My Mother's Version of Events

My mother's version of events, as written for the Butterfly Glen house psychologist. All grammatical and punctuation choices are her own. I'll embed links to relevant blog posts so you can compare different perspectives. The only emails I've made into blog posts so far were the big ones, and most of my retellings aren't dated at all, so I'll have to go through my old emails and post the excerpts from the events my mother references in her letter (from 2005 to 2008), partly just to confirm the timeline.

She doesn't mention the times she called me or talked to me during the events detailed below, but we were still in contact. A lot of what I know comes not just from my dad but also from her.

She was often high back then and, based on how long she says we've been estranged, she presumably wrote her version within the last year. I don't trust my own memory that much, let alone hers.

Dear Curtis,

    Could you please help me find my long lost daughter Christina Rosetti Martin DOB 7-31-1980. The last time I saw her was on her wedding day 15 yrs. ago!

    When I married my paraplegic husband, I married in sickness & in health and I took care of him for 36 yrs. but as soon as I got sick he filed for divorce. Paul was in the VA Hospital in Cleveland when he filed for divorce. I was totally blindsided. We had talked on the phone and he hadn't said anything. He followed up the file for divorce by cleaning out our bank account right after I paid the entire mos. bills (wrote checks for) All of the cks. bounced & I was faced with pay up or we'll shut off water, lights, gas, phone & cancel insurance on house & Cars. Naturally I panicked, I called the bank & they told me that my husband had closed out our joint account & opened a single account leaving me penniless & deep in debt. He received $8,000.00/mos Disability & $325.00/mos SS. All tax free.

    I called Paul at the hospital in Cleveland & said, "What the hell do you think you're doing? I just wrote checks for all of the months bills & now thanks to you there's no money to cover them!" He hung up on me, so I called him back & he hung up on me again.

    Paul had an extensive music collection in our family room so I called Guitar Center where he bought it all and told them that my husband passed and I wanted to sell his music studio. Notice that I didn't say my husband died, I just said he passed, as far as I was concerned he passed for asshole of the century!

     I kept out his keyboard & bartered it for massages & as mad & desperate as I was I couldn't bring myself to sell his 3 prized guitars. I just sold the amplifiers & the recording equipment. I donated his harmonica collection to the church, and I donated microphones to the church. 

    Guitar Center came to the house & gave me a check for $1,000.00 which was a rip off but I didn't have time to quibble. I took Jeff's wedding ring (had diamonds) & his grandmother's second husband's wedding ring to a pawn shop, and I sold his computer. 

    I still didn't have enough money to cover the checks I had written and I took all of his record collection (jazz & blues) to vintage stock and they gave me $60.00 which I'm sure was a steal for them and a rip off for me but beggars can't be choosers.

    I went to the bank in tears and told them my sob story all they said was I could've done the same thing to him, he just beat me to the punch. You'd better believe if I had known he was going to clean out our account I would have done it.

    I went to my best friends house and used her phone to call Paul so he would answer the phone after I got served with divorce papers at 8pm on Tuesday. I asked him what brought on the need for a divorce and he said it was because all I did was lay in bed all the time, didn't cook & didn't do laundry. I told him I had been severly [sic] depressed for 6 mos and I had only gotten out of bed to go to the bathroom. I was hospitalized 3 times in 6 mos. for dehydration & falls. He hung up on me again but he said he would put some money back in our joint account.

    Many times after that I called to try to talk some sense into him about the divorce and explain bipolar disorder but he refused to listen, he said I was just lazy, no good.

    Eventually the hospital disconnect [sic] his telephone so I couldn't call him anymore. My mother always said, "There's more than one way to skin a cat." So I bought a bus ticket and rode 4 hrs. to Cleveland, to confront the jerk face to face. He was in the ICU so I couldn't see him very long, he looked like Jabba the Hut all propped up 350 lbs. buck naked with a colostomy & foley catheter & IV's & Blood. I slept in the waiting room til it was time to catch the bus for home. As soon as I got on the bus I fell asleep and when I woke up my head was on the shoulder of the man in the seat next to me. I was so embarassed [sic]. We got to talking and he told me he had just been released from prison. I told him my story and when we got back to the bus station in Cincinnati I discovered that I didn't have enough money to take a taxi to my house so he offered to share the cab & he would pay for it. When we got to my house I drove him to the building where he was staying downtown but first we had to go to the Emergency Room to get him some medicine. He asked me to get in touch with some friends of his and tell them that he was back in town.

    I got in touch with his friends and they decided they were my friends too. They moved in with me and proceeded to sponge off of me. I was lonely so I went along with it. My son, Dante came over and he expressed his concern for me taking in a bunch of strangers. Without me knowing he hid my husbands prized guitars in the garage.

    We had a bad storm and the roof was damaged, when I called the insurance company they said they would have to do a walk through inspection of the entire house. The house was a mess so I offered $100.00 to every man, woman or child who would come over & help me clean up & get ready for the inspection, Of course the ex convicts friends were the first in line and the five teenage neighbors of my parents came over too. Dante was suspicious of all the people who helped me.

    After about a month I got tired of supporting 3 freeloaders and I told them it was time for them to go home.

    Dante came over and he asked me what I did with my husbands guitars. I told him they were on there [sic] stands in the family room & then they just disappeared. That's when he told me that he had hid them in the garage. I don't know who took them but it wasn't me.

    Anyway, I'm sure that's why my daughter quit talking to me, because I sold part of my husbands things and she thinks I sold his 3 prized guitars. She hasn't ever let me tell her my side of the story. Being left penniless. I had no choice. She also doesn't understand bipolar disorder.

    If you can help me find her, you can share this letter with her.

    Thank you in advance!

    Annie Rosetti 

 

From checking my old emails, I know that she took the Greyhound bus across the state to visit my dad at the hospital in November 2006, right before Thanksgiving. She says in her letter that it was to confront him about surprising her with divorce papers, but he didn't file for divorce until April 2007, long after she'd invited the ex-convicts to live in their house, and long after two of the convicts had been arrested for stealing Dante's car. Based on old emails, she sold my dad's music equipment at least a week before being served with divorce papers, and she had been threatening to sell all his belongings since at least December 2006. I also knew Dante took the guitars. My dad had been relieved that he'd managed to save something. I don't remember being aware they ever went missing. The only pieces of information that seem new to me are that she pawned his rings and told people he was dead.

I Want to Understand

I read a book recently called Dreamland by Sam Quinones.  It's about the opiate epidemic in the US and how it came to be, from medical journal articles to pharmaceutical companies to pill mills and the Mexican dealers selling black tar heroin in small towns.  I don't know if my mother is/was on opiates.  But I assume so based on their being the norm at the time and the side effects I saw.

I've started reading a book about benzodiazepine use and addiction because benzos seem likely to have been prescribed to my mother too, based on her complaints and again what was common to prescribe.

I want to understand what happened with my mother.  The more I read, the more I feel unsure.  How much of her behavior was because of how she is?  And how much was because of what she was taking?  How can I find out what she was taking?  Even if I reached out to her and asked, I don't think she'd necessarily tell me.  And if she's as sedated as Dante said she was the last time he visited, who knows if she'd even remember what she has taken, or what she used to take, if she replied at all.

The only place I think I might be able to find a record of what my mother was taking is maybe in my grandmother's letters to my cousin.  But I haven't looked at them since the time I read through them for genealogical information and realized my grandmother -- the sanest, kindest, highest functioning person in my extended family -- habitually talked about me behind my back.  She judged me for not being concerned enough about my mother because I didn't come to her with my worries or tears.  I cried regularly about my mother, just not to her.  I remember sitting in my dorm room after my mom really went off the deep end, spending hours Googling her symptoms and behaviors and trying to figure out what was wrong with her.  I spent too much time on WebMD and the Mayo Clinic website because I thought it was a disease.  I feel so stupid.

