Femina FortisA different take on women’s liberation

So this morning I finally understood.

Last night I received an email from a cousin of my mother’s (her closest friend growing up). She did not understand what I was asking, as my description of my mother’s anxiety and odd behavior did not fit what she remembered.

She remembered my mother being much more calm and assured than my description.

It occurred to me that many people would describe me the same way in my childhood, and that in fact no one would have noticed anything odd going on.

That’s when it hit me: the problem is never what’s going on in our lives.

It’s whether or not we consider our circumstances to be normal and dependable.

My mother’s very odd and at times traumatic childhood would not be apparent to outsiders at the time, as she would consider her circumstances normal, and would act normally in the outside world.

Just as I appeared normal to everyone around me, because I reacted to what I considered to be the way things always were.

Only when I reached my teenage years did my concept of “this is the ways things are supposed to be” fall apart (and me as well).

The difference between “normal” and “right” is often indistinguishable.

Our own personal normality and what we consider “the way things should be” often coincide. Only if we open our minds to new ways of thinking can we distinguish between what is normal for each of us and what is right.

Add in our own tendency to believe family before tribe, and tribe before outsiders, and its bloody amazing we’ve made any progress whatsoever.

Take, for an extreme example, the African AIDS epidemic. We in the US understand how HIV is spread, and how to prevent the spread, based on scientific evidence. Americans inherently believe in science and our own philanthropy.

However, whenever our missionaries (both religious and humanitarian) attempt to treat the local African populations or prevent the spread via education they are at best ignored and at worst vilified. Why is that?

Simple. Because the local leaders insist AIDS isn’t really a disease, or that it can be cured by dubious methods (virgins and witchdoctors come to mind). Often, the very people who are trying to help are accused of trying to kill Africans, or strip them of their virility.

The Africans in questions are incredibly and indisputably wrong, but as it is their “normal” and accepted way to believe their leaders and tribes over outsiders, they don’t question the wisdom of those leaders. Their “normal” is to believe all outsiders are trying to kill them and that ideology does not make room for missionaries.

Normality and “the way things are done” wins over what is right.

Apply that to individual people and their families, and it suddenly becomes clear why until children manage to leave their childhood homes they think they way things have always been done in the family is “the right way”.

Sometimes “the right way” is so ingrained that when faced with mountains of evidence to the contrary the person in question ends up with tremendous cognitive dissonance, or plain insanity.

This leads to such lovely situations as marrying a rich man, yet thinking being rich is inherently immoral. That’s just one example of a long list of incompatibilities.

I think this is where my mother ended up, with confusion and cognitive dissonance concerning the way things were done and morality. She knew much of what she was taught was wrong, yet taught her children many of the same lessons.

It’s also where I’ve ended up, and where my father has ended up.

All three of us were raised with some very wrongheaded ideas concerning the world. One (my mother) fixed what became obvious to her, but kept many other wrong ideas. Another (my father) retreated from the real world and the evidence that what he knew was wrong. He’s still avoiding the real world, and is still continually shocked that the “impossible” keeps happening to him.

Me? I’m going whole hog. I’m tossing the whole damn thing out, misconceptions and all. I’m rebuilding my concept of what is right from the ground up, because to do otherwise would be like swatting at damn mosquitoes all day instead of just exterminating the whole batch and draining the standing water.

Now I get it though. My parents had a lot of ingrained wrongheaded ideas to combat, and they just followed their initial instinct to believe family over the world.

I can easily forgive them for not wanting to deal with the immense, painful battle of ignoring everything they were taught and using logic to determine what is right. Especially as they would encounter major family resistance.

Me? I don’t get an excuse. I’m 29, and I understand that no matter what I was taught the truth and what is right is apparent to anyone willing to seek it out.

I’m going to live my life right.

Those who’ve known me for a few years have probably noticed a change. I’m not acting like myself, and I’m even more scatterbrained and irritable than usual. Extreme mood changes are prevalent and I’m more contrary and combative. Also, I’m WAY behind on projects. There’s no excuse for not having the cookbook done, but there are reasons.

First off, the cookbook is behind in part because of a massive technological failure. The proofs, layouts, and software all resided on Chris’s laptop. Chris’s laptop’s hard drive decided to fry.

