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Accountability 101

To continue on the theme of forgiveness, or lack thereof — I am reblogging (and heavily editing, mostly for length) this list from this article on abusive relationships, in the spirit of educating people who are apparently not well-equipped to hold themselves or others accountable for their actions.

This list is pretty straightforward and easy to understand.  It’s a good start to understanding how decent, empathetic people take responsibility for the things they have done that hurt other people.

I am not forgiving, but I have accepted the truth that things are never, ever going to change in a way that I will accept.  Because once you learn how decent people who really love each other treat each other, there is no settling for second best.  And no one in my family can even manage to pull off the first one.

1. Listen to the Survivor

When one has been abusive, the very first – and one of the most difficult – skills of holding oneself accountable is learning to simply listen to the person whom one has harmed:

  • Listening without becoming defensive.
  • Listening without trying to equivocate or make excuses.
  • Listening without minimizing or denying the extent of the harm.
  • Listening without trying to make oneself the center of the story being told.

What if, instead of reacting immediately in our own defense, we instead took the time to listen, to really try to understand the harm we might have done to another person?

When we think of accountability in terms of listening and love instead of accusation and punishment, everything changes.

2. Take Responsibility For the Abuse

After listening, the next step in holding oneself accountable is taking responsibility for the abuse. This means, simply enough, agreeing that you and only you are the source of physical, emotional, or psychological violence directed toward another person.

A simple analogy for taking responsibility for abuse can be made to taking responsibility for stepping on someone else’s foot: There are many reasons why you might do such a thing – you were in a hurry, you weren’t looking where you were going, or maybe no one ever taught you that it was wrong to step on other people’s feet.

But you still did it. No one else – only you are responsible, and it is up to you to acknowledge and [genuinely] apologize for it.

The same holds true for abuse: No one, and I really mean no one – not your partner, not patriarchy, not mental illness, not society, not the Devil – is responsible for the violence that you do to another person.

A lot of factors can contribute to or influence one’s reasons for committing abuse (see the point below), but in the end, only I am responsible for my actions, as you are for yours.

3. Accept That Your Reasons Are Not Excuses

In my experience as a therapist and community support worker, when people are abusive, it’s usually because they have a reason based in desperation or suffering.

      “I didn’t know that what I was doing was abuse. People always did the same to me. I was just following the script.”

All of these are powerful, real reasons for abuse – but they are also never excuses. There is no reason good enough to excuse abusive behavior.

Reasons help us understand abuse, but they do not excuse it.

4. Don’t Play the ‘Survivor Olympics’

This one is not really applicable, I think, unless and until anyone else is willing to admit that our mother was abusive and/or neglectful to her husband and her children.  Yes, parentifying and deliberate parental alienation are abusive things to do to children.

There is the point that “Anyone can be abusive, and comparing or trivializing doesn’t absolve us of responsibility for it.” This might be applicable to the idiotic “Susan was very upset when Dad died” excuse.

5. Take the Survivor’s Lead

If you have abused someone, it’s not up to you to decide how the process of healing or accountability should work.

Instead, it might be a good idea to try asking the person who has confronted you questions like:  Is there anything I can do to make this feel better? How much contact would you like to have with me going forward? If we share a community, how should I navigate situations where we might end up in the same place?

At the same time, it’s important to understand that the needs of survivors of abuse can change over time, and that survivors may not always know right away – or ever – what their needs are.

Being accountable and responsible for abuse means being patient, flexible, and reflective about the process of having dialogue with the survivor.

6. Face the Fear of Accountability

Being accountable for abuse takes a lot of courage.

A lot of people paint themselves into corners denying abuse, because, to be quite honest, it’s terrifying to face the consequences, real and imagined, of taking responsibility.

7. Separate Guilt from Shame

Guilt is feeling bad about something you’ve done. Shame is feeling bad about who you are.

Shame and social stigma are powerful emotional forces that can prevent us from holding ourselves accountable for being abusive: We don’t want to admit to “being that person,” so we don’t admit to having been abusive at all.

People who have been abusive should feel guilty – guilty for the specific acts of abuse they are responsible for.

If you believe that you are a fundamentally good person who has done hurtful or abusive things, then you open the possibility for change.

8. Don’t Expect Anyone to Forgive You

Being accountable is not, fundamentally, about earning forgiveness. That is to say, it doesn’t matter how accountable you are – nobody has to forgive you for being abusive, least of all the person you have abused.

