Category: History

Posted on

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I’ve already had the recurrence.

Not great odds.

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

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

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

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

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

From the University of Chicago:

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

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

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

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

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

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

I want to know EXACTLY what happened to me.

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I would have been 12.

My sister would have been 29.

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

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

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

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

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

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

How the hell would I have known?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on

Familiar Ground

The impeachment hearings continue the theme of politics reminding me of my FOO situation.

Calling out what is clearly bad behavior on the part of a Member of the Club results in yelling, lies, spin, misdirection — anything to defend the indefensible.  To shift blame from the person who did the bad behavior to the person who called it out, because that’s much easier and more comfortable than confronting the real problem.

Nothing makes that more clear than the R’s rabid desire to out the whistleblower.  In their minds, THAT is where the problem occurred. No one’s sorry for anything wrong that was done.  They’re just mad that it got caught, that someone had the NERVE to pass negative judgement on the Charismatic Leader.

And, it’s clear that the conservatives won’t listen to any kind of reason or logic.  They won’t be swayed by facts or evidence.  They will persist in believing that “their guy” is being persecuted, rather than simply being held to account. They will yell and wave their stupid signs and perform all kinds of hysterical theatrics, rather than admit one simple thing:  THEY WERE WRONG.

All that is pretty damned familiar.

And whatever is driving the GOP to this extreme, toxic behavior clearly runs deep.  I assume it’s kompromat of some kind, but is it money laundering? human trafficking?  compromising sex?  Who knows?

In the case of my FOO, I think it’s a refusal to face the reality that the excuses and rationales they were taught for 30 years, and have clung to for 20 more, aren’t actually true.

“If only SHE hadn’t been born, none of this would have happened.”

That phrase, or something close to it, sums up how I think my sister in particular feels about me, and to a lesser extent the other two members of The Triumvirate.  “If only you hadn’t been born!”

It is where the thinking stops, and the anger takes over.

That phrase allows you to be mad as shit at the reality you are living, but it makes a serious error.  It allows you to throw all your (justified) anger and emotions and psychological garbage about what is going on, onto an easy target (not justified).  It’s a way to cope, but not a fair or healthy one.

But when all you know is how to blame — and the idea of blaming Mom, or god, or Dad (on whom they were suddenly entirely dependent, after having scapegoated him for so long) is too terrifying to contemplate — well, you gotta put it SOMEWHERE.  And a baby is a pretty safe place to put it, from your own selfish viewpoint.  No repercussions to yourself.

There might be some for the baby.

Unfortunately, the damage that is done by blame-shifting doesn’t come back to the blamer.  The blamer will just shift THAT blame, too.

And now you don’t have to think about how Mom was mentally ill.

(Actually I don’t understand the resistance to this idea AT ALL.  Mom being mentally ill explains a shit-ton of stuff that otherwise you have to jump through a lot of hoops to explain. To me, the idea is a relief, that finally everything makes sense.  It’s truly never made any sense to me to deny it.)

The reality is different.  Even if I had not been born, “it” still would have happened, in some form or fashion. Perhaps there would not have been a Divorce.  But damage would still have been done, just like Trump would have been impeached sooner or later — because our mother was not a healthy person, and toxic people keep on doing toxic things.

I spent the first few years of my life watching my parents yell at each other. It’s one of my earliest memories of them together.  Would it have been preferable to them if Dad and Mom had stayed together, angry and unhappy, forcing my two youngest brothers to grow up in that environment?

Because that’s some of the damage that happened, until The Divorce.

Of course, by that time, the Triumvirate were all escaping out of the house to go to college, so what happened at home wasn’t of too much concern to them.  And that’s fair enough.  What college freshman should be involved in their parents’ marital problems?

But there were still a couple of little kids left in that toxic environment.