Thank god we still have the pictures, and I’m a big fan of working out my recipes longhand.

The cookbook is also behind in part because mid-process (and a much more intensive process it turned out to be) the camel’s back broke.

We’re moving. We’re not announcing where on this blog (many of you know already anyway) but we’re leaving this goddamn hellhole.

Oh, we were planning on moving, in about 2 years. Then the bank merger happened and Chris started working 12 hour days so we decided we needed a bit more family recreation. Floating in the middle of a lake started sounding pretty damn good (what’s that? my cell phone has bad reception here. sorry!) so we started looking into boats.

The weekend after we got Zoe we went looking at boats and eventually ended up at Lake Pleasant looking at sailboats. The kids and I started really getting into the whole idea at that point, and we spent some time crawling over a couple of MacGregor 26 sailboats.

In 110 degree weather.

Sometime around the finishing of the second gallon of water on the way home, Chris made an announcement. He was tired of living somewhere he couldn’t leave the house 5 months out of the year, where he couldn’t do what he wanted to do.

We were moving. ASAP. Actually, as soon as our lease ends on February 28th.

Only one problem. We’re moving out of state. We can’t found the company yet.

So no ISBN number for the cookbook.

The last reason for the cookbook being behind is extremely personal.

I’m emotionally ill.

The facade of having it together? Completely fake. Emotional stability? Hah.

Healthy behavioral patterns? Now you’re just being funny.

I literally had a block in my head that said, “you can’t do this. You’re a failure, you’ll always be a failure. What are you thinking? You can’t do anything good. Everything you touch goes to shit.”

HAD a block in my head.

I’m dealing with decades of emotional illness, persistently bad coping behaviors, aftereffects of abuse and neglect, and general insanity all at once.

Note I wrote “dealing”. Not hiding. Not pretending. Not suppressing. Not just trying to keep myself together. Dealing.

I blame Tahoe. I blame the lull in court action. I blame not spending every day worrying whether or not my children will have food or clothing, and I blame Chris for making that possible.

I also blame the bank merger, the stress of which drove Chris to consider getting a boat, then had us at Lake Pleasant in 110 degree weather looking at boats. This led Chris to declaring that goddamnit, we’re finally leaving this goddamn hell of a state. This led to me having a direction.

In short, I blame everything that has lifted my emotional and mental load to the point that I have the “luxury” of leaving survival mode.

I don’t think I’ve spent this much time outright bawling since my mother died. Memories are resurfacing; insights into just how badly I’ve bungled things and WHY are a daily occurrence.

Many of these memories are less than happy; when I told people that my first marriage was emotionally and mentally abusive I didn’t even realize how much I was UNDERSTATING the problem. Memories are reaching the surface that I’ve haven’t touched since I left; if I had, I doubt I would have had the presence of mind to fight for the kids. I’d be too busy off in a corner somewhere either bawling or completely detached from the world.

I’m also remembering how I got there in the first place, and how stupid I was to willingly walk into such a situation, and WHY. Understanding where exactly I messed up is ego-bruising, to say the least.

All of this however is a good thing. For example, I now understand why I think everything that goes wrong is my fault; one of the problems in my first marriage was my ex-husband’s unwillingness to admit fault. Getting pregnant even though he knew I’d run out of birth control, refused to buy more, and refused to use a condom? So totally my fault. Taking the kids away from him? My fault, to the point that we’re still in court to “punish” me.

That’s just one example of the degradation and dehumanization shoved down my throat. My ex in-laws wanted to bring me “down to their level”. Enough verbal abuse, emotional abuse, shoving into unwinnable situations, and isolation will result in complete dehumanization.

I think I got out just in time, and one of these days I’ll write about how I came to the decision to leave, but now right now.

I’ve been trying to tackle one surfacing memory at a time and one breakdown at a time. Every day I feel a bit lighter, a bit more stable. A bit more human. It’s been a helluva roller coaster, but I’m finally getting somewhere.

