Around the holiday season, one tends to think of one’s FOO, whether one wants to or not.  It happens less and less as the years pass, but it still happens sometimes.  In my case, I think I ruminate on all the bullshit that happened because I am reminding myself exactly WHY they are not in my life any longer.

One phrase I learned while shoveling through it all was this:

And so it was with this year.

My sister has four kids, two girls and two boys.  The first boy was a handful.  I happen to think a lot of what he pulled off was because he was smarter than her – or at least, more creative.  The best one I know about was when he used the attic access in the boys’ bedroom to create a pot-smoking den in the attic.  Freakin’ genius.  The kid only got caught when one day he thought the house was empty, but one of my older brothers was visiting, and the uncle was still in the house and heard him overhead in the attic.

Anyway.  So by the time he was a teen, my sister was at her wits’ end I suppose, but her proposed solution was that she wanted her husband to teach the kid a lesson – a physical lesson.  I don’t know the exact details, as of course I heard all this second-hand.  But she definitely wanted her husband to physically attack the boy in some way, in order to discipline him.

God, that is so cringey even to type out.

Well, my BIL wouldn’t do it.

So my sister’s next idea was to BRING IN HER TWO BROTHERS TO DO THE JOB.

Again, this is all second-hand, but I guess she was ready to have our two oldest brothers fly in for the express purpose of doing some kind of physical discipline to the kid.

I don’t know what else they might have tried before this idea showed up.
I do know that this idea is not going to work.

I have a suspicion that family therapy, or anything like that, even if they tried it, would not be too effective, because CLEARLY the problem here is the KID, and CERTAINLY NOT MY SISTER.

Just like when I went to therapists, some think that “proves” I was the problem, and everyone expected it to “fix” me.  Which is often the case, that the people who need to do the changing don’t think they can possibly be the problem.

Well, my sister’s plan never came to fruition, AFAIK.  I think my BIL found out about it and put the kibosh on it.

But in revisiting it this year, I realized that this story is another confirmation that my sister is my mother all over again.

Because remember how, when my dad used to be gone all week, traveling for work — my mother used to keep a tally of what the boys had done wrong all week, and when Dad got home on Friday he had to physically punish them?

No, actually, because I’ve only alluded to this a couple of times here and there, and never really spelled it out. Well, I can remember Mom doing this to the two younger boys, and I have no doubt she did it with the older ones too.

I can remember standing in my parents’ bedroom, near the closet, watching the proceedings.  I probably had to be in the room because I was certainly no more than 5, if my mom was still there, and presumably I was not to be left alone in another room.  (Which doesn’t make a lot of sense coming from a parent who let me sit outside on the sidewalk for hours, and sent me to walk to school by myself, so maybe I just wanted to be near my Dad when he returned from being gone all week.  Or maybe Dad was the one who realized I should not be left unsupervised.  I don’t know.  But I do know I was in the room.)

The punishing involved both parents:  Mom reading from her scribbled list on the back of an envelope, or something, and Dad swatting the boys on the behind with a belt as they lay on the bed.

This is straight authoritarian parenting, the “strict father” family model.

I now wonder if maybe Mom was angry at Dad because he DIDN’T PLAY HIS ROLE PROPERLY.  He was supposed to be the head of the household and make all the decisions (and therefore take all the blame).  With him gone all week (to earn the money, but that apparently isn’t a good enough excuse) — those responsibilities fell on her and she couldn’t deal with them.

Further, since she had to do HIS job, maybe she decided, consciously or unconsciously, therefore she wouldn’t do HER job — which was to cook and clean and launder and maybe even nurture.  She passed most of THOSE responsibilities to her oldest daughter.

Who in turn, years later, decided that physical punishment from a man (preferably a relative of some kind, after all this is FAMILY) was the thing that had to be done to a kid.  Like mother, like daughter.

Ugh.

What separation from parents does to children: ‘The effect is catastrophic’

Notes from here

I have to assume that the reason my father hospitalized my mother twice during my first year was also a catastrophic one.  I sure as hell hope so.  My sister insists that there is no proof of such a thing, and my older siblings suggest that it was something Dad did out of — oh, spite or maliciousness or something, because of course he was a bastard, and of course there could not possibly be ANYTHING wrong with Mom…

This is what happens inside children when they are forcibly separated from their parents.

Their heart rate goes up. Their body releases a flood of stress hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline. Those stress hormones can start killing off dendrites — the little branches in brain cells that transmit mes­sages. In time, the stress can start killing off neurons and — especially in young children — wreaking dramatic and long-term damage, both psychologically and to the physical structure of the brain.

“The effect is catastrophic,” said Charles Nelson, a pediatrics professor at Harvard Medical School. “There’s so much research on this that if people paid attention at all to the science, they would never do this.”

“To pretend that separated children do not grow up with the shrapnel of this traumatic experience embedded in their minds is to disregard everything we know about child development, the brain, and trauma…”

For decades, Romania’s communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu had banned birth control and abortions, and imposed a “celibacy tax” on families with fewer than five children… the government ended up opening massive state-run orphanages to deal with more than 100,000 children whose parents couldn’t afford to raise them.