It was years before I realized it was the pills, and even now as I read about opioids and benzodiazepines, I'm just now realizing just how much can be explained by the pills.  Example:  I thought when I didn't hear from my mother for days or weeks at a time (glorious breaks from her calling to yell at me, apropos of nothing) that she was going through a deep depression.  But she was probably just on pain pills.  She was probably mostly asleep.  The muscle weakness my mother insisted was some sort of progressive illness like multiple sclerosis and the doctors and I explained away as muscle atrophy from her refusal to get up and walk -- a common side effect of extended benzodiazepine use.  I should probably just do a search for most commonly prescribed pills in 2003 if I want to know what she started taking when she went well and truly off the deep end.  She had gone to the doctor to treat her sadness at the death of her brother.  I had asked her to just grieve instead -- told her her feelings were normal and wouldn't benefit from antidepressants -- but she took whatever that doctor gave her anyway.  This was six or seven years after the first time I saw her high on Soma (Carisoprodol, a muscle relaxant and non-benzodiazepine hypnotic).

I feel like an idiot.  I didn't understand anything about drugs.  I remember hearing about celebrities developing addictions to pain pills after surgery or injuries, but I didn't understand what that even meant or what that addiction looked like.  I didn't understand what being high on pills looked like.  When it came to what being high looked like, I had only seen caricatures of stoners in comedies on TV.   It seems from my grandmother's letters that everyone realized my mother was addicted to drugs but me, and I feel like an idiot.  When I was a freshman in high school, my mother had explained her behavior away with menopause (on the rare occasion she admitted it wasn't just me who was acting differently), and I was desperate to figure out what had happened that made her this way and how to prevent it taking hold of me too, since I had inherited half her DNA and assumed all of this was just happening to her and would do the same to me.  I had never seen my mother partake in so much as a glass of wine, and she was adamantly against any form of drugs.  Except the ones billed as medicine.  Then her adage of "little do good, lot do better" seemed to come into play.  Even when it came to Tylenol, she urged me to take more than the amount indicated on the bottle if the pain was "really bad," and she took god knows how many Tylenol herself everyday for as long as I can remember.  I wonder what her liver looks like.

I don't think my mother had any idea what she was getting herself into when she started with the Soma.  This all started in 1995 or 1996, around the same time doctors decided pain was "the fifth vital sign," no one should endure pain ever and, if you are in pain, you should drug yourself out of it.  Oxycontin was new to the market and a hot, highly prescribed "non-addictive" opioid (spoiler alert:  it's highly addictive and has killed a lot of people). 

The good news is I don't have to worry about inheriting any of my mother's madness, even come menopause.  The other good news is I understand more about pharmaceuticals now than at least 85% of the US population.  And I know not to take anything a doctor prescribes until I've thoroughly vetted it online and, even then, not if I can do without.  If I ever take morphine, it'll be because death is imminent because I don't want to have to try to STOP being addicted to it.  Had I been a high school athlete or gotten into a car accident that left me in pain, I probably would've been prescribed opiates and quite possibly ended up a situation like my mother's.  It happened a lot to other people at that time and for years afterward.  The only reason it didn't happen to me was luck.  But now I know at least.  Now I have information.  And I guess it's good my mother ended up in a nursing home after her last suicide attempt and her refusal to take care of herself (and our family's collective refusal to take care of  her anymore) because she might have died of an overdose by now if she were left to her own devices and dosing schedule.

My mother is the case study I teach my daughter.  They still do DARE or some variation on it in her school, but it doesn't go into enough detail if you ask me.  The "just say no" tagline implies a hit of pot and an oxycodone are equivalent, and if a kid comes to see that something like pot doesn't actually destroy their life, they might just assume the other one won't either.  Lack of nuanced understanding is dangerous when it comes to what we put in our bodies.  My mother's insistence that alcohol and sex are evil while indulging in prescription drugs and junk food multiple times a day is a good example of how black and white thinking fails us.

I wonder what she would be like if she weren't on the drugs.  I mean, she fit the criteria for borderline personality disorder before any of that.  But she started taking hypnotics and god knows what else when I was in eighth or ninth grade.  What would her non-drugged behavior even look like to adult me?  I don't know.  I don't trust my childhood memory and childhood interpretation of what she was like before the drugs.  She wasn't all bad by any means.  Sometimes she was great, and I loved her so much.  Would she still have drained my bank account?  Would she still have tried to turn my grandparents against me?  Would she still have tried to turn me against my dad?  Yes.  That started before the drugs.  Telling me he wasn't my "real" father and that I couldn't talk about it to anyone was earlier.  Telling me he'd never wanted me and had wanted to beat her into miscarrying me was earlier.  Telling me she'd let me decide if she should divorce him and that we'd be poor and have to find somewhere else to live was earlier.

I don't know what she'd be like now if not for the pills, but I trust this particular scenario has played out as well as it could for me.  Sometimes, since reading Dreamland, I think about reaching out to her.  I hadn't realized until that book just how much the deck was stacked against her NOT becoming an addict.  But I don't want her to have my phone number, and I don't want the nursing home to start demanding money from me (I'd never pay them, so it would just be frustrating for both of us).  I'd like to check in on her and see how she's doing and what she's doing, but I don't want to interact with her.  I'm not sure if it would be worse to let things go and maybe have some regrets when she dies, or to take the chance of appearing on her radar and what backlash that could prompt.  I wonder what drugs she's on now.  I wonder how she feels, or if she feels much of anything at all.

Small Update

I haven’t posted in a long time.  I’ve been feeling sad.  I’m okay and still functioning at a fairly normal level, but I’ve been having feelings I’d rather not feel.

I met my sister.  That was fine.  Apparently her parents even knew we were spending the weekend together.  My biological father apparently told her to tell me “hi” from him, which almost made me cry because I’d assumed he hated me for writing him a letter three years ago, introducing myself and subsequently upsetting his wife.  He still stays away, but it doesn’t sound like he hates me.  His wife still does though.  Because I wrote a letter once three years ago.  “Maybe when ten years have passed and she sees that her life hasn’t changed at all, she’ll be okay with it,” I told my sister.  But if she’s still mad after three years, I can’t imagine another seven will help.  I also can’t imagine him choosing to talk to me when it would upset his wife further and NOT talking to me only upsets me in my house where I cry in my shower alone.

A lot has happened this year.  I’m having trouble wrapping my head around it all.  I don’t even know where to start. 

Last night my daughter said about the fact that I don’t speak to my mother, “It’s not too late to make the right choice.”  I tried to explain, “This is the right choice.”  She’s never met my mother, only seen pictures.  My mother has required full time care on account of her crippling mental illness and prescription drug addiction for more than twice as long as my daughter has been alive.  Dante said she doesn’t really speak anymore, presumably for the same reasons, and no one else in the family can bear to deal with her anymore.  I don’t think I’m in the wrong here.  I thought my daughter understood when I explained that my mother has a disease that makes her say and do mean things, and she refuses to be treated for the disease. 

I don’t know what to tell her.  My mother is the only person I’ve ever actively cut from my life (my dad was a passive removal – I just stopped initiating everything – same with Dante honestly), and it was really hard and I was sooooo suicidal every time she’d call me to yell at me.  I lived in fear of the phone ringing, and I cried all the time and had trouble functioning.  How do you explain that to a 5-year-old?  Every day she tells me she loves me and asks me to marry her.  I don’t want to tell her how bad things can get with a mother.  I don’t want her to live in fear that things with us will turn out the same way.

