Author: Skipper

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The History, Part 4 – The Back Story

Here is what I have been able to learn about the years just before and after I was born.

Some of the following is is admittedly informed speculation, based on my solo research.  At one point I tried to get my mother’s hospital records, only to find out that they are only kept for 40 years by law in Iowa, and I was about 2 years too late.  I have asked the family if anyone has any official records, but if anyone has any documentation, they have kept it from me.  Most of the quotations come from a recorded conversation among my siblings.

The move

Prior to the year before I was born, my dad’s jobs required him to travel most of the time.  He was usually gone during the week.  Then, he got offered a prestigious job in a new city.  It was a sudden move, because the job offer resulted from the death of a colleague.

So the family moved from the place where they had lived the longest (about 10 years or so).  They moved in the late summer of ’67, so the kids could start school in the new city, and at first they lived crowded into an apartment for about 8 months.  My sister (15) started her sophomore year of high school that year, and the next two boys were in 7th and 9th grades (14 and 12).  Brother #3 was 5YO and brother #4 was around 18 months old.

I honestly have no idea why the move had to happen immediately.  It’s not like my dad couldn’t have commuted for a while, to work at the new job during the week, and coming home on the weekends, as was the status quo.  My best guess is that this would have been deemed an expensive alternative.

My birth

The following spring, early ’68, they moved into the house I grew up in, and I was born about a year later, in spring of ’69.  My sister was finishing up her junior year.

Mom’s mental illness

In the fall of ’69, at the start of my sister’s senior year, and a few months after I was born, it is agreed that my mother suffered a “nervous breakdown”.  This is the terminology that I have heard all my life.

A couple of years ago, I got a book from the library about post-partum depression, and learned about post-partum psychosis as well.  What they used to call a “nervous breakdown” is now called a psychotic breakdown.  This can involve dangerous delusions and violent behavior.

As part of her treatment, she received electroshock therapy, or what they now call ECT.  This is also undisputed — although it is unilaterally considered by everyone else that it was a “ridiculous” “unbelievable” treatment choice.

Well, here are the reasons they do ECT.

“ECT is often used with informed consent as a last line of intervention for major depressive disorder…
ECT is considered one of the least harmful treatment options available for severely depressed pregnant women…
For major depressive disorder, ECT is generally used only when other treatments have failed, or in emergencies, such as imminent suicide.“

“Hospitalization may be necessary in cases [of major depressive disorder] with associated self-neglect or a significant risk of harm to self or others. A minority are treated with electroconvulsive therapy (ECT).”

Mom was indeed hospitalized twice during my first year, for a month each time:  once in the fall, when I was around 6 months old, and then again in the spring, when I was close to a year old.

I tried asking my sister about what happened to cause Dad to hospitalize his wife:  in other words, what was the psychotic break that almost certainly had to happen, to precipitate everything that followed?

And, knowing that she always, ALWAYS defends our mother and will do so to the death — it occurred to me that if she did know anything, there was a good chance that she might decide not to tell me, and just say she didn’t know anything.  So I asked her, if that was the case, to at least tell me that truth, and not lie about it.

Well, that was a mistake.  She saw this as an accusation, and she got extremely defensive and lashed out, claiming that I had no evidence for anything like this happening.  All she does say is that Dad packed a suitcase for Mom and took her to a doctor, and that she wasn’t sure if Mom knew what was happening or not.  (Which gives some credence to the idea that she was not right in the head at that point, but I digress.)

But simple confusion on the part of his wife would not be likely to lead a man to pack a suitcase for a trip to the doctor.  If you don’t think there’s something seriously wrong, you would just take her to the doctor.  Then when the doctor decides to check her into the hospital, that’s when you go home and get the suitcase.  Or possibly you have called the doctor, described what is happening, and the doctor told you what to do.

I say that conjecturing that there was a dangerous and/or violent psychotic break makes far more sense than conjecturing that my father just suddenly decided to up and check his wife into the loony bin for no good reason — especially with a 6 month old baby, and a 3YO and a 7YO, to care for at home.

The family had been limping along for months, if not years, in denial, trying to function as best they could with a mother running the home who was increasingly nonfunctional.  My dad never talked much about it, but he referred a couple of times to things such as, “soiled clothing being put back in drawers,” instead of being washed, and that I “had diaper rash so bad that [my] butt was bleeding”.