At those orphanages, Nelson said, “we saw kids rocking uncontrollably and hitting themselves, hitting their heads against walls. It was heartbreaking…”  As the children grew older, Nelson and his colleagues began finding unsettling differences in their brains.

Those separated from their parents at a young age had much less white matter, which is largely made up of fibers that transmit information throughout the brain, as well as much less gray matter, which contains the brain-cell bodies that process information and solve problems.

The activity in the children’s brains was much lower than expected. “If you think of the brain as a lightbulb,” Nelson said, “it’s as though there was a dimmer that had reduced them from a 100-watt bulb to 30 watts.”

The children…had been separated from their parents in their first two years of life… Their fight-or-flight response system appeared permanently broken… What alarmed the researchers most was the duration of the damage. Unlike other parts of the body, most cells in the brain cannot renew or repair themselves.

The reason child-parent separation has such devastating effects is because it attacks one of the most fundamental and critical bonds in human biology.

From the time they are born, children emotionally attach to their caregiver and vice versa, said Lisa Fortuna, medical director for child and adolescent psychiatry at Boston Medical Center. Skin-to-skin contact for newborns, for example, is critical to their development, research shows. “Our bodies secrete hormones like oxytocin on contact that reinforces the bond, to help us attach and connect,” Fortuna said.

A child’s sense of what safety means depends on that relationship. And without it, the parts of the brain that deal with attachment and fear — the amygdala and hippocampus — develop differently. The reason such children often develop PTSD later in life is that those neurons start firing irregularly, Fortuna said. “The part of their brain that sorts things into safe or dangerous does not work like it’s supposed to. Things that are not threatening seem threatening,” she said.

Kindergarten, 1974/75  (5YO)

One day when walking to kindergarten, I had dawdled along the way, and I was late to school.  We were supposed to arrive during lunch recess, and play in the kindergarten playground until the bell rang for everyone to come in.

This time, when I got there, the bell had already rung and the playground was deserted.  So I knew I was late.  I didn’t know what happened to people who were late but I was pretty sure it wasn’t anything good.  I was terrified of having to walk in there in front of everyone, so I turned around, walked back home, sneaked into the house via the side door, and hid in the basement.  My “plan” was to hide down there until it was time to come home, at which point I’d come out and pretend that I’d been at kindergarten all day.

Mom found me down in the basement at some point – I have a hazy idea that I had come out of the “fruit room” to see what time it was, and had not closed the door fully, which she noticed.  (Knowing how paranoid she was about checking that all the basement windows were locked every single night, I expect there was a lot more fuss when she suspected an intruder in the house, but I don’t remember much about being found out.)

She took me back to school, or possibly walked me there the next day, and they tried to tell me that the bell didn’t always ring at the same time — so that if it ever happened again I’d go inside the school, I guess.

I’ve already written about the day I “ran away from home”, when I was around 4YO.

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

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

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

Neither of these stories were ever told as cute little kid stories.  You know, the kind that get told when you bring a date home to meet the family.

I suspect this is because there is something really off about them:  the lack of concern shown by my mother for her younger daughter is disturbing.

It might not be as obvious in the school story — it’s easy to miss (or deliberately ignore) if you don’t know that my elementary school was 3/4 of a mile away from our house and my mother sent me, a 5YO little girl,  to walk there every day by myself.

Easy prey for anyone who just might have noticed a little redheaded girl walking alone, at the same time, day after day.

(And let me tell you, after a lifetime of living it, people notice redheads in situations when everyone else is just part of the crowd.)

Her not being inconvenienced was more important than the fact that something horrible might happen to me.

It’s even more appalling when you add in that there was a known or suspected child predator in the area.  This man lived alone, a few doors down from one of my best friends in elementary school.  Every kid who walked home after school in that direction knew that if you climbed the steps and rang his doorbell, he would give you a few pieces of candy.  Decades later, my friend told me that her mom had once cautioned her, “If he ever asks you to take the candy out of his pocket, don’t do it.”

[In contrast, with my sister there was once an elaborate chain of walking, a bus ride, and someone’s mother driving, in order that she attend a Catholic school.  Maybe that’s the “excuse” that was made for my mother’s lack of care — that if it wasn’t a Catholic school, she wasn’t concerned about me getting there.  Of course, that makes her a fine Catholic — but still a neglectful mother.]

Then there was the time one winter I was signed up for after-school ice skating lessons.  This was not long post-divorce, possibly the very first year post-divorce, so I was about 8 or 9YO at most.

The lessons were Mom’s idea.  It wasn’t time for us to spend together — she didn’t participate in or even come to the lessons to watch me skate — but the agreement was that she was supposed to come down to the Auditorium after work, and make sure I got home.

One night she forgot me.  The lesson was long over, everyone else was gone, and my mother hadn’t come to get me.  It was dark, and I was scared, and I didn’t know what to do.

I waited and waited in the lobby, alone and worried, hoping that Dad would come and get me.  There was a pay phone in the lobby, but I didn’t have any money to use it.

