2.10.10
I have to say, I'm at a loss today--too much to write, too little passion or inspiration to write. Things, remarkably, are going fine. i got the news Monday afternoon that my father's polyp, found where he had cancer several years ago, was benign. At first I did the usual--gasp, smile, grin, laugh, exclaim "I knew it, I knew it!" (despite the fact that I well know--such things can't be known) to which my mother interjected "I did, too." They were "on their way out the door" to some sort of operatic outdoor concert at their gated community in FLA, so we couldn't talk for long. I did manage to get in there--"so when can I come down for a long week-end?" This was harbinger of things to come. Then, after hanging up, I did the requisite jumping up and down and telling anyone I could find suitable in the house to tell. "It's benign! It's benign!"
None of that did anything for me. Very little of those exclamations, proclamations, or turning figurative cartwheel in the living room seemed very accurate as to how I was feeling; I still felt like shit, but it had to be done, the excitement had to be expressed, if only as estimated interpersonal truth.
What did really happen was over the next several hours, the entire evening actually, as I watched t.v. and talked to Dr. M and took an extra anti-psychotic for my persistent symptoms, and ate dinner and walked to my meditation class and sat there and walked home, was that the relief slowly seeped in, like a cool maroon tide flooding a fecund marsh, feeding it, bringing the reeds and nesting birds back to life. The shroud of psychosis enveloping me populated with all those instant movies and paranoid fear, and the stinky, pungent smell of sickness, was lifted and I could breathe a bit better again. Left in my chest was the rock of despair, the insistent of suicidal rage but by morning that, too was gone. Note: none of this completely abandons me but believe you me, the air is much cleaner up here now.
Clearly the anxiety, the being on tinder hooks, waiting, waiting, waiting for this doctor to call with the biopsy results and waiting, waiting some more as he failed day after day to call in the time frame he said he would, ratcheted up my symptoms. Maybe this is a clue to my previous question: "where does disease end and human begin." Human stress, in this case, gave my illness a boot in the ass that shot it so far into the atmosphere on a wild arc of a ride that could only decline once the stress was removed. But then there was the other boot, this one shod on the foot of my family--we weren't allowed to talk about it. Hmmm...
It was hard, when I called my mother the first time, when I was sure the results to my dad's test were in, to hear her say to me breathlessly and urgently (almost violently) "Wendy, you've got to take a page from my book...you've just got to erase it, erase it from your head. " "But you know i don't work that way, mum. " (a daring response from me) "Well, you've got to try." (or something like that.) "But it doesn't always help, mum." "I know, I know, sometimes it comes around and bites you in the ass, but it is the only way..." And Then I heard the recipe for chicken caccitore at manic speed until she gave the phone to my dad and I heard about the palm rats in the attic in surreal detail. Then the phone call ended, me knowing I wouldn't be calling again soon.
I haven't written this stuff about my family in a long time and I can feel the sneaking snake of "my illness is not one at all but just emotional wreckage from living in a family where most stuff was "erased" I know this is not true. I know I have a bitch of an illness AND I know that it took years, my adult lifetime, for my parents to learn it can't be erased AND I think I know that most of this progress has been pushed onward by my learning--still in progress of course--to take care of myself. When I delivered my father's seventieth birthday cake to him amongst our entire family singing to him, he leaned a bit towards me, sparkling his eyes up at me and said softly "I never thought you'd make it here." At first I thought he meant to the house that day, then I understood. I can take care of myself. And when I call my mother without the strain of need in my voice, five times out of ten we have an enjoyable conversation and she ends with "I love you," which I return. She never used to say that Now, now that I can take care of my self, she is free to love me. There is space created in the cocoon that has bound us so tightly.
This freedom, this air to breathe and love, this space to enjoy comes out of decisions I have made. And to be fair, decisions my parents have made. When my first half-way house closed down, my instinct was to run home to my parents and live there until it was opened again. My mother's instinct was to get me an apartment ASAP. Instead, after crying, I breathed and made the best decision I've probably ever made. I agreed to go to another house in the system until they reopened the first one. I know living with my parents for a month or two rot would away any progress I was making in a beaker full of old patterns like following my parents around the house and long drawn out conversations with my mother about my emotional life and stuffed irritations and jealousy of my sister's life and fear of her children and resentment of her relationship with mum and dad, and so forth. Then, after finding the second house much better than the first, I, yes I and no one else, decided to stay and not go back to the first, newly staffed, house. It was the right decision by far and I made it on my own in the office with the director. I remember discussing it with my mother, telling her what I was deciding, getting her support, but clearly it was left up to me, and I felt confident about it.
Another decision I made, was to allow myself to see my parents aging and to change how I related to them. Especially, my mum. I started listening to her, and asking her questions as well as being a little more honest with her about myself--just the little things, like when she gasps and startles in the passenger seat of my car as I drive I've told her it is not helpful as she proposed but is harmful as it makes me a more nervous driver with her in the car. In the camera store, as we talk to the salesman I ask a question and she answers it. "Please let me ask questions, " I request and she snaps at me. I don't let it get into a fight. I listen to her about her bridge and golf and I look for common areas of interest. I mostly forgive her. I don't want to be mad at her, angry, furious, whatever. I don't want to blame her. If she is a tenth as anxious and fearful and paranoid as I am, I understand that she could not help me as a child deal with my own illness. What ensued that was a terrible tangling of our needs and obscuring of our boundaries and competition for my father's affection, and jealousy of each others success. What I'm left with in the end is this immutable belief that if I "get better" or if I am confident, talented, and take up space; if I lay stake to the veins, aortas, capillaries of my nature and my illness and treat myself and it with love and kindness, if I, in effect, take over her role--to save me--, as antiquated and impossible to fill as it is, she will die, as if we breathe from the same lungs and nourish ourselves from the same heart. My blossoming will kill her. I can only survive from her ashes. Guilt. Guilt. Unfathomable guilt is what I feel for growing up, because, after all, isn't that what I'm talking about, illness or no illness?
The odd thing is I know, too, that while all these wild beliefs and horrendous feelings about my mother whiz around in my head and chest and gut and taunt me with a deep sense of authenticity, I know they are not true. For am I not taking care of myself and is not my mother alive and well, and really, she's telling me she loves me. It is so damn hard for this stuff to take root!
Of course in the end, I am trading the fantasy of being instantly and dramatically saved forever by another for the reality something a previous therapist called my dad's love for me--"ordinary love." Is that enough when the devil is pouring oil on my body and my skin is peeling off and my mind is dank and burning all at the same time? Not not really. Then it is a case of surviving the unsurvivable and that is when my love, for myself, counts the most.