(no subject)
I got my first diary for Christmas in 1988. I wrote entries for less than 2 months, and then I found out that my mom was reading it, and it was relegated to a drawer that ended up in my garage and I just retrieved it yesterday to read it to Kaiden. Every entry was about how I loved my family and wished that they loved me back. I remembered much of what I had written, even though I hadn't seen it in maybe 20 years, just as I remembered exactly where I had stored it in the drawer of my dad's old nightstand. I dug it out to show just how longstanding the problem has been. But don't take my word for it. Kaiden put it this way: "Your family may love you, but they treat you in a way that is indistinguishable from hate." For example, if Kaiden says, "You're the best," or, "You're nice," "You're a good Susannah," they refrain an immediate, "No, she isn't," or something of the like. The other day, he called a female dog a bitch, Mom thought he meant me, which made him burst ought laughing b/c he thinks I am SSOOO the opposite of a bitch. She firmly believes it is b/c he thought, "Omg, what would she DO to me if I called her a bitch?!" Kaiden is afraid of my mother (for good reason), so, from her perspective, he is always slightly terrified, so she assumes that I am abusive and therefore, anything he says is just him agreeing with me to avoid more abuse. So his views and opinions don't count. Mom was always the good parent, since Dad was so much worse, but they were both abusive. My sister and I have agreed many times that we only had half a parent between us...the kinder half of Mom. And yet, put us in a room together, my sister sides with Mom. I have no redeeming qualities. I don't know how it benefits them. In my child's heart-spangled diary which bore no lock, I wrote of a lost golden age when my family loved me, and tried to use a metaphor from a play we wrote in a children's acting workshop to explain my loss. I wrote that they used to love me, "Until...I lost the magic drum." Mom read that and worried that I was delusional, so she confronted me about it. I got really upset that she had read my diary and so I stopped writing in it. There was no golden age. Ok, so when I was a toddler, I was maybe treated better. I remember playing Fan Square with my sister (fancy restautaunt overlooking the ceiling fan, as if it were Fountain Square in downtown Cincinnati). I remembered jumping on the exercise trampoline and singing, "Together in all weather." I remembered her playing, "Give me 5," flying a kite, riding on the tractor.... I remembered being rocked in the rocking chair, so overwhelmed by the closeness and the singing that I would pull my own hair, but despite this, I enjoyed the physical and emotional closeness of being held and rocked and sung to. I remember Mom using word flashcards to help me learn to read at age 3. I put all these moments together and imagined that 5 years ago (from 1988), my world was different, but the truth is, as soon as they found out I was different, they started treating me like crap. It isn't that they don't love me...they just don't like me. They hate that I am not like them. They would hate me outright except for their Dawkinsesque consanguinial attachment to me (I sometimes feel). I am daughter and sister. I could help put their genes in the next generation. The fact that I selfishly refuse to reproduce only makes them hate me more. Mom had a plan that I would have babies and she would get paid for caring for them while I had a full-time job. I've got news for HER! If I had children, I wouldn't let her NEAR them without being there to protect them from all the pain she has caused me. And if she hurt them like she hurts me, I wouldn't let her see them anymore. I don't want kids, but that doesn't mean I wouldn't love and protect them and make sure that they were the happiest, most well-adjusted, mentally healthy kids in the world. It just means that, for my own reasons, and there are scores of them, I choose not to reproduce or live with childen. It doesn't mean that I am the most selfish person in the world, Mom. I wish I had a way to show them what they do to me, the pain they cause, but they are the only family that I have, and they're only mean to me most of the time, not all, and in those moments when they are nice, I can pretend they love me, so I believe that, underneath it all, I really do have a mom and sister who love me like they should. Sometimes, when I've cried from the pain my mom has caused, or something else, like a friend's suicide, my sister had let me hug her and cry. Of couse, I would do that for a stranger. So would she. She's a PhD clinical psychologist. But I can imagine it is just because I am her sister and she loves me. And she's better when Mom's not around. I was so confused growing up...she would be nice on break from school, but I never noticed a pattern. She always has taken all her stress out in her treatment of me. I am and have always been her scapegoat. Because she had to protect Mom from all the ills on earth. I was an Autistic child and had my own needs and she resented me from birth b/c we had to share Mommy. I needed more than one parent could give. Dad was so scary and he hit me and screamed at me, but he never hit her, so I thought I was