They can also see dysfunction most clearly and want to heal from the past.

They’re curious, sensitive, and willing to self reflect which makes them stand out from other family members.

The black sheep becomes the scapegoat of the family.  Family members project their unwanted traits, or the issues of the family onto the black sheep. This allows them to blame the toxic dynamics on one person, and avoid looking at the true deeper issues within themselves.

Sometimes, the black sheep plays the peacemaker role. They’re expected to step in and “fix” family issues, even if those issues don’t directly involve them.

Some black sheep know from a young age that the adults in their homes can’t be trusted and begin taking care of themselves.

Many black sheep are “deep feelers” who are curious and open. This is a stark contrast to other family members who are emotionally shut down, rigid, black and white thinkers.

As the years go on, the black sheep feels the deep rage, regret, and disappointment within the family unit. They live within the chaos until they go out onto their own.

The black sheep tend to be extremely interesting, engaged, creative people who have been stifled as children. Their humor, independence, and sensitive nature can allow them to thrive as adults.

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My Sister’s Revenge — But For What?

Why is it that my sister hates me so much?  For over 50 years, she has resented the fact that I even exist.  Talk about a champion grudge-holder.  I’m told my FOO considers me to be pretty good at it (projection much?) but I’m no match for this woman.

For starters, she doesn’t really know me at all — she and I only lived together for about a year, my first year.  When she left for college in Chicago, she practically never came home again that I can remember, except for a few holidays.  So it’s not likely that we had a difficult history, or clash of personalities.  If I somehow did something to annoy her, well, I would have been less than 5 years old at the time.

Later, it became clear to me that her dislike of me was well-established by the time I was college age.  She and I rarely conversed, almost never wrote letters (I can think of exactly one of mine that she answered) and it was my husband who noted that she has to this day never once called me on the phone.

If she blames me for the whole stressful, traumatic year after I was born, I had zero to do with that, either.  Bad things happened, but it’s not like I had any agency in them.  Blame the adults!  Blame our parents!  Blame Mom for not having the hysterectomy, blame Dad for wanting sex, blame them both for not using birth control, blame Mom for failing to “accept children lovingly from God”, blame whoever for not hiring someone to take care of the younger kids — but for the love of Christ, don’t blame an innocent, helpless baby.

Blaming a baby for being born, and wrecking a family because of that, is truly vile, not to mention unhinged.  I can understand our mentally ill mother doing that, because she couldn’t do any better — but my genius sister can and ought to do better than that.

Did I ruin “her” place as the only girl?

Or did I become Daddy’s favorite, a spot she secretly coveted?

Was she mad that I got the red hair?

All of those ideas just seem so freaking petty — probably because they ARE petty.

I can think of only two things that are “big enough”, that she might “reasonably” hold against me (“reasonable” in this case meaning by the standards of this dysfunctional FOO):

1) Holding me responsible for “what I did to Mom” by being born — in other words, because my birth pushed Mom over the cliff into full-blown post-partum depression — which becomes “I caused Mom’s mental illness”, and by extension the Divorce.

This might also include guilt at her not being able to “save” Mom — she was no longer able to cover up for Mom’s dysfunction, because not only did it get a lot worse after my birth, but now Dad was also home all the time, and then she left for college.

If I hadn’t been born, Mom wouldn’t have lost her marbles, Dad wouldn’t have been told things by Mom’s psychologist (“she hates your guts”), and my sister could have headed off to college with a clear conscience.

(I was told that Mom stood at the door and watched her leave, possibly crying, but as I recall it was described as Mom was feeling sorry for herself and the loss of her indentured servant, rather than that she was going to miss her older daughter.)

I feel like this is a fairly long chain of “logic” though, and it’s just not quite simple enough to drive a lifetime of irrational hatred.  Which is why I lean towards something a little more specific:

2) Holding me responsible for her suicide attempt, and the blot on her otherwise pristine, holier-than-thou-by-a-long-shot soul.  Suicide is a mortal sin, and I can easily imagine that my sister would be seriously pissed (not to mention terrified) about having one of those on her record.