Planning Dad's Funeral

My dad died at the end of July.  Dante didn’t want to have a funeral or memorial service.  He wanted to skip it all like my mother and her siblings did with their parents because it's easy and "no one will come anyway."  I didn't want to do it that way, partly because Dad had told me what he wanted and mostly because I didn't want to be as careless as my mother.  I told him I would come.  I told him about what Dad had said he wanted – just a small memorial service with Wes Montgomery’s jazz guitar rendition of “Willow Weep for Me” playing as a final send-off.  I would buy it off iTunes and have it on my phone.  It seemed easy enough, and when I die, I really don't want everyone washing their hands of me and pretending I never existed like my mom's family does.  

I had already researched crematoriums in my hometown back when Dad and I had discussed how much life insurance to keep, so I already had an idea of who to call and how much it would cost.  I gave the information I had to Dante so he could be point person, since he was still living in our hometown, and in Dad’s house no less.  I told him about Dad’s life insurance policy, how I was the beneficiary, and how the plan had been for us to split whatever remained after the cremation.  I told him I would give him my half in addition to his own if he would handle whatever needed handling and not make me do anything.  It didn't sound like Dante has a job right now, and he will have to find somewhere to live when the bank forecloses on Dad’s house.  I knew he needed the money more than I did, and I wanted the convenience of not being Dad’s next of kin for whatever needs handling more than I wanted anything else.

My best friend put me in touch with her mother, who has been something of a mother figure for me since I was a teenager.  She is kind and good at logistical dilemmas I would otherwise have to handle alone.  She gave me contact information for an estate attorney and an accountant, in case we (read: Dante) should need them.  She told me everything that she had to do when her own dad died and left her his farm in another state and how she divided up assets for her siblings.  I thankfully wouldn’t have to do most of that because my dad left behind significantly more debt than assets.

Dad died in the hospital across the state, a four hour drive away.  I told Dante I would be driving to our hometown with my husband and daughter in two days, when we estimated the body should be back in our hometown and ready for cremation and the memorial service.  My daughter had a surgery scheduled for the following week, so I wanted to get everything done and get back home.  Dante was calling our Dad’s brother, who told his sister and mother.  They were the last of Dad's family.  We hadn't been entirely sure our grandmother was still alive until that point.  

I would tell my mom’s side of the family -- a few cousins and an aunt by marriage -- less because I thought they cared about my dad and more because he was my dad and I wanted to tell them.  I knew they would be kind.  Dante asked me to pass along his cell phone number so that he might be able to get back in touch with them.  He said he’d been cutting himself off and losing contact with people for years.  He had just recently been coming out of a depression, he said.  He didn’t want to relapse.

“Is Mom still at Butterfly Glen?” I asked him.  “Are you still on speaking terms with her?  I don’t think anyone else in the family is.”

“She’s still there,” Dante replied.  “I visited her on Mother’s Day.  I wouldn’t call it ‘speaking terms’ though.  She didn’t really talk while I was there.”  He described how the people at Butterfly Glen keep her heavily sedated.  “I guess we weren’t the only ones who didn’t want to deal with her.”

I asked Dante not to tell Mom yet about Dad dying.  They’d been divorced for ten years and hated each other for at least thirty, so the only reasons I felt she would benefit from knowing were because her spousal support – 100% of her income – would be coming to an end, and because she might be able to use her ex-husband's death to get attention.  “It’s not the end of the world if I have to see her, but if it’s all the same to you, I’d prefer not to, and we’d need a contingency plan for what she might do if she showed up at the service.  I'd rather she not know until I've left town.”

“I already called and left a message, but I haven’t told her yet,” he replied.  “It’s fine with me.  I don’t think anyone wants her there anyway.”  And that was that.

I drove my husband and daughter the seven hours back to my hometown.  I answered calls from Dante each day as he looked for another form or document he needed that seemed to have vanished in the hoard.  He’d found a metal lockbox, but it had gotten wet inside and seemed to permanently smell.  He emailed me the form to collect Dad’s life insurance.  I emailed him an obituary I wrote.  He’d been calling the VA and the crematorium every day, and he finally got the VA to say they would cover the cost of transporting Dad's body back across the state and the crematorium to agree to an early Sunday morning service.  I would have to extend my stay to a sixth day, but it was okay.  There was still a two day buffer before my daughter's surgery.

I spent most of my days in Cincinnati trying to keep my daughter entertained.  Our hotel had a pool, so my husband took her swimming every day, and sometimes I joined them.  Sometimes I stayed behind in the hotel room and watched "Gossip Girl" on my phone until I forgot where I was.  We walked around the local malls and went to lots of restaurants while I fielded logistical calls from Dante.  He asked if I thought Dad had a will and where did I think it might be.  I told him I was 95% sure neither of our parents had ever had wills.  It would have required them to do something.  Since they had more debt than assets, I had always planned to walk away from everything and let it be sold for parts, or whatever happens when you die owing people money.  I think that was Dad’s plan for me too.  I'm not sure what Dante's plan had been since his life had remained tied up with Dad's.  

Dante was freaking out a little bit.  A friend had told him the house would be taken within twelve days of the death of the person on the mortgage since there was no will leaving it to anyone.  The bank would put a lock on the door and he would be homeless.  I told him Mom was still on the mortgage even though she wasn’t on the deed anymore, so maybe they would go after her for the money instead.  I couldn’t find a copy of the deed without Mom on it, but I knew details from the divorce.  I wondered quietly to myself if Mom might try to retake the house. 

Dante asked if I thought he should stop paying the mortgage and the bills.  I told him that’s what I would do.  I told him the bank likely wouldn’t move to foreclose until he’d missed at a least a few months of payments, so I would stop payment on everything but utilities, stay put until the bank at least started sending threatening letters, and save whatever money he could for a new apartment.  He said he’d been cancelling our dad’s magazine subscriptions.  He had so many.   I warned Dante that the VA might not stop Dad's monthly checks right away and that, if they paid him something after his death, they would realize their mistake and demand it back in a few months.  It was the same thing that had happened every time he moved back into the hospital or the nursing home -- his check got reduced retroactively, and he was expected to pay them back thousands of dollars.  If this happened for three or four months like it did before, they would be expecting tens of thousands of dollars back.  I warned Dante not to spend the money from Dad's checking account in case this happened.  He replied, "Well, they better not do that then."


Cincinnati was a long trip.  It was the first time I'd been to my hometown in six years.  I spent as much time with my best friend and her family as possible.  My birthday happened while we were there, so my best friend and her mother and sister and boyfriend all joined us for lunch the day before the memorial service.  It was nice.  There were even presents.  If you have to deal with a parent's death, make sure to do it in the town where your best friend lives.  It makes everything so much better.

The morning of the memorial service, my daughter was supposed to stay with my best friend's mom and sister while my best friend, my husband, and I went to the service.  Then we'd all go out for lunch.  But my daughter started running a fever the night before and wasn't better by that morning.  I asked my husband to stay with her in the hotel room while my best friend and her family and I went to the service together.  We made up half the attendees.  My brother arrived shortly after me, and that's when the man who runs the crematorium welcomed us, showed us around, and said our dad's body should be arriving in two more days.

Grandma's Letters

My cousin has a binder two inches thick with old letters from our grandmother.  Today she lent it to me to see if I could find any genealogically significant information that she hadn't.  She'd already highlighted parts.  She told me Grandma wrote things that were weird to write to your grandchildren.  She said Grandma hadn't been the innocent victim of circumstance she used to think she was -- she made the choice to stay in her environment, and she made it repeatedly until she died.