If this kind of thing was able to be rationalized over time, it seems ridiculous to think that Dad just suddenly had a revelation one day.  Something must have happened to make it clear to him that she was mentally ill and needed medical help, and whatever it was, it was bad enough for him to know that he had to remove her from the house.

It at least seems clear that Mom was severely depressed.  Prior to being hospitalized, Mom was “crying all the time”.  She badly missed their previous home, and with the move, any support system she may have had had disappeared.  She didn’t work outside the home and she never learned to drive (a circumstance that was, you guessed it, blamed on my father), so she was isolated at home all day.

She made few, if any, friends in the new town.  This is held to be one of the reasons why she didn’t win custody in The Divorce, because she had no one to testify on her behalf.  (But over the following 12 years, when she was working outside the home and had every opportunity to socialize, I rarely saw her do so.  I remember she tried square dancing for a while, but that didn’t last very long.  I never met any friends that she made, other than a few women who would give us a ride to or from somewhere — usually a church function.)

The job change meant my father was home more.  Instead of being gone all week, he was now able to come home every night, and even come home for lunch.

One brother said, “I saw that as more of a threat than anything else.”  (and everyone else laughs.  They have no idea how twisted and unhealthy this sounds in the mouth of a teenager.  It’s called “parental alienation” and it is a serious form of child abuse.  It’s not normal — at least not if a parent is not abusive [in that case it is called realistic alienation], and I have never heard anyone claim that Dad ever raised a hand to them except in earned punishment.  It is learned from the alienating parent, the “aligned” parent.  See also the defense mechanisms of splitting and idealization and devaluation.)

It is clear that the man was not welcome in his own home.

Admittedly Dad was an absent parent during the week, because of his job.  For whatever reason, though, this arrangement held sway for years and I believe it allowed much of the dysfunction to take root.  I think things would have been very different if Dad hadn’t traveled so much, but there are also plenty of families who make this arrangement work just fine:  military families, for instance.

Another brother noted that previously, when Dad would leave for the week, for the first 2 or 3 days, they “could do anything” and were able to “screw around” instead of doing chores and so forth.  Dad’s return at the end of the week was seen as an unwelcome end to the fun (more laughter), as they then had to rush to get things taken care of before he came back “because Dad was coming home”.  See who gets blamed for Mom’s inability to run the house properly and their own teenaged lack of discipline?

(This is exactly the situation that Flylady used to call “crisis cleaning”.  It’s a lousy way to run a household.)

They saw him as a “workaholic”, someone who “enjoyed” doing work and chores, and never had any fun.  Well, when the work doesn’t get done as it should, during the week, and then it gets done in a half-assed way because it’s being done in crisis mode — well, someone’s gotta do it, and that someone probably ended up being my dad.

But it is not hard to imagine that when he returned from a week of sales and schmoozing, what he wanted — and, according to the social contract of the day, had a right to expect — was to be welcomed home by his wife and children, and have a nice meal in a clean, tidy, and well-maintained home.

He didn’t enjoy working hard all week to come home to a mess, to be required to punish his sons for a week’s worth of misdeeds, and then to reward that by going out to eat, and finally to spend his weekend catching up on chores that should have been already done.

Of course he wasn’t happy, and he wasn’t any fun.  He was being let down by his wife and alienated from his children, week after week after week.

And his was a pretty normal reaction to the situation, as it turns out:

“Rejected parents, generally fathers, tend to lack warmth and empathy… instead, they engage in rigid parenting and critical attitudes.”

Dad was considered unreasonable for things like wanting dinner to be at a certain time.  They complain that he never wanted to go out, he never wanted to have any fun.  (Oddly enough, my experience of my mother in the years that followed The Divorce can be described in exactly the same manner.  Mom rarely took us anywhere or did anything at her home that could be called “fun”.  I remember doing a lot of reading by myself in the living room, or doing her housework.)

The words used to describe living with Mom are: “relaxed”, “flexible”, “not exactly haphazard, there was some structure but it wasn’t to the letter”

The words used to describe what it was like when Dad was home:  “like having someone breathing down your neck”.

One brother referred to seeing Mom at the hospital and thinking that she was so much happier, that maybe being away from Dad for that long (a month or so) was a good thing.

I’ll note that also while she was in the hospital, she wouldn’t have had to lift a finger, and she probably enjoyed being waited on by the staff all day.

