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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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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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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.

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Recently, I’ve been knitting a gift for a neighbor whose 70th birthday is next week.  The surprise party was last night, but the knitting project wasn’t complete.

As any knitter (or crocheter) knows, this happens A LOT.

Many a well-intended holiday gift has been wrapped up, unfinished, and put under the tree.  Many a baby garment has been outgrown before completion.  I once taught a knitting group that included Marlene, a far more experienced and productive knitter than me, who was working on finishing a sweater for her husband that had been started over 20 years previously.

While I am a fast knitter, I’ve made it a personal rule to avoid working to a deadline whenever possible.  But this time I made an exception — although I knew there was a good chance I wouldn’t get it done in time for the party.

And boy, did this failure to meet the deadline stir up some shit memories.

For a while I couldn’t figure out why I was upset about not getting it done on time, when I had gone into it knowing that was at least a 50-50 chance.  And then — I remembered.

So let’s back up a little over 40 years, to the holiday season of 1981.

I would have been 12.

My sister would have been 29.

My sister had seen a pattern for a crocheted sparkly gold evening jacket in a Woman’s Day magazine, dated 12/22/81.  So the magazine probably went on sale around Thanksgiving, a month ahead of the cover date.

My sister knit, but didn’t crochet.  My mother did neither.  But I did know how to crochet.

And between them, the idea was cooked up that my sister would pay for the yarn, and I would crochet this jacket for her, in time for New Year’s Eve.

I think I was asked if I would do it (yes of course I’ll try to please my mother & my sister) and could I get it done in time?

I had only been crocheting for maybe 4 years or so at that point.  To the best of my recollection, I had not done anything like a garment before, except maybe for a Barbie doll.  I do know that in my 40+ year library of binders containing notes, yarn samples, and patterns for pretty much every garment I’ve ever knitted or crocheted — this is the very first item.

Everyone else involved in cooking up this project for me had to know it would have been a tight deadline for anyone, let alone a kid.

How the hell would I have known?

And as I recall, it was going to be my mom’s responsibility to make sure I got it done on time.

Anyone who knew our mother at that time, knows she was never on time for anything.  Getting her on a plane to Chicago every year for the holidays was a complete train wreck.  Finishing Halloween costumes was often down to the wire.  Sewing formal dresses in time for special occasions was always a last-minute rush.  The suit my mother wore to my wedding?  *I*, the goddamned BRIDE,  had to first shop for it, then mail her a selection of 2 or 3 suits, then return the ones she didn’t want — and finally, hem it for her the night before my wedding.  (There were at least 3 other women on hand who could have hemmed the dress, probably better than I:  my sister, my sister-in-law, and my mother-in-law.  Not one of them did, of course.  Not for me.)

Back to the evening jacket:  as anyone could have predicted, I didn’t get the thing done in time for New Year’s Eve.  I believe I did finish it at some point, and it got sent off, I suppose.  I have no idea if it fit; I don’t know if I even knew what gauge was.

What I do remember was that the failure, my sister’s disappointment and her anger, were all my fault.

Certainly not my mother’s fault!  Nor my sister’s, who apparently saw in me a way to get something that she wanted, and was mad at me when I didn’t deliver.

Blame & shame the 12YO, who got set up by two adults.

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Fruitcake, Part 2

“I want a slice with cherries in it!”

“They ALL have cherries in them.”

 

Thus began a lesson from my dad in quality, and ingredients, and fruitcake. I was maybe 9 years old.

This story has the resonance of a memory for me, although not exactly the reality – it could be an amalgamation of more than one real-life event, “remembered” over the distance of 45 years – but at any rate, it’s a story about me & Dad & fruitcake.

As mentioned here before, my dad was VP of Production for a chain of bakeries in the Midwest for my entire childhood. One of those bakeries is in Beatrice, Nebraska, which is where they make Grandma’s Fruit Cake.

Dad & I were the only ones who liked the fruitcake. In fact I love that damned fruitcake. We always got some at Christmas. And I especially loved the candied cherries, as much for the bright red color as the flavor. And yes, they actually had flavor!

And this was in fact the lesson: Dad explained to me that to be a GOOD fruitcake, it had to be made of high-quality ingredients. All those nuts and candied fruit were expensive, he said. So people who wanted to cut corners would use less of those things, and more fillers, like flour. Really good fruitcakes actually have hardly any flour in them. The flour in a good fruitcake is just enough to hold everything together, and in Grandma’s Fruit Cake it wasn’t really enough to do even that. (Pro tip: for that reason, you’re supposed to cut it with a wet knife.)

Even today, long after the original bakery chain got bought out by some Belgian company, the slices don’t really hold together very well. They crumble into a delicious sticky pile of nuts and fruit, a bit more than a hint of booze, and those beautiful candied cherries.

I can say that with assurance because today my husband went out for coffee with his boss, and on his way home he stopped off at the grocery store.

Of course he knows about my history with Grandma’s Fruit Cake. And only a few days ago I had been thinking of trying to order one for the holidays, and wondering aloud if it was already too late to do it – or indeed if it was foolish to order a whole fruitcake just for me.

So when he happened to spot some small, stocking-stuffer-sized boxes of fruitcake at the store, of course he picked one up for me.

And that’s what was prominently printed on the top of the box in red: one generic word, FRUITCAKE.

I was grateful for the gesture, sure, but not at all convinced that a grocery store FRUITCAKE was going to fit the bill.

(Husband didn’t notice anything special about it either at the time – although he did mention later that he thought it was kind of on the expensive side for a little box of fruitcake.

Dad was right, and still is.)

So. Tonight I was making myself some cocoa, and the box of fruitcake nearby on the kitchen counter caught my eye again.

Only this time, I saw the dark green logo in the bottom corner: the curved banner that without even reading it, I KNOW says “Grandma’s Bake Shoppe”.

I couldn’t fucking believe it.

I grabbed the box, turned it over. I didn’t even know what I was looking for, except that I saw it immediately. There was the bakery address: Beatrice, Nebraska.

Proof that this was a real, honest-to-god Grandma’s Fruit Cake…

…and the first two slices had at least 3 cherries apiece.

Much like the last time one showed up unexpectedly at a horrible time in my life, it’s a very important message. The fruitcake is something that was special to both Dad and me; that bond is still there, and still meaningful even after all these years. Dad’s love for me is still there when I need it.

“I can’t be there any more, but here’s a fruitcake for you. You know what it means. Love, Dad.”

I love you too, Dad. Merry Christmas.

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About Damn Time

Oh, I’ve been so down and under pressure
I’m way too fine to be this stressed, yeah
Oh, I’m not the girl I was or used to be
Uh, bitch, I might be better
Turn up the music, turn down the lights
I got a feelin’ I’m gon’ be alright
Okay (okay), alright
It’s about damn time (time)
Turn up the music, let’s celebrate (alright)
I got a feelin’ I’m gon’ be okay
Okay (okay), alright
It’s about damn time