At age 13, I was struck by the irony of my mother's dying on Thanksgiving Eve. It was long ago and I've rarely shed tears for my mother. I never think about her. I dream about her.
In my dreams she is alive. When I was younger I used to dream that the cancer had been a mistake. We are doing very ordinary things. Shopping. Preparing the house for Christmas. Cooking. I am utterly relieved in my dream that she is still with me.
In my 30s I had that recurring dream only with one difference. In the dream I realize it's a dream and my mother is really dead. After that, the dreams were less wonderful but also less painful to wake from.
Before my mother even got sick, I used to wonder: if I had to lose a parent, which would be harder to lose? Mommy or Daddy? My child self already splintering into multiple personas for reasons unknown; I meditated on all sorts of morbid things. My favorite author was Edgar Allen Poe.
Well, Daddy at least had a job and an income. There'd be no real uprooting of our lives if he were the survivor. It seemed I should prefer this option to me. But.
But when I thought of losing my mother the alarm was so deep I couldn't fathom it. If I had Daddy but not Mommy I'd lose everything. It was unimaginable to my child self to live alone with my father. Too horrifying to dwell on. So I didn't dwell on it.
But 5 or so years after that she was. Dead. And my 13-year-old brain would not fathom it. Refused to fathom it.
On the day she died I made a conscious decision to pretend my mother had never existed. I clearly remember thinking this was the only way I would survive the remainder of my life.
Last year was 40 years-- the anniversary I never acknowledge but always always feel.
A shock. Too shocked for tears. More of a shutting down of systems.
This is not healthy. I've known that.
About 10 years ago I got some relief from the grief working with an inner-child therapist. The therapy was unlicensed and unleashed a fury in me so severe I now see it was the ultimate cause of my divorce 5 years ago. I mean just this moment.
Just this moment. I realize it was that therapy that brought me back to life. Made me feel. Made me a person. But a wild dangerous person. A grown child who could not tolerate the narcissist she'd been married to for 15 years one more second.
Not
one
more
second
BOOM
I threatened her (pronouns matter; she was a male-to-female transsexual who grew increasingly man-like and less female 10 years into transition...very strange and painful as the man re-took control of the person and she became highly controlling and paranoid and jealous)
Yeah, no matter how flat you make a pancake it has two sides
I threatened her
with knives,
a bathtub full of knives.
(where could i have gotten all those knives but that's how she described it. I read the report. We never spoke again. Never again spoke after 20 years together)
Dumb.
So fucking dumb. I I'd have hung in there a few more months I'd be a widow now with all the bells and whistles of an officer's widow. Reckless.
No words. Like after my mother died it was forbidden to mention her name. The word "mother" would not come out of my throat until I was 35 or so. It stuck and choked me so I swallowed it.
I remember the Christmas after that Thanksgiving. My cousin was setting the table for the family. She kept saying how the table was one person short, she could not remember why, and she kept trying to think out loud why the count was minus one...Her mother (my aunt) said:
Things are different now. Then a look. Then nothing.
No one talked to me I had no voice of my own.
Agonizingly shy. Agonizing.
It was what it was. There was no reason to complain. There was no reason for it. I had everything I needed. The bills were all paid.
But no one, NO ONE had ever gotten through to me. That is precious. That is worth all the loss. Still it didn't have to happen that way. Reckless therapy. I grabbed the lifeline but it turned to fire and i got burned.
I didn't realize it at the time. That's the gift of dissociation. Living in a trance.
Mesmerized like by a Glass Menagerie. I saw that film and it hit me: Laura...I am Laura. Then I grew up and moved to the town where the man wrote it. The first place I stayed was owned by a woman named Laura and her guesthouse had a glass menagerie in the window. I fell in love with Key West like I never loved a human. Couldn't...can't love a human.
For a while I didn't know --maybe I I really had meant to kill her. I sought counseling. I begged new and ethical counselor Steve "Am I dangerous?" I told him everything.
No, he said. Not dangerous.
How do you know?
Well, you're female for one. (He always said that. So statistically it was way unlikely I'd do anything like that. But not impossible? I'd have to take that.)
Now I realize I would not have. Murder isn't in me. If it were I'd have done it sooner and be living on the gravy train today. The threat was in her distorted mind. Her mind which had me so in thrall I actually believed I'd threatened to kill her.
No such thing. It was a stupid cry for help.
A bathtub full of knives. Where would I have gotten all those knives?
A cry for help heard by a midwife I much much later found was very much insane. Still is. More quackery.
A quack killed my mother a dangerous quack but she trusted him cuz he had an MD and she trusted him near to death until a real OB/GYN stepped in and gave her proper treatment. Too Late. Way way way too late.
It turned her mother into a muttering bundle of pain.
Boźe Boźe Boźe...no words no words only god god god. I knew then there was no god. It took 40 years for that knowledge to catch up with me.
I have problems with authority.
A bathtub full of cries for help.
I didn't get help. I got tossed out on my ear and banned forever.
Five years later and I'm still reeling...trying to pull myself out of this ditch I've dug myself into. Every movement is agony.
Every moment alive and feeling is another lifetime in hell.
I'm a theatrical person. I hyperbolize. It's my salvation and my downfall. Theatre is like that. It likes clear opposites...battles fought over and over the same fucking battles only with different costumes and scenery.
And that's OK. I'm not criticizing. that's what art is. Memento Mori. How small we all are how ethereal how dust dust dust
I'm only now beginning to put that genie back in the bottle.
It's the anniversary of her death and i cannot let myself cry. If I do I will tear myself inside out with hysterical sobbing. My sobriety is wrapped around this in complex but obvious ways now I look at it.
Cuz I can't look at it. Not without something. No alcohol. No with alcohol I'd be starting the sobs but it would end. It would end and I'd pass out and feel OK a few hours later.
Carmina Burana...a poem of relentless pain. Set to relentless music. Odd how people find it stirring. It feels majestic to people who have no idea what the song is really about. It's about rolling that rock Mr. Sysyphus. Endless cycles of pain and loss.
Sure, that feels majestic.
Death adds a majesty to life like no other concept. Opposites. The journey if you are reading this you have to take. My maggoty little life will end in dust.
Memento mori. Remember we are dust.
I think this might be a poem but I can't write it. Staccato. Gulps of feeling and then back again to numb.
Seesaw zig zag teeter totter topsy turvey
and we all fall down.
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