But see how Dad is made to be the source of the problem?  Mom may be mentally ill and have severe depression, but that’s only because of the unthinkable circumstance of being forced to actually live with her husband around all the time.  Not because her husband wants and expects reasonable things, that she is too unreasonable to do.

In fact, my siblings believe that the situation was abusive, and that any professional would have told Mom to get the hell out.  (Which begs the question, so why is the divorce such a horrible thing?  but I’m getting ahead of myself.)

But — no abuser willingly lets the target of their abuse go.  Yet Dad was the one who left the marriage, and Mom was the one who resented The Divorce.

I agree, it was abusive — but not in the direction they believe.

Mom is praised for putting herself through misery and sacrificing her personal life in order to save the marriage.  WHAT MARRIAGE?  She resented the shit out of him for expecting her to do things — normal, everyday, housewife, marriage things, like cooking and laundry and cleaning and sex — and apparently, changing my damned diapers — that she simply didn’t want to do.

And incidentally, this poor decision made everyone else’s lives a fucking misery too — to the point that somewhere in all this mess, my sister tried to kill herself.  That is so far from praiseworthy I can’t even.  That is, in fact, abuse.

I have wondered just what would have made my mother happy at this point in the narrative.  She needed and wanted Dad’s income, and refused to give up being provided for in the manner to which she had become accustomed — but she hated Dad, and living in the same house with him, as his wife, made her miserable, and by extension, everyone else too.

The only thing I can think of that would have “fixed” the situation would have been if Dad had conveniently died, and left her with all “her” kids and a big beautiful house, and a big insurance policy, so she would never have to work.

The other thing that came out of this was the information from the doctors.  The only actual diagnosis I ever heard was “paranoid schizophrenia.”  But Dad related some bits and pieces to the older kids, in sound bites, like “Your mother is crazy, and she doesn’t love you.”  The doctor also famously told Dad, “She hates your guts.”  (To which one brother said, “which I could sort of see that.”)

I think it was during this period that Dad learned about things like blaming, and contempt, and how destructive those things are to a relationship, and began to see how hopeless it was that anything would ever change or get better.

During the first hospitalization, Dad used up his vacation to stay home and take care of the house and the younger kids.  Then the older kids were drafted to stay home from school in a rotation to do the job.  At some point after the initial “episode”, as it is delicately called, a housekeeper was hired, but even that wasn’t enough to prevent the second hospitalization.

The divorce

Things were admittedly dysfunctional even before the move, but the enormous stress load just made everything worse:  the move, the new job, and the changes in the household routine, with the new baby and a bigger house and of course, Dad’s increased and unwelcome presence.

And in the course of Mom’s hospitalizations and having to run the household end of things on top of doing his own job, Dad found out about things that Mom was spending money on behind his back, such as astrologers and horoscopes — and in particular, she spent money on a private investigator to track Dad, and tried to hide it from him.

This was a huge betrayal to Dad, because to him, money was equal to love; it was how a man showed his love for his family, by being a good provider.  Letting his wife handle his money that he worked hard for was a symbol of his trust in her.  To then find that she wasted a lot of his own money by paying someone to spy on him was, to him, the height of dishonesty and treachery.

Of course this is not Mom’s fault – not even really her doing.  The blame for this is placed on the private investigator!  who is held to have manipulated Mom into doing it.

Predictably, they fought about sex (mostly my mother resenting my father and making him out to be a bastard for wanting to have some).  Apparently at some point Mom accused, “This is all about sex, isn’t it?” and Dad either (a) didn’t deny it or (b) agreed, depending on whose memory you rely on.

Well, she was right:  in her head, at least, it probably was.  There are several stories about how screwed up my mother was about sex.

It would be funny if it weren’t so unhealthy.  The woman who didn’t want to have sex with him got paranoid and mad when she thought he’d found someone else to have sex with.

Sex is generally considered a normal and healthy part of a normal and healthy marriage.  The person who doesn’t believe this is the one who is not normal or healthy.

At some point Dad started spending his weekends somewhere helping someone remodel a house.  (It’s not clear if this was before or after the bit with the PI.)  He would come home on Friday, throw a bunch of tools in the car, and leave.  But this was considered to be “great, because he’d be gone all weekend.”

So, they fought about money.  They fought about sex.  But so what?  These are the two of the most common things married couples fight about.  What they were apparently unable to do is communicate effectively (without blaming!) and resolve the problems.  This was absolutely, positively, not all on Dad.  Yet the excuses are all made for Mom.

