Category: The Future

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Majority Rules

All I’ve done is take on the role that the majority want me to have.  There isn’t a single person in the group who has a reason for keeping me in that is stronger than their reasons for keeping me out.  Here’s how I think the scorecard looks:

  • Sister- doesn’t want me to exist because of her issues with me, whatever they are.  Happier with me gone.
  • BIL – would like to have me back, wants conflict over, but controlled by Sister.  Their kids are probably also in the same position.
  • Brother #1- would like to have me back, wants conflict over, but somewhat controlled by Sister.  Conflicted enough to feel guilty, so ignores “no contact” request.
  • SIL #1- unknown, but probably aligned with B#1.
  • Susan – doesn’t want someone around who sees through her manipulation and holds her accountable.  Happier with me gone.
  • Joe – might like to have me back, but controlled by Susan and Sister.  Easier with me gone.
  • Brother #3 – probably doesn’t much care.  Might align with Sister if it gets him a spot.
  • Brother #4 – doesn’t want me to exist so he can be the baby of the family and get the attention.  Happier with me gone.  Annoyed that I’m not 100% gone yet so continues to snipe at me via blog comments.
  • SIL #4- unknown, but probably aligned with B#4, as well as their kids.

And if you think that mess is fixable, you’re a dreamer.

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The People You Can’t Forgive

An online friend’s Facebook post pointed me to this religious article, which although I am not religious at all, contains a few nuggets that spoke to me:

“That feeling of… wanting to assert your rightness or your victimhood — depending on the depth of your wounding — can take… years to dissipate… You have to go through that necessary period of feeling half dead, half angry, half in denial — this is the liminal space in which we grow for some reason.”

This might indicate to some that what I have been going through is normal.  But that assumes an acceptance that what has happened to me at the hands of my family was indeed wounding and traumatic.  Which would in turn mean that they did something wrong to me, that they are responsible, at fault, and we just can’t have that.

My family’s version starts out with where the blame is “supposed” to go, and works backwards from there to find a “reason”.  Thus:  I am wrong for holding this silly grudge for so long.

“When someone that you once trusted — and shared your heart with — betrays you, it feels like someone stomped on your soul. And they probably did.”

“The people you can’t forgive can’t fully be released until you find something better to fill the hole.”

“[Forgiveness] doesn’t entirely work unless we have a larger comfort, a safe and more beautiful enclosure to move toward. If we only empty out, and do not refill with something better, there is still a gaping hole within us.  Without something positive, comforting and loving to fill that hole up… we’re left to depend entirely on willpower — and our willpower is normally very weak, especially on those days of loneliness, stress, tiredness and hunger. So we’ve got to keep our aloneness and emptiness filled with something loving and positive.”

I feel like this is where I am now.  Trying to find something to replace all that I’ve lost.  Trying to find new logs for my new raft.

[Another thing that occurs to me about this needing-something-to-fill-the-hole:  that’s what I was to my father.  The people he loved and worked for had all stomped on his soul.  His wife hated him; most of his kids had been taught by her example, and would rather see him gone than home.  But there was one child of his who hadn’t yet been taught, and who was worth trying to save from that.]

But the really important part of this article is just one sentence:

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

This is one of the remaining sticking points.   Everyone else in my family of origin takes the easy way out, to just transmit their pain to others, instead of dealing with it and doing the work to transform it.

Personally, if I were to try to define “sin”, I might start with this.

I have long liked two other quotes that carry this same idea:

“I believe that if, at the end of it all, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts.” — Roger Ebert

“If you empathize with your child, you want your child to be fulfilled in life, to be a happy person. And if you are an unhappy, unfulfilled person yourself, you are not going to want other people to be happier than you are… Therefore, it is your moral responsibility to be a happy, fulfilled person. Your moral responsibility.” — George Lakoff

There obviously has been a lot of pain in my family.

My mother, of course, transmitted her pain to others, to her family.  She never figured out how to deal with whatever her problems were.  Despite all her praying, all her religiosity, she remained bitter and unhappy, even after she was free of the man on whom she blamed all her unhappiness.  She continued to blame and transmit her pain to others for her entire life.

My siblings were on the receiving end of a lot of that pain.  For the most part I don’t think they have dealt with the realities of what happened, with what was wrong, and with the fact of who it was that was unhealthy — and just HOW unhealthy.

