Often when I share about my childhood in therapy with Katina, she says she thinks of me being so so tiny in a family of people so much more fully grown looking up and when I think of all the body problems I have had centred around my head and my neck as well as the problems with ‘staying inside my own skin’ this makes sense.. I was so often overwhelmed by what was going on and felt myself to be in another world in so many ways.
I just looked again at a photo I posted of me taken on my older sister’s wedding day in December 1965.. In it I am dressed as all the adults were in a blue dress and pillbox hat. I remember in parts the torture of the hair salon that day. My long hair was all coiled up into ringlets to be put under the hat (I was only 3 years old at the time).. My body is also twisted to one side and my right shoulder is up around my right ear… I don’t look at all comfortable.. I look even more miserable in the photo taken at my older brother’s wedding about 3 years later.. In that photo Dad is holding my hand and my own hand is all clenched up..
My other sister who has had so many struggles with depression, anxiety and coming alive looks positively miserable in the later photo and it is a funny thing that apparently they got two of the skirt parts of the bridesmaids dresses mixed up so that the one she is wearing is far too short, whereas the one on the other bridesmaid is far too long.. It was also revealed to me a few years ago that one part of our family on Mum’s side was not considered genteel enough to be asked to the wedding this it the relative that was also asked by my brother’s side of the family who it was wanted information on my Mum’s death as in their words “Grandma is worth a lot of money.” If you knew my relative Julie this would be the last thing on her mind as she cared for Mum due to the fact of being related and they spoke often on the phone.. and this is the relative who has done so much research on the painful history of addiction and loss on my Mum’s side of the family.
When I returned home in 1987 after Dad died and all of the other trauma, it was to another wedding.. My Mum had decided to marry a man she had met from the same squadron my father was a part of despite the fact she had only known him a short time, something she later came to admit was a mistake and came out of loneliness and unresolved grief. I was not jealous she was marrying Ross but I do remember being very uncomfortable on the day wearing a dress and shoes that were not mine.. and could not have been more ill suited to me…To be honest I am glad Mum had someone to share her life with but it came at the expense of her being able to be as available as she could have been to me at a time I so needed her and was still in active addiction. That said, by that time my wounds were mine to carry and I would act them out and go through a lot more disasters before finally getting sober 6 years later. The responsibility really lay with me to work on them.
Ross and Mum ended up separating a year or so before my ex husband left me in August 2004… Ross would often call me and tell me how Mum was the love of his life but he left as he did not want to be a burden and my Mum had the care of my older sister Judith who, at that stage was still alive and resident at a group home for people with acquired brain injury.. Jude loved Ross and saw that, at times, Mum didn’t treat him as well as she could but often Ross would be reliving much of his war trauma in stories that went on and on about his narrow escape from Holland that was, at that time, occupied by Nazi forces.. Ross had to leave the Netherlands suddenly and never got to say goodbye to his family and mother and his mother then had a breakdown, not knowing if her son was actually alive or dead for many years, until after the Second World War ended. I always showed compassion to Ross even when others saw him to be ‘a pain.’ And my older sister had a very soft spot for him as well.
Today I know I am no longer that little child but I maintain a strong interest in both babies and children.. I just dropped my sister back to the hospital after she rang me to see if I could come and take her home to get some warm clothes as the temps are starting to drop below freezing here right now.. On the way home we went for a coffee and there was a little baby sitting on her mother’s lap and as usual I made eye contact and in time managed to get shy smile out of the baby. The Mum started opening up to me about the cold and seemed genuinely chuffed someone had connected with her.
I am grateful today to have been able to respond today to the request to be there for my sister.. I am not asking or expecting anything from my family any more. While at the unit where she now lives we talked over how she is feeling living in Mum’s own place now and we spoke about psychological separation.. I feel my sister is getting stronger somehow. I felt signs of growth today in the fact she called to ask for my help, thought the clothes she did have were ‘enough’ and the fact she has been walking with a group at the hospital.. These are small signs of progress I see and I keep being hopeful for her..
It often seems to me that maybe we came into a family to learn lessons or to be there in a way with a higher knowledge that we only gain by enduringtough lessons.. Maybe we had something to give, that only we could give and could only turn our own life around when we refused to keep engaging in a ‘victim’ story.. Carl Jung once said that we have no control over what happens to us in childhood but we do have control over what meaning and purpose we make of it.. In some very very painful experiences and with some deeply entrenched patterns we may continue to struggle to take back power but my feeling is that the more we stay trapped in a ‘victim’ view the more hopeless and trapped we become. Where does the power lie in that?
I used to hate people confronting me with this type of stuff but in the movie I watched on anorexia last week To The Bone it happens to the central character Eli. She argues back but in time has her own personal vision of where she will end up if she doesn’t begin to change her attitude.. For me I would rather light a fire than continue to freeze to death in an ice cold room, but first I have to realize I do have active arms and legs and volition to go out and collect the wood and kindling and other resources to light that fire!.. I may have been a helpless overwhelmed child in a room of massive disconnected adults years ago but I am not that child all alone any more, as long as adult me continues to turn up for her, I think my life is going to be far happier for the remaining years than it ever was for the earlier ones.
Emerging From The Dark Night 