Scattered pieces

I now realise that I want, or expect, my mothers reactions and feelings towards me to be black and white.  I want her to care, or not care… love, or not love… nothing in between. I don’t understand the ambiguity of her reactions to me.  I don’t understand how she can come up here when I ask her to support me; but then treat me with casual disregard in other ways.

I need her to be the bad guy, because then I have somewhere to direct my anger.  In many ways, she is a safe outlet for that anger (the anger for the father is too immense to go near).  I acknowledge some of the anger directed towards her is justified… she suspected that I was being hurt, but did nothing; and she can say the most cruel and thoughtless things.  But she doesn’t deserve to be the sole beneficiary of the anger that I direct outwards.

My mother was brought up in a house that was dysfunctional – Granddad had at least one affair, and brought a woman pregnant with his child into their house to live for awhile; and Nana had Parkinson’s Disease, so my mother had to take on extra responsibilities from a fairly early age.  Her marriage to my father was also dysfunctional.  She knew this fairly early on in the marriage; but in those days, you didn’t divorce.  Divorce would have been seen as a failure – when she was still married, Granddad told her that at least one of his daughters got it right.

So, she comes from a history of dysfunction.  She has superficially sought help for the issues that arise from that dysfunction; but didn’t see it as worthwhile, so never went too deep.  This means that her ability to change is minimal.  Over time, she has come to accept my mental health issues with a little more understanding… she’s now less likely to ask “when is this all going to be over”… this indicates that she can change, or at least lower her expectations of me.

In many ways, my relationship with my mother is all about my own failings.  This is the reason I react to her thoughtless words… I used to be the perfect daughter, and I no longer am.  I don’t have the ability to compartmentalise my reaction to her, as well I used to.  When she is around, I can usually do it… but I’m now aware of the consequences of bottling all of that hurt up and putting it away.  That’s not to say that I lash out at her, I don’t… I just shut down while she is around.  It’s a very compartmentalised way of interacting with her.  It may sound harsh, but it’s probably how we’ve always interacted, I just wasn’t aware of it.

It was Mother’s Day here yesterday.  I was in a dissociative fog for most of the day… I reached out to my mother, but it wasn’t a good interaction.  I was expecting a level of interaction that will never be.  I need to understand that.  I need to understand the ambiguity that comes from being human…  It’s not a personal insult when she cuts off our Skype call to talk on the phone to my brother, it’s just how she is.  She will never change, so I need to change my reactions to the hurt caused.

It’s this sort of relationship that makes me realise how far reaching the effect of any abuse can be.  My mother never had the skills to make the lives for her children better than her own… I don’t think she realised that there was anything better.  That’s probably the saddest part of this whole situation, my mother will never know anything better.  She escaped an abusive marriage, but never addressed the underlying issues which drew her to that abuse to begin with.  This is why healing is so important… learning to change the way we view the world.  That takes time, effort and perseverance…  some days, those qualities seem in very short supply.

—————-
Now playing: Silverchair – Ana’s Song (Open Fire)
via FoxyTunes

I am the youngest of four children. The mistake at the end. I was a difficult birth, and apparently screamed non-stop for the first six months of my life. I was told this many times as I was growing up. It was usually in a joking way, although how you can joke about a child being a “mistake at the end” is beyond me.  These stories and jokes chipped away at my self-esteem, to the point where I soon realised that I was worthless and an annoyance.

As I grew up, the father’s drinking became more of a problem.  Those parts within who believe he abused us, link his increased drinking to his abuse of us.  Those who don’t believe he ever touched us, link his drinking to alcoholism.  No matter what the cause, his drinking became worse over time.  This meant that it wasn’t safe to bring the few friends I had, to the house.

What does all this have to do with birthdays?  Well, this environment set me up to hate my birthday.  My birthday was a chore for those around me.  That’s if they remembered it.  The disadvantage of having your birthday at the start of the month, is people often forget to turn over the calender.  So often, people forgot my birthday.  My favourite grandparents never sent me a birthday card on time.  I was the queen of getting belated birthday cards.  Don’t get me wrong, I appreciated those cards, but a part of me saw this as being yet another way in which I was inconveniencing those around me by existing.

As I was growing up, I did have birthday parties (I don’t remember them, but have photos as proof).  Usually my two cousins who were of a similar age to me, and sometimes someone from school as well.  But a school-friend was always dicey, as if my father was home, he would be drinking.  I always tried to protect the people I knew at school from my house.  They didn’t need to see the secrets.

My siblings both liked and hated my birthday parties.  It meant they got to eat all sorts of good food, but it re-enforced the concept that I was the favourite child – especially for my sister.  My sister’s birthday is very near Christmas; that usually meant combined birthday and Christmas presents.  She always got a party as well, but she always hated my birthday parties.  Well, she just hated me.

As my self esteem was chipped away, I gave up on birthdays.  By the time I finished primary school, I hated my birthday.  But there were still some parts who secretly loved them.  I think they used to call out the names of those who was having a birthday in the coming week at school assembly, I remember a young one beaming when our name was read out – someone saw us, someone cared!

