Letting go...again

Once upon a time, there was a little baby.  He was round and sweet with ten fingers and ten toes.  He had huge brown eyes and dark, long eyelashes.  His baby soft hair was curly with those springy open curls that wrap around your fingers when you touch them.  He was smart and so adorable.  His skin was a light brown and soft as only a baby's skin can be.  He had the most lilting laugh, bubbly and wonderful to hear.  I loved him, cared for him, fed him, changed his diapers, held him, kissed his toes and fell in love with him so deeply.  I was twelve years old.  


As he grew, I took his little hand and showed him the world.  I watched him, protected him, and defended him.  When the typhoon raged at night, I would steal into his room, which was the farthest from everyone's,  and carry him to mine and place him into my double bed so he could be with me; in case he awoke in fear.  I held him close and comforted him when he was afraid.  I played with him and his little friends and dressed him up and took him trick-or-treating on Halloweens.  I made tents for him and helped him play.  I washed his clothes and cleaned his  room.  I made his lunch and ate with him.  When he was six years old, I carried him on my back up and down the hills of Jerusalem because his little feet were too tired to go as far as he wanted to go.  When he was in school, I baked and decorated cookies and cupcakes for Halloween and Christmas and brought them to his class.  I drove him to concerts and made banners for us to hold so we could scream our lungs out;  I didn't know who the bands were but he did.  I drove him out in the forest to get him out of the house after his accident because he hated being cooped up.  I played "spoons" with him and his friends and made him designer look-alike shirts.
I drove him and his friends to midnight showings of Rocky Horror Picture Show and did all the fun stuff with the squirt guns and rice.  Then I drove them to late-night fast food places so they could squirt the window cashiers.  We laughed and laughed and had so much fun.  When other grown sisters would have been off doing their own thing; I spent time with him and his friends so he could go places because he couldn't drive yet.  I treated him  to movies, lunch out, and concerts.  


I loved watching  him grow and change.  I remember him calling the storm "roughy funder" and seeing his eyes light up at Christmas time.  I remember him laughing and running outside and  his  amazing eloquence.  I remember his jokes and his freckles.  I remember his playfulness and caring.  I remember his intelligence; he was so smart and insightful.  I remember how sweet he was when  I tucked him in for nap time or bed time; he didn't want to go but he was so good he would do it anyway.  He was always so well behaved and a good friend to his buddies.  His loyalty and generosity were wonderful to see. 




I got married when he was six years old and went away but I came back a year later and stayed for several years.  I moved out again with a boyfriend but came back again when that didn't work out.  I took care of him when our mother went to Texas and took him camping with me because he liked camping.  The one day, I married again, he was 15 and gave me away.  After that, we rarely saw each other because I moved away and began raising my own family.  


Yet I never forgot that little boy, my baby brother, deep in my heart.  He has a place, a him-shaped place in my heart that no one else can ever fill.  



Now we are both grown and we cannot relate to one another.  Our mother has damaged us both and has tried ( and succeeded) to stir dissention between us.  He has a wife and children but he thinks I am the wrong one, the overreacting one.  We grew up in a dysfunctional home, our mother was a narcissist who wove her web of harm to me and favoritism to him.  Despite this, I always loved him, I never begrudged him his successes or felt jealous of his money or his life.  I just want him to be happy because he is the first child I ever loved and cared for and I cannot imagine wanting to be (or have)  better than him. He feels like my first child but not.


But now we are apart;  he is still in the dysfunction while I have been through therapy and can  no longer tolerate being hurt by him or our mother so I have had to walk away.  This year seems full of walking-aways.    I feel deep grief and sadness;  I have loved him as long as he has lived, almost 40 years,  and there is a hole in my heart still shaped like him that cannot be filled.  He brushes off  my deep feelings for him and only when we relate on a superficial level does he show a softness to me  when he looks at me and even more when he looks at my children.  Yet when I mention the dysfunction; he grows hard and condescending.  This reaction is not his fault (because of the dysfunction)  but it feels like a knife is turning in a fresh and unhealed wound.  


My baby brother.  I miss you, I love you, why do you have to suffer and why does that suffering mean I cannot relate to you?  Why can't I help you?  This hurts so badly; as though he has died.   Why can't we be close?  Why can't we be friends?  And will the pain  ever go away? 

The light goes on....

The other day I was reading about narcissism.  I began to read about it because I was curious as to how it operates in my life and others' lives.  I came upon a site that listed symptoms of Narcissistic Personality Disorder and I was horrified to realize that both my parents and my older brother fit most of the listed character traits.  I also found a website for daughters of NPD mothers and the long characteristic descriptions were hauntingly familiar;  my mother was exactly like so many of them.  