I doubt that my sister has ever revisited and dismantled the pain that in her teens caused her to become suicidal.  That has been buried under a shit-ton of “Mom was a saint and Dad was a bastard.”  Blaming.  Throwing your own psychological garbage onto someone else so you don’t have to deal with it.  Specifically, onto Dad, and almost certainly onto me:  the idea that my birth is what caused all the problems, and it is my existence that somehow fucked up hers.

Or, if you start with the idea that anything Dad did was bad, by definition, then the fact that the one child he raised is less of a train wreck than anyone else would be an assault on one of your most basic beliefs, every time you saw her.  And if you’re still angry about The Divorce, yet here is living proof that it didn’t wreck everyone’s lives – that it was, in fact, a good thing for some, and particularly for the two people you learned to hate – well. That would be annoying as shit.

(In fact, you might have a strong need to believe that his paternal, nurturing love for that child was something unnatural, even dirty.)

I have a hunch that my sister would honestly prefer me to have a few more really good failures in my life, so she could point to them as proof of my basic wrongness.  Right now about all she has is that I am atheist, childless by choice, don’t have anything that looks like a “real job” to them, and that I’ve also chosen to reject the treatment of a shitty group of people.  Not a lot to go on.

My SIL Susan had her own tragedy in her childhood.  Her father would go on an annual fishing trip to Florida, but one year when she was about 8 years old, he had a heart attack and died, and never came home.  I have to assume that her pain over that is at least part of what caused her to be so shitty to me at my own father’s deathbed.

But here’s the thing:  you don’t just get a free pass.  You don’t get to fail miserably at even attempting to deal with your own shit, and instead just lob it onto someone else.  That’s not healthy, responsible or fair.

That’s not love.  What it is, is a sure way to wreck a relationship.

But apparently it is how my family “functions”, to use the term loosely.  Or maybe “copes”.

Shit rolls downhill.  My mother blamed me for existing because it embarrassed her.  My sister blames me for existing either because that is what caused everything to fall apart, or because I fuck up her worldview, or both.  Susan blames me for calling her out on her callous behavior and rudeness to me the night my father died.

I’m not sure what exactly I ever did to make all the older women in my life see me as a handy target.  OK, I maybe have an idea.

I HAD A FATHER WHO LOVED ME.   And worse, “didn’t” love them.

My mother was always very jealous.  If she was jealous of my father’s love for me and lack of it for her — WHOSE FAULT IS THAT?  Not mine.

If my mother was also jealous of my sister, and lied to her, and twisted her way of thinking about our father, and deliberately alienated her from him, and my sister believed my mother’s bullshit, and believes that our father didn’t also love her, and that bullshit led her to cut off communication with him for decades — WHOSE FAULT IS THAT?  Not mine.

If my SIL never dealt with her own painful past, and the loss of her own father, and she is so jealous of me for having mine that she has to take it out on me when my own father dies — WHOSE FAULT IS THAT?  Not mine.

As for “shit rolling downhill”, that choice of metaphor is no accident.  The hierarchy of age is a very strong one here.  Age confers rights, and righteousness (although obviously not responsibilities).  My youngest brother has no one to shit on but me (and from the little I’ve seen, his own children, but that’s mostly beyond the scope of my knowledge).  Thus in the context of our FOO, he bullies me, yells at me, thinks he has the right to lecture me and tell me who I am, how I should act, what I can and can’t say.  Now that I’ve removed myself from his ability to do that shit to my face, he leaves shitty comments on this blog.

But the fact is that absolutely everyone else in that house the day my father died was older than me, and most had had ample time to deal with their shit, and had not done so.

They all knew I was facing more grief on that day than anyone else, but they were too fucked up themselves to hold their shit together — Susan foremost among them and Joe not far behind.

In the end, they didn’t give a shit about my pain because they were too invested in throwing their own shit onto me so they wouldn’t have to deal with their pain.

And don’t tell me that it couldn’t be done.  It’s been 15 years since our parents died.  I’m as old now as they were then, and I’ve done it.  It’s been hard, and painful, and cost some money and a lot of fucking work, but I did it.  They’re all older, and supposedly so superior to me — well then, if I can do it, if I can put in the work and go to therapy and figure out what’s fucked up, I don’t see why it would be beyond them.