Thankfully my friends seem to understand, and since all but one came after my life started improving they’re a constantly reminder that things have changed permanently for me. The one exception I’ve known for 12 years and has been my best friend since we were 15 and she’s been nothing but a help. Plus, when I think that maybe my memories are false, that maybe I’m exaggerating,she’s been there to correct me (and very often tell me I’m not, it really was that bad).

Just KNOWING that all of this had a reason, that I’m not imaging what happened, that despite being surrounded by the insane I’ve got some kind of footing in reality HELPS. Helps so much. I’m starting to trust my thoughts, my conclusions, my judgments again. It’s not that I was insane because everyone else was right, but that everyone around me was insane and wrong. This doesn’t just apply to my ex in-laws, but to my family and the way I was raised as well. My parents made everything needlessly complicated, and formed a tiny little petri dish of a world that had NOTHING to do with the outside world.

Everything I ever learned means squat. Reality is so much better. Reality is what I knew all along, but nobody around me was willing to admit to.

Now that I don’t think of myself as insane (or at fault for everything, or worthless), I see just how difficult I’ve made this whole process, and how soon I should be able to start shipping out. Cookbooks will be out before Black Friday, hopefully WAY before if I can continue to be this mentally stable.

As a bonus, for those of you who’ve seen the house, I’ve made tremendous progress is getting organized. I even found my Book of All Knowledge, the notebook my oldest recipes are written in, so THEY’RE getting added as well.

There is one last stress, however, and it has nothing to do with my mental and emotional state, but rather my father’s.

Chris and I never wrote about the full circumstances of my mother’s death. It’s not that “death by infection and metastatic breast and ovarian cancer” isn’t correct; it is. The circumstances are just much more complicated than a simple diagnosis.

In reality, what happened to my mother was a mixture of her own procrastination and ignoring of problems, my father’s outright denial, the first hospital’s apathetic care, the second hospital’s apathetic care (minus one doctor), and the ambulance ride to the third hospital.
My mother was admitted to the hospital with fluid in her abdomen, and 6 weeks later she was dead. I’ve never quite gotten over the shock.

I watched her as the doctors did tests, waited forever to get results, declared breast cancer and performed a mastectomy. After months of not being able to keep food down (even in the hospital) she developed an infection, went into respiratory arrest, and died in the ICU. That’s the short version.

NONE of this was unavoidable. My mother assumed the lump was a spider bite, even though it persisted for a year, and never got a mammogram.My mother spent months without an appetite and gaining weight without food intake. She hid her health problems from my father (and everyone else). Not until her distended stomach turned into a source of acute pain did she go into the hospital. Once at the hospital she refused to be “a bother” and attempted to make everyone ELSE’S lives as easy as possible.

Since my father believed her when she said it wasn’t a big deal, my dad took her in, then retreated into his work. He wasn’t there to help her make decisions because he thought she was mentally competent.

She wasn’t. She’s been hiding her pain for months, if not years, as became obvious once we tried to untangle the business’s finances afterwards.

I visited the hospital every day to see if she needed anything. She was almost always fine. I tried to talk to the doctors, but I could never seem to reach one of them. She always said they were waiting for tests anyway.

Until the day they scheduled her for a mastectomy, that is.

The day of I waited outside the surgical unit with my oldest brother. When the surgeon came out, he said it was worse than they’d feared. He estimated the cancer had been there for a decade.

All of a sudden my mother gave up the pretense.

My dad had no clue what to do, and leaned on my and my brother. Neither of us had authority to do anything. (As a sidenote, both of us now have power of attorneys for both our father and youngest brother, depending on who is more available in the situation).

My mother’s recovery did not go well. She still couldn’t eat.

The hospital tried to discharge her. She hadn’t eaten for 4 weeks and they tried to discharge her.

My father and I fought the discharge won. The first time.

The second time he took her to another hospital.

Another apathetic hospital.

My mother lost the ability to speak. She started hallucinating. She still didn’t eat.

One week later, we finally got a break. My mother’s oncologist went on vacation and someone filled in for her.

This doctor took one look at my mother, one look at her chart, and transferred her to the best cancer unit in the state.

Thank God for University Medical Center.

Unfortunately, during the 2 hour ambulance drive she went into respiratory arrest. The paramedics managed to keep her alive (they didn’t know she had a DNR) and she made it to the ICU.