So was it better in their eyes for there not to be a Divorce — as long as they didn’t have to live in the mess themselves? Because Catholicism, presumably.  And this is the major reason I gave up on Catholicism:  because it always puts ideology ahead of actual people.  I have only ever met exactly one Catholic priest in my life who put people ahead of ideology, and I’ve met an awful lot more who didn’t.

The Church brainwashed our mother to do the same thing:  if she hadn’t been Catholic, she would probably have had the medically recommended hysterectomy after her fourth child, and presumably my sister would have her wish:  a family that doesn’t include me.

Well, she more-or-less has that now, and I hope she is happy about it, and also that she chokes on it.

Mom chose ideology over what was better for her and her family.  And it eventually helped to destroy that family. My sister has chosen to cling to her grudge against my existence — rather than as an adult, re-examine the situation, work through the unresolved trauma and pain, and recognize the lies for what they were:  a way to scapegoat me, and protect Mom, and later Susan, from having to take responsibility for their own actions.

I wonder if she ever wonders how it feels to have someone begrudge the fact that you even exist.

How it feels to be deliberately not included in your own family.

What does all that have to do with the impeachment? Not a lot, necessarily, other than the shape of the current situation.

Oh, and that the continued and unwavering support for Trump & the GOP that we see in the polls tells me that about 1/3 of our population has some degree of mental health issues or unresolved trauma.

Anyone who can look at the mess that is Trump & the GOP and think, “That’s fine, that’s normal” and cheer them on — rather than recoiling at the unhealthy performances being put on in order to protect a man who is clearly a narcissist — has some issues of their own.

But mainly, it’s the sight of hysterical, toxic behavior to cover up and excuse previous toxic behavior.  And no hope of anyone ever changing.

Posted on

Parallels

Dear Polly,

I have a very severe allergy to mushrooms. I carry an EpiPen, and I have been hospitalized multiple times because of exposure to this food. One time, I began convulsing in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. My husband politely explained this to his parents when we started dating, and I was invited to family meals.

Since then, most meals we have shared at my in-laws’ house have had very limited options for me. Somehow, they manage to find a way to add mushrooms to almost everything. One time, they made a point to make a special plate of mushrooms and pass it around. My mother-in-law said, very rudely, “I would’ve liked to add mushrooms directly to the salad, but SOMEBODY has problems with it!” They even added mushroom powder to the mashed potatoes at one holiday dinner. My mother-in-law claimed it was a new recipe she’d found…

[So, she’s asked them to do something, because it’s a problem for her, and they’ve refused to do anything about it, and it’s clearly all her fault. Check.]

This has caused a huge wedge between my husband’s family and us. We no longer spend holidays with them and rarely speak. They don’t get to see their grandkids, even though they live very close by. His sister stopped talking to us. He has a brother who still reaches out and is kind to us, but he acts as though his parents are just set in their ways and we should forgive them and move on.

My husband supports me 100 percent, and he is very angry and hurt by their actions. But at times I feel terrible that I am the cause of this rift, and I just want a happy family.

HELP!

Disrespected Daughter-in-Law

Dear DDIL,

You’re not the cause of this rift. The cause of this rift is TRULY TERRIBLE HUMAN BEINGS.

Every now and then, a group of people assumes the traits and behaviors of sociopaths. Maybe one person in the group completely and permanently lost their doughnuts several decades prior, and slowly, each member of the group learns that playing along with this singular menace is the only way to survive. Eventually, the members of the group are so utterly confused and gaslit by each other that they enforce the will of the group and nod along with bizarre opinions …

Because these people are confused and weak and angry — and because they’re rendered increasingly more confused, weak, and angry by their exposure to each other — they tend to have less and less contact with those outside the group. And when they do encounter someone who’s not in the fold, they recoil and attack. Anyone who questions the group is attacked with words and actions. Anyone who questions the group is bad, and the group is good.

This rift has nothing to do with you. You could be the purest, most perfect, most lovable human alive, and these resoundingly toxic humans would find a reason to take issue with you. They are unwell, full stop.