Blame-shifting would be instant psychological relief.  I made her do it, simple as that, not her fault at all.

Next, cue a lifetime of cultivating an “I’m a better Catholic than you’ll ever be” reputation beyond reproach, as insurance — a way to tell yourself that YOU couldn’t really have done that awful, sinful thing… unless, of course, some other EVEN MORE AWFUL PERSON (baby!!) MADE YOU DO IT.

If this were to be true, it’s one of the saddest things ever.  Not only did she not get any help for this that I ever heard of — it would have probably been viewed with Old-Testament judginess, rather than New-Testament love & concern.  Did no one stop to think for a minute that hey, if someone actually tried suicide — maybe things are REALLY REALLY BAD??  Maybe the adults involved are making terrible decisions under stress?

But probably the stigma of mental health issues — first Mom’s and then my sister’s — kept everything under wraps and within the family as much as possible.

It’s admittedly a lot of conjecture — but whatever it really was that my sister unfairly blames on me, effectively wrecked my family for me.  I was always wrong, always the scapegoat, never in the club.  My other siblings, and presumably her children, followed her lead.

I wish I could not care, as she does.  But there’s some people I still miss.

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Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents

Well.  A book that might just explain everything.

A friend recently discovered it, and recommended it to me.  I showed it to my therapist, who wasn’t familiar with it, even though it’s been out for almost 10 years.

If I indulge my most cynical thoughts, I’d say it isn’t more widely known because it’s clear there are an awful lot of people it applies to, and they spend a lot of money trying to soothe themselves with just about everything:  substance abuse, religion, material possessions, other people.

More likely, it’s because the people who could use this info to become healthier, happier people — or at least, people who inflict less damage on other people — end up not being self-reflective people, which is the first requirement for change of any kind.

I would implore the next generation of this fucked-up family to at least give this book a try.  I no longer believe there’s the possibility to heal my generation, but I do believe the next one can be happier.  And I would always wish that for them.

The audiobook is on Libby, with no limits on borrowing at my library.  There are some exercises available as a free pdf file as well.

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The Kids Are Not All Right

Over the past year or so, as my therapist has become familiar with my FOO history, she has often said that what she hears is a family that was “always fighting for scraps”.  “Scraps” in this case being love, affection, recognition, self-worth.

There wasn’t enough to go around — partly because dad was perpetually gone during the work week, partly because I don’t think my mother ever had what I call a “full tank” — meaning that you have to have a solid foundation of those things for yourself before you can truly give them to another person in a healthy way.

Another way to put it came from a set of cassettes that Mom once gave me about relationships: the presenter said that you have to become a “whole person” before you go looking for a mate, and they also need to be a whole person, or else you’ll just be two half-persons trying to make a whole person.  Substitute “healthy” for “whole” and “unhealthy” for “half-person”.

I strongly suspect that my mother’s family was hugely dysfunctional; I know there was trauma.  She was not close to any of her many siblings during my childhood; the one sister she was super-close to died in young adulthood (of some kind of “female” cancer, I believe).

There was once an incident when Dad had a new job and the family was moving back from the East Coast to the Midwest; along the way, near Chicago, the two oldest boys got very sick, to the point of requiring hospitalization, and there was no health insurance because of the job change.  Dad had to borrow money to pay the hospital bills.  My mother was from Chicago and all her family were there, AFAIK — and yet, they apparently did not contact her family in this crisis. Weird, to say the least.

(And even without that crisis — if you had been on the East Coast for the past several years, away from your family for the first time ever, and had three kids that none of them had ever met — wouldn’t you SCHEDULE a visit as you were passing through??

Well, you would if everything were normal.)

So. There was never enough healthy good stuff to go around.

And naturally, the children in this family saw each other as competition for that scarce resource.