I never had the opportunity to talk to my mother again.

4 days later my father and I made the decision to take her off life support. My father called my middle brother and told him to come down to see his mother; my brother said he’d be there in a week, they were driving and his wife wanted to visit friends on the way. My father called me, one step from falling to pieces.

Chris called my brother. All of a sudden my brother and his wife and kids were on a plane to Tucson.

2 days later while I was giving my father a break from her bedside, she passed on.

Afterwards I drove my dad to his guest room at a friend’s house. Picked up his things. Picked up my brother’s luggage to take to the house. BABYSAT MY NEPHEW BECAUSE MY SISTER-IN-LAW WAS TOO BUSY BAWLING OVER THE DEATH TO COMFORT HER HUSBAND OR TAKE CARE OF HER CHILDREN. Drove my father, kids, and nephew to my dad’s house. Called the pastor to make arrangements for my grandparents to be informed and for the memorial service to be held. Called all the other family members to inform them. Did the grocery shopping with 3 kids in tow so there would be food in the house. All in the day she died.

I made the cremation arrangements.

If it weren’t for Chris, I would have been a complete wreck. As it was, that month and a half almost killed me.

6 weeks of hell that could have been avoided. If my mother had been proactive in her health, if my father had taken control, if the first hospital had done more, if, if.

Chris “forced” me through the grief process, in that he prodded me until I dealt with and accepted my mother’s death. It was the kindest thing he could have done for me.

I’ve done my best not to dwell on it since, and to get on with my life. I could rail against the unfairness of the situation and seek out someone to blame. But I don’t.

That’s evidently my father’s job.

Since my mother’s death, my father hasn’t been quite all there. He spends quite a bit of time railing against the hospitals, blaming them for her death. When he’s not busy being enraged, he’s busy in self-pity mode.

In July (13 months after her death) my father went on an extended trip to his childhood home for a reunion. My aunt (his sister) and I hoped it would do him some good, and she did her best while he was there to help him through the process.

When he got back he seemed better, happier. I thought that maybe, just maybe, this scapegoat hunt he’d been on would be over.

A few days ago I called him, and he told me he was just about done with his project. He’d been going over everything that happened, and he was ready to take his notes and journals to the media and take on the evil hospital.

…….

I’m pretty convinced at this point that my father has lost it. My hope that he would ever come back to reality and be a father and grandfather? Well that’s pretty much crushed. I can accept that, I knew it was a possibility.

Then he told me he needed me to read everything to make sure it was all accurate.

Yes, my father wants me to re-read my personal hell from day one in order to pursue his own version of vengeance.

I can’t do that. My memories are horrifying enough without reliving everything, much less while I’m dealing with other resurfacing memories.

I don’t know how to tell him that I can’t do it, without doing what I really want to do, which is tell him to look in the mirror and he’d find one of the people responsible there. Then, if he looked on the shelf he’d find another responsible party in the urn.

I don’t know how to tell him just how much worse this is making things for me and the kids. That it’s not bad enough that at 28 I’m motherless, my kids no longer have a grandmother, my unborn children will never have a grandmother, that for all intents and purposes they don’t have a grandfather. No, that’s not enough, I also have my father attempting to destroy me (intentionally or not) by having me relive the worst couple of months of my life.

I am completely heartbroken.

So if I seem a little out of sorts, crazy, or otherwise not like myself, that’s why.

The good news is, despite all of this, life is getting much better.

The in-law drama continues.

In one corner, we have my terminally ill mother-in-law, who is convinced she will die within the next few weeks.  She’s been living in an extended stay hotel with son #2 for 6 months now.  She refuses to move out and refuses to go to a hospice.

Guess who spent days getting her covered by Social Security and Medicare so she could live in better circumstances, all with the understanding that she would follow through?  That would be me.

In another corner we have my brother-in-law, son #2, who has spent the last 4 years leeching off his mother and selling her medications for money.  Normally twitchy and an absolute asshole, he has finally quit oxycontin and is acting like a real human being.

He’s moving back to Boston on the 1st.  His mother told him she’d go with him.  He’s absolutely thrilled.

He doesn’t know she never plans to go to Boston, because she thinks she’ll die before then.