But have these humans ever indicated that they’re open to new information …? Have you seen any signs that they’re heartbroken over this turn of events and they want to find a way to mend fences? If not, it’s hard to see why they’d suddenly wake up and look for understanding now.

Even so, I would get a doctor’s letter. I would send the letter. But I might also solicit a letter from a therapist, explaining that no matter what mitigating circumstances they might ascribe to their behavior, they’ve done a lot of damage to their relationship with their son and with you, and a large effort, either individually or as a group, will be necessary to fix that damage.

I guess that, personally, I’d want to be crystal clear with them before I disappeared for good. But honestly, that’s one of my flaws. Even when the writing’s on the wall, I want to explain everything. I want to believe that people can change… and all of the confusion and bewilderment that stands in the way of those connections needs to be cleared away or at least tolerated, even when that takes a lot of hard work and a lot of forgiveness and a lot of deep breathing on everyone’s parts.

Your situation challenges this view. Your situation points to the fact that some people are at once so ignorant and so disordered that they cannot understand or navigate reality without hurting other people in the process.

Sometimes people are just unwell. There’s nothing you can do but pity them and keep your distance. It’s pretty awful when you’re related to them. But these motherfuckers are unrepentant. They’re angry, and they want to punish SOMEONE. God only knows what brought them to this, but your only recourse is to stay the fuck away.

And honestly, I’m sure that once you two are officially given up for dead, they’ll find another easy scapegoat and that member of the family will defect, too. That seems inevitable. That’s just what happens in the Upside Down.

It’s very sad. Mourn it. Go see a therapist and encourage your husband to see one, too. This is a hard thing to accept. It’s going to take time.

But don’t ever be tempted to believe that you’re doing something wrong here. This is not on you. This is their abject madness, and it’s up to them to grapple with it. It has nothing to do with you. Let go of this and move forward.

We don’t all get the families we want… If they were abusive or violent, it would be simpler. They’re the worst because they still get to think that this [family rift] is just your little hang-up. They’re the worst because they think it’s completely normal to rage at you for [calling out their bad behavior] … They’re the worst because they get to walk around acting like they’re regular, good-hearted people most of the time…

…put them behind you and don’t look back.

Posted on

Journaling

Some more evidence that this blog was the right thing to do.

“It is very difficult to complain about a situation morning after morning, month after month, without being moved to constructive action.”

Labeling emotions and acknowledging traumatic events — both natural outcomes of journaling — have a known positive effect on people, Dr. Pennebaker said, and are often incorporated into traditional talk therapy.

At the same time, writing is fundamentally an organizational system. Keeping a journal, according to Dr. Pennebaker, helps to organize an event in our mind, and make sense of trauma. When we do that, our working memory improves, since our brains are freed from the enormously taxing job of processing that experience, and we sleep better.

This in turn improves our immune system and our moods; we go to work feeling refreshed, perform better and socialize more. “There’s no single magic moment,” Dr. Pennebaker said. “But we know it works.”

On the other hand, Dr. Pennebaker’s research has found that journaling about traumatic or disturbing experiences specifically has the most measurable impact on our overall well-being.

In his landmark 1988 study, outlined in his book “Opening Up: The Healing Power of Expressing Emotion,” students were randomly assigned to write about either traumatic experiences or superficial topics for four days in a row. Six weeks after the writing sessions, those that had delved into traumatic experiences reported more positive moods and fewer illnesses than those writing about everyday experiences.

Posted on

Rule of Law vs Charismatic Leader

Politics continues to reveal to me interesting things about people in general, but especially about my FOO.

For about the past decade, I’ve been truly mystified by the number of people who really, really WANT to run their lives and make decisions according to something other than facts and data.

Religion, astrology, tarot cards and palm reading, Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop thing. Mysticism. The Power of the Ancients. The Secret.

