Author: Skipper

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On Tuesday morning, I saved my husband’s life.

Zero exaggeration. His heart had stopped.  Sudden cardiac arrest.

I did CPR on him while waiting for the EMT’s, who had to shock him twice to get his heart going again — so no possible mistake or misinterpretation about it.

A day later I interrogated the electrophysiologist, and he said he read the strips from the EMT’s himself, and he said my husband was definitely in ventricular fibrillation, which means his heart had completely stopped. (This will be important later. When talking to the doctor, I had to make sure there was actual hard, inarguable data.)

I have since learned that in sudden cardiac arrest, brain damage occurs after 5-6 minutes without blood flowing, and death occurs in 6-8 minutes.

The ER nurse confirmed that the CPR I did kept him “perfused” — meaning I was moving the blood around adequately to keep his brain oxygenated and free from damage.

The survival rate for SCA outside a hospital setting is less than 10% — and that’s just survival, let alone surviving “neurologically intact” (my new favorite phrase in the whole world).

My husband survived, neurologically intact, and beat those dismal odds, thanks to me.

I not only saved him from dying, I also saved the part of him that is him.

The EMT’s said it; our GP said it; the ER nurse said it, along with countless other hospital staff.  Over and over the EMT’s said, “You did everything right” and explained to me that I was the first two links in the Chain of Survival.  The ER nurse said, “You did exactly what we hope everyone would do.”  (Here we see me amassing evidence from outside authorities to back up my “claim”.)

I am writing this because my reactions to being told, “You saved his life!” again and again over the past few days have been most illuminating.

At first, it was almost annoying. My initial internal response was, “Well, what the hell else would I do?”

Then it turned into saying self-deprecating things, diminishing what I had done. I said things like,

  • “Well, I really didn’t do anything, I just followed instructions.”
  • “We were just super lucky.”
  • “There was a job to do and I just did it.”
  • “Honestly it does not feel like I did much of anything other than follow directions.”
  • “The dispatcher walked me through everything … I really just did what the dispatcher told me to do.”

The one and only thing I was genuinely proud of in the immediate aftermath was that I remembered to run and unlock the front door before the 911 dispatcher told me to. When she told me to, I said “I already did!” and I felt that was the only part I could really claim to have done myself.

The next day I was of course doing a lot of googling and rapid self-education on cardiac arrest, and I sent this message to a friend:

All right, maybe I did save him. I wasn’t sure that the CPR was enough to keep his brain going. Heart, yes. Brain, I wasn’t too sure about that.

“Luckily when you are horizontal like that just the action of squishing the ribcage is enough to force blood through those aforementioned one way valves and keep the brain from dying.“

(Here I found another outside authority to quote — and even then I could only say “maybe”.)

A couple of days after the event, I posted about it in a closed group of online friends. The responses were, of course,  overwhelmingly positive and supportive, because they are decent people and they genuinely care about me.  These are some of the things they said to me:

“holy shit, way to go, YOU! Never been in a situation like that but can only hope I’m as capable as you were”

“You FREAKING rock. But we knew that.”

“takes great presence of mind to handle this situation and you are incredible!!”

“I am so proud of you!!”

“you saved him (YOU SAVED HIS ACTUAL LIFE!!! … accept the accolades, you badass life-saving muthafukka!!!”

“OMG! You’re amazing”

“Damn, that is some scary shit! You were a real champion”

“You’re a strong woman. I think you need a cape.”

“You did so well to “keep the heid” as they say in Glasgow and not lose your shit completely in a panic. Well done you!”

“not many people have an amazing and focused wife”

“I’m going to goddam pieces here for you. I AM PROUD OF YOU.”

“Great job! You are a freakin’ HEROINE!”

“Holy fuckballs! But seriously yay for you keeping your head and the blood flowing.”

“I guess now you know how you react in a crisis. Can I be on your team when the zombie apocalypse hits?”

But the most important comment was made by a friend in The Netherlands:

Nope. You don’t get to downplay this. You played a major part in saving your husband’s life.

I expect that certain people who might read this have by now assumed that I am writing this to make a big deal over myself and brag to them.  Right around “My husband survived, neurologically intact, thanks to me”, I figure.

That assumption would be incorrect on a couple of levels.  First of all, because there is an underlying assumption that to be justly proud of this accomplishment is  a bad thing for me to do.  If one of them had done it, I am sure they would be getting (well-deserved) praise from siblings.  I would not.  Which is pure bullshit.

In fact I suspect any such readers instantly made various excuses in their heads about what I did, to minimize it, to downplay it, to make it so I didn’t really do anything awesome, which is something I’m not allowed to do.

This is why I had the need for the hard data and the outside authority.  To push back against the negativity, the scapegoating, the criticism and minimization and sabotage that I have historically gotten from certain people for my accomplishments.

One of the rationales for minimizing what I did will probably be “so what, Susan’s done this plenty of times.”  Well yeah, she’s a fucking nurse and gets trained and paid to do it.

And right there I am defending against a critical observation that I can reasonably predict will be made, and the one which can’t be refuted with the hard data and the outside authority.  Here it’s at least admitted what I’ve done, but it’s minimized because someone else has also done it.