Mom was “under an awful lot of stress”.

Mom was “trying to keep the marriage together”.

Wasn’t Dad?  Wasn’t it stressful to find out that no one wanted him around?  That his wife was spying on him?  When Mom was sick, wasn’t he using all his spare time to do as much of both jobs as he could?  And this was while his day job was brand-new to him.  Oh, no, that’s not stressful.

But Mom is the one that they “feel so bad for”.

Guess what?  That is the hallmark of a manipulator.

My BIL — a man whom I believe everyone in the family respects greatly —  once said something to this effect:

A man wants three things out of a marriage:  to feel important in his own home, to have a good meal, and to have a roll in the hay every once in a while.

My dad got none of the three out of that marriage.

So at some point over the next 4 or 5 years, he decided there was nothing left for him, and probably nothing positive for his younger kids, in keeping this relationship going.  He had nothing, in the way of family, to lose.  So he decided to divorce her.  He really had no other choice worth making.  And alone of his kids, I’ve never blamed him for making that choice.

Because I’m in the same position:  a family that doesn’t want me around, that refuses to even consider that they could be part of the problem.  And just like it was to Dad, it’s been made clear to me that nothing is ever going to change, and there is nothing left for me to do but leave.  I too have nothing, in the way of family, to lose.

It’s still painful.  Rejection always is.  But it’s a pattern that I can at least recognize now, and get away from.

Part 5

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Everything Will Be All Right

 

Hey, don’t write yourself off yet
It’s only in your head you feel left out or looked down on.
Just try your best, try everything you can.
And don’t you worry what they tell themselves when you’re away.

It just takes some time,
Little girl, you’re in the middle of the ride.
Everything, everything will be just fine,
Everything, everything will be all right, all right.

Hey, you know they’re all the same.
You know you’re doing better on your own, so don’t buy in.
Live right now, yeah, just be yourself.
It doesn’t matter if it’s good enough for someone else.

It just takes some time,
Little girl, you’re in the middle of the ride.
Everything, everything will be just fine,
Everything, everything will be all right, all right.
It just takes some time,
Little girl, you’re in the middle of the ride.
Everything, everything will be just fine,
Everything, everything will be all right, all right.

Hey, don’t write yourself off yet.
It’s only in your head you feel left out or looked down on.
Just do your best, do everything you can
And don’t you worry what the bitter hearts are gonna say.

It just takes some time,
Little girl, you’re in the middle of the ride.
Everything, everything will be just fine,
Everything, everything will be all right, all right.
It just takes some time,
Little girl, you’re in the middle of the ride.
Everything, everything will be just fine,
Everything, everything will be all right.

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Take Responsibility

I ran across this excellent short essay about The One Sentence That Gets My Kids to Take Responsibility.  It reminds me of the old marital advice to not use “you” statements in arguments, which has stood me in good stead over almost 20 years, so there must be something to it.

Their sentences are filled with the words: he, she, they, and what they did to ME!

They’ll try to say “I . . . am really mad because so and so hit me.” We back up and I tell them to start over. We’ll stay there until they’ve filled in the blank with their own actions.

The other sentences that use the word “I” are just as important. “I’m sorry. I did this _____ to you.” Those sentences can be equally hard to spit out.

For relationships, for careers, for parenting, for taking responsibility and for advocating for yourself – the word “I” matters.

It’s not about taking blame, it’s about owning our actions and moving on.

Ever tried to have a conversation with someone who has mastered the art of deflection and passive aggression? Nothing gets solved.

How much faster does something get fixed when someone admits that it’s broken and how it broke?

Owning our actions is important.

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Two Little Words

There is a world of difference between

I didn’t do anything wrong

(therefore any problem that exists is your fault, because I am perfect, how dare you suggest that I am not perfect, you are wrong)

and

I didn’t mean to do anything wrong

(but I’m human, I made a mistake, I was rude and disrespectful, I didn’t listen to what you were asking for, I’m sorry, and I hope you can forgive me)

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Birthdays and Losses

Today was the birthday of a good friend of ours.  Someone whom my husband has known since his teens:  he was at our wedding, and he set up the interview that turned into my husband’s job for the past 15 years.  It is because of him that we moved here, where I finally found a place I could feel like I fit.