Finally, an older gentleman came into the building, and although I was scared to do it, I also knew I had to — I asked him for a dime so I could make a phone call. He took me up to the office area, and they called the house.  I don’t remember much else, but Dad was furious.

And then there was the continual problem of me walking the 4 blocks home from her apartment — by myself, in the dark.

This cropped up over and over again through the years.  Mom didn’t see why she should walk me home, because then SHE would have to walk back in the dark by HER self.

I clearly remember her and Dad arguing about it once, at the front door, after Mom and I had walked home from church one Sunday.  There was a clause in the divorce decree that said that visitation with Mom had to be “reasonable times and reasonable places” — a phrase that resonated throughout my childhood — and that she had to be responsible for our safe transportation to and from.

I can remember Dad clearly making the point that if I was sent to walk home from her apartment by myself, “something” could happen to me.

My mother’s literal, actual, word-for-word response to this was,
“But what if something happens to ME?”

So.  Clearly she was keenly aware of the potential danger — when it pertained to her.  And just as clearly, she was absolutely unconcerned about exactly those same dangers threatening her daughter.

While she was entirely aware of the hazards of a woman walking alone in the dark, she was perfectly fine with me doing it — apparently the idea that something might happen to me didn’t bother her at all, as long as it didn’t happen to her.

In the beginning, she would walk me to the front of the house and then wait for me to go in.  She was supposed to stay until I turned off the light that was left on in the foyer, which would mean that I was safely inside.

At some point, my mother came up with the compromise that she would stand on the uphill corner, safe under the streetlight, and watch me walk the long downhill block to our house, past the wide open, empty park.  This required a new “signal”, which was that I was supposed to flash the porch light on and off a couple of times once I got inside.

God only knows what the plan was if someone nefarious jumped out of the bushes and grabbed me as I walked the rest of the way alone to the house.  (Well, of course there was no fucking plan, other than to keep herself safe at the top of the hill.)

I know that at some point Dad found out about the “compromise”, and he was mad about that too, but I don’t remember what might have been done about it.

My older siblings — who were of course not living at home during this period —  while defending my mother’s loss of custody in The Divorce, once claimed that she couldn’t possibly have been neglectful, saying that she’d have had to be “leaving us in a car to go drink in a bar”, in order to REALLY be neglectful.

Now read this, and look at this little girl’s picture.

April Tinsley: DNA snares man in Indiana girl’s 1988 murder

DNA evidence links an Indiana man to the murder 30 years ago of an eight-year-old girl, police say.

John D Miller, 59, has appeared in court facing charges for the 1988 abduction, rape and murder of April Tinsley in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

Police matched his DNA from used condoms to evidence found on the girl’s underwear, an affidavit says.

It also states he has confessed. The killer apparently taunted police and threatened other little girls.

The murder

On 1 April 1988, April was abducted while walking to a friend’s home.

Three days later, her body was found in a ditch 20 miles (32km) from her neighbourhood. She had been assaulted and strangled.

Despite finding DNA evidence on April’s underwear during the initial investigation, police failed to narrow down a suspect.

This story literally nauseates me.  It makes my stomach heave.

This could have been me.  And my mother would not have given a shit.

In fact, it’s taken me over a week to write this post, since I first read the news story — because it makes me so sick and appalled.  Because what I realized — with the force of a punch to the gut — was that for my mother, me getting abducted would basically have been a huge positive for her.

• She would have gotten a ton of sympathy, and she always loved being a martyr and having people feel sorry for her.
• Me being gone would have eliminated a whole lot of work for her — especially since I was the youngest, which meant that I was the only thing keeping her from being able to do as she pleased all day.
• Finally, it would have been a “get out of jail free” card for absolutely anything the whole rest of her life.

Given all that, and all the times this issue cropped up over and over again in my childhood — when I read this news story the other day, it suddenly became very clear to me that my mother would have loved for me to disappear.  It would have been great for her, just as it would have been great for her if Dad had died:

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

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

The really sickening part of it is that Mom had to be completely aware of what would have been likely to happen to me if I had been abducted on my way to school, or after the ice skating, or any one of hundreds of times I walked home alone.  She was able to sexualize my father’s love for me and my brother’s pre-teen erection – she got both of those out of thin air, on her own.  So the idea of someone sexualizing a little girl was not something she couldn’t comprehend.  And again, she was obviously aware of the dangers of a woman walking alone.

Yet she let it happen, again and again, over years and years.  And I heard from her own mouth how her safety was more important than mine.

Look back at April’s picture.  Read what happened to her.  And see if you can still claim that my mother was not neglectful.

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.

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.

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!”

Notes from here

“Today, ECT is administered to an estimated 100,000 people a year, primarily in general hospital psychiatric units and in psychiatric hospitals. It is generally used in treating patients with severe depression, acute mania, and certain schizophrenic syndromes. ECT is also used with some suicidal patients, who cannot wait for antidepressant medication to take effect… This treatment is usually repeated three times a week for approximately one month. The number of treatments varies from six to twelve.”

Might explain why Mom was hospitalized for a month each time.