The list is here:

• Has a grandiose sense of self-importance (e.g., exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements)
• Is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love
• Believes that he or she is "special" and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people (or institutions)
• Requires excessive admiration or attention
• Has a very strong sense of entitlement, e.g., unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations
• Is exploitative of others, e.g., takes advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends
• Lacks empathy, e.g., is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others
• Is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him or her
• Regularly shows arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes
• Displays an inherent selfishness
• Separates their children into scapegoats and golden child and triangulates their relationships to go only through the parent 
•  
Most of these represent my mother and a lot of them my father and brother.  It is when the affects on the child are listed that things got very disturbing.  I was the scapegoat for my mother so she trained me to supply her with attention, parent her, be her emotional support, see myself as worthless compared to her, and doubt my own intuitions.  I had no privacy, no boundaries, my mother competed with me sexually when I was a young adult, still treats me like the less-than child in the family in so many little ways.  The disorder is so difficult for most outsiders to see that the child is not believed by most people when they try to explain it. It causes very low self esteem, self doubt, enmeshment with the parent, lack of boundaries, relationshop problems and physical problems.  

As I saw my life finally in black and white on the screen and my intuitions  and feelings finally validated I began to cry deep wrenching sobs of relief.  I wasn't crazy or wrong after all.  I wasn't making things up, causing trouble, projecting, or being a bitch.  Instead,  because of the therapy I had been to, I had started to be independent and see her problem but had no name to call it.  And now that I am caring for my dad, I see it in him as well though he was less around to be as destructive as she was.  I also see it in my older brother who also shaped my view of myself. I also see it in my husband's mother and his younger sister who is his mother's golden child.  His dad seems to be an enabler.   

No wonder I felt so safe with my husband;  he was the first person to believe me when I told him about my mother.  I also believed him when he described his mother.  Our mothers display the list differently but they both had enough of the symptoms and characteristics that he and I were damaged.  And our families continue the abuse; he and I have felt like the unloved ones in both families.  

Now I have to work on achieving a sense of self.  I am stopping contact with my mother because the freedom that will allow me and my family sounds wonderful.  I cannot stop contact with my dad yet but I am working on doing that as well.  

I also need to realize that the needy part of me is still there and in need of scrutiny and work.  How to balance this when I have a family and a soon-to-be very busy schedule is going to be difficult.  At least I know where to start and that my life will get better and better as the days and weeks roll on. 

A little more.

I was the second child and only girl in my family until I was twelve; my little brother was born then.  I was born in Chicago to my Army dad and my stay-at-home mom (it was 1960) and I had an older brother.  When I was three we moved to Germany for about  three years.  Those were wonderful years filled with castles, fairy tales, ballet lessons, pink and white tutus, satin toe shoes, flowers and flower boxes, feather bedding, trips to amazingly beautiful places and saturation in the European cultures of Germany, France and the Netherlands. 
I was six when we came back to America.  The return devastated me.  We were stationed in Aurora, Colorado.  America was dirty, littered, ugly;  no fairytale black forest or castles, no beautiful art and architecture, just hick cowboys.  I hated my own country.  No one ever knew how I felt and I had no way of articulating my feelings then.

Soon after, my parents divorced;  I was only seven years old.  Their divorce was a shattering experience for my brother and I and he dealt with it by abusing me verbally and physically.  We moved several times and my brother and I were left alone a lot while our Mom worked. 

When I was in second grade, my Dad came to visit for Christmas.  My brother and I were outside playing and I came in to use the bathroom only to see my mom flat on her back, my dad straddling her and beating her.  I remember screaming and my brother came in with his new bow and arrow set in his hands;  he nocked the arrow and told Dad to get off our Mother or he would kill him.  Dad got off but Mom was black  and blue in the face. 

A few days later, we moved away from Colorado;  my mom drove us three to her bachelor brother's house in Pennsylvania.  A few days after we got there and she got us enrolled in school, she left and went back to Denver; leaving us alone with an uncle we barely knew.  His first nanny was mean but the second one was nice.  I remember crying myself to sleep at night a lot.  My big uncle, (he was well over six feet tall) would rock me in the rocking chair, hold me close and call me his little old bag because I wore some old grown up dresses he had in his basement.  Even though my brother was meaner than ever to me, I clung to him like a lifeline because by then, I felt I had lost my father and my mother;  my brother was barely ten years old.  My mother was only gone two months but it felt like a year to me. While I was there, my maternal grandmother got my hair cut on my birthday; it was so short it was like a boy and I  cried because my curly dark brown hair was gone. 

My mother came and got us and took us back to Denver where we met her new boyfriend.  He was an African American and we lived in a hotel for the summer months.  We moved to a house for the start of the school year and when I was nine, my mother married her African American boyfriend.  He resented my brother and I because he really just wanted Mom to himself.  That same year, my mom told me she didn't trust my dad around me so that was why we only saw him in the summer for a month at his mother's house.  From then on, I was afraid to love my father. 

We moved in the middle of the night because my step dad couldn't make enough money to pay the rent and we were running from unpaid rent.  The new home we rented was in a neighborhood with mostly Black people.  My brother was beaten up by some of the Black kids there;  they used the tips of fishing rods to beat him which left welts on his back.  He had been a gentle (except to me) person all his life, more the studious type.  In that house, my brother and I were awakened in the middle of the night after my mom and stepdad had had a huge, screaming fight.  My stepdad said he was taking mom to the emergency room because she tried to kill herself.  I think I was ten years old. My brother and I clung to her the next day as she lay in bed, depressed.  We were both afraid to leave her alone lest she try again.