In the third corner, we have Chris’s grandmother, aunts, uncles, and various other family members.  All of them have been fed bullshit stories about the situation from his mother.  He’s been telling them the truth the entire time.

They don’t believe him, or me for that matter.  That doesn’t keep them from pressing him to “do something”, like we haven’t been trying to “do something” for the last 4 years.

In the last corner we have Chris and me.  The ones who have been trying to fix the situation, talk some sense into his mother, and take care of her.  We’ve been constantly thwarted by his mother, who “doesn’t want to be a burden.”

Guess who’s going to end up handling the fallout from the situation?  That’s right, Chris and me.  There’s no one else, and both of us have too much honor to just run from the situation.

Sigh.

Happy Father’s Day to…

My dear husband, who took on two little girls who weren’t his biological children, and treats them as if they were.

My Uncle Charlie, who did his best to protect me whenever he could.

My Uncle Jim, who responded the right way on the worst day of my life.

Michael S., my BFF’s dad, who watched over me and knew more about me than my own father did, and gave me full access to his house when I needed it most.

David L., my high school boyfriend’s dad, who did the same.

You all protected me far more than my own father ever did.  From you I learned what it meant to be watched over and guarded.

SO I’ve already written that I don’t want to be my mother.

Now the real question is, how do I stop acting like her?

She’s been dead for 2 days less than a year and I’ve been dealing with the realizations ever since.  Mostly about how she never really allowed anyone to really “know” her.  Her entire life became a skillfully created and maintained artifice to hide who she really was.  Now that many of the secrets have come spilling out I’m finding more and more things I need to change in my own behavior.

It’s not fun at all.

I love my mother and miss my mother, but I’m also extremely angry with her, especially once I realized I was raised to be just like her.

I can’t do it anymore.

Everything held back, that is.

I didn’t realize how healthy my relationships with my crew are until  yesterday.

Over the past year I’ve tried cultivating a habit of being entirely up-front and truthful with my husband, my kids, and my friends.  Most of them have been content to return the favor.

I’ve gotten quite used to being able to say whatever is on my mind and not let anything fester.  Repressing ANYTHING is dangerous for me as I hold it in and let it fester, requiring a submissive release to get it to go away.

Having finally cleared my years old backlog of repressed emotions, thoughts, and comments I actually feel pretty damn good.

So imagine my shock yesterday when I started feeling like crap again.

Oh yeah, that just MIGHT have been caused by my visit with my grandparents, aunt, and horribly spoiled cousin.

*Sigh*

After all, I did learn the absolutely wonderful behavior of repression from my family.  The overriding rule of my paternal clan is, after all, THOU SHALT NOT UPSET ANYONE.  Even if they really deserve it.  Even if they say something so completely stupid that it requires an answer.

So when my 90-year-old grandmother wondered aloud how my mother did so much before she died, I did not say, “she had the time because she was busy NOT taking care of herself.  Her own martyring killed her.”

Yes, the truth, but it would have upset Grandma.  That’s against the rules.

More biting of the tongue followed.

Then more.

Then I packed up the kids before I turned homicidal.

I’m not doing that again.  Next time they are getting my full comments, filtered for vulgarity only.

I am so glad to be home and I REALLY need some release.

Today would have been my mother’s 62nd birthday, if she hadn’t passed away in June.

So much has happened between now and that Thursday morning and the pangs of grief have lessened considerably.

Her death opened my eyes to so very much.  It’s much easier to see now how much she martyred herself, how much she hid from us, how incredibly emotionally ill she was right up to the end.  How in denial she was, to ignore the symptoms of her cancer until it killed her.

In the nine months since, I’ve made many resolutions following her death.  To be like her, and yet not be like her.  To be faithful, full of faith, and involved in the community.  To not ignore my needs, and not be ashamed to ask for help when needed.

My mother was a good woman, but incredibly broken by her childhood.  I don’t think she ever really recovered from whatever happened, and I doubt my uncle will ever be able to tell me the whole truth about their childhood.  But I can hope.

In the meantime, I am resolving to not fall into the same traps she did and to face life head on.  It’s difficult, but necessary.

I miss you Mom.  Happy Birthday.