Broken Cycle
Bean on the first day of 5th grade.
She looks so much like me at that age it hurts my heart.
My daughter’s first day at the university was today. Tonight is her second night sleeping at the dorms. Last night she sent me a text message saying goodnight and that she loves me. My heart swelled big as a house when I received it. I sent her love and unicorns.
Today she told me she actually was able to sleep last night, which for her is a big deal since she inherited my biochemical insomnia. My sleeping chemistry was rewired early in childhood. My body stopped being able to sleep because sleep was dangerous. My daughter inherited the biology but not the actual trauma. It’s upsetting to know I gave her that “affliction,” but I do try to give her love and more love and more love to help offset it.
I told her today that the unicorns I sent her helped her sleep. She said she believed it.
This all sounds so simple.
It’s not.
These past couple of weeks I have been working round the clock between managing day job (the one I work to care for my daughter and do things like provide her a home and get her to university) and doing all the work it has taken to get my daughter “moved” into the dorm and starting university. It has been crazy busy, and don’t even get me started on errands errands errands and crises crises crises. But I’m weathering my way through it.
Remember, my daughter would just be starting her senior in high school right now if she had followed the “traditional” path. Nothing about my daughter has ever followed the traditional path. Should I be surprised? Half her genes came from me.
Saturday night was supposed to be her first night sleeping at the dorm. After I finished helping her with more decorating and unpacking and getting her mini fridge and microwave set up and hanging up the little Japanese lantern lights I got for her a zillion other things, I drove home.
And I howled like a dying animal. I bellowed. I sobbed. I cannot even describe this kind of crying.
I got home and looked at my kid’s room with her unmade bed, one of her American Girl dolls - Samantha - propped in the corner, and I sobbed some more.
The only thing I could do was play my guitar. I played for two hours. I tried to make a video. They failed. Here’s a recording. I just played what came out.
The sound I made when I missed my daughter and didn’t know what to do:
Click to viewShe came home at 4 am. I can’t say I wasn’t happy to see her go into her bedroom and sleep.
How do I even begin to describe where I am at right now? Most mothers go through Empty Nest Syndrome. But because of my PTSD and my hyper vigilance, I am beyond the Empty Nest. I’m talking massive infrastructure failure.
Maybe I should go to another time over 19 years ago when I all of a sudden decided I wanted to be a mom.
This was a shocker. After surviving everything I had survived - a horribly violent childhood and a nightmarish teen life on the streets combined with a family history of drug and alcohol abuse, incest, rape, domestic violence, and countless other horrors - I figured there was no way on the planet I would or could ever be a mother. I felt I was an abomination, a broken human who did not deserve to give a life to another yet alone be trusted with the care of a child.
But then at age 35, I suddenly thought that I wanted to be a mom and that I COULD be a mom.
So me and my kiddo’s dad got me pregnant. When I married him, I married outside my class. I was blue collar working class through and through. Though I had a degree from UC Berkeley (which is how we met), I had an 8th grade education. My kid’s dad comes from a white collar educated family. His family paid for him to go to college and to get his PhD from Berkeley, the kind of thing supportive parents who can afford it do. We were and still are very good friends, but marrying him was also part of my relentless pursuit to outrun my life and to break the cycle of my origins. For the record, that doesn’t work. You can’t marry your way out of your life. But that’s another story. Class is what class is, and it is very very difficult to navigate a relationship that crosses class boundaries, whether economic or cultural or both (which was my case).
When I found out I was going to have a baby girl, I was SO HAPPY. Oh my god, it was such a miracle. A baby girl was growing inside my body despite everything it had survived! The one huge promise I made to myself was that I was going to really break the cycle with her. She was not going to experience the things I experienced or the kind of life that was the norm for my family. I was going to bust through the cycle and demolish it - not just the cycle, but every fucking cycle that needed to be broken. She would not be abused. She would not end up on the streets. She would have parents who loved her and cared for her and were there when she needed them.
And mostly that has been true, and the cycles have been broken, except for the fact that nothing about her family life was traditional, and having a mom with extreme PTSD is not really the Hallmark version of motherhood.