Then there was the incredible stress:  moving to another state, another new job for Dad, him being home all the time, a new house, my birth, my mother’s increasing dysfunction and eventual hospitalization, the stigma of mental illness, and finally the older kids being given the job of covering mom’s responsibilities.

And naturally, there was resentment among these kids — although it seems to have been directed at each other, and specifically me (as the new baby who was causing all the problems) — rather than appropriately at the adults.

And it probably was never “safe” to do so.  There is a very strong tendency in this family’s children to protect & defend the mother, rather than the normal other way around.  Getting angry at Mom for not being able to take care of her own responsibilities and choices, and having to do it for her, was probably unthinkable.  As for Dad, the older kids apparently barely knew him, and had been taught to distrust him, if not to hate him — and now they were dependent on him.

It shouldn’t have happened that way.  There were so many bad choices, so many other decisions that could have been taken, to prevent all this pain.  The adults in the room did their best, but it wasn’t very good.  Dad was out of his depth, Mom was out of her mind, and basically they tried to cope by turning three teens into one functioning adult.  [In retrospect, they might have been able to pull it off if, say, it had been summer or they were otherwise allowed to do the job together — but they were still expected to go to (a new) high school part-time.  Just a fucking impossible situation.]

As someone who knows a thing or two about childhood development, my therapist has tried, as best she can, to explain to me the effects it would have been likely to have had on all of us — including taking into account what was known at the time versus what is known now — and the hugely insurmountable distance it created, especially between my sister and me.

At one point she theorized that we are like Harry Potter and Lord Voldemort:  “neither can live while the other survives”.

My sister’s reality and lived experiences require mine to be denied; my reality and lived experiences, especially during that first couple of years, are of a sister so deeply intertwined with our mother that they are practically the same person.  And I am still, in some sense, that crying infant who doesn’t understand why her mother/sister keeps abandoning her.  I only recently realized that when my sister went away to college, to me, at about a year old,  that was yet another huge abandonment (three in one year, if anybody’s counting).

I keep thinking about how my therapist said, with a long sigh, closing her eyes, turning her face upward, with pain and sadness written all over her face:

“… you were ALL. STILL. CHILDREN.”

You can call me irrelevant, insignificantYou can try to make me smallI’ll be your heretic, you fucking hypocriteI won’t think of you at allSticks and stones and all that shitDoes Jesus love the ignorant?I like to think he’d gladly take us all
The kids are not all right, none of us are rightI’m tired, but I won’t sleep tonight‘Cause I still feel aliveThe kids are not all right (not all right)None of us are right (none of us are right)I’m tired, but I won’t sleep tonight‘Cause I still feel alive
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After the meteorite

(From Seth Godin)

When it slams into your house and destroys it, we’re likely to pursue one of two lines of thinking:

–How did I cause this? What choices did I make, what mistakes did I permit, why did I deserve to have this damage, or who can I blame?

–Well, that happened, now what should I do?

Looking for reasons, blaming others, or worse, blaming ourselves is a waste. It’s self-defeating. It creates shame and second-guessing, separates us from our community and distracts us from the work at hand.

Sometimes there’s a lesson to be learned, but when actual bad luck leads to a significant bolt of lightning and all the pain it causes, there is no lesson.

There’s simply what happened.

Now what?

Blaming and blame-shifting has always been a huge part of my FOO dynamic.

Mom blamed Dad for EVERYTHING.  She shamed him for being a “country bumpkin” because he was born in a small town in Iowa, even though he also joined the Coast Guard and traveled more than she ever did internationally; he even learned some of another language when he was stationed in the Marshall Islands in WWII.  Plus he later moved to Chicago (where they met) and then he traveled all over the US for work.  She moved with him to CT, VT, MA, MO and IA, but never willingly traveled anywhere as far as I know or in my living memory, except back to Chicago for holidays with my sister.
ETA:  She did travel for weddings, and she did come visit Texas once, outside of any such occasion, that I recall.