And you can fuck right off with that.  The EMT’s and the ER nurse have done it a thousand times too, but they all congratulated me anyway.  Because they don’t have a pathological jealous need to minimize what I did.  They are simply happy that my husband is alive and that I did the right things and saved him.  If you can’t do that too, there is something fucking wrong with you.

And this is also the source of the annoyance at the beginning.  Because I already knew EXACTLY what I’d done.  It was fairly obvious I’d saved his life.

But having been trained really thoroughly by a bunch of jealous people, my reaction to having people say it out loud to me was not a feeling of pride or relief; it was annoyance that it now became “necessary” for me to start downplaying it, even though I didn’t want to.  More emotional work for me.

After a couple of days I figured out that I was saying the self-deprecating things as a defense mechanism — to say them BEFORE OTHER PEOPLE COULD DO SO, because it hurts a little less coming from my own mouth than from others.

Who I was expecting to “say” those things?  I could put names to them.  Names I have known my whole life.  Sister, Brother #1, Brother #2, Brother #4.  These negative, self-diminishing things are what I would expect to hear from them, and the positive, affirming things my friends said are things that I cannot actually imagine my siblings saying to me.

It’s a toss-up on those first two, which sibling would be the first to claim it was all God’s doing, which is just another way of taking credit away from me — although Brother #1 is the one who would go further and try to take some credit by saying that it was because THEY STILL PRAY FOR US, because they are such good people as to pray even for us, even though we don’t deserve it.

There is probably some form of “all those online people saying nice things about you don’t really know you” being thought, as well.

I’m not making these derogatory things up.  Every single one of them is rooted in some factual past incident; every one of them has been said and/or done to me by someone in that group, many of them at the worst time of my life.

Secondly, I am writing this for the same reasons as I always write on this blog: in order to help me understand the past, process things that have happened, and work through realizations I’ve made.  This one is a biggie, and I would be hard-pressed NOT to write about it.  And I decided my need to write about it is more important than my biggest reason not to write about it.

Which is of course the “no contact” decision.  It’s been written here before that under stress, old patterns take over.

If he had died, the decision would have already been made.  We already have a pact that if either one of us dies, the other is NOT to notify any of my relations.

But this wasn’t death, although it was the next thing to it.  And so, over the past four days, there have been moments when I thought about letting some of my estranged relations know about this.  Old habits die hard, and at a time of severe crisis, the idea of being able to turn to the people you’ve know the longest, and having them love and support you, is still a very attractive fantasy.

And I thought through it some more, and decided against it, because it IS a fantasy.  If they read it here on the blog, well, as I said it’s more important to me to write about it for myself, than to let them know about it.  I don’t care what they think, I don’t care what they do, nor what they know or assume or conjecture.

Because interestingly, after realizing what voices I was “hearing” — and subsequently telling them to all fuck off, both mentally and through writing this piece — the voice that I can finally hear is my Dad’s.

Dad’s “voice” is now not silenced by my own self-deprecating words, or those I can imagine coming from others — it is now amplified, by what my real friends, and even the strangers, have said.  I know what I would hear from him today, if I could tell him what happened, because it is echoed by the normal healthy people around me now.

And I see that his is the voice that the others have always been trying to silence with the things they’ve said (and not said) — because his is the voice that has always been hugely proud of me.

ETA (2 days later) — To clarify:  I’m certain if my siblings read this, or their kids, or their friends, or whoever, they will insist that “they’re not like that!”

Maybe they aren’t.  It’s been several years since I’ve interacted with them, after all.  And maybe they aren’t like that — to other people.

“…even everyone’s favorite “nice guy” (or girl) can be an abuser. Sometimes abusers are really nice and funny (until they’re not)... Sometimes they’re really sensitive, caring people who lose control once in a while…  Sticking with the pervasive idea that abusers are monsters makes it easier to overlook… otherwise regular folks… People are complex and complicated, but they’re rarely all bad, all the time…

They will defend themselves, and others will defend them, by saying that what I have written is wrong.

Nope.  It is not wrong, and no one can say that it is wrong.

Because — and this is one of the crucial points that has always been missed — this isn’t only about THEM.  It is about HOW THEY TREATED ME.  It is about my experiences at their hands.  The people who I imagine, who obviously still have hold on some real estate in my head, are based on my history, my experiences, my memories of how they acted towards me.

I have positive memories too, but not as many — and they are pretty much overwhelmed by the shitty things they did to me at the worst of times (and echoed by somewhat less shitty things, done over decades).

“… there can be a lot of happy times. A lot of calm times… A lot of fun…

“If someone you know says, “But I loved them and I miss them,” the correct answer is not, “Are you an idiot?” It’s something more like, “Yeah, we can love and miss people who aren’t good for us and who can’t be in our lives. It sucks, but it gets better with time.”

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Can we call it something else?

Notes from here:

“Let’s talk instead about the psychological concept of toxic masculinity. Let’s talk about our pushing boys into dominance, suppressing emotions, devaluing women and obsessive self-reliance, often interlinked with violence.

“A couple of weeks ago, CMS teacher Justin Parmenter wrote an article objecting to carrying a gun as a teacher and pushed for increased socio-emotional support in schools. He got a response from a father mocking his physique, challenging his manhood, dismissing Justin’s thoughts and calling him a “wuss.”