I hadn't expected my name to come up so many times in her letters.  My mother was my grandmother's only daughter, closest friend, and primary source of transportation, so it's only logical I would be a prime source of gossip.  Except I wasn't interesting.  The gossip isn't always bad.  Sometimes she says I sang at church and did a good job, or she comments on how hard I've worked to maintain a 4.0 GPA throughout school.  Sometimes in the next sentence she comments on my related "whining" or "complaining" or my "mood swings."  "Same old, same old," she dismisses.  I was 17 for that one.  It was around the time my mother called the hematologist from church to prescribe antidepressants for her "moody teenager," though talking to the doctor myself or seeing a mental health professional was still strictly forbidden.  I'm not sure how much of my bad behavior was witnessed first hand and how much Grandma heard from my mother.  I mostly saw my grandmother at church at that point.  

She details my mother's breakdown in 2005 on a week-by-week basis.  She didn't detail it in my letters, but she did for my cousin, and probably for other friends and family on her mailing list.  She comments how I "finally got around to being worried" about my mother.  "File that under 'better late than never,'" she quips.  My dad and I had been talking and worrying for some time of course, but that didn't count because it wasn't for an audience.  She said my mother's change in behavior was partly due to her poor health, partly her bad husband, partly her daughter finishing school and choosing to continue to live so far away, and partly because she didn't have a good relationship with either of her children.  And partly the "over medication," of course.  Grandpa yelled from the next room, "Do you need to detox?!" while my grandma was on the phone with her, but my mother heard him and "snapped out of it" enough to behave better, so no action was taken.  All of this came from letters.

My grandmother gauged my mother's mental health by how much she talked to her and how much she ate.  "Annie only ate a quarter of her Frosty yesterday," was cause for alarm, but "Annie finished her Frosty today," was a sign that the worst was over, the dark cloud had passed.  "Did you know Annie has lost 70 pounds?" she asks in January of 2005.  I didn't realize it had started so early.  I don't know if I saw her between Thanksgiving of 2004 and my wedding in 2008.

Grandma's reviews of me improved when she started receiving regular letters from me.  I hadn't realized I was writing my own press releases.  She references my purchasing "a proper dining table" in three consecutive letters.  I guess she wrote to my cousin more frequently than I wrote to her.  She details the stressors of my Manhattan job, but this time without the added snark or the implication that I'm whining.  I wonder if her news bites inherited whatever tone the original teller passed down.  She wrote about my trip to Atlantic City, my cooking Christmas dinner for Michael's family, and she seemed delighted or at the very least neutral about all of it.  

I don't know if there are letters from the time my mother swore she would turn her parents against me.  I can't stand to find them.  I don't want to read anymore.  I was shaking from adrenaline as I read about myself, like I was being attacked to my face, but there is no one to even talk to about it now let alone fight.  My grandmother has been dead for eight years, and I'm just now seeing that she wrote what I perceive to be snarky things about me when I was in the darkest and hardest time of my life.  I don't like it.  I don't like being made fun of for "complaining" and "whining" and having emotions.  I was depressed, and my mother was mentally unstable and abusing drugs.  They complained about my emotions, and then they complained when I stopped exposing my emotions to their view, even though it was 2005 and I didn't cut ties with anyone for another three years.  I've tried to stop having emotions, and I can't.  The best I could do was shield myself from the people who mocked me for having them.  

I am finding it hard to be generous when I'm hurt and angry and no one in that family has ever apologized to me (or anyone else, as far as I know) for anything.  I'm afraid I will never stop being angry.  I wish my dad and my grandmother -- and, hell, my grandfather too -- were alive just so I could say mean, cold things to their faces.  I would be quiet and calm, and when they would get upset at my terrible words, I would scold them for being so emotional, so "moody," so sensitive.  (It's what I'd like to do to my mother too, but I hear she's kept heavily sedated these days. More on that later.)  

I try to be generous because I know they all were mostly miserable, but I still judge them because they made me miserable too, and I deserved better than what they dished out.  Everyone does.  Everyone deserves better, but they were the ones who were responsible for me and prevented me from having that.  I will try to be generous and believe they did the best they could with the tools they had not because I think they deserve my kind thoughts but because it's good practice for the generosity I do owe to my daughter.  It's another way I can be less like them.  It's really hard.

I'm afraid I will never stop being angry.

Looking Up My Family Online (Again)

Have you ever remembered something one way all your life and then seen it again later and it was completely different?

I was looking up Eugene, my lone surviving maternal uncle, online today, as I sometimes do.  He's hard to find.  I'm Facebook friends with his wife of nearly three decades, but she never mentions him, her photos don't include him, and based on some posts from her family, they didn't spend Thanksgiving together.  I wonder if they got divorced or maybe he died.  Surely one of my cousins would have known and said something.  Surely my regular Google searches for his name and the word "obituary" would have turned something up.

My uncle Eugene has lived in the same house for about three decades.  My other uncle used to live there too until he died in 2009 just shy of age 60.  They didn't live apart in my lifetime.  Uncle Boyd would pay the mortgage and Uncle Gene would pay the utilities.  Uncle Gene had always worked odd jobs that earned below the poverty line, selling used cars, playing in a band at a local nightclub, and working in collections at one point.  Pooling their resources was the only way they could afford their beautiful and spacious house, my mother said, and there was plenty of room for everyone.  I remember Uncle Boyd lived in a ground floor bedroom off the kitchen.  Uncle Gene and his wife lived in one of the upstairs bedrooms.  There was a stained glass window in the corner of the stairway, a gazebo off the front porch, and the sprawling backyard had fruit trees.  It was the nicest house anyone in our family owned.

I looked up the only address I could find online for Uncle Gene, but the picture was of a tiny shack of a house.  He must've moved.

But there was a gazebo in the same place.  And the front stairs looked the same.  And I realized my uncles had lived a tiny shack of a house all along.  How is this possible?  The lines of the roof and walls aren't even straight, and they're at odd angles.  According to the internet, the bank foreclosed on the house in 2013.  I guess they couldn't pay the mortgage without Uncle Boyd's contribution.  He lost his job at the steel mill to a machine back in 2000 and he never found another one -- it was the only job he'd had since he was 16 years old -- but I guess he received something in unemployment or maybe disability since he was diagnosed bipolar around the same time.  He should have had a pension too, though I don't know when that would have started paying out.  Grandpa started collecting his pension from the same steel mill when he retired at 55.  Anyway, Boyd died, the bank took the house, and my uncle Gene doesn't live there anymore.  One of my cousins said she had wanted to reach out to him after Boyd died but she'd held back because he's mentally unstable.  He was the most stable of all of them, I thought.

The bank auctioned off the house for $18,000 to something called BLT Homes Inc., which appears to fix up homes just enough to rent them out.  Uncle Gene and his wife started renting the place two houses down after that, according to the internet.  But I can't find anything about where Gene works, if anywhere, or what he does or how he is.  Why does no one in my family blog?

Then I started looking for my mother.  That way madness lies.  I haven't found an updated address for her since the group home the hospital released her to after her last suicide attempt by self-poisoning (don't try it, folks -- Harvard School of Public Health did a study, and ODing by pills has a less than 2% success rate).  And my dad said she left that place years ago when they told her she'd have to pay something to keep living there.  I keep searching by her name and her past addresses and diagnoses and the churches she's attended, but I find nothing new.  I don't want to reach out to her; I just want to watch her quietly while she is unaware.