He and I and my husband had a tradition to take the afternoon off for the premier of every single one of the LOTR movies.  We made it to all six movies together.  No one ever made an excuse.

Despite knowing him for so long, I didn’t get past his façade for a long time.  He put on a front of sorts, being on the surface a hard-partying kind of guy, who dated strippers and lived fast.  So I didn’t really get to know him until a couple of years ago, when we went on a trip to Las Vegas for a reunion of sorts with a few of my husband’s other friends of that timeframe.  We had a couple of good conversations then, during which he “admitted” to us that he, too, is atheist (after which I high-fived him).  I asked him if he was conservative or progressive, and he said progressive.  I asked, how does a former military guy, raised Catholic, become progressive?  He said, “Thinking.”

I felt like we then became real friends, safe in the knowledge that we had shared values, but he spent a lot of the ensuing time in China for work.  During that Vegas weekend I said I didn’t have very many people with whom I get to have an enjoyable, intellectual conversation (not one that wasn’t an argument).  I didn’t have much chance to have more such conversations in person with my new friend, but we became friends on Facebook, and I found out we had a few more things in common.

He was more than just a friend.  He was starting to feel like family — like a brother.  He had the same name as one of my FOO brothers, too.

And then he died three months ago, very suddenly, in China, at the age of 48.

There are certain dates that are more or less etched in my memory.  January 13th.  January 30th.  March 26th.  July 18th.  August 7th.  Sibling’s birthdays.  I took them off my calendar but they are still in the back of my mind (although now I don’t usually notice the days when they actually happen, but maybe a couple of days later).

November 2nd.  I never had a chance to celebrate this new brother’s birthday with him.  Between the time I found out what it was, and the actual date, he was gone.  I feel like a heel for never asking before.

And I feel like shit for not being able to fully support my husband in his grief for his lifelong friend — especially since he just lost HIS mother this spring (actually, both my husband and our friend did).  Not having been especially close to my own mother, nor to his mother, I haven’t been great about supporting him in that loss either.  Which is particularly crap, because he tried very hard to support me when my parents died and we were both too young to know anything about grieving, let alone all the other shit that came with those losses.

But I’m too wrapped up in my own lousy baggage.  This loss, on top of everything else, seems to be too much, and I have a hard time putting my own grief aside for his.

I lost a good friend and co-worker fifteen years ago, in Texas, to a car accident — someone who I ate lunch with every weekday, and who immediately volunteered to take care of my cats, twice a day, for two solid weeks, when my husband had already left for his new job and I got word of my father’s cancer diagnosis.  Steve died in that accident while I was away on that visit.

I had an online friend in New Zealand, whom we got to meet in person when we visited there in 2008, at The Wirld’s Most Nawt Northerly Cheezemeet.  She and I shared a birthday.  Kim died of breast cancer in 2011.

I lost Morgan, my beloved cat of nearly 19 years, a couple of days after the anniversary of my father’s death.  Morgan had been a birthday present from my brother Joe (although I think he got my birthday and my sister’s mixed up because they are only a week apart.  Our birthdays were on Fridays that year, and we went the Saturday after her birthday, not the Saturday after mine).

I lost both my parents in 2001, when I was only 31 — well, 31 and 32, respectively, even though their deaths were only 3 months apart, because guess what?  My birthday was in between.

I lost the whole rest of my family between then and 2012.  (Well, I lost the illusion of having a family when I asked for a little too much.)

My FOO has never celebrated my birthday as a group.  There have been milestone birthday celebrations for just about everyone else, including several that I got on a plane for.  When my own 40th was approaching, at one of the reunions I tried to start a conversation abut what we could all do together to celebrate my first milestone birthday.  The only person who even joined in was my BIL.  My family (or rather, my sister) refuses to celebrate the day I was born, the day I should have become a part of the family.

And now, just when I thought I had a new log in my raft, a solid, dependable friend and brother — we’ve lost him too.  And I never got to tell him “Happy Birthday, Joe.”

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“You Can Let Them Go”

One thing that strikes me, after reading this excellent essay, is that out of all the people who know about what happened in my family, no one (outside the family itself) is being a jackass about it.

“Some things in life cannot be fixed. They can only be carried.”

No one else is telling me I need to “get over it”.  Mostly, the people I speak to about it say things like, “Man, that really sucks.”  (And a fair amount of “That’s fucked up.”)