“What was ironic about this father’s response, however, was that this limited perspective of manhood and attempts at shaming Parmenter are symbolic of the toxic masculinity linked with these shootings.

“Be clear, masculinity is not automatically problematic. Wanting to take care of one’s family, sports competitiveness and being devoted to work are some traditional traits that can be positive.

“Yet toxic masculinity is often linked with substance abuse and domestic violence…

“I imagine there are men reading this who are thinking that the traits I mentioned are what makes them successful. And that is the seduction of toxic masculinity. It can “work” in our society, until it doesn’t.

“…The thing about emotion suppression is that if you don’t tell on your disease, it will eventually tell on you.

The push to mask pain, shame, fear and insecurity with limited responses like anger or intellectualization is lethally toxic.”

Other stereotypically masculine traits, such as self-reliance and emotional repression, are correlated with increased psychological problems in men such as depression, increased stress, and substance abuse.

I suppose the name for it comes from the fact that it is the traits that are traditionally considered masculine (or “macho”) that are toxic: toughness, dominance, self-reliance, and the restriction of allowable emotion to one dimension, which is anger.

These lead to misogyny and promote violence, including sexual assault and domestic violence, which are mostly performed by men against women.

So “toxic masculinity” doesn’t just apply to men attacking other men for perceived weaknesses.  It might not be so bad if they limited their stupid aggression to each other — but toxic masculinity leads men to attack women too.

The concept of toxic masculinity explains a lot about our family situation, as well as the end of my engineering career.  Men who feel entitled to treat women as decoration, as tokens, as things to leer at in the office — those men are the reason I left engineering, and leaving was the only option I had.  When you are being treated poorly by someone who will not change, leaving is your only healthy choice.  I learned that the hard way, twice:  once in engineering and once in my FOO.

(I suppose there was a third event, actually, in my leaving the Catholic Church — an organization that treats women and children poorly and will not change — although that was far less traumatic for me since I never fully bought into it in the first place.)

But it’s not only men who can be toxically aggressive toward someone they consider “less than” or “not one of us”.  I came to recognize that that “family” is full of men — and one woman — who feel entitled to belittle a younger sister when she says she has been hurt; to tell her how wrong she is about everything; who write angry, attacking comments and emails, instead of asking or listening; and go behind her back to others to make her look bad.

I have brothers AND a sister who have made nasty remarks about my looks; challenged my womanhood (I am wrong and a failure since I chose not to have children); dismissed my thoughts, reasoning, words, emails, blog; and while I didn’t exactly get called a “wuss” because I’m not actually male, I did get told things like “you gave up too easily” on the career, and I should have just “gotten over it” and buried all that pain that Joe and Susan deliberately caused, for the sake of the family.

In other words, I wasn’t strong enough.  Maybe I wasn’t “man” enough.  But it’s not only men who can behave this way.

I have one brother that I know of who abused his wife:  and lo and behold, the cycle of pain and unaddressed issues continues to the next generation.

“If you do not transform your pain, you will with 100 percent certainty transmit it to others.”

His daughter called me almost three years ago, wanting to get away from her own domestic violence situation.  Her husband had repeatedly held a gun to her head, knocked her down, and finally kicked her out of the house without her phone.

Fortunately she had my phone number in her wallet, and she called me, instead of anyone else in the family, because she didn’t want to listen to a bunch of judgemental bullshit.  I just sent her some cash, and told her she needed to go to a battered women’s shelter.

She said in surprise, “That’s not what I am.”

Of course not.  Because fish don’t know that water is wet.

A long time ago I learned this truism from a knitting friend:  “When you’re in it, you can’t see it.”

I thought I had a loving, supportive family — until I didn’t.  Until it was painfully clear, even to me, that I was no longer in it, I was not “in the club” — what I was, was a useful scapegoat.

And even then it took me 10 years of repressing my pain, and another 5 of working through it, until I got to that truth, and fought with it, and argued with it, and finally accepted it — and a life that is now free of that  scapegoating, undermining, criticism, and rejection.

The next day my niece’s husband “wanted to talk” and she went back to him.  And that’s not at all uncommon:  battered women generally make 5 or 6 attempts to leave before they finally succeed.

I haven’t heard anything from her since.  I’m guessing he told her something along the lines of, if she really loved him, she would cut off contact with me, as I was obviously trying to break up their marriage by supporting her.

Well yes, I suppose I was.

When you are being treated poorly by someone who will not change, leaving is your only healthy choice.  But it’s a hard, hard lesson to learn — especially when it involves people you loved, and who you thought loved you.

I hope she’s OK, wherever she is now.

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How to survive gaslighting

Notes from here:
“What’s happening on a national level is activating and retraumatizing a lot of people who have been gaslighted in the past. The crazy-making, mind-bending, massive confusion-inducing effects of our current administration’s recklessness with the truth and disregard for verifiable facts is creating an emotional and psychological whiplash.

Four survival strategies:  check, check, check, and check.

Remain defiant

…anger protected me, because I knew what I knew. It couldn’t be erased. Being defiant does not make you difficult. It makes you resilient.

Recognize there will never be accountability

The person who is gaslighting you will never be able to see your point of view or take responsibility for their actions. They will never get it. They will never say, “Oh, you’re right – you have a point.”