My Cousin's Half-Brother Was Murdered

My cousin Ellie's parents divorced before I was born.  Her father was my uncle who got his high school sweetheart pregnant and then dropped out of high school at age sixteen to get married and take a steady union job (the only job he ever had, as far as I know) at the local steel mill like his father before him.  He had a cocaine problem as an adult and ultimately died of a heart attack in his fifties, a few years after the steel mill laid him off.  Her mother was my uncle's high school sweetheart who got pregnant with Ellie at age seventeen.  We all went to the same shitty high school in the same small town where we all grew up, albeit decades apart.

Ellie's mother went on to remarry, and that marriage lasted for the rest of her husband's life.  I didn't know this until recently.  She had another child too -- a son -- several years older than me but a decade younger than Ellie.  I hadn't known this either.  I only know this now because Ellie started posting on Facebook last week that he was missing.  She said he was 40 but, due to a car accident and traumatic brain injury, mentally closer to 12.

His body was found in the woods yesterday; he had been murdered.  I don't know the details, but apparently someone does because the police have already arrested two young men for the crime.  Their photos are in the news.  Their faces look like they were made for punching, and I hope they get everything they deserve.  I hope they are scared.  That's the worst thing I can imagine personally -- being scared and cut off from anyone who might be able to save or comfort me.  It's what I imagine most people would experience while being murdered.  I hope they feel it through a lengthy trial and a multiyear prison sentence.  I hope they can't live with themselves but have to for a really long time.  I've looked them up on Facebook, and they're both very much poor, uneducated white trash, so at least they shouldn't be able to buy their way out.  I don't think the currency of being a white male extends far when your victim is an equally white male.

It was when I was thinking all these thoughts that I realized I did know my cousin had a younger brother.  We went to elementary school together.  I met him once, but I had forgotten.  It was the time my mother and I were watching Ellie's daughter, Wendy, for a few days.  I remembered bringing her to school one morning while my mother was dropping me off.  I remembered being approached by an older boy and girl who inexplicably knew baby Wendy.  My mother told me they were Wendy's uncle and cousin.  When I asked if they were my family too, my mother told me no.  I was confused and disappointed.  I always remembered the cousin's name because it was the same as my own, but it occurred to me today that I remembered the uncle's name too.  I think he had been in fifth grade when I was in kindergarten.  If I could go back in time and watch events unfold, these are the sorts of mundane things I'd want to see again.  I'd want to know what else I missed, who else I met without realizing.  It was an awfully small world I used to live in.

His mother doesn't know yet that he's dead.  She's in the ICU recovering from surgery.  I met her once too when I was younger.  She was really nice.  She worked as a stagehand in the costume department for the US tour of Phantom of the Opera, and she showed me around backstage as a favor to my mother, even though we weren't technically family anymore.  I hope she's okay.  Ellie is having a hell of a time.

I don't understand murdering people.  I understand the allure of committing violence -- I've been made powerless too many times not to want to do it to someone in return -- but if your life is going badly and you feel worthless, I expect you either to learn to cope or simply to internalize it as a quiet shame like the rest of us.  You don't get to kill someone just because you feel bad.  And reading these murderers' Facebook pages, one of them appears pathetic and self-pitying to the point that -- had he not been a violent criminal -- I would have simply felt sorry for him.  He battles his weight, he doesn't have many friends, and his own father doesn't seem to care much for him.  The more I learn about someone, the more I tend to relate to them and the less I can be angry, but this piece of garbage person also killed someone who could not defend himself and whose family now has to live with the fallout.  He should kill himself.  If he were to kill himself, my only regret would be that he didn't do it before murdering someone who actually had friends and family who loved him.  (I kind of want to write that to him in a letter.)  The other murderer just sounds like a really stupid sociopath who is bad at not getting caught.  I understand feeling violent and wanting to hurt someone else.  It's what I feel about these murderers, for instance.  It's what I've felt when people have physically hurt or restrained me and made me feel powerless.  It's a horrible feeling.  I get it, and it doesn't ever go away completely.  And I have zero empathy for the people who act out their violence on others.  There are too many other options for that one ever to be acceptable.  Violence is the act of a despicable coward who cannot sit with his own feelings.

A Good Memory of My Childhood Home

When I was in elementary school, when it was cool enough, back before styrofoam insulation and clear plastic covered every window of our house for years at a time, sometimes my mother would open the windows.  I can only remember it happening on a handful of occasions.

I remember riding the bus home from school once and, when it pulled up to my house, seeing that the heavy wooden front door was open wide with the screen door visible behind it.  I felt a jolt of happiness.  The windows would be open.  My mother must be in a good mood. 

My parents' house usually smelled of stale air.  My mother liked to keep the air conditioner cranked up and the house cold inside, but it still managed to feel stuffy.  Just being inside it with its unnaturally dark rooms and cavelike dankness made me feel drained.  From childhood to college, I remember having that feeling, like something in the house was sapping me of my energy.  I think my mother felt it too.  When she wasn't asleep, she often wanted to get out and go somewhere, and when we went out to dinner in my teen years, she was as loath to go home as I was.

On the rare occasions that my mother opened the windows, she also turned on the house's attic fan, which I can only vaguely remember because the last time I remember seeing it in use was when I was in elementary school.  I remember a large metal vent in the ceiling that would open when the attic fan was on, allowing me to see the fan spinning behind it, whipping up what I remember as strong winds through the hallway.  It was loud and powerful.  It felt nice to be surrounded by so much moving air. 

Sometimes when the windows were open, my mother even cleaned.  This is one of my favorite memories of my mother.  She put a Dolly Parton record on the big turntable in the family room and blasted the music through the house.  Because closed doors and narrow doorways were tricky for my dad in his wheelchair, our house had an open floor plan back before it was fashionable.  My mother hated how she had no way to close off portions of messiness to visitors, but the music carried well.  I don't remember if she mopped or dusted or what -- I remember being too young to be of use myself, maybe four or five -- but she sang along to the music, and I loved it.  She seemed happy and full of energy -- so rarely did she have any energy -- and it made me happy to be close to her with the music and the breeze playing around us.  The air smelled fresh, and cleaning products always smelled better than the heavily clove-scented air fresheners my mother used to cover up the other smells of the house for company. 

It's warm here today where I live now.  I have the windows open, and the house smells fresh.  I can hear birdsong and some of my neighbors talking outside, now that the drone of what sounded like a dozen lawn mowers and weed wackers has ceased.  None of the lights are on because the sun makes it brighter in my white-walled home than any amount of electricity could achieve when I was a kid.  I'm glad I don't live there anymore.  The good days were too rare, and they were still worse than the bad days are here.  Here I can clean and open windows whenever I want.

"Show Everyone What a Good Actress You Are"

Up until my late teens I thought I wanted to be an actress.  I was in school plays and church musicals and even the occasional summer Shakespeare program, but after enough of them, I realized I didn't like performing or even rehearsing.  I liked attention and I liked pretending to be something I was not.  If I could have skipped the plays and gone straight to being hugged and told I'd done a good job, that would have been my ideal situation, but I didn't realize that at the time.

When I was in high school and depressed and had to speak publicly or mingle with strangers or do something social I desperately didn't want to do, my mother would urge me, "Show everyone what a good actress you are."  It worked.  I didn't want to fake happiness for the sake of making my mother happy.  My mother vastly preferred complaining to strangers over feigning happiness, and it irritated me that she wanted me to be a shiny happy person while she said whatever she wanted about me right in front of me (sometimes comically flattering, sometimes cruel or mocking) and continued her reign of martyrdom.  But I didn't want to be like her either, and I'd already learned that being cheerful made me dramatically more popular, so I "showed everyone what I good actress I was." 

I felt painfully shy growing up, but behaving as though I were shy tended to get me yelled at and publicly humiliated, so I'd learned to shut down my shyness along with my depression.  They were still there, but I locked them in a room of my brain where they temporarily couldn't get out or show themselves. I knew they were there, but I temporarily couldn't feel them.  I wouldn't have been able to function the way I was expected to if I could have felt them. 

