To a Relative

 Once, I would have said        

Your "fairy-tale grandmother" came at the expense of me having any grandmother. Your mother is a spoiled selfish child who can't stand anyone else having the least crumbs. Your grandfather was an abusive controlling miser unable to tolerate anything outside his tightly truncated sphere of influence. I hope I never see you again and have to battle myself between the propriety of simply ignoring you versus storming up to you to tell your family to fuck off into the sun.

Now, I have to see - you were no more at fault than I was. You too were a child caught between adults who never grew up. Your grandfather - my step-grandfather, who wanted to increase that "step" distance - may have been the root of this. Your mother was clearly his Golden Child who could ask for anything and get it. That being said, I'm pretty convinced that my mother stoked the fires of drama just as much as yours. 

Why did the adults pit us against each other? 

Why was it always "___ looks too made up, like their mother"? 

Why were my academics always brought up against your passions? 

The blatant favoritism your grandfather showed hurt. As an adult, I force myself to remember, none of this was your fault or design; you were a child who only knew what you'd been shown. The estrangement I felt from my grandmother was clearly your grandfather's doing; I suspect he wanted to distance her from any "outside" support or influence. He would call me something I thought was a term of endearment - now I suspect it was his way of avoiding acknowledging who I was, that I was a person.

I am so angry that he chose to be miserly, restrictive, abusive, and controlling. I am ashamed of how my mother constantly made passive-aggressive remarks and outright criticism to worsen the rift between my family and yours. I'm disappointed that the grown-ups in our lives chose to be petty, critical, and childish.

It's a shame - I've taken up one of your favorite activities now as an adult, and I wonder if I could have learned from you. Maybe I could have helped you in some way as well. 

I guess I will never know.

Letter 2: Dear Dad

 I wish you’d realized how lonely I was as a child and that I desperately needed a parent to be a parent. I needed someone in the family to “be the adult” and set boundaries up front, not retroactively. I wanted to spend time with you, but like Mom, you put your work first. 

I’m not sure why your adult issues were passed on to us kids. I never needed to know about your still-festering anger about your ex-wife, or your desperation to make up for the time you didn’t talk to your mother by trying to force that relationship on us. I know you had very traditional views on who ran the house and how, but your inflexibility caused strife between you and mom - which was another thing that, as a child, I didn’t need to hear about.

I don’t know why you chose to absent yourself from your family, but it was effective. I don’t know why you didn’t serve as a check against Mom’s excesses, but avoiding that didn’t help any of us. I wanted to spend time with you as a child, but you made it very difficult. Was it easier to just turn a blind eye and a deaf ear?

I know you didn’t want kids really, but I tried to be the best non-kid kid I could be. I learned to play chess, poker, and how to shoot pool. I learned about the space program because of your enthusiasm. I tried not to ask for things too much and I tried to be as easy-going with you as I could. I tried, Daddy - why didn’t you? 

Letter 1: Dear Mom

 How fucking dare you expect me to be an adult, shouldering adult concerns and conversations as a *CHILD*? I should never have had to listen to concerns within your marriage, your family, your work, or your social life. I should have never had to worry about being the “good, easy child” because I wanted to make *your* life easier. I should have been experiencing new things, trying and making mistakes instead of reading about them because that was easier for you.

How can you say I’m abusive when it’s the emotional neglect you’ve dumped on me for years that’s made it so difficult to put my feelings first - besides being actively suicidal? I haven’t been the most coherent at stating what was wrong and how - but pus usually doesn’t come out of an infected wound neatly. By the way, during the times my depression actually was bad, thanks for telling me I didn’t have it bad enough to be depressed - did you somehow think that was helpful?

How fucking dare you try to compress my life as small as possible just to be more convenient for you? You chose to send me to a private school - and then only to magnet schools, effectively preventing me from having friends my own age. You chose to actively discourage me from pursuing activities you weren’t interested in; I don’t know if it was feelings of inferiority or simply a distaste for having to plan around me, but it worked terribly well. The only activity outside of school from grades one through six was Girl Scouts, and I remember not wanting to go most times. 

Returning to finish school was selfish; the way you went about it essentially left me parentless when I needed it. You didn’t set boundaries with other people - including your husband - and so that slopped over on to me. Making yourself run ragged at your job was also terribly poorly executed; in your push to make yourself noticed, you failed hard at one of the main components of your job, which was processing books. In addition, I learned that my time wasn’t worth anything if I wasn’t being useful. If I wasn’t helping with stuff for your job, you didn’t really seem to want to spend any time with me - and if you did, from your tone and body expressions I was always left with the impression that I was an imposition.