I believe my siblings learned this reaction to adversity from her example.  They unilaterally blame Dad for the adversity we all experienced, from my mother’s hospitalizations & mental health diagnosis; they now blame me for things such as me “overreacting” to The Susan Incident.

I will bet a significant amount that my cancer is being ascribed to me being atheist, rather than simple bad luck or the more scientific likelihood, the effects of early childhood trauma.  One reason for that is self-defense:  if I got cancer because I am atheist, then they are safe from the same adversity.  If it’s just bad luck, or the effects of trauma, then they are not so safe.

But what about all the praying they say they are doing for me?  Should I go back to the god who apparently GAVE me the cancer, despite all their prayerful efforts?

Of course, the faithful would say the cancer is a sign to me from god saying TURN BACK NOW, REPENT YE SINNER or some such.

So if I had gone back to church today and prayed, does anyone really think I’d be cured tomorrow?  Why doesn’t that work?

I’ve always said, if there’s a god who demands more or other from me than what I can perceive as reality, through the senses and brain that he supposedly gave me, that’s a shit setup.  That god lost me around 7th grade, with the doctrine of transubstantiation.   I tried for another 20 years or so to find some other, believable religion, but never have and finally gave up.  (And my life immediately became simpler and happier.)

And one big reason for my non-faith is, how much time has my FOO devoted to actionless prayer, rather than taking concrete, earthly action?  Our mother preferred to pray about her failing marriage:  talking not to her husband, but to an invisible man in the sky, asking him to solve all her problems WITHOUT her having to change any of her other behavior or choices, such as the put-downs, the constant blame-shifting, the triangulating between us kids in order to maintain control, or the refusal of the medically-recommended hysterectomy after her fourth pregnancy nearly killed her.  Or even the decision to marry our father (which I believe she saw as a way to get away from her FOO, which I believe was also dysfunctional.  I mean she had to learn it someplace).

I believe our mother was a deeply unhappy person, but I also believe she never understood how much of that was due to her own destructive choices, and how many of those choices were due to her religion.

There’s probably no lesson to be learned from my cancer Dx, other than to make the most of whatever time I have left.  It’s just bad luck, or childhood trauma, neither of which I can change, and little of which I can understand without help from people who are mostly invested in ignoring that whole period of my birth and life, wishing away my very existence.

And I get that delving any more deeply into that would be likely to cause them a lot of pain.  OTOH, what pain have I suffered, and will I suffer, in the almost complete lack of knowledge of my early childhood?  It will potentially cost me my very life — and with no hope for me of an afterlife, that’s ALL the marbles.

This won’t cut any ice with them, because of its source:  but my dad always used to say, “Love is when you care more about the other person than you care about yourself.”  It’s one of life’s truisms, as far as I’ve experienced it.  And it says quite clearly that they don’t love me, when their potential pain is more important than my actual existence.

You know how most people have cute stories of something they did when they were 2, or 4, or whatever?  I don’t have any.  The best version of that I have is that when I was 3, my birthday fell on Easter, and I was so excited because I thought all the baskets and everything were for me.  But that’s my own memory, not because anyone told me about it.

There could be some lessons to be learned from that, but my siblings don’t want to teach me, or learn about me.  Or maybe the cancer is supposed to be a sign from god that’s a message to THEM?  hahahahaha of course not, they aren’t the ones who need “fixing” as I was told I was.

But if that flesh and blood thing is so damned important, maybe they should start with their own.

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Yes I have cancer. No the outlook is not good. Here’s what I want.

Yesterday I got a text from my oldest brother.  (The first text ever, actually.)

At first I assumed someone had died, and he was letting me know.  Turns out, they found out that I have metastatic triple negative breast cancer.  I’ve chosen to keep it from them for almost two years, for several reasons, and it turns out that was the right decision.