It’s all the same snake oil, and it’s all bullshit, but it keeps selling.

This post by Teri Kanefield discusses the difference between those who want Rule of Law (a rational system) in our country, and those who want a Charismatic Leader, and boy does it shed some light on that whole conundrum.

One way to understand U.S. politics is a clash between two kinds of authority:

  • Rule of Law
  • Charismatic Leader

The American right wing wants a charismatic leader…  Most of us want Rule of Law (rational-law model).  The “Rule of Law” and “Charismatic Leader” models are mutually exclusive.  To exist, each must destroy the other.

  • Rule of Law requires facts.
  • Charismatic leader requires myth.

AND

  • The way to undermine the Charismatic Leader is to prove the myth false.
  • The way to kill Rule of Law is to undermine factuality.

The Charismatic Leader needs to undermine facts and law…
(note:  This is the same as the form of abuse known as “gaslighting”.)

If the myth that props him up is shattered, the leader loses support.
(It’s okay if he lies. It’s not okay if the myth is shattered.)

Clearly this was my big sin, as seen by my FOO:  destroying the myth.

Prof. Timothy Snyder explains that in the past, the ones who didn’t want to live under Rule of Law went west to the frontier, where there they could do as they pleased and create myth. In Europe, during the period of empire, they went to the colonies.  Snyder says that our current crisis —liberal democracy in trouble worldwide— resulted from the fact that we ran out of places for them to go.

In my FOO, the timing was such that when the Rule of Law (Dad) showed back up to live at home full-time, the Triumvirate was on the way out the door to go to college anyway.  Thus they were able to preserve their myth of our mother as a rational, loving parent, and our father as the source of all the problems.

One idea underlying liberal democracy is the “social contract,” which forms rule of law. The way to save the Constitution is for an overwhelming majority of people to reaffirm the social contract.

In my case, the obvious social contract that was broken is the one that says a family is a family, no matter what; that these are the people you can always count on.

But another one was also broken, the social contract between a mother and her children:  the cultural idea that a mother is engaged and loving, and sacrifices willingly for her family.

The seduction of believing in myths is that they are glamorous and shiny.

The problem with believing in myths is that sooner or later, they run up against the Real World.

One example of how belief in a “harmless” myth affected my mother, and our family, is that she sincerely believed what she was told in her teens by a fortune teller at some fair:  that she would give up a glamorous “stage career” that she could have had. In my mother’s head, this was a career as a concert pianist.  Instead she became a non-glamorous wife and mother.

(I never heard my mother play one single note on a piano, ever. I have no idea if she was really that good, but I have my doubts.)

I heard this story dozens of times through my childhood.  And plenty of mothers probably have similar stories about “what might have been”.  But with my mother, she never followed it up with anything like, “But I have you, and that’s better than anything else I could have had!” and a hug.

No, my mother’s repeated telling of this story was an expression of how dissatisfied she was with her life choices.

If that’s the choice my mother wished she had made, she had no one but herself to blame for it – or possibly she could have blamed a competing myth, the Catholic Church.

But a career as a concert pianist takes a lot of fucking work and practice and grit, and a certain amount of luck.  It isn’t glamorous except for maybe the 2 hours you’re on the stage. I imagine there are plenty of people who did try to make it as a pianist and failed. It’s not quite the same as the failure of not even trying, but it’s still a failure of the myth.

So what happens when the myth fails to deliver?

The believers look around for someone else to blame.

My mother chose to act the martyr and victim, and shift the blame instead, usually to my dad.

Just one small example of how belief in a harmless, entertaining myth can fuck up a decent reality.

Posted on

File Under “Obvious”

“Depression during pregnancy and in the year after childbirth is surprisingly common. It’s estimated that 1 in 7 pregnant women will suffer depression while pregnant or following childbirth.

