An End

Last night I dreamt our house was sinking. Every time I looked out the window I saw the earth around our house swallow up more and more of our home and everything in it.

Peter and I were scrambling trying to get our two kids and four animals out of the house before it was swallowed completely. It seemed impossible to get all of our family together and no one would leave without the others (which was kind of sweet but also infuriating and troubling).

I woke just before the house was swallowed completely.

Here is the completely unsurprising dream interpretation of a house is sinking into the earth:

To dream that you or something is sinking suggests that you are feeling overwhelmed. Someone or something is pulling your down. Alternatively, the dream means that some important and significant stage in your life may be coming to an end. 

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For those who have followed my journey, you know the story. For those who have not, my mother was a bright, funny, spirited, woman with so so many dreams. She achieved several of those dreams. And she did so while not getting support and help for her pretty significant mental illness.

However, she found a way to numb the pain and began self medicating with drugs and alcohol about 20 years ago. We have not seen each other in 8 years. She died at 65 of complications resulting from alcoholism.

These past 2 weeks I have felt flooded much of the time--so many thoughts and feelings that I can't tease them apart or think them through. Flitting in and out or sinking deep into my bones, these thoughts and feelings are pulling at me as if being tossed by a wave....wave after wave after wave...

And, the rest of life doesn't stop. There are still children and pets, with their own crises and needs and lives. And there is still a pandemic and we still are living in this altered state. There is much to wade through in the turbulent flood and I am chest high.

I am processing this significant stage of my life coming to an end and will be for as long as it takes. This week we are preparing for my mother's virtual memorial. Watching old videos and looking through her writings and pictures have been both painful and healing. I hope the memorial we are planning brings others who have loved her some catharsis. Creating it certainly has.

PTSD and going forward

My therapist says I have PTSD. I checked out the description on wikipedia:

Posttraumatic stress disorder (also known as post-traumatic stress disorder orPTSD) is a severe anxiety disorder that can develop after exposure to any event that results in psychological trauma.^[1][2][3] This event may involve the threat of death to oneself or to someone else, or to one's own or someone else's physical, sexual, or psychological integrity,^[1] overwhelming the individual's ability to cope. As an effect of psychological trauma, PTSD is less frequent and more enduring than the more commonly seen acute stress response.

Diagnostic symptoms for PTSD include re-experiencing the original trauma(s) through flashbacks or nightmares, avoidance of stimuli associated with the trauma, and increased arousal – such as difficulty falling or staying asleep, anger, andhypervigilance.

And I agree. This label has both freaked me out and brought me comfort. "Oh...that's what it is. Of course..." Or, "Oh that's what it is! Crap!" Either way, it is accurate.

I have not been able to stay asleep lately and I am, as ever, hyper vigilant. If I spy a tan sedan, my heart races....and not in a good way. I have spent so many years now feeling like I am holding back the wall of crazy to create a clear space for my children to have a crazy free childhood. Now I see that I have paid little attention to what holding that back in such a way is doing to me. I am starting to crack. But I am getting help.

I am talking with my therapist regularly and I am now talking with my family doctor. She has suggested EMDR, a therapy that I admittedly do not understand very well, but apparently helps to connect the left and right sides of the brain and can help take the visceral emotional response out of the equation...or at least let me see it through more rational adult eyes. My doctor is also giving me something to help me get to and stay asleep for more than 30 minutes.

I am happy with my plan. As happy as a situationally depressed, anxious and traumatized person can be. We'll see how it works out for me. More on that later.

Last night my mother emailed me again. Well, me, my sister and my uncle. I wept after reading it. She may not be using, but she is still a mess. She is delusional at best. And now she doesn't even know how to keep up the facade well enough to fool people for long. Who knows how long this newest person will last. My rational brain said, I really should just block her emails. I have made my position clear and she is choosing to not hear it. I do not need to hear from her in delusionville. It is not good for me. My emotional brain said, she wants pictures of us. Her kids...her grandkids...oh my god, if I was deprived of the joy of my children I would be lost. How can I do this to her? How can I deprive her of us? And then I try to fall asleep and wake up panicked...again...and realize, I cannot do this.

I just can't hear from her right now. Not "harmless" yet delusion filled emails. The perverted message is getting through my defenses and knocking me down. And I cannot afford to go through my life as me, as a mother, knocked out.

Joy in the midst of sadness

I derive so much joy from my children. They are a constant source of laughter and delight. I feel such gratitude for them. I feel honored to be their mother, to be able to shepherd them through their childhoods, to be the one whose arms they run to when they are hurt or scared or sad. It is a tremendous blessing, the good and the bad. But there are days when I am just sad and down and I have at times struggled with these days in how to best parent through it.