It was a sort of pleasant dissociation in which the feeling part of me went on lock-down and I wore a smiling mask set to a socially acceptable autopilot program.  I don't think I said anything particularly charming or clever on autopilot, but I knew how to smile and respond politely and ask simple questions.  Based on people's reactions, I seem to have done fine.  I don't even think my mother had a socially acceptable autopilot program.  She simply smiled and laughed a little too loudly while she complained and overshared ("How are you today, Annie?"  "Oh, fairly partly cloudy.  My hips hurts, my son's unemployed, and my daughter is a moody teenager who can't wait to spend all my money a thousand miles away at college.  Kids and dogs and husbands!  Ha ha ha ha!"). 

I remember once in high school I won a small scholarship award and my mother told me I'd have to give an acceptance speech at the scholarship luncheon like it was the Oscars or something.  I'd learned to perform songs and plays from memory without panicking years ago, regardless of the audience size, but I was horrified at the idea of having to come up with my own words.  Writing always made me freeze up, even though I always eventually got through it.  I can't remember if she told me in advance or sprang it on me in the car on the way to the function, but I panicked until I had formulated a plan for something vague and sweet and humble to say.  When we arrived I, of course, learned my mother had been lying.  None of the other scholarship winners gave speeches or even said a word beyond, "Thank you."

I asked when I got to the podium if I should give a speech and the person in charge said, "If you like," in a surprised tone of voice.  Whatever, I thought.  I've panicked and written, and I might as well say what I wrote.  I also knew I'd probably be in trouble with my mother on the car ride home if I didn't give an acceptance speech after she'd expressly told me to.  So I gave my acceptance speech.  I pretended what I was doing wasn't absurd -- that I'd been so moved by their generosity I simply had to speak -- and I beamed and thanked everyone present and pandered to the organization so effectively that they gave me the scholarship again the next year when I didn't even apply for it.  I'm proud of that.  I was an average actress in theater, but I'm pretty good in real life.  I know how to behave anyway.  My mother should have thought about that before she started slandering me to her few friends and family in the years that followed.  She doesn't know how to behave.  It was yet another valuable lesson she taught me despite never learning it herself. 

The First Time I Self-Injured, I Thought I'd Invented It

[Trigger warning:  This post is about self-injury.  Also, I lifted most of the title from a Chuck Palanhiuk novel.  That's probably not a trigger, but I want you to know I know.]

When I was in high school, I started hitting myself in the head.  Slapping quickly progressed to closed fisted punching.  Eventually I escalated to banging my head against the wall of my bedroom.  

The first time I did it was fairly instinctual -- I think.  I don't remember if it was before or after I'd first heard of cutting, but the idea of cutting was unappealing to me because I was self-conscious enough about my body already and didn't want to add scars to the list of attributes I felt I had to hide.  When I hit myself though, it was instinctual.  I didn't know anyone had ever done that before.  The physical pain anesthetized my emotions.  It was immediate.  It felt good simply because I didn't feel as bad anymore.

I don't remember what prompted each occasion I hit my head, or any of the occasions.  I had a hard time living at home with my parents, especially after the dawn of adolescence, which also coincided with the start of my mother's prescription drug abuse.  I had plenty of friends and did well in school, but I was not entirely well and home was not a happy place.  I hit myself a lot the year I was, I think, seventeen.  Seventeen was hard.  I remember dreaming that I was graduating and moving away and then awakening to find myself still a junior in high school.  I cried and cried.  The cheap wood-paneled walls of my bedroom gave a satisfying vibration when I slammed my head against them.

I eventually developed a dull, lingering headache that lasted for weeks.  I don't often get headaches, so I was a bit alarmed.  I think now, in hindsight, I had possibly given myself a minor concussion.  At the time though, I thought I might have caused a brain bleed.  My grandmother suffered a brain aneurysm not long before this time, and I worried that I might have caused some kind of hemorrhage in my brain that was going to kill me.  My primary concern wasn't so much the dying as the possibility that God would count my self-initiated brain hemorrhage as a sort of "long con" suicide attempt and that I would burn in hell for all eternity for instigating it. 

In a panic, I bargained with God that I would stop hitting myself in the head if he would excuse me from dying of a brain hemorrhage and burning in hell.  I stopped hitting myself, and within a couple of weeks my headache subsided.

I took up banging my head against the wall again in the final year or two of my contact with my mother.  I don't remember the circumstances.  My mother was at her worst in terms of leaving me raging voicemails and waging campaigns against me with family at that time.  It was around the same time I started drinking and actively researching suicide techniques (spoiler alert:  the most effective ones sound horrifying).  I don't remember any of this in reference to self-injury though.  I just remember the apartment where I lived at the time.  My bedroom had an exposed brick wall, and I made the mistake of banging my head into it.  Just once.  It hurt.  It hurt really, really bad.  There was no satisfying vibration or echo or even a thud.  It barely made a sound and it HURT, and the bricks were actually sharp.  I remember that wall.  I stopped not too long after that and haven't taken it up again. 

Now I know that 45+ minutes of high intensity cardio creates the same numbing effect in me, except my head doesn't hurt and the only physical sensation is a sort of warm, sore, jellied feeling in my muscles.  It isn't as immediate an effect, but it's close enough.  This end note sounds off here to me, like it doesn't belong with the rest of the story, but I think it's worth noting it's hard to quit self-injuring without finding a coping tactic with which to replace it.  I didn't come up with exercise right away either.  I don't remember that time all that well, but I probably just drank more for awhile, until that stopped helping too.

An Open Letter to My Mother in 1965

Dear Annie,

I'm writing this to your 15-year-old self because that is when I believe these words might have meant something to you.  We met when you were 30 and I was born.  I think 30 was too late.  Fifty-something, when I tried to tell you some of these things for the first and last time, was far too late.  The last year we were in contact, you were generally drugged and sometimes barely lucid.  So I'm telling you these things in 1965, when you were old enough to understand but still young enough you might have believed you could change and choose your own fate.

Things are going to get rough.  I know they've already been rough.  I know you are the only girl among all your brothers and that you have to help out around the house in ways they aren't expected to, and I also know your dad is kind of an asshole.  Don't try to claim he isn't.  We both know he is, and it's as much my right to say so as yours, so deal with it.  I also know you're poor, but you'll be surprised to learn your family is doing better than the majority of American households fifty years in the future, and your parents are going to be just fine thanks to unions and pensions.  You're going to be just fine too -- physically and financially -- but you won't see it that way, which is the bigger problem.

You are smart.  You might have always suspected this and someone convinced you otherwise, or maybe you never even realized it, but you are smart and resourceful.  If you are willing to believe these facts, you can be unstoppable.  But you have to try.  Continually trying is the really hard part.  Perfection is not important.  It's not even possible, so forget about trying to be perfect and trying to avoid failure, and just do.  Stop taking all the remedial classes in school so that you can get the best grades.  Stop taking the jobs you think no one else wants.  You are smart enough to do more, and you will never be perfect no matter how low you aim.  Just do the best you can.  Take every opportunity you can.  Keep trying, and you'll be fine.  You know how I know this?  I'm really smart.  Trust me.

In a few years, you're going to marry an asshole who reminds you vaguely of your father.  Emotionally stunted, fits of rage, decent provider, all that same old comfortable bullshit.  Don't let him break you.  Just because the disability checks come in his name doesn't mean he is the only one of value in your relationship.  Your innate value isn't based in US currency.  Neither is your daughter's.  Try and remember that.