In fact, using the process of “doing” accountability to try and manipulate or coerce someone into giving their forgiveness to you is an extension of the abuse dynamic. It centers the abuser, not the survivor.

One shouldn’t aim for forgiveness when holding oneself accountable. Rather, self-accountability is about learning how we have harmed others, why we have harmed others, and how we can stop.

But…

9. Forgive Yourself

You do have to forgive yourself. Because you can’t stop hurting other people until you stop hurting yourself.

When one is hurting so much on the inside, that it feels like the only way to make it stop is to hurt other people, it can be terrifying to face the hard truth of words like abuse and accountability. One might rather blame others, blame the people we love, instead of ourselves.

This is true, I think, of community as well as individuals. It is so much easier, so much simpler, to create hard lines between good and bad people… It takes courage to be accountable. To decide to heal.

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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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The History, Part 5 – The Last Reunion

So.  My parents got divorced, my dad got custody of the three minor kids, and the house, until I turned 18.

I grew up, mostly alone.  My siblings were two older brothers, 7 and 3 years older, who weren’t much interested in a little sister, except on my youngest brother’s part as a target.  (I remember once complaining to him, about the “games” we played, “How come I’m the one who always gets beat up?”)

I went to college.  I noticed that most of my family communication went through my parents, and wasn’t sibling-to-sibling.  Pre-internet, I spent a lot of New Year’s making resolutions to write monthly letters, make monthly phone calls.  I set up schedules for myself and so on.  They always fizzled out pretty quickly, I now know because I always started with my sister, and of course got nowhere.

I graduated, moved to Texas, met my husband, got married.  In the years that I lived there, I (and eventually my husband) got to spend more time with Joe and Susan than I had ever spent with an older sibling before.  We thought we had a decent relationship with them, although I think now that certain incidents over the years added up to Susan not liking me much, because I didn’t play her game very well.

I remember one specific event, involving a Christmas present, that showed me how manipulative she was.  I also remember feeling that there had to be something wrong with me because I didn’t like Susan much, even though she was SO NICE.

In mid-2000 my husband and I decided to move to Oregon and immediately after that decision, my dad was diagnosed with the cancer that killed him less than a year later.

In early 2001, both my parents died and this shit happened.

In 2006, we started having the August reunions.  And I started feeling worse and worse about them every year.  I would talk about having to buy the plane tickets starting in January, but somehow I couldn’t bring myself to buy them until June.

Susan continued her usual games.  The really shitty one that she pulled was when I reached out to her and Joe prior to the first reunion, and suggested that we do the meal planning together.  Of course, my suggestion was ignored.  We showed up, only to find that Susan had planned the meals on her own, and deliberately excluded me from my own idea.  She continues to be in complete charge of the meals every year — which of course snubs me, every year.

By the 4th reunion, in 2009, I was fed up.  I made up an excuse not to go, but wrote my sister a letter in which I told her the truth, at least as far as I understood it then.  My husband didn’t understand why we couldn’t just say we weren’t going, but after the histrionic response we got back which included a line about “what are we supposed to do about weddings and funerals?” he understood.

This started to make sense to me, though, in that there were certain events I was expected to be at in order to “complete the set”, but I wasn’t really wanted there.  My sister’s weird insistence on my presence, yet the way she all but ignored me while we were there (which was noticed by my husband), started to make a little sense.

There was a wedding instead of reunion #5, and we skipped the 6th one again.  That was the one at which the recording was made about my earliest years.

Then came reunion #7.

It was the second worst weekend of my life, the first being the one where my dad died.

We arrived late on a Friday night.  My sister didn’t stay up to greet us.

Saturday morning, the guys all went out golfing.  I got up maybe around 9:00 and walked out towards the kitchen in my pajamas, only to see my sister, SIL, and one of my nieces coming out of the other half of the house.

My sister looked at me and said, “We’re going to the Farmer’s Market,” and they all three walked out the front door.

She wouldn’t even say anything welcoming, like “hello, it’s good to see you,” let alone cross the room to give me a hug.  There was no chance I was going to hear, “Hey, why don’t you throw on some clothes and come with us?  We’ll wait.”

So I spent the morning alone in the house, got cleaned up, and got in touch with one of my online friends, Janet, who lives in the same town, and with whom I had already planned to have lunch.

With it being obvious that everyone else was having fun spending the day with others, that I wasn’t actually welcome at my sister’s house, and probably wasn’t going to be missed, I ended up spending the whole day with my friend, until dinnertime, and we actually had a very fun afternoon.