Obviously I have chosen my friends well.  They are normal, healthy people who offer their empathy, not defensiveness or blame.  (To be fair, that’s partly because they don’t have any skin in the game, other than being my friend.  Objectivity and normalcy come easily from people who are not personally involved in what happened.  Defensiveness and blame come easily from people for whom empathy would require that they take their share of the responsibility.)

The things that happened can’t be fixed.  Won’t be fixed, for sure, because the people who need to fix them don’t have a need to do the work.  Why should they?  They still have a family — albeit it is short a couple people now.  Sure, their little sister got mad about “nothing”, “threw a fit”, “picked a fight”, held a grudge, went off the deep end, broke off communication with the whole family over “nothing”, shrug, what can you do?  Losing her isn’t important enough to make anyone do anything about it.  They probably miss my husband; I doubt many of them miss me.

Yes, I know what I asked for is hard.  What I asked for also happens to be normal, decent treatment of a valued family member.  And you know what?  When you care about someone, you do the hard shit for them.

If the roles were reversed, I know everyone would have come down on me like a ton of bricks for being disrespectful to Susan.  It would be the easiest thing in the world.  (In fact, Joe did exactly that:  telling me that specific words that I supposedly used when I made my request were “disrespectful to Susan’s job”. )  But they won’t do it for me, because I am somehow less important than Susan, in my own family.

So I know they are capable of the “normal, decent treatment” part.  It’s the “valued family member” part that they can’t manage.  And they don’t want to understand, because to understand would require work, would require questioning things that have never been allowed to be questioned even when they make no sense, and it would be hard.

“People tell others to take responsibility when they don’t want to understand.  Because understanding is harder than posturing. Telling someone to “take responsibility” for their loss is a form of benevolent masturbation. It’s the inverse of inspirational porn: it’s sanctimonious porn.”

I’ve been thinking of a metaphor lately:  that life’s relationships are like logs in a raft.  If you have enough good, big, logs in your raft to hold you up, you can weather the currents and the storms that come at you.  They still suck, but you can weather them, because you have your raft to depend on to keep you out of the water, to get you safely to the next port.

I used to have a really big raft.  Then, when a storm hit and I lost my biggest, sturdiest log, it turned out that some of the other logs were rotten and they fell apart.  Still other logs, that were held to the raft only by the rotten logs, drifted away.  Suddenly, in the midst of grief and loss, I was in the water, clinging to the one log I had left.

For a decade or so, I tried to gather up the pieces of those broken, rotten logs, and fit them back into a raft that I could float on — because those logs had always been a part of my raft, and I thought my raft had to have those logs in it, or it wouldn’t be a raft.

Then, over a few years of hard work and a lot of painful realizations, it became clear to me that those rotted logs were actually what caused me to end up back in the water, time and again.  And even if I could get them back in my raft, they weren’t going to hold me up.

I lost a total of 23 people when my raft fell apart.  Twenty-three people.

(I guarantee that if any of them are reading this, they have just stopped to count and see if I am correct in that or not.)

That, frankly, is a shitload of loss to deal with.  No wonder it took a few years to come to terms with it.  Fortunately, I still had a log or two to cling to, and they kept me from going under.

I’m finding other logs, and I am building a new raft.  None of the logs are quite as big as the originals — there’s not much that can make up for 40 years of shared history — but they float.  And I can depend on them to hold me up.

… if anyone tells you some form of get over it, move on, or rise above, you can let them go.

If anyone avoids you amidst loss, or pretends like it didn’t happen, or disappears from your life, you can let them go.

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Madness

One thing that has been tough is giving up a lot of personal history.  I’ve mentioned before that I have no one with whom I can reminisce in a positive way about my childhood or my father.  And there are other bits and pieces that come up from time to time.

My love of rock music comes straight from my oldest brother.  When he lived in Minneapolis, which has a thriving music scene, he would record stuff on the radio overnight (this was probably about 30 years ago.  Cassette tapes and the radio, that was it.) and see what he came up with.

I still remember sitting in the kitchen, playing one of his “fishing” tapes for myself, and hearing “Senses Working Overtime” by XTC for the first time and being completely blown away.

And falling in love.  Up to that point, my notion of “rock music” was a lot of 70’s classics.  I had NO IDEA it could be as cool as that.