“The consequences of maternal depression can be severe, according to Davidson, who describes a “cascading set of problems” including premature birth, low birth weight and failure to thrive. After childbirth, new mothers who are depressed can be neglectful and inattentive to their newborn, putting the infants at risk for an even greater number of problems.”

As a society, we really, REALLY don’t want to talk about the idea that motherhood isn’t all sunshine and rainbows. The idea that a mother could NOT love her child is flat-out disturbing to a LOT of people.

I know, because as a kid, in order to describe the unusual distance in the relationship between my mother and myself, I used to say that I “didn’t have a mother so much as kind of an aunt.”

Looking back, I can see where this put a lot of people off. It made adults uncomfortable. They didn’t like the sound of it, they didn’t deal well with it — UNTIL I gave them some kind of explanation, or excuse.

The excuse part went like this: “My parents are divorced, and I live with my dad, so my mom isn’t at home all the time.”

This made some kind of sense, so people took it at face value, because the alternative — to ask why on earth would 4 blocks mean that I couldn’t have a close relationship with my own mother — well, that’s one rabbit hole that no adult ever went down, to my recollection.  There weren’t that many divorced people around at that time and place — I was definitely the only kid with divorced parents all through elementary school — so no one had much of an idea what a “normal” divorce looked like.

Later on, a few of my friends probed a little deeper, and to them I would say, “She’s not there to fight about things like what I’m wearing or how much makeup I have on or whatever.” And this made sense to them, at the stage where they were asking the question.  (In fact, it turned into a strategy — when we were going out in high school, we’d get ready at my house so my friends could avoid such confrontations.)

But despite such easy explanations, the idea that a MOTHER’S LOVE could be changed by a short physical distance still doesn’t actually make sense. And she was neglectful of me prior to The Divorce, anyway.

There was something truly wrong there: whether it was my mother’s mental illness, the electroshock therapy, the two month-long absences during my first year – all things beyond anyone’s control – or her maladjusted way of dealing with adversity, which was to cast blame around and scapegoat, along with the clear indications that she just was not interested in being a mother.

I think if the root cause were confined to that first year of my life, if she had wanted to have a loving relationship with me and had worked at it, that we would have been able to have a better relationship.  But she didn’t put in much effort. (And it’s clearly the adult’s responsibility here to do so, not the child’s.)

We never were close, especially physically: we rarely hugged, we never sat side by side on the sofa, “Love you” and a kiss was confined to goodbyes, and as I lived further away and saw her less often, occasionally hellos. No wonder she saw my childhood physical contact with my father as abnormal and perverted, as I sat on his lap, or he rubbed my back.

In later years, it didn’t take much to break whatever bond we had. In my freshman year of college, while on the phone, I must have said something that she didn’t like, and she claimed to take offense “at my tone” and wanted me to apologize. I refused to do so, and we didn’t speak for about a year and a half.

HOLY SHIT. Just think for a minute about just how abnormal that is. Not speaking to your youngest daughter (who is 18 or 19) for a YEAR AND A HALF because you didn’t “like her tone”!

But it got worse. Shortly after college, there was the time she stayed with me in Texas while Joe & Susan were getting married, and my then-boyfriend-now-husband noted that every time I went somewhere with my mom, I came back crying, because of something nasty she had said to me.

The worst of those was when my own mother told me to my face, “I like Susan better than you, because she’s nicer to me.”

I will bet money that any of my siblings who read this will say to themselves, “Well, that’s perfectly understandable.”

No, it’s not. It’s abnormal. It’s considerably fucked up. Mothers who love their children do not say shit like this.

I’ve long wondered whether our mother was unhealthy and maladjusted and mentally ill with all her kids, or just with me. Of course, no one will discuss it, so there’s no hope of finding out for sure.

But I feel like the fact that they have found ways to excuse EVERYTHING awful she ever did, means that they were in training to do so for a very long time. She may not have been depressed or psychotic in the early years of her parenting, but I will bet money she was narcissistic. With Dad often absent during the week, she would not even have had to be all that subtle about it. And I’m so grateful I was saved from growing up enmeshed with that.

