Category — the crazy stops here

When I publish a post I’m sensitive about, I argue with myself about having posted it. The secret to my insane rate of self disclosure here is that I entertain that argument only after I hit publish. Then I spend two days trying not to puke on my shoes when I think about it.

My discomfort always stems from the same thought- what if someone were to judge me just on that post? What if someone just clicks through here and this is their first impression of me? Or, more terrifying, what if someone who knows what my laugh sounds like reads it and it changes their perception of me for the worse? Of course, you know the end to this story- I always end up reassuring myself that not being true to myself is a much worse fate than losing favor with people.

Still, when I’m in the middle of reorganizing my kitchen cabinets and wondering what a fucking lunatic I am, I get a Twitter notification with a link to a sweet surprise.

Thank you, Angela, for the reminder that if you trust people with the truth of who you are, you’ll be rewarded by the ones who matter the most.

So my therapist recommended a website to me this morning. Which is interesting, because he’s never done that before. He recommended a book once, which I purchased, read and found helpful. I wrote down the address and checked it out this afternoon.

I’m a little confused.

I like my therapist. He’s good at what he does.

The website was about abused children. It was about a therapeutic method under which adults who were abused and neglected by their parents or primary care givers stop sympathizing and empathizing with their parents and turn that unconditional love and acceptance on themselves. Her premise is that I cannot truly love myself if I forgive my parents, because I’m inherently repressing my rage and sorrow to accommodate a favorable view of them.

Okay, what?

That just blows my mind. It took me a long, long time to view love as coming from a bottomless source, to let go of the concrete idea that love is a limited resource and realize that loving creates more love. It’s magical that way. It also took me a long time to forgive my parents.

The undeniable truth is that I was abused and neglected as a child. Certainly, there are children that have much worse circumstances than I ever did. That doesn’t change the fact that I’ve been hit, kicked, throttled and otherwise physically injured and intimidated. That I didn’t receive critical medical care. That I was often left home alone all day when I was sick, or taken out of school to care for my sister when she was sick. That I endured verbal attacks and public humiliation at the hands of both of my parents. Those things happened, every bit of them, and they hurt. They changed me as a person, and I will never know who I might have been without the influence of abuse and neglect.

I could tell you the tragic stories of my parents’ own childhoods, I could show you the hands they were dealt while I came of age. I could tell you that they are, at heart, good people with good intentions. I could remind you, and myself that they love me to the ends of this Earth and would do just about anything for me. I could make a list of all of the wonderful things they’ve given me, taught me, shared with me, created for me. That would all be true.

Perhaps my issue with this woman’s premise is that it is so very black and white.

I didn’t deserve what I endured as child. No child does. That my parents did the best that they were capable of, given their own states of mental health and their own experiences growing up does not excuse or minimize my suffering. What they were capable of, what they were willing to justify and settle for is pathetic and disgusting. There simply is no excuse for it.

For my future children, for my adult life, I’ve chosen another path. I’ve decided that the crazy stops here, that I want to understand and overcome the influence of abuse and neglect on my own mental and emotional processes, so that I don’t unwittingly pass them to my children, or unthinkably, cause them to suffer as I have suffered. A critical part of that journey has been making peace with my parents.

They are who they are, and their ability to admit the truth without justifying or minimizing it is very limited. If they were capable of seeing things through my eyes, they never would have been capable of treating me the way they did. I have decided, consciously, to love them in spite of their flaws, in spite of their mistakes. Because they gave me life, because my blood is their blood, because they do love me so very, very much, and because I love them immensely.

As a grown woman, I’m still vulnerable to their special brand of hurt. The very minute my father begins to stumble around my home and slur intelligibly during our conversations, I cease being a thirty year old woman, through some kind of Alice in Wonderland type transformation, I fall down the rabbit hole until I am eight again. Anxious and unsettled by my father’s antics, hyper-vigilant, as well as resigned to falling asleep to the lullaby of my childhood: my father retching violently in the bathroom nearby. Trying to will myself to sleep and hoping that I sleep deeply enough to avoid a repeat performance as a morning revelry.  That old, tired dance inspires a rage and sorrow that still leaves me exhausted and anxious.

The difference is, my Dad knows how I feel about it now, and we don’t talk much about it, and I don’t make it an issue (as that would only serve to drive a wedge between us and not foster any change in behavior on his part), and he is sheepish and offers the same olive branches he offered that poor little eight year old girl: breakfast out, spending money, compliments, and casual apologies or denials. Another important difference- he leaves town, he goes home, and as his plane soars above the ridgelines, I pop up out of the rabbit hole and start to resume life as a functional, independent adult.

Maybe this woman would say that I’m still punishing myself by allowing my father to drink in my house, by allowing him such a large space in my heart, by choosing to love and adore the lovable and adorable parts of him. I don’t buy that. The decision for me was to learn to take my parents as they come or be a voluntary orphan. To have the best and closest relationships with them that I could, or to excommunicate myself from them. I will grant her, this forgiveness comes from a place of superiority to an extent- I have to look upon those parts of them that caused my suffering from a place beyond my natural perspective.

I had to come to understand those horrible parts of them as symptoms of their own suffering, and I had to accept and understand that they are not willing to break the trance of their delusions and demons in order to overcome them. So I did. Because I love them. Because they love me. Because I hope that my children will do the same thing, as much as I hope that I give them less to forgive me for.

“A mature person is one who does not think only in absolutes, who is able to be objective even when deeply stirred emotionally, who has learned that there is both good and bad in all people and all things, and who walks humbly and deals charitably with the circumstances of life, knowing that in this world no one is all-knowing and therefore all of us need both love and charity.”  Eleanor Roosevelt