It turns out that people were upset about this:  this was interpreted as me rejecting the family, by choosing to spend the day with someone else.  Someone who was actually happy to see me.  How dare I.  And probably, how dare I find people like that.  People whose genuine, kind, loving behavior  make their behavior look bad.

This bit here is actually pretty key.  See, this has to be my fault — it can’t be framed as that I actually had a good reason to go hang with Janet; it can’t be justified due to the fact that I was left alone, and felt unwelcomed by my family.  Because that would mean that my sister and Susan and others were thoughtless and unwelcoming — at fault, or at least partly responsible.

And of course, this is a miniature version of the big problem, and it is treated the same way:  it has to be my fault that I have rejected the whole family.  It can’t possibly be true that I have plenty of good reasons to leave, because that would in turn mean others have at least a share of the responsibility.

Being shouted at, snubbed, ignored, bullied, deliberately disrespected — and having no one stand up for me against that kind of treatment, and getting more of it when I stand up for myself — those are my good reasons for leaving.

I can name at least two different people who have done each of those things to me, over the course of several years.  So it’s a systemic problem, not isolated to one or two people.

If it is acknowledged that I have good reasons for my no-contact choice, then it also has to be acknowledged that those are things that people in this family have done to me, and that they are bad things.  And then — GASP — they would have done something wrong!  It would be their fault!

That can’t be allowed.

One option to get around this is to acknowledge that these things have happened, but they aren’t really that bad and I should “just get over it”.

Another is scapegoating.  They start by figuring out who to throw the blame on — “it’s YOUR fault” — so they don’t have to deal with their own guilt, shame, embarrassment, whatever.  And then come up with any kind of bullshit reason to justify it — “for bringing it all up again the next day.”

That was the excuse created by Joe and Susan to explain why they were “forced” to yell at me the day after my dad died.  “I made them do it” — I’m not clear on how the reasoning works, but it is a simple, convenient, and total abdication of any personal responsibility for their actions.

I can see that the “reason” is indeed something they were pissed about — I sure as hell wasn’t supposed to bring Susan’s disgraceful behavior back up the next day.  Maybe it is a way of communicating what it was I did that they were unhappy about, and a subtle way of explaining what I had better not do again.  Maybe this is how narcissists train their prey.

But, back to the reunion story.  So, when Janet brought me back to the house, everyone was there getting things ready for dinner, and my youngest brother invited me to go “for a walk to the lake”.  I was surprised but accepted.  Thankfully, my husband decided to go along too.

This invitation turned out to be nothing more than an excuse to yell at me privately, so no one else in the family would see it.

His opening line wasn’t “How have you guys been this past year” or any kind of small talk.  He started right off with, “You have to admit that Dad was a lousy father.”

(Later I realized that this is actually true, in the sense that HE NEEDS me to admit it, because that is his excuse for being a lousy father.  I’ve never told him he can’t think Dad was a lousy father to him, but apparently even he can see this is a shitty excuse, so he needs this idea to be universal.)

He went on to say a lot of other shit, including accusing me of “trying to tear the family apart” and “digging up the past”.

(I now am pretty sure this was about was him being mad at me for getting them all to talk about the family history (for a grand total of one whole hour) THE YEAR BEFORE.  He had been saving up this shitty lecture for A YEAR.)

The part when I finally got mad enough to speak my mind was when he magnanimously said, “No one holds it against you the way you acted at Dad’s funeral.”

(Nothing happened at the funeral that I am aware of.  This is code for “when Dad died,” apparently because those words are too difficult to utter.  If you think this makes for very bad communication, you are right, but it’s only the tip of the iceberg.)

That was when I said, “No one holds it against me how *I* ACTED?  Maybe I still hold it against all of you the way YOU acted.”  When he expressed surprise I said, “I know none of you stuck up for me.”

It went downhill from there.  At one point he actually threatened me, saying, “We’re all you have.”

There was one very comical moment, when he was on me about “there’s no point in digging up the past like this” and why I was doing it.  I said something like, “I’m just trying to figure out who I am and where I come from.”

He looked right at me, with my husband not 5 feet away, and told me what my name was.  Except that he used my maiden name.

I looked at him in astonishment and said, “I haven’t used that name in 15 years.”  It was now clear that the “conversation”, if such it could be called, was being held with someone who didn’t quite have both feet in reality.