Acknowledgement is not on the cards. And asserting yourself is not just useless but harmful. Because the person gaslighting will never be able to respond to logic and reason – and so you have to be the one to recognize that logic and reason can’t be applied.

Let go of the wish for things to be different

The wish for things to be different is very powerful and inoculates you to the tumult. It allows you to continue to believe logic and reason will prevail. You want to believe the person will change. You want things to make sense. But they won’t. You want to feel you are on safe ground. You have to let go of this wish. Because things will never make sense. You will never be heard.

Develop healthy detachment

“You feel confused and crazy. You’re always apologizing, wondering if you are good enough, can’t understand why you feel so bad all the time, or know something is wrong but can’t put your finger on it. You thought one thing, they say another; you can’t figure out which is right.”

A tip she offers for handling things is to write down what actually happened in the conversation. “Once you are not flooded with emotion, you can reflect rationally. Look at the conversation and see where it took a turn.”

When someone is so certain about what they believe and they keep on insisting and trying to convince you – over a period of time – it erodes your own perception. And having to verify reality is in itself destabilizing.

With gaslighting, it feels as though the ground is always shifting beneath you. There is no center of gravity. And while we’re being told up is down and black is white, the only way to make sense of it is to remain resolute. Let people have their alternative facts. You’ll stick to reality.

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Exit, voice and loyalty (Seth Godin)

We often have a choice: speak up or leave.

In commerce, if we don’t like a brand, we leave. The always-present choice to stay or to go drives bosses, marketers and organizations to continually be focused on earning (and re-earning) the attention and patronage of their constituents.

Sometimes, instead of leaving, people speak up.

<snip>

Loyalty, then, could be defined as the emotion that sways us to speak up when we’re tempted to walk away instead.

…When you have a chance to speak up but walk away instead, what does it cost you? What about those groups you used to be part of? I’ve had the experience several times where, when my voice ceased to be heard, I decided it was easier to walk away instead.

Voice is an expression of loyalty. Voice is not merely criticism, it might be the contribution of someone who has the option to walk away but doesn’t.

And if that voice is not listened to, is devalued, invalidated, shut down, belittled, ignored — it does walk away.

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The Mushroom Story

Wow.  It has come to my attention that I’ve never written about The Mushroom Story.  I can’t believe I’ve left out this gem.

I’ve mentioned before that no one talks much about the years starting from when I was born up to The Divorce.  This story is one of the very few I know, and it comes from brother #3.  When I was in college, in Colorado, brother #3 was also living in Colorado.  So I went to visit him one weekend, during my senior year.

Some background:  he is seven years older than I am, and at the time of The Divorce, when I was about 6YO, he was about 13YO.  A tough age for kids, and especially so in our dysfunctional family.  Brother #3 was always held to have been badly affected by The Divorce, and it’s probably true.  By the time I was old enough to pay attention, he was already the “black sheep”:  he dropped out of high school, experimented with drugs and alcohol, went to live with Mom for a while, and then moved to some unspecified living arrangement that was probably Not Discussed, at least not around me.  I would guess that he stopped living at Dad’s home around 16YO or so, when I would only have been about 9YO.

All this is to say that, 14 years later, I barely knew him.  But at that point I had a car, and he was my brother, and within driving distance, so one weekend I went to see him.

One memorable thing stands out about that visit.  At some point we were ordering a pizza, and he asked what I liked on my pizza.  I said, “No mushrooms.”  He asked why; I gave my usual answer, which was, “I just don’t like mushrooms.”

And that’s when I found out EXACTLY why I had a lifelong dislike of mushrooms.

Brother #3 told me a story that happened around the year prior to The Divorce, when he was 12YO and I was 5YO.

We lived in a house with four bedrooms and one roomy bathroom upstairs, so it was not unusual to share the bathroom.  With up to seven people in the house of all ages, it was simply a matter of efficiency — even in high school, when there were only three people left in the house, brother #4 and I would both be getting ready for school as late as possible, and both trying to brush our teeth or whatever at the single sink.

On this day, brother #3 was taking a bath in the tub, while our mother and I were also in the bathroom for some reason.  The tub was separate from the shower stall, so it didn’t have a curtain or anything.

While in the tub, brother #3 got an erection.  And I, as a curious and apparently observant 5-year-old child, said, “It looks like a big mushroom!”

Now, he was our mother’s 3rd son.  Pre-teen erections cannot have been news to her.  But she came unglued, both at him for having it, and at me for noticing it.

My brother told me all he knew of the fallout for me was that our mother immediately hustled me out of the bathroom; then she came back and proceeded to grill him about whether he had “been aroused by his sister”.

FFS, anyone who knows anything about maturing boys knows they get erections at the passing of the breeze, sometimes.  But instead of a natural biological occurrence, she was suspicious that something sexual, something “dirty”, must have occurred.

Projection?  Paranoia?  Oedipal?  Wherever she got the idea that his erection had to be sexual, it sure as hell wasn’t a healthy or reasonable one — it was completely inappropriate.

As for me, I have zero conscious memory of this event, and I don’t know what she said or did to me after she took me out of the bathroom.