Mommy's girl and she was Daddy's girl, but I left her "out in the cold" when I hogged Mommy, who my sister knew was already dealing with too much thanks to Daddy. To my sister, I was just one more burden that Mommy didn't need to deal with. She would cry on the schoolbus, but dry her tears before she got home so as not to upset Mommy. I ran to Mommy with tears. Daddy would yell at Charity, and she'd run to her room to cry and break her beloved china cats. I would stick around trying to understand why I was being yelled at and end up getting hit. All my life, I have hidden this pain and this truth. A perfect church-going family, Sunday School teacher and Chairman of the Deacons for parents, kids in the choir. I have continued to hide all these years. I have been, in my life, profoundly alone without a single friend there to talk to. I can't blame anyone but me for closing up and shutting people out in 1998. It was b/c I planned to kill myself, and if no one was close to me, they wouldn't grieve for me. I did it to be kind to those I cared about. And then, I went off the antidepressant and got better. Paradoxical reaction to an SSRI. I am " fine" now. It has been over a dozen years now since I quit taking them. But I am not fine. As I type, an eighth of my body is in horrible pain because my muscles are knotted up, running from the top of my skull to my waist on the left side. It is spreading, at that, having started out as a cramp in the back of my left neck on Wednesday, waking me screaming in pain Thursday morning. I got screamed at for acting like I was in pain when I could not move my head or left shoulder. I got screamed at for acting tired when I normally go to bed 2 hours earlier. I got kicked out of Thanksgiving for the second time (though this time, I did not actually leave). The first time, it was because I needed to rinse a dirty wire whisk. How dare I say her whisk is dirty! Never mind that she has 20 40 vision and doesn't wear glasses and the whisk hadn't been used in months and was not kept in a drawer, so it had months of dust on it.
Now, here is the really confusing thing. As I mentioned before, my family may love me, but they treat me in a way that is indistinguishable from hate. However.... they must love me, because, even though they treat me badly, if someone else attacks me, they will defend me. Why would they defend me if they don't love me? Our relationship is truly dysfunctional. It makes The Simpsons look like the perfect family. In fact, I have sobbed before in emotional pain and longing during a Simpons episode because of how much I longed for the love they have for each other. I will never understand, I think. I can't figure out how to get them to like me, to not verbally abuse me and grind my meager self-esteem to dust. If ever a child needed a parentectomy...well, there are worse. But there is the concept of the good enough parent, and there ought to be the concept of the bad enough parent. Both my parents were bad enough. Kaiden couldn't believe me when I said Mom was the better parent, until he finally met my father. He was amazed. My father is amazingly...horrid. I was a planned child, but that didn't stop him from resenting my existence, because, after all, I was the child of the woman who didn't want to move to Pennsylvania and told him she wouldn't stop him from moving there. So he chose to stay and never forgave us, even though I was years away from being born when this happened. I felt like Frankenstein and the Phantom of the Opera in younger days. I felt like the horrible monster they created and then loathed and despised. I suppose that's it. They love me, but they also despise me. I don't know why, except that I am pedantic and literal-minded. But they like Temperance Brennan on Bones, and she is both of those things. So what is it about me? I am nice. I am kind. I care about others. I am always there when they need me. I don't understand. They claim that I am manipulative. They say I can make my lips turn blue on purpose, that I can make myself get chill bumps, that I can make my teeth chatter, that I am overly dramatic when I do something like flippantly say I woke up screaming in pain and then laugh about it, when I dismissively and quietly admit I am sad that they just fed live baby mice which I had been holding for half an hour to their chickens, I am sorry that I have feelings. I am sorry I got attached to the mice. I am sorry that I feel for tiny creatures and their suffering, that I don't see it as any different than throwing a kitten to crazed dogs or a baby to a crocodile. I am sorry that I feel. I am sorry that I can't hide my feelings completely, I am sorry I look like a drama queen when I am expending all my energy into not reacting to the thing I am allegedly being overly dramatic about. I should get dramatic about something one of these days so they have a basis of comparrison. I don't know what they want from me. I can never be normal. I can't do any better. I apologize for being me, but I can't help it, I never could help it, I am sorry I am me but who else could I be? I don't know how to be any different than how I am. The thing is, I don't want to be different than who I am. I just want my family to be nice to me and love me. I want to not have all this pain.