He said the way they found out was “almost totally random” but it was actually pretty deliberate.  Brother #3’s second wife, whom I have never met, apparently did a search for me and found me on Facebook, where there was a public post I wrote about it last summer, when a few high school people that I wasn’t FB friends with were pinging me, because I guess the news had gotten around among them.  I got a few really nice messages from some of them, but I didn’t have the bandwidth to deal with each of them, so I just wrote a public post.  I assumed no relatives were looking for me any more (and I was right:  my actual siblings aren’t looking for me.  A stranger was, because a complete stranger cares more about finding out about me than any of my siblings).

I interpret what my brother meant by “random” here is something like, “we weren’t expecting her to find out something like this, where we might have to do something.”

His use of “random” to describe this could also suggest that the wife “doesn’t know the history”, to quote that long-ago revealing statement from Brother #2.  In other words, she doesn’t know that I’m not supposed to be treated like an actual family member.  I wonder just how that unwritten rule is going to be explained to her.

My brother started off using a very old childhood nickname, which was oddly touching.  I now wonder if that was a deliberate way to fake closeness or induce me to be more open, as he hasn’t used that name for me literally in decades.  And the rest of the conversation was fairly formal.

And with a little hindsight, I now see that it was indeed, as could have been predicted, all about him/them.

He didn’t ask how I was.  He didn’t ask what he could do for me, or us.  He didn’t even ask exactly what I have, or what my prognosis might be (although that information might have come from the FB post, but he said he hasn’t been on FB for years, so I doubt it).

He did ask, oddly, if he should ask what last name I’m using now.  I still don’t know what that was about. **  Do they think that my husband of 26 years would now leave me in sickness?  In fact he has been fantastically loving & supportive through everything.

(He reacted to this contact with far more anger than I had, over what they’ve done to me, which is a sign of love:

“Look, just so we’re clear,” he says, “if somebody asks something or says something about my sister that I don’t like, understand that I will break a bottle over their head.” Few words express love clearer than these.)

** ETA:  I probably figured it out.  Due to issues with FB Biz Manager, I had to close down my original account and start a new one, around April 2021. I christened that one “Morgan McDonald” so I could keep the two accounts straight, and then over a few months, I migrated friends from one to the other.  Once I had everyone transferred, I deleted the old one, and changed the name on the new one back to my real name.

BUT — if they are aware of “Morgan McDonald”, that means they’ve been spying on my account for at least a year and a half, and probably longer than that.  Way to “respect my privacy”, assholes.

If this is what they are doing, I’m pretty sure they spin it to themselves and each other  as, “We’re just being good people, looking out for our pathetic sister.”

They just canNOT stand that someone utterly rejects them, and especially someone they see as “lesser”.

Knowing that I’ve been dealing with this for almost 2 years, my brother made an offer for me to come and stay with them if I wanted different medical care.  Lymphoma was mentioned as a local specialty — which is not what I have.

What I have is quite aggressive:  it’s at the far end of the charts on every measure there is.  In fact, I initially had 2 kinds of carcinoma:  both HER2+ and triple negative.  I’m on my seventh therapy in total, including radiation and surgery:  I had chemo & immunotherapy for the HER2+, which looks like it did not metastasize; and chemo, immunotherapy and now another chemo for the triple negative, which did.

If I hadn’t been getting stellar medical care for the past 2 years, I’d probably be dead already.  As it is, a Residual Cancer Burden of III after surgery predicts:

    • 10-year recurrence/death rate = 40% for HER2+ BC
    • 10-year recurrence/death rate = 75% for triple-negative BC

And I’ve already had the recurrence.

Not great odds.

Anyway, it’s clear to me in retrospect that the offer wasn’t meant to be actually useful.  Once I explained that I am not in want of adequate medical care, the tone of the convo became that of someone who wants to end it as soon as possible.  I believe this texting was his way of “doing something” so he can stave off guilt and feel like he did something.  And he can report that back to everyone else, who can then say, “well she says she doesn’t need any help” and that’s that.  Go back to uselessly praying to that same god who GAVE me the cancer, if that’s what you believe in.  And keep pretending to yourself that you care about me, all the while maintaining your long-held beliefs & anger at me for things that were not my fault.