Posted on

Family Estrangement

I’ve been coming across lots of pertinent things lately.  These are some interesting notes from this article that a friend sent to me about family estrangement.

“For me, as for most people, it took an exchange so toxic, so far outside the boundaries of what’s acceptable, that something snapped inside me.

“…my only regret is that I didn’t do it earlier. Much, much earlier.

“The cultural narrative around estrangement is that it’s a problem that needs to be solved. We see and feel the supremacy of the genetically connected family in a thousand ways throughout childhood. By the time we’re adults it literally goes without saying…

“For us, estrangement isn’t a problem; it’s a solution to a problem, a response to an otherwise unsolvable dilemma. It’s a last resort when you’ve tried everything else over and over, when you no longer trust the relationship. When — as Ann Landers once wrote — you’re better off without the other person in your life.

“I’ve interviewed more than 50 people who have estranged themselves from family members, and I have yet to meet a single one who regrets it. They regret whatever situation made it necessary. They regret not having a parent/sibling/family member they could come to terms with. They regret that their problems were severe enough to make estrangement look good. But they don’t regret doing it.

“More than three-quarters of the participants in one study felt estrangement had made a positive difference in their lives. One woman I talked to who initiated an estrangement said her main feeling was relief, even liberation. Another told me it was as though she’d lived under a cloak of silence that had suddenly been lifted. A third said, “There really are cases where estrangement is the better course. It’s horrific, it’s sad, it’s tragic, and it’s better than the alternative.”

“It’s also a lot more common than you might think…The most recent research suggests that up to 10 percent of mothers are estranged from at least one adult child…

Fascinating side notes from this paper: some suggestion that the lack of a loving relationship between my mother and me was far outside the norm, and probably caused or at least exacerbated by factors outside my control.

  • the mother–daughter tie has generally been found to be the closest, most enduring, and mutually supportive of all parent–child gender combinations.
  • mothers report being most emotionally close to last-born children.
  • parent–child relations tend to be more stable when both parents are present
  • maternal depression has been shown to interfere with parent–child relationships
  • mothers who have a larger number of children may be more likely to have an estranged child simply because the risk of having a child become estranged is greater as the size of the group increases.

“…and that about 40 percent of people experience family estrangement at some point. Most people, though, fall somewhere less definitive on the estrangement continuum, a term coined by Scharp, one of the few researchers who studies the phenomenon…“I find that people are just more or less estranged.”

Some families talk by phone but never visit. Some email but never talk. Some see each other once or twice a year but keep their relationships superficial. Many sustain long periods of silence punctuated by brief reconciliations.

In my case, what I did was put words to a situation that already existed, and eventually I escalated and formalized the estrangement when they refused to deal with it or even admit it.

I forced them to make a choice, and admit to an unpleasant reality:
Prove to me that I’m really a member of this family. Listen to me and defend me against this unacceptable behavior — the way you defend everyone else who’s really included in this group — or not.

Clearly, they chose not to.

They literally could not do otherwise.  They could not show me respect, love, or support against an in-law’s disrespectful behavior, and then a brother’s.
Not even the level you might extend to a stranger.  To them, I am less worthy of those things than a stranger.

It was far easier to judge me, instead of judging one of their own.
Instead they chose to scapegoat me again, to say it was my fault for putting the choice out there — when it was the actions of others against me that brought it out in the open — and then my fault for no longer accepting my scapegoat role.

What makes my situation different from those described here, though, is that I didn’t choose the estrangement.  I was estranged by them from the very beginning.  Thus the difficulty I had, the pain and the loss I dealt with, in grappling with the fact that I wasn’t a “member of the tribe”, and never had been.

What I am guilty of is wanting a family, wanting my birthright — when that “family” made it clear so many times and so many little ways over so many years, such that when the big thing happened, I was supposed to have known better than to even ask.