It’s clear, though, that whatever she did to me, it was traumatic or painful or terrifying enough to establish a very definite, lifelong, mushroom phobia — and equally clear that it too was completely inappropriate to the situation.

I told my first therapist this story and she asked if I had ever had a negative reaction to, say, my husband’s erection.  I said, “No, I was freaking FIVE YEARS OLD, and CLEARLY I THOUGHT IT WAS ABOUT MUSHROOMS!”

Later, I realized I was probably very lucky to have come away from whatever was done to me that day with only a phobia of mushrooms.

And I still won’t eat mushrooms to this day.  Knowing how my phobia came about hasn’t changed anything.   Our unhealthy mother terrified her own child, over what she chose to see in a perfectly natural occurrence, to the point of creating this permanent, negative effect.

Fortunately this has only been a minor inconvenience for me — but it could have been so much worse, and who knows what other events like this occurred, what unhinged reactions she had, and what negative effects they had on all of us.

Hobson’s choice, but I think maybe I was better off with the neglect.

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Fractured Family

Q.  A sibling’s family has been so torn apart by personal and business disputes that one son no longer talks to his brother or his father and refuses to attend family celebrations. He also refuses to participate in counseling. His perspective on what has caused all this is very deeply felt but not necessarily accurate or realistic, particularly because he refuses to accept any responsibility. Is there any way to break through this impasse? — Concerned Aunt

A.  Only if the father and sons want to.

I have seen families in similar situations decide that they want to heal enough to be able to spend holidays together, or for their kids (the cousins) to have good relationships. In these cases, they have found a family mediator who has helped them work through the business and personal disputes — often in pairs first, to work through issues specific to their relationship. I’ve seen (and helped) people do it, and it’s awe-inspiring. They learn a huge amount about their capacity for forgiveness and about being compassionate with themselves and one another. And they teach these things as family values to future generations. It’s an invaluable gift they pass down.

But it is a lot of work, it’s not an easy road, emotionally, and it takes quite a bit of time. There is rarely one breakthrough moment or one conversation that changes everything.

So as the concerned aunt, you can suggest it, you can even ask permission to look for someone to help who might “click” with them. Most major cities have community mediation groups or associations of family mediators. Family mediators usually do primarily divorce work, but many do other kinds of work with families and family businesses too. Some mediators are also therapists, or work closely with therapists, so have strong background in working with families to understand and promote reconciliation. Not everyone has the resources to take advantage of resources like this, of course, but if they do and they are committed to it, progress can often be made.

It’s important to note (as a number of readers commented last week) that there are situations – particularly when mental illness, addiction, abuse, or deep dysfunction is involved – where the boundaries that family members draw are a healthy and necessary response. As a bystander, it’s tempting to think that the answer is always reconnection. But separation – temporary or long term — is often crucial for self-protection and healing.

At the end of the day, it is their road to walk. Your job is to cheer them on from the roadside, whichever road they choose.

Few things are as emotionally upsetting as having a family member who has severed ties with you (or with the whole family). Most of us work especially hard not to cut off ties with family, precisely because they are family. And so when someone does, it is often experienced by those cut off as being cavalier, petty, or the result of a failure to try hard enough.

In short, he or she is holding a grudge. A grudge, by definition, is a thing that should not be held. It’s not a legitimate or healthy reaction and the resulting choices are bad ones. A more stable person would not have taken offense in the first place and a bigger person would surely have let go of it by now.

But that’s not how it’s experienced by the people holding the grudge. They know that what they are doing is protecting themselves, drawing essential boundaries, doing the only thing left to them to do. When we cut ties with others it’s not because we don’t care; it’s because the friction or pain or dysfunction have finally overpowered even the special pull of family.

None of this tells us whether those who withdraw from families are right or wrong, justified or not. It only says that that their reasons make sense to them, even if they don’t make sense to us.

…Here’s what not to do.

Don’t write them a long letter or email explaining your perspective. Even if you do a beautiful and skillful job of it, even if you apologize, it is unlikely to achieve your purposes. Why? Because inevitably some aspect of what you describe will feel “off” to them (“That’s not what happened!”) or will leave out parts that they feel are most important. And their interpretation of your motives for writing the letter is colored by emotion. Your desire to reconnect is seen as a desire to absolve yourself of guilt, to manipulate, or to appear to be righteously taking the high road.

So they finish reading your lovely letter and feel even more upset with you. Now they have even less incentive to reach out and talk because they’ve heard what you wanted to say (and it was wrong). Remember that email and letters aren’t dialogue. They’re monologue. And they’re the channel of communication that can escalate conflict most quickly.

A special note to those who have curtailed family contact

If you are going to cut off ties or establish a boundary — and this can sometimes be a healthy reaction to unrelenting criticism or destructive hurt — here are two things to remember.

First, tell others why you are doing it. You think they already know; after all, your reasons are obvious or should be obvious to anyone who cares. But they really might not know. And if they don’t know, they are free to think the worst. When you inform them, don’t focus on others’ character (“I can’t be with the family because you are all so toxic and hateful.”) Instead, focus on how you’re feeling (“The last three times we’ve had big family get-togethers, my anxiety has just gone through the roof. I leave feeling judged and rejected. It’s too much for me to deal with, so I’m going to stay away this year.”). And if there are conditions under which you would increase contact, let them know (“If you can refrain from commenting on my weight or my spouse, we’ll come.”).