On exhausted days I remind myself that there will come a day when my kids are older that I long for R (my one year old) wanting to crawl into my lap continually and bring me a "boo" (book). Or for L (my 5 year old) to have a seemingly endless list of questions about stars and the solar system while upside down on the couch and kicking his legs around. They will likely not be doing this same thing when they are 18 and 14 or even 9 and 5. I want to appreciate it in the moment, while it is happening, really soak it up and let it feed my soul. But, and isn't this always the kicker, it is exactly at those moments when you have been home with your kids for 5 continuous snow days that you feel like a crazy person who needs just a moment of silence with her body to herself. Yet, here comes R with another "boo" and there is L with repeated and increasingly loud questions about the Sun.

When I fall short in moments like this, when I do not react with loving warmth and patience, I have, in the recent past, been hard on myself. When I say, "No R, not now," Or "L, enough with the questions for now. You need to find something quiet to do," I feel that I will kick myself down the road for this missed opportunity to connect with my children in a mutually enriching way.

So steeped am I in healing from my own childhood that I sometimes forget what it is to be healthy.

Being healthy is not about never showing that you are tired or sad. Being healthy is not about denying those feelings and faking it. Being healthy is not about white knuckling it. Being healthy does not exclude sad feelings, tired or overwhelmed moments. And my children can see me in those moments.

It is okay. It is good even. Because then they see me recover. They see me need a moment of silence, and then seek them out to read a book. They see me need to have my body to myself and 10 minutes later be ready to wrestle and tickle them on the floor. They see me rise and fall in healthy rhythms throughout my days.

Talking about these rhythms and needs with my son have even helped him identify his own needs for space and quiet times in the midst of over stimulation. So fearful am I of my mother's very erratic and scary ups and downs that I have tried to negate all signs of somber and tired moods. But I am not my mother and my kids are not me. They continue to fearlessly run around not worried that I am going to explode. Because I don't. I do lots of things, but I do not turn on them. I am predictable, even in my sad moments. They do not look at me with cautious fear when I feel sad.

And even in the midst of my sad day I find unspeakable joy in this.

Friend or Foe?

My mother's most recent "other", point person, enabler wonders why we are no longer facebook friends. She caught on to my recent silent friend deletion. In an attempt to rid my life of the drama, and after she left cursing, screaming ugly posts on my mother's facebook wall, I defriended her and now she wants to know why. Where to begin?

I share an awkward relationship with my mother's other enablers. I have been known to warn them at the beginning. I say something to the effect of: "I know my mother is reaching out to you lately. I'm not sure what she is saying, but I just want you to know that she is sick and really needs help." In response to this I have heard a mix of responses.

The most recent "other" responded by telling me that my mother is indeed sick and does need help--from me, her ungrateful daughter. To which I did not reply. It is a sickening feeling to know that out there in the world your name and reputation are being dragged through the mud by your mother and her "others". I've gotten more used to it by now, but it never feels good.

I feel sympathetic for these others, as I know the disturbingly bewitching ways of my mother. I understand what is like to have her say you are the only one who truly understands her and to have her shower you with praise. This is how she begins to pull others into her reality. A place I resided for much of the 80s and 90s.

For all the sympathy I feel however, do I want to be facebook friends? We were in contact while my mother was actively using her when I was more interested in my mother's whereabouts. But really, is this a connection that is anything but depressing and ugly for me?

My mother's enablers fall into three main categories. The first is the kind and naive friend. This person hears my mother's very convincing tales of woe and persecution and takes it upon themselves to offer her a "fresh start."

The second type is the person with an agenda of their own. These folks have issues themselves: an ex boyfriend who was controlling and abusive, a friend who was an alcoholic. These people fall for the lines but also weave them into their own distorted reality to create a compounded delusion. These alliances can be the ugliest and most long lasting.

The third category of my mother's enablers are her daughters. Her daughters are hewn into the shape of attack dog, fierce defender, loyal abider and dream continuer. We are extensions of her when it feels good to her and separate from her when it does not. We were raised to be this so it was the easiest and most natural of enabling situations for my mother. We have had to fight our way out of the tangled web and we continue to work on rewiring our minds and hearts. It is as if my pain, panic, worry and joy sensors were all connected to my mother's well being...thus making her well being paramount to my own wellness.

This connection has had to be severed.

Becoming a mother and realizing that I now have little people dependent on me made me wake up. Having my mother live perilously close to the edge or over the edge, as the case may be, also made me wake up.