Except, of course, that they “aren’t the problem” and never will be.

To that I say — PROVE IT.  Prove it the way I did.  Go to therapy.  Spend the money, like I did.  I dare you.  Go for just two or three sessions, explain it all to a professional, and get them to agree with you.

And good fucking luck.  Because I know and you know why you won’t go do it.

But that is the only circumstance under which I will resume contact with anyone in this family.  Go get some help, work through your shit, and then we’ll talk.

My other siblings were, and are, probably just too fucked up to do anything about it.  Well, to do the right thing about it.  I wish they weren’t, but that’s all I can do about it.

In some ways what happened has been a favor to me, to throw off this pile of bullshit, to put down the box of shit my sister has made me carry for her all these years.  At least I get to live the second half of my life unencumbered by all their bullshit and baggage.

This feels like a place to end.  I don’t know if it is really going to be the last post in this blog — but I’ve finally finished at least part of what I set out to do, which is to tell my story.  The whole sad, angry history is finished, all laid out neatly in the sidebar, all making a lot more fucking sense than the story they tell themselves.

All anyone has to do, if they want to understand, is read it with an open heart, and a mind that is ready to accept responsibility, instead of simply shifting the blame.

Shit Together Clear

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No Contact Means No Contact Means NO CONTACT

I should have known better.

But, in times of crisis, as we know, we revert to old patterns.

When my FIL died recently, it threw me back into a bunch of painful memories:  about my in-laws, and how they never welcomed me into their family because of my MIL’s issues, and about the deaths of my own parents, and of course, all the bullshit that went along with THAT.

So I did something that in hindsight I should not have done.  I broke my no-contact rule, and emailed my sister’s husband, to let him know what had happened.  Being the two men married to the two Henchal women, my BIL and my husband have always had an affectionate relationship.  Add to that, I have always felt like he genuinely liked me, and us.  (Of course, my BIL does not have the bullshit baggage from my mother that everyone else does.)

I felt like in normal circumstances, letting my BIL know what had happened to my husband was a courteous and normal thing to do.

What I wrote to him was, “I’m only letting you know because I think you and he both liked each other a lot.”  By this I meant that I intended the information for him only.  I suppose the exact words I wrote were not 100% clear in and of themselves, but in the context of the whole no-contact thing, I’d think it would have been obvious that I was telling him only, and not intending for this news to be spread around my family.

While my BIL has been kind and decent and sympathetic to us through all that has happened — and I know that what has happened breaks his heart too — our lives, what happens to us, and what we choose to do, is frankly none of anyone else’s damned business any more.

My oldest brother doesn’t respect my no-contact decision.  He insists on sending emails or cards or making phone calls on occasions such as holidays, birthdays, or anniversaries.  Pretending nothing is wrong.  Usually with an irritating remark that indicates that he is fully aware of my wish for no contact, but he is clearly and willfully ignoring it.

It is apparent that he thinks I have no right to get what I have asked for.  That’s happened before.

Instead, he does what HE wants to do.  He probably rationalizes it in some fashion as being because he “knows” better, but he really does it because it makes him feel better.

And because he is not used to putting aside what makes him feel better, in order to give someone else what they have specifically asked for.  That’s also happened before.

The youngest brother has a habit of coming on here every so often and leaving comments to belittle me, tell me how wrong I am about it all, how paranoid or irrational I am, and how much fun they are all having without me.  It’s another beautiful example of exactly the same behavior.

He knows I want no contact.  If he chooses to read the blog – that’s his deal.  No one is making him show up here.  It would be fine if it stopped there and he took responsibility for his decision to read what I write.

But he too is incapable of respecting my no-contact decision, because he can’t deal on his own with whatever emotions my writing brings up, and he has to throw it all on me, and make me out to be wrong so he can feel better.

He cannot help himself because that would mean denying himself something HE wants to do, even needs to do.  It would mean putting my wishes above his own, out of respect for me.  Whoops, whoa, no can do.

Of course I could block him.  But up to now, I have decided not to, because his comments are a useful reminder that the family I actually have is not the kind of family I wish I had.  A reality check.

The funny part is that he has now started “hoovering“, telling me (not INVITING but TELLING me) that I should “become part of the fam again”.