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Revisionist History

I can’t agree with the grammar (“revision” as a verb, instead of “revise”), but the concepts are important.  Notes from here.

Revisiting bygone times to revision them differs dramatically from simply dwelling on them. For the process of revisioning the past is mostly about reperceiving it in a way that helps correct present deficiencies in your self-concept. It really has nothing to do with vain attempts to relive the past as such. And done properly, it doesn’t put you at risk for getting mired or entrapped in yesteryear either.

Rather, it’s about asserting your adult prerogative to interpret anew the various things that happened to you when you were much younger–to correct the faulty understandings that eventuated in negative ideas you still have about yourself. Given your level of cognitive development back then, you couldn’t possibly have understood accurately the deepest import of what your eyes and ears seemed to be telling you. It’s also likely that, beholding reality with a child’s egocentricity, you couldn’t help but ascribe detrimental meanings to yourself in connection with negative events that may in fact have had little (or nothing) to do with you.

To give but one example, suppose when you were young you witnessed the painful divorce of your parents. And let’s say that before they separated, they fought constantly–and many times when they were engaged in fierce battle, you heard your name come up. Scared, despondent, and unable to resist feeling somehow “implicated” in their domestic warfare, you concluded that their horrible animosity must in some way be your fault…

Note:  this is one thing that never happened to me as a result of The Divorce.  Young as I was, I was able to understand that my parents didn’t like each other — it wasn’t even a change, because in my eyes, they never had.  To me, them splitting up was entirely logical.

…What you mistakenly thought was your fault you can now recognize as totally their responsibility…

…revisiting the past to correct (or “revision”) the unfavorable conclusions you came to about yourself [Editor’s note:  OR OTHERS], either as a result of specific parental shortcomings, or being subject to an abusive environment generally.

…It hardly matters whether such messages were overt or covert, intentional or inadvertent. If you felt obliged to accept the authority of those who “delivered” them…

…ask yourself whether your caretakers were overly critical of you, whether they held you to unrealistically high, or exaggerated, standards. Once you become fully conscious of the emotionally abusive things they may have said or done to you…

…Without doing such “remedial” work, it’s almost inevitable that your behavior will continue to be governed by distorted, deprecating messages…

…the key objective in revisiting your past is to reevaluate the grievous conclusions you may have come to when–compelled to wrest some pragmatic meaning from your experience–you could do so only in ways that (though age-appropriate) were severely limited, or fallacious.

…you may have had little choice but to go along with what your family required of you…. seeking out whatever succor and security was available. And, assuming that acceptance from your family was conditional, you may have been all too willing to “forfeit” parts of yourself to win their validation and support. To quell inner anxiety, you may have needed to disown whatever parts of yourself seemed to get disapproved of–and even to align yourself with (or acquiesce to) your caretakers’ negative evaluations. And if the particular objects of your desire were linked to their disapproval, you may have had to flat out deny them, too (or declare yourself unworthy of them).

…there are several other reasons to return to–and revision–your earlier life. And in different ways they all pertain to getting much-needed closure on the past.

… the single best way to accomplish this is to review what once happened to you as something that had to happen, given your–and others’–level of development/evolution at the time. It may well be a platitude to say that everyone does the best they can. Still, I’m convinced that taking such a benign perspective toward humanity is not only charitable, but reasonable as well. To compassionately understand our collective weaknesses and defenses–as well as the limits in our sensitivity, knowledge, understanding, and moral development–is, finally, to accept our common frailties in a manner that allows us to move beyond poisonous feelings of gloom, resentment, hatred, or vengefulness. So if you can adopt such a forgiving position both toward yourself and those in the past who caused you pain, you can begin the healthy process of letting go of earlier hurts and disappointments.

Regarding your past differently… enables you to make final peace with it.

…undertaking such a course of “letting go” won’t be without a certain grief. But this may also be something that’s long overdue. Remember, however bad your earlier years may have been, you couldn’t grieve them while they were still going on–while they continued, in fact, to be your present. And once you grew up, you probably tried mostly to forget them, never giving yourself the opportunity–precisely through grieving–to say farewell to past miseries once and for all.

…anger (not typically recognized as a defense as such) is frequently utilized to cover up far more disturbing feelings. Sadly, that can be an effective way—despite all sorts of collateral damage—to avoid experiencing them again.

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More on PPD

I wonder if any of this sounds familiar to my siblings?  I know one young brother says that he remembers Mom crying all the time.

I knew I was struggling with postpartum depression when my daughter was just six weeks old. I cried every day, and tossed and turned every night. I was nervous and anxious. Suicidal. But instead of talking to my husband or reaching out for help, I suffered in silence. I slapped on a smile and pretended everything was OK. I lied even though I knew I should have been open and honest about my struggles. I knew I should’ve told someone — anyone —how miserable I was. How unhappy I was. That I wanted to die. But the truth was I couldn’t tell anyone about my postpartum depression (PPD) because I was scared. Scared others would see me as flawed and unstable; worried people would see me as an unfit parent. I couldn’t tell anyone about my PPD because I was terrified that if people saw who I’d become, they’d take my daughter away from me.