This love of music also contributed directly to my marriage.  When I first met my now-husband, he was impressed upon seeing my CD collection.  When he subsequently sent me a French pop CD as a “farewell have a nice life” present, that gift started a chain of events that has lasted over 20 years and has included going to see hundreds and hundreds of shows.  Last year, when that French pop artist toured for the first time in forever, we went to see him.  (In Brussels.  Which was awesome.)

So this music thing has been a huge part of my life, and it all started with my brother.

The same brother left a lot of books and records stored down in the basement when he moved out.  When I was bored, I’d sometimes go looking through that stuff for something interesting.  I know that’s where I found Madness’ album “Keep Moving”, another eye-opener.  British pop, not quite ska but getting close.  I still love that album.

This fall we went to see Madness.  (In Britain.  Which was also awesome.)  They only did a couple of songs from that album, but they did this one.  They have aged incredibly well and still sound exactly the same.  It was a great show, not least because we were staying at the home of some long-time online friends, who are now a part of my new family.  When we got back to their house from the show, they pulled out a bunch of snacks from their fridge (“tapas”!) and a couple of bottles of wine and the four of us stayed up until 3:00 a.m., just talking and having a great time.

It’s good to have a brother again.  He doesn’t get the New Wave music thing but at least he cycles.  🙂

I hear the sound of rain falling in my ears
Washing away the weariness like tears
I can feel my troubles running down
Disappear into the silent sound

I feel the rain falling on my face
I can say there is no better place
Than standing up in the falling down
In so much rain I could almost drown20150917_145254-0

It’s raining again
A crack in the clouds reveals blue skies
I’ve been feeling so low (low)
But now everything is on my side
The sun and the rain
Walk with me fill my heart again

Do de do do de do do do
Do de do de do de do do do
…20150918_192642

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“there is no point… unless THEY see you do it”

After a convo I had yesterday with an online friend and mentor, I was left wondering about something that has been a question for a long time.  Namely, what DO I want out of all this?

For the most part, I have little in common with my siblings, and in general they don’t seem to actually like me as a person any more than I like them.  As my husband once pointed out, my sister has never called me in all the time he’s known me (20 years).  We have never had occasional chats on the phone, without there being a birthday or some other “reason” to call.  Casual emails have historically gone in one direction only.  My husband has long been mystified as to why these people, who are so little a part of our day-to-day lives, why they even matter to me.  Why does it matter what they think?  What am I trying to accomplish?  Intellectually I know I will never convince them to hear, let alone validate, my POV.  Why isn’t a better understanding of what happened enough for me to have for myself?

Also, going way back, even before I started figuring out my scapegoat role, I have always felt a lack of “the right to be here”.  I often feel as though I don’t have an automatic right to even exist, let alone automatically be considered an equal part of the family.  I have to be sure I clean up after myself, and not leave any trace of where I’ve been.  I’ve generally put that down to the lack of a mother’s real love for me, and probably her irritation whenever I made a mess or caused any kind of housework for her.  (SO RIDICULOUS.  Who the hell has another kid without realizing that this will entail actual work?)

That attitude continues to this day, mostly through my sister.  Once my husband and I were talking about my sister and how she treats me, and I started to say, “It’s like she thinks I have no right to be — ” and I got stuck for what to say next, and he pointed out that the sentence was in fact complete.10563036_10152660479401617_9115251964809521780_n

So yesterday I was trying to re-locate this quotation that I had seen one of my friends post on Facebook.  And in googling what little I could remember of the phrasing, I stumbled across a paper.

“All parents also notice an important change at around 2 years of age when children manifest ‘‘self-consciousness,’’ the so-called secondary emotions such as embarrassment or pride in very specific situations such as mirror exposure or competitive games… Toddlers become typically frozen and sometime behave as if they wanted to hide themselves by tucking their head in their shoulders or hiding their face behind their hands. They show embarrassment. This is a robust phenomenon and one is naturally tempted to ask what it means psychologically for children in their development. The literary quote reproduced below captures this important transition:

There is a thing that happens with children: If no one is watching them, nothing is really happening to them. It is not some philosophical conundrum like the one about the tree falling in the forest and no one hearing it: that is a puzzler for college freshman. No. If you are very small, you actually understand that there is no point in jumping into the swimming pool unless they see you do it. The child crying, ‘‘Watch me, watch me,’’ is not begging for attention; he is pleading for existence itself.

M.R. Montgomery Saying Goodbye: A memoir for Two Fathers.”