“In my experience, estrangement makes people deeply uncomfortable. They wonder what’s wrong with you when you can’t get along with your family. They worry that if you can estrange yourself, maybe their parents/children/siblings could do that to them. Estrangement seems to threaten the primal order of things and opens the door to a lot of questions most of us would rather not think about…

“Imagine for a moment that these people have good reasons” to be estranged, says Scharp.”

Posted on

Hindsight

Happy 2019. Do less work on being friends with people who are doing zero work on being good to you.

Captain Awkward

I recently ran across this post online and found it surprisingly validating. While the whole thing has parallels to The Susan Incident, this paragraph really caught my attention:

“You are not overreacting, and FUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK [Susan] for this behavior and fuck family members for enabling it by acting like your reactions to bad stuff [are out of line].”

All I could think was, wow, I wish I’d had this advice and the ability to respond like this 6+ years ago. For example, I wish I’d been able to say this:

Hey, I don’t want this to be forever, but until I can trust that this won’t ever happen again, until I trust that y’all understand how serious this is, and until y’all stop treating me like I’m the one doing something wrong, this is how it’s going to be.” 

“Until you get a real apology and whatever else you need to put this behind you, as long as other family members keep pressuring you on her behalf, Keep. Naming. What. She. Did.”

(Well, I kind of did do that, after I found out that Joe & Susan lied about it all to everyone else. It’s just that no one wanted to listen.)

For her: “Susan, do you understand why I am mad? It’s not just for having a conversation. It’s because when I simply asked you to go elsewhere to have it, and it was clear that it was upsetting to me, you refused to do that one thing. It’s ’cause you could have said you were sorry but you didn’t. It’s ’cause you raged at me when I brought it up to Joe. It’s because you both lied about that rage attack to everyone else, and told them it was all my fault, that I picked that fight. It’s because your fauxpology came with a side of blame, like me being pissed off and upset about this is “overreacting”.” 

For other family members: “She stood there laughing and chatting with the hospice nurse, while I was trying to cope with my beloved father’s death. When I politely asked them to take their conversation somewhere else, she refused to do so and continued her behavior. The next day she flew into a rage, literally yelling in my face when I tried to talk to Joe about it. They both lied to everyone else about who started that fight. When I got understandably upset, they tried to blame me for “overreacting”.

If you want to work on someone about this, go talk to Susan about her behaviors instead of trying to police my feelings.” 

For everyone/both: “You want me to come back and visit, and put this all behind us? I’d like that, too, someday, so, show me that I can trust this won’t happen again by taking the time it did happen seriously. Show me that you’ve learned from this.

At minimum, going forward, you can’t continue to treat me like the problem person all the time. You can’t treat my opinions or feelings or life choices as though they are WRONG or inconvenient for you or a sign that I’m irrational.

You don’t have to agree with me or understand it in order to do it. Not negotiable. ” 

Not that it would have made any difference to the outcome — I highly doubt anyone would have listened any more than they did(n’t).

I just wish *I* had had the ability, the groundedness to see it that clearly, and communicate it that succinctly. I wish I’d realized sooner that I had spent my whole life fighting a losing battle whose outcome had been decided probably even before I was born. I wish I’d been able to understand that that boundary was needed — even though these people were supposed to be my “family” — and to set it a long time ago. It would have saved me a lot of time, pain, and work.

Posted on

Smiles

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/oct/24/terrible-effects-postnatal-depression-mental-illness

“…I am a lifelong sufferer from depressive illness. I have spent many years trying to work out why, and I have come up with many possible explanations. To date the most convincing one I can find is that my mother unwittingly “gave” it to me… through the tragedy of her own postnatal depression.

“My mother’s depression was a closely held secret. In fact, none of my family could remember Jean, my mother, having it. Perhaps there just wasn’t a name for it then. But when she died, more than 30 years after my birth – she killed herself after a depressive episode – and I checked, many years later, on her medical records, there it was in black and white.