I know you're pretty hard-wired at this point to buy goods cheaply and avoid investing in nice things, either because you've grown up poor with parents who grew up even poorer or because of your low self-worth or both, but please know this deal-seeking tendency is not the most fiscally intelligent tactic.  You will have plenty of money soon.  You'll have more than you immediately know what to do with, which will prompt you to eat steak sandwiches every night, as you will tell me, because apparently this is a stupid and expensive thing to do.  Anyway, if you avoid seeking deals and shopping for thrills and hoarding because it makes you feel safe, you will continue to have more money than you know what to do with.  When you need a new pair of shoes, spend five times as much as you would on the cheapest possible pair and get something nice and comfortable and sturdy.  It took me years to learn to shop this way, but it's actually less expensive than buying a ton of cheap stuff you won't end up using.  You'll also have less of a hoard, which I realize is also something you're probably hard-wired for at this point based on what your childhood home looked like and the stories you told me. 

You are mentally ill.  I know those words sting, and I want you to understand that it isn't something bad about you.  It's just something that is.  You are too young right now at 15 for most decent professionals to diagnose you with what ails you, and it probably hasn't even occurred to you anything is wrong yet at this age.  You probably seem like a fairly typical teenager.  It will get worse, but it's not entirely out of your control, and a good portion of what goes down will be courtesy of prescription drug abuse.  Yes, it's still abuse even though they're prescriptions.  Remember that.  If you can effectively treat an ailment without a prescription drug, do it, even if it involves hard work like therapy or regular exercise.  I kind of doubt even your 15-year-old self would hear me out on that particular note, but seriously, even prescription drugs can be dangerous and you will have a tendency to get out of control.  Know thyself.

I'm not sure how you feel about control at 15.  I've always craved control over my own life and my own situation, but the version of you I know generally wanted people to take care of her so she could check out.  I hope you aren't like that already.  You are powerful when you try to be.  If you don't like something, you can change it.  Please don't check out.  Please don't expect other people to take care of you like the wilting flower you will pretend to be. 

It might be hard to believe that you could get a full-time job that would support you comfortably or that you could earn a college degree or seek help from a mental health professional until you start to feel good from something other than excessive doses of prescription drugs.  You could do those things though.  I know your parents "don't believe in therapy," but fifty years from now, most of your family will be dead, your parents included, and the rest won't speak to you.  You'll be left with very few options beyond stepping up to the plate and taking care of yourself.  Please rise to the challenge.  Please take care of yourself.  Please be the smart, capable woman I know you could have grown into.  It's not too late.  It's never too late. 

And when your family stops talking to you, it isn't because they hate you or because you're "bad."  It's because you behave in a cruel and crazy way and they choose to stop dealing with you because they have to take care of themselves too.  You are almost full grown, and you haven't been the baby of the family since the year after you were born.  I'm going to lay some ugly truth on you:  you will never again be someone's number one priority.  Ever.  I hope you got the bulk of your mother's attention in the months following your birth, but that was it.  No more.  I realize you don't even remember that time.  I'm truly sorry, but that's the hand you were dealt.  You have to be your own grownup now.  If you refuse, well... I guess someone in a nursing home might keep you alive, but it won't be all that pleasant, and you will still eventually languish and die.  You can be the capable, in control woman I know you can be, and you can choose your own happiness, or you can languish and die.  You don't get to be someone's baby.  You don't get to be the beloved golden child.  Not everyone gets a turn at that fate, and if you ever did, it's long done now.  Sorry.  Them's the breaks.

I hope this letter isn't too much of a downer.  I wonder -- do you ever cry anymore?  I know your dad was kind of a dick about that with the, "Stop crying or I'll give you something to cry about!" line.  You said the same line to me, followed immediately by how much you hated when your father said it to you.  You don't cry much in the future, at least not in front of other people.  I do want you to know though that people see how you feel.  You're not going through it all alone.  They can't do for you the things you have to do for yourself, but people are there and they do care.  They just can't save you.  You have to do that part yourself.  It's really hard, but I know you can do it.  You're smart and capable.  You feel things deeply.  It's hard feeling like you're all alone, but there is help out there, even when you're eventually old and alone.  But you have to try.  You have to choose to be the one in charge of yourself.  If you give up, no one will rescue you.  If you hit rock bottom, you will hit it hard and it will hurt.  No one will scoop you up and save you.  Know that.  It hurts, but it's important to know that. 

The most important thing you can ever do is take care of yourself.  You have a tendency to want to rescue people, to be their savior.  It doesn't tend to go as well as one might hope, but you could save yourself.  That would be amazing.  I hope someday in the future, more than fifty years in the future, when all the time I've known you is done, these thoughts reach you.  I hope you realize it doesn't matter how old or ugly or fat or poor you think you are.  You can still choose to take charge of your own life and take care of yourself.  And I hope you do.  Because I love you and have always wanted the best for you.  I just can't tell you face-to-face anymore.  I have to take care of myself and my daughter and my family instead because that's how this was always supposed to work.  I can't save you, but I will always pray you decide to save yourself like I know you can.  That's the best I can do.  Now let's see your best.  -- C

Another Email

For the record, I was grossing $30k per annum in 2007.  I don't even know off hand what the mysterious $2k referenced below was all about.  It might have been something extra my dad had me transfer over when their account was empty, intended to cover the household bills that were on autopay (which was most of them).  I know that was a thing that happened at one point.


From: Christina R. Martin <christina.r.martin@gmail.com>
Date: Sun, May 4, 2007 at 2:07 PM
Subject:
To: Paul Rossetti <stargazer23401@aol.com>

Hi Dad,

I returned Mom's calls today.  She told me she already spent the $2000 that she discovered in the bank yesterday and then said she had come to me to solve her money problems.  I told her I didn't know what she should do, and she accused me of not caring.  When I told her I care but that I didn't have a solution, she got mad at me for not immediately offering her money -- apparently the solution to her money problems is supposed to be me.  She claims I have "money coming out [my] ass" and that Dante is better than me because, despite the fact that he is getting evicted from his apartment and losing his electricity, "he cares."  She said, "You make good money, dontcha?"  I told her I don't make nearly as much as she does, and she said, "I don't have any money!"  She started to yell some more, so I told her I had to go and I hung up.  She makes me very sad.

Love,
Chrissy

My Mom... Again: An Email

This one is from January 2007, the year before I cut ties with my mother.  My parents were mid-divorce, my dad was back in the hospital, and my mother had come out of her lengthy bout of not eating or moving or bathing to refinance the mortgage on the house and become worse than ever before.  

When my mother refinanced the mortgage, the monthly payments increased by about 50% (until the first rate adjustment, when it increased by about another 20%) and the mortgage reset for another 30 years of payments.  In exchange for this deal, my mother would receive $40k cash (as referenced in A List of Mom's Antics While Dad's in Hospital).  In order to ensure my dad's compliance since she needed his signature on the refinance paperwork, she promised him half the money.  I honestly think he would have signed no matter what because he tended to do whatever she demanded and then throw his hands in the air and claim he had no choice, but whatever.  

When she spent her half inside three weeks, my dad moved his $20k from my parents' joint account to the new joint account I had opened with him so that my mother couldn't spend it too.  That's the $20k referenced below.  Since she didn't appear to monitor her bank account back then (or ever?) and simply spent until it was empty, I hadn't expected her to notice.  Seriously.  It normally went from five figures to empty in a matter of days anyway.  It might seem odd to a third party that I didn't try explaining to her, "You promised that half of the money to Dad," but knowing me and knowing her, it wasn't odd.  It wouldn't have lessened the yelling or the retribution, and my primary wish back then was to stop getting yelled at.  In my family, telling the truth tended to go badly.  Lying was easier and more effective.  I just wish I'd learned that fact before my twenties.