I’m willing to bet a decent amount of money that a few of them are actually glad I might soon be gone for good.

In other words, even though now they know I have aggressive cancer and am likely to die far too soon — I don’t believe they will change a thing.

Because that’s far more comfortable.  It’s easier.  And it’s especially a better option than facing up to the possibility that MY FAMILY gave me this cancer.

I can hear the eye-rolling from here, but it’s a scientific fact:  “The more Adverse Childhood Events a person experiences (such as …neglect…[or] Having a family member attempt or die by suicide [or] …Growing up in a family with mental health… problems), the more likely they are to suffer from cancer…”

From the University of Chicago:

“Local chemical signals released by fat cells in the mammary gland appear to provide a crucial link between exposure to unrelenting social stressors early in life and to the subsequent development of breast cancer”

There’s not much else that can explain how I went from a healthy 52YO who routinely got mistaken for being 10 years younger, to having a super-aggressive, treatment-resistant form of breast cancer.  I don’t smoke, I don’t drink to excess, I’m not overweight, I eat relatively healthily.  I have no other health issues.  I got all my preventive care checkups. I have no genetic markers.

Early studies explored ways that children who faced adversity such as… neglect at home were at higher lifelong risk for a range of problems including cancer…
…chronic, toxic stress in childhood can affect a person over the course of their life… the trauma of having one or both parents die does impact breast density, risk for breast cancer, and risk for especially aggressive types of breast cancer.

It’s not much of a stretch to imagine that having your mother disappear for a month at a time, twice, during your first year could have a similar effect on an infant as if she had died.

I’ve given up on any possibility that I might get what I actually want (apologies, respect, acceptance, love — in other words, CHANGE) from my siblings.  And now that they know about the cancer, anything they might do will more probably be out of self-preservation from guilt, and not because they love me, miss me, or care about me.

But – in the unlikely event that anyone actually wants to do something useful for me, here’s the only thing I’m asking for now:

I want to know EXACTLY what happened to me.

I want to know what Mom did that night that made Dad pack Mom off to the doctor, and made the doctor immediately pack her off to the hospital for a month, keeping her away from her infant daughter.  I want to know why & what happened the second time she was hospitalized, too.  I want to know about Mom’s medical history, any actual records, and anything known about her mental health, or why she received electroshock therapy.  I want to know everything my sister knows, because I suspect that’s at least part of what made her try to commit suicide that year.  I want to know what they themselves did to me, or didn’t do for me, when they were put in charge of me and the younger boys.  I want to know how long I sat around in wet diapers and had such horrible diaper rash, and why 40 years later the same brother threw at me the words, “WE CHANGED YOUR DIAPERS”.

I’ve been trying to get any information I could for years.  I had to trick them into giving me a good chunk of what I do know, but they put a one-hour time limit on that one discussion session, and I’m certain there’s more.  And I have a right to my own goddamned history.

Here are the terms I will offer:  any information I get will be kept confidential.  I won’t blog about it, and I won’t rat out anyone who tells me anything to the rest of the family.  I was able to keep knowledge of my cancer from everyone for 2 years, and they only found out by accident — so that proves I can keep that promise.

My time is limited, and there’s a decent chance it’s because of what happened to me as an infant and a child.  Now that they know about the cancer, I’m asking – one last time – for the one thing I can only get from them.  My sister is likely to get what she’s always wanted:  a world without my existence in it.  So the way I see it, it’s only fair that I also get what I want before I’m dead:  and I want the truth.

I hope someone finally has the courage to give me at least part of what I want.  I know no one has the courage to love me in spite of dictates from my sister, and probably Susan — but I have a little hope that someone will have the guts & the decency to finally give me information.