“The note comes in July 1956, six months after my birth. It reads: “It would appear that her present relapse has been going on since the birth of her first child.” She was prescribed potassium bromide – an anticonvulsive and sedative, a precursor of modern antidepressants. Later, until 1959, there were prescriptions of phenobarbitone and Largactil. Phenobarbitone is another tranquilliser, Largactil is a “phenothiazine for treating schizophrenia and other mental illnesses, particularly paranoid symptoms”.

“So for the first three years of my life – at least – my mother would have been suffering some form of psychosis. What I was faced with for the first few years of my life was a mother whose emotional spectrum, presumably, was limited, and registered at the dark end.

“I suspect I would not have often looked up to see a delighted, smiling face.”

“I cannot say with certainty how causally tied [my own depressive episodes] are to my experience as a newborn of my mother’s depression. But more than one developmental psychologist has explained to me how profoundly sensitive babies are to their mother’s facial expressions. As I understand it, the unresponsiveness of a depressive mother who cannot mirror her baby can lead to the development of a depressive child. The report rightly recognises this, noting the effect “over decades on their children’s prospects, both in terms of development in the womb and during the crucial early years”.

I can still vividly remember the second visit to my therapist, to whom I had just started telling the whole tangled story, and who had given me the assignment of trying to define any “beliefs” in my FOO. I had come up with “Mom is never wrong” and “Susan is never to blame.”

I voiced those two phrases and then I looked at her and asked, “Are those the same thing?” And she instantly got the biggest, widest smile on her face, a genuine, happy smile of approval.

And I suddenly REALLY wanted to see that again.

Immediately, viscerally, desperately, I wanted – NEEDED – to make her smile at me like that again.

The feeling was so strong, and unexpected, that I immediately did my best to hide it, and I didn’t mention it to her, ever.

In hindsight, it is more accurate to say that, while at the time my THOUGHT was to “make” her smile at me — what I really wanted was simply “for her to smile at me like that again” — without the part about me having to make her do it.

Because of course a baby doesn’t usually have to “do” anything to make a mother smile at her. Sometimes the mother just smiles, I expect.  But in my case, I think it shows that I didn’t get that kind of smile — the smile that says, I love you, for no reason other than that you are here — and deep in my mind, it became established that I had to do something to make it happen. I wasn’t going to get it for just being me.  Not from her, anyway.

And the pattern continues into the years that follow. Maybe my siblings picked up on her dysfunction, through things as subtle as a smile that didn’t happen, and mirrored HER. Maybe they were trying to gain her acceptance and approval as well, I don’t know. Maybe this is why I have never been able to make my sister laugh.

I do know that I wasn’t ever “really” a part of the family in some eyes, and for years I tried so hard to “make” them smile at me and accept me — when acceptance should have been automatic — but because of my mother’s illness, it wasn’t.

But the one place that I did get those kind of smiles was from my dad. Not quite the same as from a mother, I am sure, but I got something, enough to keep me from being a complete lifelong depressive mess.

In fact, I may have been saved by the factor written about in this article, which was what led me to the one that inspired this post. My guess is that with my birth and my sister’s, my father wasn’t depressed. I heard stories from my mother about how he insisted on giving my sister her first bath. And while at the time of my birth, he may have been under stress from the move and the new job, and confused or even angry about how my mother ran a household, and how she reacted to my birth – I’m going to say he probably wasn’t depressed.

“The report, like many modern social care reports, focuses on the economic cost of such illnesses, which strikes me as odd. It is the human cost that is primary – the agony of mental illness, which is very often avoidable with treatment, being passed from mother to child.

“… For me and thousands of others, the long-term costs are, 50 years later, being pinned to a bed by your own mind unable to think anything but the blackest thoughts… I haven’t suffered postnatal depression – but I have suffered from it.