By the time I reached my teens, birthdays were actively hated.  They were a chore for those around us, and another reason for the sister to pick on us.  On my 14th birthday, my sister didn’t want to go out with the family for my birthday dinner, she wanted to go out with her boyfriend (who was abusing us) and her friends.  She first told my parents that she didn’t want to go, but they told her she had to ask us for permission to not go.  Of course, we told her to go with her friends.  Why force her to be somewhere she didn’t want to be?

Just before my 16th birthday I was assaulted.  This was the last straw in ever wanting anything to do with my birthday for the teen and adult parts of me.  The birthday become a traumatic anniversary.  It was decided that it was best to ignore it and move on.  Over the years this worked well, the mother would still send gifts and occasionally the rest of the family would remember as well.  It became a habit to have the week of my birthday off, as I knew my functioning around that time diminished significantly. Quite often the mother would come up for a holiday during that week, which forced a level of functioning within the system, as a way of self-preservation.

Which brings us to this year.  This year, the mother didn’t come up.  This year we weren’t forced to function, and things fell apart.  Leading up to the birthday, there was lots of lost time and dysfunction.  Then on the birthday there was pain, lots of pain.  Not from the adult ones, but from the young ones who needed some reason to keep on living.  On our birthday, we got a supportive email from a friend, a present from the mother, and a manipulative email from our sister.

Apart from the manipulative email, we appreciate the acknowledgements we received.  But what really hurt the young ones, was that we didn’t hear from either brother.  The brothers were idolised by these young ones.  At times they were an island of safety in an otherwise chaotic life.  This lack of contact re-enforced our belief that if we were gone, no one would notice.  The entire day was spent trying to fight those messages.

I realise that this all sounds attention seeking; but it’s about us trying to work through what happened and why.  It’s about us being more in touch with those young ones who were hurt by the people they care about, not reaching out to them – and yes, we do send messages and cards to those people.  It’s about being perceived as a bother and inconvenience to those around us.  It’s about not having an adequate support system around us.  It’s about not believing we have any right to a support system, and being terrified to try to build one.

It’s about not being worthy of… anything, everything???

While in respite, the respite house owner/carer turned to me and directly asked me how I was.  It had been a hectic day with the other women in respite acting out in various ways, meanwhile we’d been quietly in our room doing art and drinking water.  The question was asked directly, and we deflected it nicely by saying that we were fine.  It was her follow up statement that threw me, and cut to the core of our issues while growing up – “It’s always the quiet ones who get overlooked”.  I was that quiet one.  I always have been.  I actively become quiet when things are bad with my mental health or if people are hurting me.  It’s one of the ways to become invisible, to become so quiet that no one sees you.  If no one sees you, then no one can hurt you and no one can ask you difficult questions.  So, we became very good at being quiet and flying under the radar.  The respite carer knew this technique…

When we relayed this incident to the mother after we’d come out of respite, we couldn’t do it without tearing up…  The carer “saw us” in that brief moment of asking the how we were.  In contrast, when telling the mother, she looked away, uncomfortable with the situation and the tears in my eyes.  I try not to blame my mother for her reactions, she had tough parenting and has never been in therapy long enough to change the habits of being an absentee parent herself.  She does try to show she cares in various ways, they’re just not very productive or meaningful.  Instead of apologising for the oversights in the past, she washes my windows…

We remain that quiet one.  We do this in therapy as well.  Liz has now realised the extent of our avoidance and quietness during therapy.  Our resolve for the New Year is to try and tease out the anger that sits within the system.  In many ways I don’t mind if this happens, I’m so out of touch with the anger that I don’t recognise it as existing.  But, at times when I do get a sense of the anger being there, it terrifies me to think that we will be looking at it more closely.  It’s something that has been tucked away and growing for the last 30 odd years, I’m not quite sure what it will look like when we do lift the lid.  Liz assures me that we will lift the lid very slowly and with great care…

Ivory mentioned in her blog about making new traditions around important dates – Christmas in particular.  I also need to do this, to shake off the rubbish from the past and get out of the loop of negativity and repeating patterns that I find myself in.  She mentions sharing a Christmas story and recipe that has meaning or tradition for us.  Being in the Southern Hemisphere where Christmas tends to be a very hot day, our traditions revolve around a barbie (bar-be-que) and pavlova…

Here’s the recipe for this deliciously light dessert…

4 egg whites
¼ teaspoon salt
1 cup castor sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla essence
1 teaspoon white vinegar
2 teaspoons cornflour (cornstarch)

Preheat the oven to 150°C.
Beat egg whites and salt in a bowl until soft peaks form. Gradually add the castor sugar while beating. Continue until stiff peaks form. Beat in the remaining ingredients, vanilla essence, vinegar and cornflour. Turn mixture out onto a baking paper covered tray. Shape into a circle approximately 23 cm (9 in) in diameter.