Right.  Supposedly he’s been reading the blog but apparently his reading comprehension is crap, too, because obviously I NEVER HAVE BEEN PART OF THIS FAMILY.   And nothing about this second-class citizen attitude towards me has changed — keeping Susan and my sister from throwing a fit is far and away more important than having me and my husband as part of the family.  The unreasonable person always wins with this bunch.

In fact, now that I look at that hoovering post again, I see several techniques that have been used by them.  Look at #1, “Ignoring your requests to break off the relationship and attempting to continue on as if nothing has changed.“  That’s the oldest brother right there.  #2, “Asking you when you’re going to “get over it” and return to your past actions.”  Youngest brother, check.

And on and on.  Fake apologies.  Sending unwanted cards, messages, packages.  Ta-da.  How does it feel to see your own toxic behavior, all the bullshit you pull, all spelled out for you?  Don’t bother telling me because it’s not my shit to deal with.

Although, to quote my snotty sister, “You probably won’t be able to help yourself.”  (Oh, hey, another one.  “Drama games.”)

I doubt it occurs to my oldest brother that sometimes these communiqués make me cry.  That every damned time he does it, it is a reminder that I am not respected, in one way or another, by my FOO.  That I don’t have a right to what I want from my own family – that it’s THEIR needs that always, always come first.

That it’s EXACTLY what Susan did to me that night, when she and the hospice nurse knew exactly what I had asked for but decided that they didn’t really need to do it — that it would be good enough for me if they just gave my request lip service, and then of course continued to do exactly as they pleased.

And it is another reminder of the other people who don’t call.  Who have, in fact, never called.  My husband has pointed out how weird it is that in the nearly 23 years since he and I met, my sister has never once called me.

Like me, I suppose my oldest brother wishes for a whole and unbroken family, for love and connection — exactly what drove me to write to my BIL.

Unlike me, my BIL has not requested no contact, and is not being disrespected every time I do it.

Also unlike me, my brother (and for that matter, my BIL) could do something about it, could hold people responsible for their behavior, but doesn’t.

You can probably guess that the news was spread.  I know it was, because a couple of weeks later, a holiday card came in the mail from my oldest brother, with a few sentences saying that BIL had told them about my husband’s parents, and (despite knowing that we are not religious), that they would pray for them.  Shades of the same thing, really.  Praying will make them feel better.  It does absolutely nothing for us.

At least there were not any actual words of sympathy.  Such words coming from them, as my husband said, “after how they’ve treated you, wouldn’t mean shit.”

The card has sat around our house for a while, in a pile with all the rest of our holiday cards.  For a few days, every time I saw it, it would piss me off.  I got past that fairly quickly, but it didn’t seem enough to just throw it in the recycle bin with all the other cards after the holidays.

An old friend used to throw a New Year’s party every year, and she had a tradition of inviting everyone to burn an effigy in their fireplace at midnight.  Your effigy was supposed to represent something that you wanted to let go of or leave behind in the coming New Year.

You can see what’s coming, right?  😀

It’s a little late for New Year’s, but what the hell.  The blue bowl was once my mother’s, and I opened a really nice bottle of champagne, too.

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Babies are what now?

So I found a new friend recently – someone with whom I had a lot in common, much more than I usually do with people I meet.  We are the same age, each with no kids.  She also likes cats, she spends time online, she lives nearby, she doesn’t have a day job either.  She’s had some shitty people in her life and is also interested in figuring out what the hell happened.  We usually text each other just about every day.

So the other day new friend drops a bombshell of a text:  “I’m pregnant.”  We didn’t even know they were trying, so this was completely out of the blue.

And because I have been able to identify with her more than with many people, this announcement had the effect of triggering me badly on pregnancy/motherhood issues, sort of as if it was me who was pregnant, or maybe an alter ego.

My issues on motherhood go in both directions.  They include my own disinterested mother, and probably the infant abandonment as well, when she was hospitalized.  Let’s not forget that the person who was probably my surrogate mother, my sister, also abandoned me when she went off to college the next year – as well as she plainly dislikes me, or at least wishes I didn’t exist.

I’ve never had anything you could call a loving mother.  People talk about the “universal” bond between mother and child, the unfathomable, unbreakable, unconditional love a mother ALWAYS has for her child.

I have no idea what that is like.

