Personal Post: Ghosts
I've been emotionally unavailable to everyone lately. I wish I could honestly say I'm just lost in the glow of being a new mom, that each and every day Sephie is growing and learning so much, I couldn't care less about the outside world. I've certainly see that be the case with a number of my friends, but that isn't accurate here.
Mostly, I just feel stuck in my head these days. This isn't a new thing for me. For years, I've been described as a person who lives there, but what sets it apart in the present is that a lot of my daily contacts have dropped down to weekly contacts. It isn't that they don't care; it's that I've stopped responding.
A lot of it is that the work I've been doing in therapy. While I haven't been depressed, exactly, I'm still sorting out the postpartum nonsense, and it seemed to have gotten better, but ever since B and I came back to our place after Sephie's birth, I've been doing a lot of processing on my childhood. A few weeks ago, Sue and I talked about having me find a local therapist. The idea really stressed me out, because we have a good working relationship and had just started to get back on track. Our work suffered a lot after I initially moved out here, but I re-committed myself to the process right around the time I probably conceived, and not long after, I felt like we were really back to where we needed to be.
And so, I think on some level, hearing her suggestion that we investigate other options motivated me to buckle down and open myself up to the work. Though in my teenage years, I often discussed my mother with my then-therapist, in hindsight, it seems incredibly superficial. We never delved into the hard issues pertaining to my childhood. What that means, in the context of the present, is that we never discussed the abuse by my parents. Talking about how my mom left me a crazy message calling Dad's then-girlfriend a whore is fine, but it doesn't talk about how I felt when she likewise told me that she wished I had died instead of my sister.
I also think I sensed an innate resistance on part of my then-therapist to discuss it. I mean, she had met with my mom before, and my father, and my dad told me that when she met with both of them following the night I ran away because Mom split my lip, she observed Mom being, well, Mom. She also suggested to me once that my mom suffered from Borderline, though it was a subtle suggestion and more in reference to the Borderline tome's title, I Hate You--Don't Leave Me. Maybe I just never felt comfortable getting into all the messy, emotional work involved with identifying that my mom wasn't just some crank who would say really offensive things, but an actual abuser.
You know, the list goes on and on, but I think on some level I couldn't really face it because I was still largely living inside of it. I didn't have the luxury of the outside perspective because I obviously wasn't outside of it, and I don't think I could handle coming to terms with just how bad all of it actually was. And I know in the near future, that means trying to use EMDR to process the really disturbing memories. The memories, of course, that my dad was part of, that I don't want to acknowledge because I don't do well with seeing people as both good and bad. I have put my father on a pedestal as "good" and recalling his parenting errors shows that he was "bad." It's not that simple, of course, but that's how my mind functions. I have to learn to accept that as amazing as my father is, there was a time not all that long ago that he wasn't, and that it's okay to feel that way. The thing is, I know my dad would understand and even help me process it, but my (irrational) fear of being rejected by him keeps me from expressing those thoughts to him.
As distressing as that particular dynamic is for me, the bigger issue these days is how I tried to get help for myself, and those efforts ultimately yielded no results. At my session with Sue on Monday, we talked at length about the different times I tried to reach out to teachers, only to receive a lot of static in response. It's difficult not to get angry as so many of my actions, in retrospect, make sense. I never wanted to go home, I was withdrawn and obviously distracted in class. I still remember penning my first suicide note--I was 9, for Christ's sake!--in crayon, during a poetry unit, while my peers were writing about bunnies and flowers.
One thing that recently came to my attention is that abused children tend to come across as very apprehensive, like they're waiting for something bad to happen. I can remember once getting in trouble in fifth grade because I hadn't completed an assignment for that day, and I was trying to complete it on the sly. In front of everyone, the teacher scolded me and said, "You're always trying to hide from me." Why didn't she do anything to understand why I was hiding? Why did the teachers I reached out to ignore my plea for help?
These days, when I shut my eyes, I often am struggling with the memories. The verbal abuse, the feeling of Mom's hand connecting with my jaw, coming up with just the right thing to say to provoke her so that I don't have to deal with the anxiety of not knowing when she'll decide to do it anyway. I can't even fully articulate these thoughts to anyone outside of my therapist because of how deep those wounds are. I tried to open up to B about it today, and he said he could tell it bothers me because I have such a hard time talking about it.
I want to get to the place where I don't still hear Mom in my skull, particularly when I make a mistake. I was a good kid, and even if I wasn't, I didn't deserve what I went through at home. There is never an excuse to hit your child in anger, and with me, it happened repeatedly from my earliest memory until Mom split my lip when I was 16.
On a logical level, I know it wasn't my fault and that what my parents did was not okay. But on a very emotional level, I want to know what was so wrong with me that my brothers did not have the same experience. I want to know why I just wasn't smart enough or thin enough or pretty enough not to constantly be evoking their wrath. I want to believe I will someday reach the place where a conflict with someone else doesn't leave me feeling like, on some level, it's only a matter of time before they haul off and deck me, too.
It's part of why I think the whole, "Well, sucks to be you if you think I was a shitty parent, but I did the best I could" is such a freaking cop-out. Because sometimes your best isn't good enough. It's not like running a marathon. You're raising a person who will, in all statistical probability, go on to raise another person. What you do matters, and saying you did the best you could doesn't mean you did a good job and you're off the hook for the shitty shit that you did. When you raise another person and you mess it up, you've condemned generations to putting up with your half-assed excuse of the "best" you could do. And I desperately want to avoid that, I want to avoid Sephie having to bear the burden of my parents' shortcomings.