My aunt, uncle& cousin have quit attending our tg dinner. No clue why. But they wanted to get together, so they picked a place I couldn't go. My whole family knows about my tobacco allergy, but they went to a bar that is owned by Paul's nephew. No nonsmoking section. So I stayed at Mom's babysitting 5 dogs while they had a nice time having dinner with the whole family. My uncle, my aunt, her sister, my cousin, his fiance, my mom, Paul, and Charity. They could've gone anywhere. I said that I felt hurt that they picked a place I couldn't go. It was not an oversight; I heard Mom planning it on the phone, saying I couldn't go b/c of the smoke. I told her I felt hurt because I was excluded. Oh what a drama queen! Poor, poor Susannah, feeling sorry for herself! I was calm, rational, polite, sincere, firm. I was intentionally excluded from a family dinner in leiu of Thanksgiving. How am I supposed to feel? They didn't even bring leftovers for me. I just ate nasty boiled turkey leftover from tg dinner. I cope. But I should not meekly take this treatment without even a word to say, "Hey, I know what you are doing and it hurts."
What else can I say? 31 years of examples. Mom used to get so angry at me for "Being manipulative." I would cry and beg her to tell me what I did wrong. She would say, very, very angrily, "You know very well." I'd cry and beg and plead for her to at least tell me what I did, that I'd never do it again if only she would tell me what it was I did wrong. She would break a yardstick into pieces while caning the backs of my legs. (She thought my bottom was too padded to hurt enough for a sufficienct punishment.) Why would I beg to know the offense if I knew? What would I gain by this? Why did it make her so angry when I cried and begged for the reason for the punishment? She would tell me that if she wasn't too good to be spanked, then I wasn't too good, either, she would be so angry, and her tone made me sobb and sobb and ask, because I really needed to know, "Do you love me?" And she would yell, "No!" And I would sobb so hard I couldn't breathe. Whatever unknown thing I had done had cost me my mother's love. She didn't love me anymore. Later, she would "make up" with me, as if we were adults who argued, and she would say she loved me, and I'd say please never say you don't love me anymore, because that hurts more than anything else. Apparently, I shouldn't have asked. Why do you ask when I am mad at you? Because, that is when I need it the most. I need to know you still love me. But it is 1000% manipulation, you see, nothing but me trying to get her to feel sorry for me, so it should be met with such an excruciating response as what she delivered. I, apparently, deserved for my mother to say she didn't love me because I asked her when she was angry. Why did I always believe her? Why did I keep asking? Because the need never went away.
I will now relate some anecdotes you may have heard.
Mom. I was a Junior in high school. I was carrying something, laundry I think, to my room, and mom told me to run the vacuum cleaner. I said, "I will as soon as I put this in my room." She slapped me across the face and my glasses went sailing across the room. I am legally blind without correction. I was sobbing and feeling around on the floor for them. Her hand kept reaching back as if to strike again, while I begged her that I couldn't see to vacuum without my glasses. I frantically searched the floor. I was afraid she would step on them, as she moved closer and kept drawing back her hand, threatening to strike again. When I finally found them, she screamed, "Go to your room!" Why did she have to hit me, terrorize me, yell at me, make me cry, when I said I would do it as soon as I sat the stuff I was carrying in the correct room? How did I provoke her? What did I do wrong? How could I have done better? And then, she sent me to my room, where I was going anyway, and I cried too hard to run the vacuum.
Mom picked me up from church on Wednesday nights,
unless Dad was there for a meeting. I was dismayed to see his car. I got into the back seat because I was extra afraid of him that day. We were at the stop light for Wilson Creek Road when I decided to tell him it wasn't my fault. I think it was that a deer had hit his car when I was not even present. He hit me hard a few times and said, "Whose fault is it?" I said, "It's no one's fault, it's just one of those things that happens." He hit me a few more times, and repeated the question. I yelled, "It's no one's fault!" A few more hard whacks. "Whose fault is it?" Now, I was angry from being hit about 15 times. "It's your fault!" I yelled. This repeated, several hard hits, "Whose fault is it?" "It's your fault!" and then he asked again and I knew I had a choice to make. I could get out of the car. Police would get involved. My father would be arrested for child abuse. My world would turn upsidedown. "It's my fault," I said, ashamed of myself for this self-betrayal. He drew his hand back, but did not swing. "What did you say?" "It's my fault," I repeated, louder. "Ok," he said. He turned and drove on, leaving me in that horrible state, feeling worse about myself than I ever had before. He had done it to the others before I was born. He had never beaten me into submission before. Bruises would've healed, and I should've let him hit me all the way home. I would've forgotten eventually. But we were at least 20 minutes from home. I was so ashamed I could not even tell Mom he had hit me. I am a person of high integrity and this was such a violation of my integrity. But I was just a child under torture. You need training to stand up under torture. Still, I am more messed up from that incident than any other childhood abuse from my father. When I was in the same seat with my mom and sister in the car when I was mid-sentence and he reached back to hit me and I was 17, when I grabbed his hand, threw it back at him, and started sobbing while my mom and sister carried on like a bunch of chickens and he kept saying, "I didn't hit her," and I couldn't stop crying so I couldn't tell them that he didn't succeed in hitting me...I cried because I remembered. That was when I finally told them about the other incident. I cried from memories, not from physical pain. I cried because it was the same physical action and I had PTSD from the prior event.