But also, I NEVER had a positive model for motherhood, for seeing myself in the role:  never spent time around babies, never got to see motherhood or pregnancy expressed as a positive thing.  I’ve never changed a diaper in my life.  In fact I have a phrase in my head that I don’t know where it comes from, but it is this:

“Babies are bad.”

(In my head it’s to the tune of “Feed the Birds” from Mary Poppins… as if maybe I heard someone singing it to me.

As it happens, the movie came out about 5 years before I was born.)

My own mother was so embarrassed about having had me at such a late age — I suspect mostly because it revealed to the world that SHE MUST HAVE HAD SEX — that for years, all through grade school, she wouldn’t put her birthday on the registration form and every year I got asked about it and had to say I DIDN’T KNOW HOW OLD MY MOTHER WAS because she was so embarrassed at having me.

She was ashamed of my existence, because of WHAT IT SAID ABOUT HER.

In the other direction, over the past few years, as I have figured out all the other stuff about my fucked-up family, I have come to realize that my choice not to have kids was probably mostly a result of the slanted, negative view of motherhood that I was shown, and that I never got a chance to experience the “good side” of it and thus form my own opinion either way.

I was 13 when my sister had her first child.  (Fun fact:  I am closer in age to my two oldest nieces than I am to my sister.)  My lousy sister might, for example, have had me come and stay with her over the summers as she had her kids, but of course she would not have wanted me around (although you’d think she might have at least enjoyed turning me into a household slave, as was done to her).

My mother used to explain my childless choice away by saying that it was because “you had your own mother taken away from you.”  She meant by my father, and The Divorce (because of course it had to be his fault).

(Note this also presumes my choice is wrong, and has to be blamed on something.)

I think she was almost right, but not for that reason.  If my mother was “taken away from me” it was because of her mental illness.  A distance of four fucking blocks is not enough to keep a loving mother from loving her child.

But being a self-centered narcissist who worried more about what other people would think of her, than about her own child — that will do the job.  You can pull that one off in the same damned house.

So, I used to think that not having kids was my own choice.  But for a while now I have been worried that I made the wrong choice, based on other people’s garbage.  And I’m terrified that as I watch my new friend’s experience, and spend time with her and her baby, it will confirm that I made the wrong choice.

Confirm that once again, I have lost out on something important — maybe even essential to a happy, fulfilled life — that I should have had.  Because of my fucking fucked-up family.

Over the years, as I’ve lost my whole family, and a few friends, there haven’t been a whole lot of new people coming in to fill up that empty space.  My husband’s mother had her own issues, and certainly didn’t welcome me with open arms into their family.  I had hoped my new friend would maybe fill up a little of that lonely, empty space — but of course that’s changed now.  She will have new priorities, and a lot less time for friends.  And that is as it should be.

But if I had had my own kids, maybe I wouldn’t be so lonely — I would  have someone, a family of my own.  And I probably got robbed of that opportunity.  Certainly I was only given biased information, and didn’t have the opportunity to truly make my own choice about it.  And it’s too late now to change that.

Maybe things will be fine.  Maybe I will be perfectly happy with this opportunity to be an “aunt” to my friend’s child, and maybe, just maybe, the experience will confirm that I really made the right choice for me.  I suppose there is a 50-50 chance, right?

But what if the opposite does happen?  What if I hold my friend’s baby, and my heart breaks?  What if I find out that yes, I got manipulated into making this hugely important choice WRONG, based on my mother’s fucked-up bullshit, and the collusion of a bunch of selfish angry teenagers (my siblings)?  How angry will I be then?  I don’t know if I can live through that.

ETA: after a few days and some help, I’ve been doing a lot better with this.

Since I don’t have a current therapist, I consulted with a longtime online friend who also happens to be a psychologist, and she said several things that helped a ton.

For one, she pointed out that if I wanted to change my mind, it isn’t too late, and she’s right:  I am not actually past child bearing age.  Ironically, my mom had me at about my age.  One year younger, I believe.

Of course, that doesn’t much help with the one-sided, negative view problem.  Nothing can fix that, but overall it seems my gut reactions are still holding.  One of my other online friends is babysitting her great-nephew today, and discovered she can’t use a computer around him because he keeps grabbing and touching.  My immediate reaction was “holy cow I could NOT deal with that.”