Reduce oven temperature to 140°C. Bake for 15 minutes, then further reduce the oven temperature to 120°C and bake for 1 ¼ hours. Cool completely in the oven with the oven door ajar.

Top with whipped or brandy cream and your choice of fresh fruit – traditionally strawberries, kiwifruit and a sprinkle of icing sugar.

There is debate over whether the pavlova was first made in New Zealand or Australia, but we consider it a New Zealand dish :)

As for a story or tradition, possibly my favourite Christmas memory is making home-made Christmas crackers with my Nanna (grandmother).  We were on holiday in Okiwi Bay, sitting around the kitchen table picking out presents for each person, adding the popper tape and wrapping them up in paper.  It was simple fun and the presents in each cracker were so much better than the ones you get in the store brought Christmas crackers.

My past isn’t always painful…

I was 24 when I last talked to the father. It was during my first year of being on-campus at university and I’d agreed to stay with him for a long weekend. He hadn’t been contributing to our care since the divorce when we were 16, but we still a sense of duty to him because… well, he is the father. To say that the weekend was a disaster, would be an understatement. He lived alone in a cold, small, two bedroom semi-detached house situated at the bottom of a hill. The house felt dirty, but I think that was our association of his dirtiness getting mixed up in the perception of the house. He had become a bitter, mean old man who took pleasure in putting others down and feeding his narcissistic desires.  He was not pleasant to be near.

In a move similar to asking the mother to leave when she came to visit, I left the father’s house earlier than planned. I couldn’t cope with him. The day I left I knew that I would not be able to see him again as he was too toxic. I grieved on the drive home… grieved for the father I realised I would never have, and the one I was now leaving behind.  While listening to the radio during the drive, a song came on that started the tears – Stand by me by Ben E. King.  To me, the song is about being strong enough to face the darkness of your fears, as long as there is someone standing beside you.  During that car trip, this was particularly meaningful… I knew I was about to tell the family about my decision to no longer have contact with the father.  I also knew that I was probably going to have to confront the father as well.

At the time I was living alone – I didn’t even have Winnie (our cat).  So, I knew that there would be no one standing beside me, instead it would be up to the dissociative system to come together in a meaningful way to protect us all.  This was at a time when I had no working knowledge of my dissociation, but I remember the internal conversations which evolved as I was taking the long trip home…  There was fear, screaming, celebrations and physical pain caused by tension…  But then, in a shift that I’ve now come to identify as M taking over, there was a sudden calmness and knowledge of what needed to be done.  This calmness allowed Sophie to listen to the song and begin our grieving.  I don’t think we fully explored the grief, but the song allowed us to cry for things we wouldn’t have and to get to a place of accepting what was happening.

When we got home, we made the necessary phone calls to the family.  I don’t remember much about that time, but I do remember slamming the phone down on the father with the parting words that he and I had “never been able to talk”.  I have seen him since that time – grandfather’s funeral etc.  We’ve tried to be civil to him, purely out of fear and not wanting to cause more trouble within the family.  But I know that under that veneer of civility, Frank is waiting to tell the father just what damage he has done.  I also know that such a discussion would be pointless, as he is incapable of seeing his own faults and it would only serve to frustrate us further.

There have been other versions of the song done, but it’s Ben E. King’s version that affects us the most…

When the mother visited last time we talked about the childhood and some of the things that happened.  In some respects I think she was checking out when we were hurt and by whom – a fairly understandable concern for a mother.  What became very obvious is that huge chunks of the childhood are missing from our collective memory.  This is for both good and bad incidents.

I’m quite happy with the knowledge that you don’t remember everything from your childhood.  But what I really need is some good memories to hold onto.  There’s no way that the childhood was all bad.  I know there are some good pieces, and this was confirmed by the mother when we were talking about it.  She’d ask “do you remember…” with a smile in her voice; but we couldn’t remember it.  Admittedly this is the woman who had a baby photo of our cousin and tried to tell us it was us, so odds are her memory isn’t all that accurate either.  But where in this head are some good memories?

Aimee is our happiest and carefree young one, but she holds almost no memories.  She was purely there to be happy and appease everyone around us – she did this well.  K has a smile which would break your heart, but it’s a smile born out of being scared all the time – it’s very tentative.

When the mother was talking about the good memories, it became obvious that not many of them were totally positive.  I remember Nanna brushing our hair dry one time when we were staying with them in Wellington, this is the only totally positive.  The rest are tinged in some way – on holiday at the Marlborough Sounds, getting out of the car and running to find the ocean… we found it by falling down a cliff.  Deciding to eat raw pumpkin seeds before going on a family holiday… only to throw them all up before reaching the town limits.  Being the smallest in the family so being told to go up the storm water drains to scare the eels down for the brothers to catch.  These stories are often told with humorous teasing at family gatherings, but we don’t remember the events.  I can see how they’re funny, but they’re not the sort of thing that you can hold onto when you’re whole body is shaking from a triggered abusive memory.

Whoever in this head has got the good memories, can they share them with me please…  Could really do with some good stuff right now.