They defended me. He attacked me, they defended me. So they must love me. They just treat me in a way that is indistinguishable from hate. I will never know why.
(Typed on a Droid 2)
Now, here is the really confusing thing. As I mentioned before, my family may love me, but they treat me in a way that is indistinguishable from hate. However.... they must love me, because, even though they treat me badly, if someone else attacks me, they will defend me. Why would they defend me if they don't love me? Our relationship is truly dysfunctional. It makes The Simpsons look like the perfect family. In fact, I have sobbed before in emotional pain and longing during a Simpons episode because of how much I longed for the love they have for each other. I will never understand, I think. I can't figure out how to get them to like me, to not verbally abuse me and grind my meager self-esteem to dust. If ever a child needed a parentectomy...well, there are worse. But there is the concept of the good enough parent, and there ought to be the concept of the bad enough parent. Both my parents were bad enough. Kaiden couldn't believe me when I said Mom was the better parent, until he finally met my father. He was amazed. My father is amazingly...horrid. I was a planned child, but that didn't stop him from resenting my existence, because, after all, I was the child of the woman who didn't want to move to Pennsylvania and told him she wouldn't stop him from moving there. So he chose to stay and never forgave us, even though I was years away from being born when this happened. I felt like Frankenstein and the Phantom of the Opera in younger days. I felt like the horrible monster they created and then loathed and despised. I suppose that's it. They love me, but they also despise me. I don't know why, except that I am pedantic and literal-minded. But they like Temperance Brennan on Bones, and she is both of those things. So what is it about me? I am nice. I am kind. I care about others. I am always there when they need me. I don't understand. They claim that I am manipulative. They say I can make my lips turn blue on purpose, that I can make myself get chill bumps, that I can make my teeth chatter, that I am overly dramatic when I do something like flippantly say I woke up screaming in pain and then laugh about it, when I dismissively and quietly admit I am sad that they just fed live baby mice which I had been holding for half an hour to their chickens, I am sorry that I have feelings. I am sorry I got attached to the mice. I am sorry that I feel for tiny creatures and their suffering, that I don't see it as any different than throwing a kitten to crazed dogs or a baby to a crocodile. I am sorry that I feel. I am sorry that I can't hide my feelings completely, I am sorry I look like a drama queen when I am expending all my energy into not reacting to the thing I am allegedly being overly dramatic about. I should get dramatic about something one of these days so they have a basis of comparrison. I don't know what they want from me. I can never be normal. I can't do any better. I apologize for being me, but I can't help it, I never could help it, I am sorry I am me but who else could I be? I don't know how to be any different than how I am. The thing is, I don't want to be different than who I am. I just want my family to be nice to me and love me. I want to not have all this pain.
My aunt, uncle& cousin have quit attending our tg dinner. No clue why. But they wanted to get together, so they picked a place I couldn't go. My whole family knows about my tobacco allergy, but they went to a bar that is owned by Paul's nephew. No nonsmoking section. So I stayed at Mom's babysitting 5 dogs while they had a nice time having dinner with the whole family. My uncle, my aunt, her sister, my cousin, his fiance, my mom, Paul, and Charity. They could've gone anywhere. I said that I felt hurt that they picked a place I couldn't go. It was not an oversight; I heard Mom planning it on the phone, saying I couldn't go b/c of the smoke. I told her I felt hurt because I was excluded. Oh what a drama queen! Poor, poor Susannah, feeling sorry for herself! I was calm, rational, polite, sincere, firm. I was intentionally excluded from a family dinner in leiu of Thanksgiving. How am I supposed to feel? They didn't even bring leftovers for me. I just ate nasty boiled turkey leftover from tg dinner. I cope. But I should not meekly take this treatment without even a word to say, "Hey, I know what you are doing and it hurts."