For another, she said this :  “Your feelings about your friend do not actually come from her having a baby. You are jealous because that baby is going to have a wonderful mother and that mother was your friend before she had a baby. So you have to give up your friend to a third party that isn’t going to bring you any joy. Even her baby gets a good mother and you have to give up your friend and hear about how much someone else loves their baby.”

Which is pretty accurate, although there is probably something in there about how that baby is going to have a great mother WHO IS A LOT LIKE ME.  And that makes me feel so sad.

Let me be clear:  I totally don’t grudge that baby her great mom – but I just wish so badly that I had had the same.

Sometimes I see moms hugging with their kids, out in the grocery store or whatever, just happy to be together, and it just about kills me.  I can see how reassuring, how comforting that must be to have.

In the recorded conversation, my sister speaks wistfully about a family they knew with several kids in it about their own age, one of whom my brother Joe was good friends with and another my sister apparently dated for a bit.  Joe refers to them as second parents; my sister remembers how they were a warm, loving family, and how the dad always hugged her when he saw her and how much she appreciated that physical show of affection.

Yet she can’t understand how it makes me feel when she doesn’t hug me in greeting, or barely speaks to me when we are together.

It’s also strange to me that our father’s physical affection to a 5YO me was so easily cast as “dirty” — yet this physical affection of an unrelated older man to a 16YO is perfectly innocent and a good thing.  Just goes to show the deeply ingrained prejudice against any action of my father’s, no matter how normal it might have been.

My online friend kept saying, “Your kids are never your friends,” and that was kind of “off” from what was making me feel so bad — but that helped me realize that when I was saying that “if I had had kids, at least I would not be so lonely” it was not so much a desire for friendship, as that A FAMILY THAT I CREATED WOULD NOT BE ONE THAT I COULD BE KICKED OUT OF, or have to struggle to earn a place in — or in the case of my in-laws, never let into.

And that is probably the heart of the whole thing.  I’m always outside looking in.  I’ve never had a mother’s love.  Never had the experience of a real family.  I’ve experienced a dad who did a damned good job of filling in for that unloving mother, but I lost that when I was pretty young.  And I have a wonderful loving husband.  But I’ve also had five siblings who never quite allowed me the membership in the tribe that was rightfully mine.  And I had a mother-in-law who, for reasons of her own, kept me out of “her” family.

Now I am faced with being outside looking in again, at a warm, loving, happy family that I’m not truly a part of.

That may or may not come to pass, but it is painful to contemplate.

My online psychologist friend said that what I am feeling is pretty normal for the situation.  And she also said some very nice things about how far I’ve come in the time she’s known me.  So that was good to hear.

And finally, I’ve decided that if I had to get it wrong, I’d still rather make this mistake than the other one:  where I had a kid, and found out that motherhood wasn’t what I really wanted, and ended up being a mom who was neglectful and disinterested.

Of all the things I’d hate myself for, doing to someone else what my mom did to me would be the most unforgivable.

Maybe that means part of my original choice and my child-less identity is less about “Do I want to have a child or not?” and more about, “I’m going to be smarter and more considerate and a better, healthier person than my mother,” but so be it.  It’s my choice, and I own it now.

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Everything Will Be All Right

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Birthdays and Losses

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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“You Can Let Them Go”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Madness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe the mom they knew wasn’t neglectful.

The mom I knew was.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Relationships are like streams…

“…constantly flowing and as they flow they meet obstacles. Some are minor and others major but a relationship either flows around the obstacle or it is blocked, and if permanently blocked, it ends. This is not cause for stress or anger, resentment or jealously. It is what it is. Move on with appreciation and without bitterness for the relationship that is no more, and open your heart to other possibilities that life presents. The most important factor in maintaining a meaningful relationship with lovers, family or friends is simply acceptance. You need to accept them for who they are and they need to accept you for who you are. If you cannot accept another person for who they are, you need to stop inflicting stress on that person and to walk away. And if another person does not accept you for who you are, you need to walk away no matter the nature of the relationship. Stress kills and living with a person who does not accept you for who you are is like living with a person who is slowly killing you.”   ~ Captain Paul Watson

That “lack of anger or resentment” is a helluva lot easier said than done — especially when it involves all the people on earth that you’ve known your whole life — but I’m working on it.

More than I can say for anyone else.

(ETA:  Whoops, a little bitterness there.  Like I said, I’m working on it.)