But it was still upsetting and painful to have all that thrown right in my face, when every year I tried so hard to put it all aside for the sake of the family and the reunion.

Of course, he bears no blame for doing this to me, for “digging up the past” on his terms.  None at all.  (As far as I am aware, no one else has told him that he was out of line for doing this.  The same people who have no issue telling me what I’m doing wrong in terms of family relationships can’t bring themselves to hold one of the club responsible for doing something out of line.)

We all went back to the house and had dinner, and got through the evening.  That night I was horribly upset, couldn’t sleep, and spent most of the night crying, because of course my brother’s yelling at me had brought the whole Susan Incident back up, and I dimly realized the truth of how I was seen by my own family.

The next morning I got up early, just after 6:00, grabbed our laptop, went out on the front porch by myself, and tried to see if I could catch the train back to Chicago and go home.  I thought maybe I could call Janet to take me to the station.  By the time I got the wifi password right, I had missed the one train there was on Sunday, so I was unable to do so.

With that idea scuppered, I went back in the house to get a portable scanner that I had borrowed from a friend to take on the trip, and a pile of old photographs.  (My sister has uncontested custody of ALL family photographs, even the ones she isn’t in, or that are from places and times she can’t stand.  All I had been allowed to have were copies, so I had brought the scanner in order to copy ones I wanted.)

My sister and Susan were sitting in the living room talking, one on a chair, the other on the pulled-out sofa bed, practically knees touching, so that there was no other way to walk through the room but between them.  I said “excuse me” and did so, got the scanner and the photos, and then walked back out to the porch, doing the same thing.

When I came back in an hour later, looking for more batteries for the scanner, my sister looked at me in great surprise.  She exclaimed, in a tone that suggested she was completely taken aback, “When did you go out there??”

I mean, I had literally passed between them — inches from them.  They had to move apart so I could pass.  TWICE.  And she had not even noticed I was there.

She sure noticed that I didn’t ask her about being a grandmother, though.  That was thrown in my face later.  In fact, I was told that, “It was interesting that the universal post-reunion comment last year was that [you] did not ask anybody anything about what they were doing.”

In fact, people talked far more to my husband than they did to me.  They talked to him ABOUT me.  They wondered at the apparent irresponsibility of me going off with an online friend (who was a 75YO woman).  And more than one person talked to him about how “tolerant” he was of me not having a “real job” and bringing home a paycheck.

It’s clear now that this was an attempt at training him to see me in the “right” way, the way that everyone else saw me.  An invitation to complain about me, perhaps, and get some more fodder from my own husband that they could use to bolster their negative opinions of me.

So it also became obvious that I was talked about behind my back, and criticized, to my own husband no less.  My behavior was examined and found to be unacceptable — and of course this would be because I am unacceptable, and not at all because I had any reasonable reasons for my behavior.

Not at all because I had by turns been snubbed, yelled at, left out, and even my actual physical presence had been ignored.

Yet everyone was apparently universally aware that I hadn’t been interested enough in THEM.

There also was a misunderstanding about photo albums, which started with me asking my sister to bring my dad’s WWII photo albums to the reunion, so she did — along with a couple of albums in which she had zero personal interest, that included photos from my childhood years, so I’m not sure why she even had them.  The night before we left, she told me I could take “the photo albums” as she didn’t think anyone else was interested in them.

So I did.  Only I took the wrong ones.  I took Dad’s WWII albums — the ones that, as it turned out, my sister had had for a dozen years and yet her children had never seen them.  Huh.

The sister who couldn’t notice me while I was there noticed the missing photo albums within a half hour of our departure.  We got a hysterical phone call on the way back to Chicago.  I am still surprised that she did not demand I unpack them and leave them with her husband.

So anyway.  A few days after returning home, I decided I was never going back, and wrote the first “fuck you” email.  As you may guess, it didn’t go over well.

I was told I needed therapy, among many other things.  So I got some.  And I found out I was right.  I found out about narcissism, and how that kind of person behaves, and what it does to relationships, and things all started to make sense.

Part 6

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The History, Part 4 – The Back Story

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

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

The move

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

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

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

My birth

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

Mom’s mental illness

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

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

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

Well, here are the reasons they do ECT.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The divorce

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mom was “under an awful lot of stress”.

Mom was “trying to keep the marriage together”.

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

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

Guess what?  That is the hallmark of a manipulator.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Part 5

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Everything Will Be All Right

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Take Responsibility

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Owning our actions is important.