It all started with the crying. A few tears here. A heaving, uncontrollable sob over there. I would cry if I spilled a glass of water or if my coffee got cold. I would cry because my husband was going to work; because I was tired; because I was hungry; because the house was a mess. When the baby would cry, I would sob beside her even louder and for longer. Everything triggered a sobbing response from me, and no matter what I did, I couldn’t stop crying. I’d soothe the baby, and the tears would begin again anew. Nothing helped, and everything else only seemed to make it worse.

Before long, the tears came without rhyme or reason, and soon, they streamed down my face unnoticed. I could comfortably carry on a conversation while crying. Then, however, the sadness shifted. I became angry and anxious. I’d tense up the moment I heard my daughter’s cries. I’d stiffen at the thought of touching or even holding her. I became bitter and resentful, and the rage I felt consuming me was absolutely blinding.

When I found myself recoiling from my daughter, I knew something was wrong.

When I told myself that I hated my daughter, I knew things needed to change.

When I wanted to leave and abandon her, I knew I was sick.

But then, one cold November day, I couldn’t keep it together any longer. I couldn’t hide it any longer. I couldn’t keep it a secret. My daughter was having a fitful afternoon, and she was teething, screaming, crying, and refusing sleep. I did everything I could, but I felt my will collapsing. Then I had a vision; a disturbing, terrifying vision. I saw myself holding my daughter, feeding her, rocking her, and coddling her, and then the next, I was squeezing her. Hard. The way a mother should not hold her child.

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The Answer

One of the long-standing questions I’ve always had is:  what exactly happened that made Dad check Mom into the hospital when I was about 6 months old?

No one seems to know, or if they know, they aren’t telling.  I asked my sister once, and that was a disaster.

But I recently had a FB convo with some of my online friends, and in the course of that, the significance of something I’ve known forever finally, FINALLY struck me.

Here’s something I wrote 2 years ago:

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”.

I think I missed one super-important thing about these statements.

These are the ONLY two specific things that I can remember my dad ever saying to me about this period.

And I finally realize that there’s a good chance my dad was actually telling me what the crucial incident was.

If these two discoveries happened simultaneously, wouldn’t that be enough to make you realize that something was seriously wrong?

Mom had a lifelong habit of putting things off, and also hoarding things.  Her apartment was home to stacks of newspapers and old magazines, “waiting for the boy scout paper drive”.  Her kitchen counter always had dirty dishes on it, along with old vitamin bottles.  I can’t tell you what it was like cleaning out her fridge (well obviously I can, I did it many times, but it would take too long and that’s not the point).  So the idea that she would have stuffed shit-soiled clothing in a drawer to be “taken care of later” is not out of character.

I was the first infant she had dealt with in this particular house.  My next oldest brother was about 2YO when they moved in, and about 3YO when I was born.  So if he wasn’t toilet trained by the time they moved in, he was probably on the way — and at any rate, a toddler doesn’t require as many diaper changes as an infant.

There were three floors between the bedrooms and the basement, where the laundry was.  There was a laundry chute, but you wouldn’t throw soiled clothing down it to sit with relatively clean clothing.

I have to do a LOT of guessing from here on out, but –

I am assuming cloth diapers – disposable diapers were invented in 1948, so they’d been around for 20 years, but I suspect they would have been seen as an extravagance.  I also have to assume there was a diaper pail in the bedroom or bathroom somewhere.

The simplest thing to do would be to put such clothing in with the cloth diapers, maybe?  But diapers get bleached, I am guessing, so that wouldn’t work, in my mother’s mind.  Clothes just don’t go in with diapers.  (Or if disposables were being used, then clothes to be washed would not go in with trash.)

The next obvious thing to do would be to have a second diaper pail or other container for soiled clothing.  This was not the kind of solution that would come easily to my mother.  And if one wasn’t already there — and she couldn’t just go out to buy one, because she didn’t drive — and if she had asked Dad about it, he probably would have said something like, “You don’t need a second diaper pail, just take care of it right away” — the groundwork was already well-laid by now that my mother didn’t hold up her side of the deal — anyway, if the solution wasn’t right there when she needed it, I can totally see her deciding that a dresser drawer was a good enough “container”, and stuffing it in there to somehow deal with it later.  Only “later” never comes.

It’s unclear to me from the words my father used whether his discovery was an ongoing thing, or a one-time thing.  My gut feeling is that he discovered something that had been going on for a while, enough to be shocking.

Now, throw in the fact that whatever happened, happened sometime in the fall:  after all the older kids, including my sister, had gone back to school after the summer.  So now my mom didn’t have my sister around all day to do her work, nor several kids around to tell, “Here, run this soiled clothing down to the basement and put it in the sink.”  It would have been more-or-less the first time since my birth that she was on her own with all the housework and chores.

It’s even possible that it could have been my sister’s job to deal with the soiled clothing in the drawer:  and maybe that worked over the summer, but once school started, maybe she forgot, or maybe my dad found it before she could get to it one day.

Finally, for Dad to be home, it would have had to happen on a weekend, during the evening/night, or at lunchtime.  The fact that my sister was apparently present would rule out lunchtime.  So it was probably outside of normal office hours.