So much of ‘adulting’ I’ve had to teach myself, from friends, books, and the internet. Things like how to curate your possessions, to eat food that is tasty and nutritious, to maintain things like a house and a car, to exercise and to take care of one’s body appropriately. There were lessons, too, you should have taught me and didn’t - like why a fifteen-year-old girl is never actually interesting to a man seven years her senior, or how to tell people no. 

Why did you have a child that you didn’t want to teach, play games with, or expose to new experiences? Why did you have a child when you left me to be achingly lonely after I started school? Why did you have a child when you treated me like an adult? In essence, why did you have a child when you didn’t want to be a parent?

I’m still so angry and frustrated at knowing that YOU squandered so much of the potential I had to be a happy, fulfilled person. Was your convenience, your to-do list worth my life?

Letters: Introduction

I've been reading books recommended by my therapist and other sources. We talk about them in my sessions. One recent book was "Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life" by Dr. Susan Forward and Craig Buck. In it, the author has exercises targeted toward those dealing with incest, but I felt that the exercises would be useful for me as well, obviously with a slight difference in focus.

One of these exercises is to write a letter to the 'main' abuser (in the book, which ever perpetrated the incest) and the other parent. Although in my case there wasn't incest, I do feel there was one parent who carried out the majority of the abuse, and one who effectively enabled it. In that respect, I'm going to post the letters I've written to each of them.

I don't expect my parents to ever see these letters. I'm not even sure I want them to unless I were about to cut off contact and burn those bridges. They're not nice, happy, 'thanks for the great childhood' letters, which you've probably guessed from the tenor of my previous posts' content. They are, however, what I feel, think, and remember.

Call and Answer

Five letters. That’s all it is. It’s not that the word is long or difficult to pronounce. It’s all the baggage the word carries.

Abuse.

Funny how difficult it is to say, isn’t it, when I’m describing something about myself. It’s the lump in my throat as I work up the courage to admit it - to myself, first.

I was abused.

I don’t really feel like I own that word. After all there are so many other people out there with stories that make mine look normal in comparison. I remember, then, being told that one person’s suffering does not negate another’s. Pain isn’t ranked.

I had an abusive childhood.

No one would believe me. I was fed (too well, some might say - and they are wrong), clothed, sheltered, sent to school. It wasn’t like I grew up in a shack. I remember telling other kids that said they wished they had my parents, that they didn’t know what my parents were like at home.

I was emotionally neglected.

I try not to think about it, the plummeting feeling of being canceled on again, the stomach twist of being yelled at in the car every morning, the heavy stone of giving advice on workplace conflicts and marriage troubles, the double-edged cut of sneaking chips - candy - anything I could eat that would make things a little brighter even for a moment.

My parents were emotionally abusive.

I want to say it’s not true. Maybe I imagined it? - except who would imagine a childhood so lonely by chance, or even design. My best friends were a guinea pig, stuffed animals, and books - not people and certainly not them.

My parents abused me.

Deep in my core, I know. This was not how growing up was supposed to be. Despite that, I have to deal now with the scars that take unusual shapes and the habits that no longer aid my survival. C-PTSD, they say.

I am a survivor of child abuse.

Trying to form new ways of talking, communicating, learning that asking for help is okay. Being an adult is so strange when the skills I’ve been taught my whole life are the opposite of what I need to thrive. How to eat, how to approach others, how to believe in myself. 

I refuse to let their abuse win.

I don’t think they treated me so by design. That would require a deeper level of self-awareness, and they don’t like therapists. Funny, that - the ones who have tended the lighthouses on the shore of mental health for me are Scylla and Charybdis for them.

I will triumph. 

I do not want to just survive.





Note: Scylla and Charybdis are monsters from the Odyssey that live on either side of a narrow strait; one is a multi-headed creature that eats men, and the other is a whirlpool that devours any ship unlucky enough to get too close.

Older musings on The Body Never Lies by Alice Miller

p.146
“The child was not given the nourishment needed from [the mother] and has found no substitute for this in later life. Without drugs, this gap can literally express itself as a feeling of physical hunger, gnawing away at the stomach, which contracts in response.”
- The Body Never Lies by Alice Miller

Constant hunger, but not for food; for attention and affection.

I remember saying I was jealous of her students because they got more of her time than I did - and I was told that was wrong because they’re impoverished, etc. That doesn’t change the fact that I felt - and still do - that my mother had chosen to lose herself to her school.

