Author: Skipper

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.”

(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.

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.