But I did my best and I did many things, even though I also fucked up many times. I used my blue collar background to teach her how to do important shit like use power tools even if I sometimes became unhinged by shit when I should have stayed calm. I could have learned quicker how to be a more effective parent to a teen girl rather than internalizing everything that hurt her. I so much wanted her not to hurt, that I often caused more harm than good by trying to (over)protect her. Well, I can’t go back in time. I really tried, and by golly I didn’t have much to go on. It’s not like I had any decent examples in my family.
And now my kiddo is leaving home and going to college. It has been and will continue to be a brutal transition. Largely because she did have a loving home, regardless if it was untraditional and fucked up on a “social norm” scale. Largely also because she inherited genetic wiring as a result of my traumas, and she has anxiety that is off the rails. I passed my trauma onto her, something I never thought could happen when I got pregnant. It did not cross my mind that my daughter sharing my gene pool could 1) pass on the biological changes that occurred in me as a result of the horrific traumas I survived, and 2) that despite my desire to break the cycle(s), half her genes would still come from me and my family which is filled with addicts, abusers, and the mentally ill.
Accepting that as much as I wanted to change things for my daughter but could not change all of what being me and of me means is very painful. I’ll never be able to give her a grandma who is not a junkie, for example.
Then there is the fact that letting go of her is SO HARD for me. I fear for every moment of her life. I want her to be OKAY, like, FOREVER. And I can’t control that.
I tried so damned hard to be a good mom. And I will continue to try hard, but good lord I have made some big mistakes. Some of them were because of ignorance. I went blindly into parenting with this huge glow of hope without even thinking of the kind of permanent damage I endured and how it could affect my child. I thought I could simply shut the door on my past or outrun it. I was completely unaware of things like transference and how it would affect me and my relationship with my daughter during key moments in her development.
Such as this one.
Certainly one of the reasons I find myself floundering and sobbing is because somewhere deep inside of me there is a girl who left home under dreadfully different circumstances, and that girl is crying her heart out. That girl is me.
I can’t believe my baby is growing up.
The good thing is that I am realizing that I will always be her mom. Hell, we were at Zumba together tonight. I fielded any number of crisis phone calls today. We are planning things we will do together.
But damn, I cannot believe what a bumpy journey this has been. What kind of person am I to have as a mother? I wouldn’t wish that on anyone! But I do love my kid hard, and I have done some really good things as her mom despite my failings and my brokenness!
My daughter still hugs me, cries on me, laughs with me, and shares with me. She talks with me about her feelings and her fears. I never did or would do these things with my mom. So I must have done something right if she still trusts me to care for and be there for her. And I will care for her and be there, dammit!
Did I break the cycle? Well, I think I put a fairly large fissure in it. She has had to face down some difficult things having me as a mother, but she also knows I love her beyond measure. She is in college at age 17. I have always given her creative and personal freedom to discover and nurture who she is and not who I want or expect her to be. All I want is for her to be happy and healthy and to nurture her unique special soul. She will be 18 this October, and she bypassed all the hell I endured in my teen years. Hurrah.
I was talking to my living brother recently (the one who shares my name - the other Kim), and we were talking about how challenging kids can be. I was talking about my daughter’s anxiety. He was talking about some difficulty he was having with one of his granddaughters. Then he said very calmly and matter-of-factly, “Because of the way we were raised, I will never lay a hand to a child.” Somehow hearing him say that made me feel both very good and very bad. It was good because it validated our childhood experiences and it confirmed that he and I have really tried to break the cycle of violence. It was bad because it reminded me of how “different” I am from nearly every living soul in my life. Sometimes I think my brother is the only person I really have. Sure we had to fight for our individual survival because we grew up in a Survival of the Fittest, Fight, and/or Duck and Cover environment, but we are deeply and sometimes fragilely and painfully connected.
I spoke with him tonight, and we shared our feelings about being outsiders. It’s not the big things that bring it on. It’s the little things. The stuff everyone takes for granted. Like having parents who cared for you and your future and did everything they could to make sure roads of possibility were open for you. We did not have that. My daughter does. She’s on one of those roads now.
Bean eating dinner in her dorm.
She just sent me a huge LOVE message from her dorm. It made me so happy. Nothing else matters. When my daughter is doing well, my heart is at peace.
I’m going to bed. Peace to you too.
PS: Here's a failed video of me wailing on my guitar the night I cried for two hours beside myself with missing my kiddo. My shit phone cut off the video but whatever. Maybe that's like symbolic of cutting the cord . . . .