I remember doing assistant work for so many projects - worksheets, goody bags, cataloging, marking books for the collection, inventory, stuff for the yearly ‘reading carnivals’... I probably could have paid for college had I been paid minimum wage for all the time I spent working. I was “paid” in Tootsie Rolls or occasionally some thing I wanted.

All I really wanted was to be treated kindly, listened to with respect, and engaged with on an appropriate level. I can count the number of times my father has played chess with me (supposedly he likes chess) and it’s in the single digits. The only game mom really has ever played with me since...middle school? is Uno. I’m very aggressive in these games, possibly as a way of ‘punishing’ her for ignoring me all those years.

I still feel her school took her from me - although ‘took’ isn’t really correct; it’s more like a person who enters and stays in an emotionally abusive relationship despite everyone telling them to get out. School is where she hurt herself to the point of being almost disabled; she’s hurt both ankles, one to the point of requiring surgery and removal of the nerve to alleviate the pain. Even now, years after, she can only hobble.

I see in her constant martyrdom and stupid, arrogant overachieving the little kid still trying to impress a parent who only sees her as a tool. It’s not going to work. It never would have. You can’t make a narcissist love you, accept you. You might as well try to teach a snake to tap dance.

-

I don’t understand the whole “inner child” concept. Probably because I don’t think I ever really thought of myself as a child, nor was I really treated as a child when I was one. I was usually treated as a miniature, inexperienced adult - the curse of the gifted/autism spectrum.

I wasn’t supposed to get frustrated or want things that didn’t have monetary value or couldn’t be bought. I remember dad yelling at me over math homework when I asked for help, as even with his explanations I just wasn’t getting it. Small wonder I don’t like math and insist on doing things entirely by myself - that’s what I was forcefully taught. To not ‘bother’ other people by asking for help and to be the ‘little adult’ they expected.

I am in no way upset or angry at the (informal-ish) diagnosis of ASD; it just confirms what I already knew on some level.

I AM upset at the adults who constantly treated me as not a child and expected behavior more appropriate from an adult.

My Inner Child

My therapist asks me to reconnect with my inner child.
I cannot. There is none.
Surely you were little once. Think of yourself then, she says.
There were times when I was five, eleven, thirteen, sixteen
but I was not a child.
I was an adult who had not yet reached the age of majority.

When I was five, my frog died.
I am told I grieved so much
they asked the priest to talk to me,
about life and death, fleeting joy.
A teacher’s aide turned forty.
They decorated with tombstones;
prognostications of inevitable death.
When they found me under the table,
They were surprised
That I was angry,
That I vowed to hermit until I too was old.

When I was eleven, I learned
That I was fat.
Irredeemable. My crush didn’t like me back
So my mother (in her infinite wisdom)
“helped” me
(what I now recognize as sexual assault)
We bought him Halloween boxers
hung them in the cloak room
for all to see.
I wonder now whose humiliation was worse.

A classmate was harassed by a boy.
The school did nothing
until she left him vulgar, insulting notes to stay away-
then she got in trouble.

When I was thirteen, I had never realized before
that dichotomy between lonely and alone.
By yourself - at peace - was alone.
It comforted. Restored.
Surrounded by people and not one kindred soul
No confidante, no lunch buddy
my mother could not listen
her ears full of her own worries
made her deaf to mine.
That was lonely. Suffocating.
I can’t remember if it rained more that year
or if that is what I remember.

I lost my great-grandmother that year.
She treated me as a child - beloved but not
yet expected to shoulder the burdens of adults.
She taught me to crochet.
I have her hooks - a tiny touchstone with a loving person.

When I was (almost) sixteen, I learned
about kissing and desire.
Not from a boy - from a man six years older.
an ex-convict, tattooed, living in a trailer
parked on his father’s wife’s front lawn.
I learned too about adults and their whims.
The wife, once a friend, showed her true skin -
a creature bent on obtaining its own desires
without regard to anguish of any other.
That was the year I learned how to cut people out.

Later I had a boyfriend
brainwashed by his parents and the church.
I tried to raise him
but the damage had been done.
I could not raise us both.

When would I have been a child?
There was no time
between work, internships, angry bosses,
bitchy coworkers, marriage troubles,
history, science, English, geometry,
finances, traffic, French, statistics
feeding another’s desire to prove themselves
To whom? My question was never answered.

My inner child was sacrificed
on the altar of adults’ busy lives.