My mother's other "others" out there in the world are like ghost relatives. They have been likewise used and abused, some more grotesquely than others. Some have seen that my mother is sick, some are still vying to be her "other" again soon.

I am trying to move on with my life. For myself and for my children and husband and, truthfully, there just is not room in that picture for hauntings by these others. So, yes, I am no longer her facebook friend and hopefully soon she will move on too.

Slow death

I've recently been receiving emails about a friend whose wife's mother just passed away after battling a terminal illness. My heart goes out to this friend and his wife and family. After I received this email I thought, I do not envy them this situation (I mean, who would?), but there was, if I am totally honest, a part of me, that envies the clarity with which one can speak of such an event.

It is tragic and it is life's unavoidable sadness when a loved one dies. We mourn, we pay respects, we weep, we come together, we galvanize around the love shaped hole that this person left in our lives. It is terrible and sad and life upending, but it doesn't feel perverse.

In my life I go forward with straightforward sincerity and honesty, as much as a cynical and slightly jaded person can, yet with my mother all feelings are perverse and convoluted. With love comes hate, with worry comes rage, with sadness comes apathy...I feel dirty when I think of her and there is no one else in my world who makes me feel that way, thank god.

I'm ashamed to say that in more than a little way I envy the straightforward despair and longing. Now, to be fair, I don't really know this woman's family and for all I know there is a convoluted jumble of feelings there too, but this is how I perceive these events and how I have experienced death with other family members. Family members who are somberly and beautifully just...missed and loved.

I am currently working on not becoming a bitter person. Usually I can see the relativity of situations when people discuss family, but sometimes, like now, when things are raw and my mom is found wandering the streets of another state in a sheet, I have a hard time feeling anything but bitter rage at this f'd up hand I've been dealt.

I will not intervene for she doesn't want actual help. And now I'm trying not to even think of her because it only makes me anxious and depressed imagining what she is doing today, right now, as I type this. The only thing that my thinking of her accomplishes, as far as I can see it, is it makes me less available for myself, my husband and my children. The very thing I swore I would not do.

But as I have aged I have seen that the promises of youth are steeped in idealism that often blur with time. So, my kids occasionally see me distracted or stressed. It is less than ideal, sure. But they also see me recover and do so more and more quickly. Such is life. But I will not have my kids hold me while I cry about my mother like my mother did to me. That buck stops here.

On the one hand I have no issue with that as I am not mentally ill like my mother and feel no impulse to rely on my children emotionally (and for that I am so so grateful). On the other hand it is difficult to be the emotional shock absorber as it needs to go somewhere other than deeper into me. I do not want it and will not take it anymore.

I have some ideas for how to channel it and remain hopeful that they will be healthy outlets. For now, I'll end.

To begin

I tried to start this blog a few months ago. I was beginning to see the deep need to share and open up about my situation with my mother. But then I stopped short of posting anything for fear that my mother would find it. I was paralyzed.

What I have realized is that if I predicate my actions and freedoms based around my mother I will go crazy, or stay crazy, as the case may be.

I believe with all my heart that my mother has a borderline personality disorder. It took me many years to figure out what to call it. It looks like different things at different points in her life, but all tallied, this is my best fit for what I see and experience.

The problem is (and to be honest, there are many problems) that my mother is a psychologist. A clinical psychologist, no less, who has worked at borderline clinics. But that is not all. She also writes books on parenting. Try bringing this one in for family therapy.

However, in her last iteration of instability, we did just that, or at least we tried, until our therapist told us she could not continue until my mother was off of substances.

In the past year she went from a well paid job, an apartment in the same town we live in and occasional dinners with my family, to being homeless for four months, crashing with friends, ruining marriages, and drinking and drugging so much she has to be regularly hospitalized.

Fantastic. So how do I respond to this? 15 years ago I would have been with her in the moment, enabling and defending her and upholding her deluded reality. 10 years ago I would have stepped in to help with the crisis (for my little sister's sake more than for my mother's at that point, as she was only 13). 5 years go I was starting to take a stand, but would still put a next day ticket on an almost maxxed out credit card to fly to be with my mother who "had a stroke" (with many empty pill bottles around). Now, I distance.

A wise woman once told me what happens to people who empathize with crazy people: they go crazy. And that was where I was, trying to connect my mother's "reality" to reality. I was trained well and it has taken years of consistent work to free myself and I'm not quite there, but I'm pretty damned far along.

I will not get into the back story right now. But I did want to finally commit to putting something out there in this shared space, bravely as a testimony to my experience.

A friend reminded me the other day that it will not always feel this raw. And I think that is true. Her roller coaster is never ending, yes, but I am finally getting off of her ride.