So you’ve got Mom’s established habit of putting things off.  And whether it was because of postpartum depression, or a lack of interest in having yet another baby, it’s clear that Mom was neglecting me and my diaper changes.

So maybe I needed a diaper change.  Maybe Mom refused to do it, or said she’d do it later.  Maybe Dad tried to make her do her job.  Maybe she couldn’t or wouldn’t.  Maybe Dad finally took care of me, or watched Mom while she did it, and found that I was bleeding.  Maybe that’s also when he found the soiled clothing, and found out whatever the rigmarole was around that.

So I can easily see where that would have led to a fight.  But they fought all the time, in my memory, so what would make this one different?

The physical neglect of a baby, to the point of injury?

The shock of finding shit-soiled clothing in a drawer?  Maybe in multiple drawers?  Who knows, maybe there wasn’t a clean item of clothing left for me to be put into.

Either or both of those together might do the trick in a normal household.  But this one had been coping with dysfunction, jumping over the missing stair, for quite some time.  People were adept at making excuses for behavior that was outside the realm of normal.  I don’t know if those two things would have been enough, or not.  My gut is, maybe not.

I think there’s probably one more ingredient missing:  which would be the clue from my sister, that when Dad took Mom to the hospital, my mother didn’t seem to know what was happening.

I still think this indicates a psychotic break or other acute episode.  Maybe Mom was just out of it, or maybe during the fight she said the kind of bizarre things that people say in a psychotic break, or maybe she even tried to harm me.  Maybe she got angry at actually having to take care of me (!) and tried to do something violent to me — shaking me or something.

I think something like that would have been required to get Dad to realize that he had to get actual medical help, get her out of the house, maybe just get her away from me for my safety — even during an evening or night or weekend.

ETA:  a few days after I wrote this post, I remembered one other fact I was told by my dad.

On at least one occasion, Mom was out wandering around at night, in the park that was across from our house, in just her nightgown.

Remember this all happened somewhere around October or November, so it would have been too cold to simply be out for a breath of fresh air or a walk, without a coat or footwear.  Possibly there was snow, even.

Maybe this fact completes the puzzle.  Maybe I was crying and I woke Dad up.  At first he didn’t know where Mom was.  Maybe he went looking for her first, or maybe he took care of me first – hard to say.  If he thought she was just in the bathroom or something, maybe he went looking for her and then found out she had left the house.  Or maybe he took care of me and found me bleeding and the soiled clothing, then went looking for Mom.

Either way, I’m assuming that when he found her, she wasn’t particularly lucid.  And I’m guessing that this would have been enough of a jolt for him to realize that she wasn’t well, and needed care outside of what could be done in the home.

Today, one would call 911 in this situation.  But in 1969, 911 was still in its infancy.  So Dad would have had the choice of calling the police, the ambulance, or the fire department.  Obviously nothing was on fire.  Presumably no crime had been committed.  So it would have been an ambulance — but no bones were broken, no one was bleeding (except me and my diaper rash).  And an ambulance in the middle of the night attracts attention, too.

I can see where Dad would have not called an emergency service, but would have taken her to the hospital himself.  Or he might have gotten Mom back home and into bed, with the intention of calling her doctor in the morning, and when he did so, the doctor told him to take Mom to the hospital.

There’s one more tiny piece of evidence that what my father told me was significant:  which is that diaper changes for us younger kids have always been voiced by my older siblings as a source of contention and resentment.  I don’t know how many times I’ve heard, “We changed your diapers!” from my older siblings, at least once even in my 40’s.  And changing a diaper is unpleasant enough, sure.  But the way they say it, I think it means more than just an unpleasant task done by unwilling teenagers.

If it was known to my older siblings that the incident that led to my mother’s hospitalization, which led to her psychological analysis, and finally to the breakdown of the marriage, “started” with me and my diapers — which is a huge oversimplification, of course, but one that isn’t hard to conclude —  then it isn’t hard to imagine that those diaper changes, and therefore me, is where the blame would go.

And “We changed your diapers!” becomes not only an accusation against the person who needed the diaper changes– “It was YOUR fault!”– but also a defense — “It wasn’t OUR fault!”

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Tumblr user actualanimevillain:

sometimes you say or do bad things while you’re in an awful mental place. sometimes you say things that are rude or uncalled for or manipulative… no one is perfect. but once you’re through that episode, you need to take steps to make amends. you need to apologize.

“i couldn’t help it, i was having a bad episode” is a justification, not an apology.

“i’m so fucking sorry, i fucked up, i don’t deserve to live, i should stop talking to anyone ever, i should die” is a second breakdown and a guilt trip. it is not an apology.

when you apologize, the focus should be on the person you hurt. “i’m sorry. i did something that was hurtful to you. even if i was having a rough time, you didn’t deserve to hear that,” is a better apology. if it was a small thing, you can leave it at that.

if you caused significant distress to the other person, this is a good time to talk about how you can minimize damage in the future. and again, even if it is tempting to say you should self-isolate and/or die, that is not a helpful suggestion. it will result in the person you’re talking to trying to talk you out of doing that, which makes your guilt the focus of the conversation instead of their hurt.

you deserve friendship, and you deserve support. but a supportive friend is not an emotional punching bag…  what you say during a mental breakdown doesn’t define you. how you deal with the aftermath though, says a lot.