What else can I say? 31 years of examples. Mom used to get so angry at me for "Being manipulative." I would cry and beg her to tell me what I did wrong. She would say, very, very angrily, "You know very well." I'd cry and beg and plead for her to at least tell me what I did, that I'd never do it again if only she would tell me what it was I did wrong. She would break a yardstick into pieces while caning the backs of my legs. (She thought my bottom was too padded to hurt enough for a sufficienct punishment.) Why would I beg to know the offense if I knew? What would I gain by this? Why did it make her so angry when I cried and begged for the reason for the punishment? She would tell me that if she wasn't too good to be spanked, then I wasn't too good, either, she would be so angry, and her tone made me sobb and sobb and ask, because I really needed to know, "Do you love me?" And she would yell, "No!" And I would sobb so hard I couldn't breathe. Whatever unknown thing I had done had cost me my mother's love. She didn't love me anymore. Later, she would "make up" with me, as if we were adults who argued, and she would say she loved me, and I'd say please never say you don't love me anymore, because that hurts more than anything else. Apparently, I shouldn't have asked. Why do you ask when I am mad at you? Because, that is when I need it the most. I need to know you still love me. But it is 1000% manipulation, you see, nothing but me trying to get her to feel sorry for me, so it should be met with such an excruciating response as what she delivered. I, apparently, deserved for my mother to say she didn't love me because I asked her when she was angry. Why did I always believe her? Why did I keep asking? Because the need never went away.
I will now relate some anecdotes you may have heard.
Mom. I was a Junior in high school. I was carrying something, laundry I think, to my room, and mom told me to run the vacuum cleaner. I said, "I will as soon as I put this in my room." She slapped me across the face and my glasses went sailing across the room. I am legally blind without correction. I was sobbing and feeling around on the floor for them. Her hand kept reaching back as if to strike again, while I begged her that I couldn't see to vacuum without my glasses. I frantically searched the floor. I was afraid she would step on them, as she moved closer and kept drawing back her hand, threatening to strike again. When I finally found them, she screamed, "Go to your room!" Why did she have to hit me, terrorize me, yell at me, make me cry, when I said I would do it as soon as I sat the stuff I was carrying in the correct room? How did I provoke her? What did I do wrong? How could I have done better? And then, she sent me to my room, where I was going anyway, and I cried too hard to run the vacuum.
Mom picked me up from church on Wednesday nights,
unless Dad was there for a meeting. I was dismayed to see his car. I got into the back seat because I was extra afraid of him that day. We were at the stop light for Wilson Creek Road when I decided to tell him it wasn't my fault. I think it was that a deer had hit his car when I was not even present. He hit me hard a few times and said, "Whose fault is it?" I said, "It's no one's fault, it's just one of those things that happens." He hit me a few more times, and repeated the question. I yelled, "It's no one's fault!" A few more hard whacks. "Whose fault is it?" Now, I was angry from being hit about 15 times. "It's your fault!" I yelled. This repeated, several hard hits, "Whose fault is it?" "It's your fault!" and then he asked again and I knew I had a choice to make. I could get out of the car. Police would get involved. My father would be arrested for child abuse. My world would turn upsidedown. "It's my fault," I said, ashamed of myself for this self-betrayal. He drew his hand back, but did not swing. "What did you say?" "It's my fault," I repeated, louder. "Ok," he said. He turned and drove on, leaving me in that horrible state, feeling worse about myself than I ever had before. He had done it to the others before I was born. He had never beaten me into submission before. Bruises would've healed, and I should've let him hit me all the way home. I would've forgotten eventually. But we were at least 20 minutes from home. I was so ashamed I could not even tell Mom he had hit me. I am a person of high integrity and this was such a violation of my integrity. But I was just a child under torture. You need training to stand up under torture. Still, I am more messed up from that incident than any other childhood abuse from my father. When I was in the same seat with my mom and sister in the car when I was mid-sentence and he reached back to hit me and I was 17, when I grabbed his hand, threw it back at him, and started sobbing while my mom and sister carried on like a bunch of chickens and he kept saying, "I didn't hit her," and I couldn't stop crying so I couldn't tell them that he didn't succeed in hitting me...I cried because I remembered. That was when I finally told them about the other incident. I cried from memories, not from physical pain. I cried because it was the same physical action and I had PTSD from the prior event.
They defended me. He attacked me, they defended me. So they must love me. They just treat me in a way that is indistinguishable from hate. I will never know why.
(Typed on a Droid 2)