I’ve always had a weird sort of conflict between wanting attention, wanting to be noticed, and then being embarrassed when it happens — just like a 2YO.  I’ve put this down to a mother who didn’t really like it when I got attention, especially from my father.  But what little kid DOESN’T want attention?  That’s a normal thing for a little kid.  But I think I was taught that it was wrong, that it was being a show-off, and that I should just be quiet and entertain myself and not make a mess and not bother anyone.  Meaning Mom.

I think I was about 18 months old when my sister went away to college, and the other two of the Triumvirate went away over the next 3 years.  They would probably have been a big chunk of my day-to-day (mostly) positive attention, and they went away.  Just when I was becoming aware of myself in relationship to others, more and more the mirror I had to reflect myself back to me, the person I spent all day with, was a mother who basically wanted me not to be there.

Most of my early memories are of playing by myself.  When I was alone, I at least didn’t have anyone reflecting back to me their annoyance at me being there.  I still feel safest when I am by myself:  there is no one to get mad at me.

I have a memory of the time I “ran away from home”.  I was not in kindergarten yet, because it was in the afternoon, and I was in pm kindergarten.  But I was old enough to run away, so everyone else would have been old enough to be at school, and I was the only kid left at home all day.  (At least, I don’t remember anyone else being home at the time, as in the summer.)  So I was maybe 4 or at most, 5YO.

I “ran away” by going up the sidewalk until I couldn’t see my house any more.  Once I was out of sight of our house, I plonked myself down in front of the second house from ours, maybe 300 feet up the hill.

I don’t know how long I sat out there, but I eventually got tired of being a runaway and went home. I found out much later that the neighbor had seen me sitting on the sidewalk in front of their house and called my mom, WHO JUST LET ME STAY OUT THERE.  Where I wasn’t a bother to her.

Her excuse was that well, once the neighbor called, then she knew where I was, so that was OK.

I don’t think normal moms do that.  I mean if a neighbor called and said your 4YO kid was sitting out in front of their house — you’d go get them, wouldn’t you?  A normal mom might even go out and sit down with their kid and ask them why they wanted to run away, and listen to them and give them a big hug and tell them they didn’t want them to run away because they loved them, and maybe even go home and have some cookies or something.

I got left to sit out there alone, because that was more convenient for my mother.

And my siblings sit there and claim, “well, she wasn’t actually neglectful.”

Maybe the mom they knew wasn’t neglectful.

The mom I knew was.

And they knew it too:  on some level, they know they have to make that statement, that excuse, before someone comes right out and says that she was.  They were teenagers when I was born, and they had to know about what my father told me:  of physical neglect, to the point where I had diaper rash so bad that my butt was bleeding.  They know, and they still believe that she should have been granted custody of the younger children.  My sister even testified to that effect.  My oldest brother refused to testify for either side, preferring to stay out of it, and the third was deliberately wishy-washy when questioned by the lawyers, so they left him out of it.

Interestingly, these are the same behaviors they exhibit in today’s family crisis.  My sister defends the narcissist; my oldest brother just wants to stay out of the whole thing.  Joe, who would normally be the one considering both sides of the issue, and playing the role of “devil’s advocate” or mediator is married to Susan.  No chance that he could be allowed to see the other side of any conflict that involves Susan.

So I know there’s no way anything will change or heal with regards to them.  The question is, where do I go now to heal the little girl who got ignored or abandoned by almost everyone she knew, except for one person?  The answer might be that one person — my father — if he weren’t gone.

My whole world disintegrated the night he died.  And fucking Susan stood there, laughing.  And refused to go elsewhere when I asked her to.  And she and Joe yelled in my face the next day, when I called her on it.  And everyone else either defends her, or refuses to take a stand.  Well, Fuck. Those. People.

There was one person whose attention mattered, and he’s gone now.  So, watch me — or don’t.  I’m still here, I still exist, and I deserve to.

At some point, possibly as a graduation gift, my mother gave me a plaque with Max Ehrmann’s “Desiderata” on it.  I read it often, and half-memorized it.  I remember that to my mind parts of it sounded like woo-woo bullshit, and I dismissed it.

 But the very lines that irked me then, although I didn’t quite understand why, are the ones I am remembering now:  and no wonder they pissed me off.  This was exactly the opposite of the message I got from her.

You are a child of the universe,
no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here.