We moved from that house to another in a different neighborhood.  By this time, I was in fifth grade and looking big and chunky so kids were teasing me about being fat on a daily basis.  My Mom got pregnant while my brother and I were on our annual summer month-long  visit to our dad and fraternal grandmother's place.  Those visits were filled with carefree summer days with our dad and lots of religious holy roller stuff.

When I was told that my mom was pregnant, I didn't feel anything but resentment.  Her pregnancy was difficult so I was made, as the only girl, to do most of the hosuework, all of the laundry and run and fetch for my mother every day.  My baby brother was born at the end of May so I spent my summer vacation getting up at 7 AM every morning to make my mom breakfast because no one else would do it.  I was left with the baby every time the family went anywhere and I had to change his diapers, rinse them out in the toilet, wash, hang out, take down, fold them and put them away.   My older brother just got to play with our baby brother so he liked him. 

My mom kicked out our stepdad when the baby was about 4 or 5 months old.  Later, after Christmas, my older brother went to live with our Dad and my Mom, baby brother and I moved to inner city Denver.  I was alone in a public bathroom in Denver when I was molested by a young man who felt me up, forced a kiss on me, touched my breasts and threatened to hurt me. He was pressed up against me, full length and my back was against the wall.    I was lucky that I got away before anything worse happened but that shook me to the core.  I was five feet seven inches tall, a BIG girl and up until then, feeling perfectly capable of taking care of myself but that confidence was destroyed in those few minutes against that wall in that bathroom.  I  was attending yet another school.

The summer I was 13, my mother decided to divorce my stepdad and let me move in with my dad, too.  I loved living on base with my Dad because it meant stability.  I was still wary of my Dad, though he never did try to do anything sexual to me.  Military bases are such microcosms where everyone knows what you are going through so they are just more cohesive and accepting to some degree.  It is like living in a small town.   On my 14th brithday, my parents remarried.  I was fairly content then.  I loved my little brother by then and felt like I was his second mother. 

when I was 15, my dad got orders to go to Okinawa so we packed up and moved there for a year.  That was so much fun!  I loved living there and seeing the Japanese culture, people, architecture, music, food and so on.  Though I was still fat and  introverted, I was enjoying the church youth group and the camping trips we made. 

We moved to Lawton, OK after that year in Okinawa.  After I turned sixteen , my brother went to live with our fraternal grandmother and I loved being out from under his overbearing influence.  When we got on-base housing and it would mean switching schools (which would have been my 15th school in 11 years)  my parents took me out instead and allowed me to work as a child care worker for the post chapels.  I earned money but most of all, I was allowed to study anything I wanted.  I came home with stacks of books on ancient civilizations, religions, anthropology, psychology and history.  My brother came back to live with us and then, after being there for a year, my Dad prepared to retire in Tucson. 

My whole life, throughout all this, I was aware that I seemed to have intuition though I didn't know what it was called back then.  I would lie on the ground, spread eagled, on a rainy day and feel the rain fall on me.  I felt like  I was one with the earth, as though the rain soaked into me and then into the ground.  The wind caressed my face and lifted my hair during storms and I loved the electric feeling of storms.  I always felt like an old soul and like someone that knew things that I could never describe to anyone else.  I seemed to know what people were feeling or when they were lying.  In Fort Sill, when I was 16, I would light a small flame in my room, chant some words, face the west window (I had three windows in my room then), feel the energy rise up in me until my fingertips tingled and I fairly burst with it.  I wanted to let it out with a primal scream but on-base curfew being what it was I could not so it was a wordless and silent scream.  I felt things so much and I could not tell anyone because my family were predominantly air signs who lived in their heads and were not familiar with intuition; they often belittled me for it.  I felt like I was different from my family and most people. 

We moved to Tucson and I was 18; I took my GED and passed and read everything I could get my hands on about astrology, Paganism, tarot cards, and Robert Wilson's book "Cosmic Trigger."  This book was about thinking about what you think about and being aware.   

I was a sheltered but aware virgin, taught to think for myself and to think out of the box.  I was very innocent and unprepared for life;  I knew all the facts and correct info about sex and procreation and a lot about politics and how people really think and act but I was ignorant of relationships for the most part.  I was intensely curious about sex and relationships after reading so many romance novels (including the smutty ones) but was afraid; I felt that men couldn't be trusted.  Even my brother was messed up.   I overheard him tell my mother (through the AC vent between our rooms) that he thought I "wanted him"  sexually.  I was sick to my stomach.  I didn't like my mother, I was estranged from my father though I lived in the same house with him, and now my older brother, who I looked up to, was getting sexual thoughts about  me.  I didn't belong to any of them and my little brother was too young for me to relate to much.    I wanted to get out and away from this sick family.  I was looking for love and acceptance.   Within a year, I would travel and my life would change drastically. 




But that is for another post.