It gets a little dark at the end. 

Dear Jerry,

I think I mentioned the last time we spoke that my mother had started calling again.  I've found the best way to get through her tirades without dissolving is to put her on speaker phone and watch the amused reactions of Michael and anyone else who happens to be in the apartment at the time.  They reinforce that she is crazy, which means that I am, by default, sane, and this is always a reassuring thing to find out.  

Today was the worst since the "day of inappropriate voice mails left in irrational anger."  First off, the bank sent a letter to my dad confirming that he had transferred $20k to our new joint bank account.  Of course, my mother opened it and read it, as she does with every piece of mail that enters the house, regardless of to whom it is addressed.  The only thing I could tell my mother was that he had wanted to send me money for the wedding.  I had planned out the entire story in minute detail beforehand -- explaining that the money was for my wedding, which she had told me she'd pay for and clearly would not be able to, was the only way she would consider it a lost cause and not try to recoup it later.  Now she is under the impression that my father just gave me a $20k gift and she is trying to convince my brother, who is holding my dad's favorite guitars for him so that my mom cannot sell them, that my dad only cares about me and clearly does not love him.  I had to relay these new developments to my dad so that he could try to explain things to Dante as best as he can without having to trust him with too much information.  Luckily, my mother's interest in anything I have to say wanes the second I open my mouth, so I mostly looked like a spoiled daughter who has no idea what is going on in her finances.  

My mom then asked why I ignored everyone at Christmas.  I think she was referring to the fact that I didn't send her a present.  Neither of us mentioned the fact that no one in the entire family contacted me at Christmas, either by mail or by phone.  She probably didn't think they needed to; I just didn't mention it because I didn't want to get involved in the fight she was trying to have with me. I had meant to send everyone cookies like I did last year, but by the time I had enough time to bake them all, none of them would have gotten to their destinations in time.  I explained that I didn't call her because I didn't want to get yelled at.  I can't think of a nicer way to say it, so that's how I say it.  I have told her this before, but apparently I should know that I deserve to be yelled at and I should stop trying to avoid my punishments.  

The part I remember best was when she told me that I should buy cards for everyone and treat my elders with respect (I guess this was a reference to the fact that my grandparents and I don't write to each other anymore -- she used to get angry when we did because I wasn't writing to her) and that I'm 25 years old and "need to grow up."  I'm already planning to use that line on her the next time she cries about not having enough money to care for herself.  "You are 56 years old, you have never had to work for a living, you can't manage to take care of yourself when handed $6000 per month, and you blame all your problems on everyone but yourself -- it's time to grow up," I'll say.  "I shouldn't be the one to tell you that you have to learn to take responsibility for yourself, but since you've alienated everyone else you know, it seems I'm the only one who will."  That might be a little too preachy.  Maybe just, "Stop whining!  Take responsibility for yourself!" or "Good god, I'd like to set you on fire!"  That would be the most frank.

I hate her so much.  I hate myself so much.  Her calls just make both worse.  I've never been good at taking these things in stride.  I try to act stoic, and I'm trying to be strong for my dad, but I hate her so much.  Every time I hear from her I feel more useless and hopeless than before.  I'm a bad person and everyone in her family apparently thinks I'm a deserter and a "selfish little bitch," and if my genes come from her, what if I get more like her?  What if I have children and ruin my marriage and their lives?  What if they hate me as much as I hate her?  Part of me is totally fine and hopeful and wants to see the world and do big things, but the part that she talks to just wants to kill myself.  My logic is that, even though she'd still hate me for doing something so self-centered, I wouldn't be able to do anything to make the situation worse.  

I'm sick of things being my fault, and if I'm dead, I can't be blamed, can I?  Not logically anyway.  I don't think too much anymore about all the stuff I'd need to put in order beforehand -- since she wouldn't be the one going through my things, what do I care if I haven't destroyed everything I ever wrote? -- though I would want some sort of will in place for the money in my bank accounts.  I've done a little research but the internet isn't terribly helpful.  I don't know what to do.  If I died, I think it would kill my dad, but I don't know what to do.  If I someday decided this is what I want, I don't know if anyone would support me, and I'm not sure of the legal ramifications if Michael knew in advance.  I don't know what to do.  I'm sorry if this sounds stupid or silly.  I don't make rash decisions, so it won't happen tonight, but I've been thinking about it for awhile now, and I think I might do less damage in the long run this way. 

I hope you had a good trip to New Orleans.  Did you do anything fun?  Sorry for the long, depressing email.  -- C

How I Realized It Wasn't All My Fault

The first time I saw a therapist, I was 28 years old.  I hadn't spoken to my mother in over a year, and I basically sobbed uncontrollably while saying everything I had kept predominantly bottled up for most of my life.  My tears poured nonstop for the first several sessions, even when I wasn't upset.  It seemed like an automatic response to being allowed to let everything out.

When I got to the part about how a mother's love is supposed to be unconditional and, if my own mother hates me, then I can't possibly be a decent person, my therapist prompted, "But you ultimately realized the thing about mothers is just a trope and it isn't necessarily true.  You realized what your mother thinks has no bearing on who you are as a person... right?"

To which I replied, "...What?"

The Time My Mother Gave Me Caffeine Pills

My mother started giving me caffeine pills my senior year of high school.  I was very tired.  I was in the school plays, took private music lessons at a local university twice per week, was an officer in several school clubs ("colleges want well-rounded students"), and spent all day every Sunday at various choir practices and church groups.  I frequently fell asleep doing my homework and broke down in tears when I had yet another paper to write.  My grades didn't suffer -- I had made straight A's for several years, and that didn't change until I finally got an 89% my last semester of AP Calculus -- but my crying seemed to annoy my mother. 

One day my mother gave me a little yellow box of pills she had bought and told me they would help me get my homework done.  This was the same year she gave me anti-depressants, about three years after she started self-medicating with pain killers and muscle relaxants, and several years after she started doling out to both of us pretty much every vitamin supplement she read about in magazines or saw mentioned on television.  Dr. Oz wasn't a thing back then, but something comparable must have existed because she had us on multiple supplements I had never heard of anywhere.  I don't even remember how many pills I was taking daily back then.  Six?  Nine?  I want to say nine because I knew I could take eleven pills -- including a couple Tylenol -- in one giant swallow.  Most of the supplements she bought had no discernible effect, such as the aloe pills and the garlic pills and the vitamin E.  The caffeine pills did though.  The box she gave me said each pill contained the caffeine of two cups of coffee.  I didn't see how this would work significantly better than just drinking more coffee, but I did as she said and took one, as I always had when my mother gave me medicine.

The caffeine pills didn't help me think or stay awake.  I still felt exhausted, but now I was shaking and freezing cold too.  They left me too wired to fall asleep, but writing essays still took work.  My mother urged me to try the pills again, to take another.  She seemed sure they would help me get my work done, as I always had regardless of what I took or didn't take.  After a couple more tries with the caffeine pills provoked exactly the same shaking and chills, I stopped taking them.  My mother was wrong.  They only made me feel worse.  I would make do without them, as I always had. 

The number of pills I consumed dropped considerably after I left for college.  I didn't have money to waste on supplements that did nothing, and the doctor I saw at university health services when I needed a prescription renewed had made fun of me for being on so many things at my age.  No one had ever bothered to make fun of my pill consumption with my mother in the exam room.  No doctor had ever dared to imply I should take less than what my mother was doling out.  She has a knack with doctors.   

"Daughters Are a Lot Harder Than Sons"

When I was pregnant with our first and only child, my husband and I were delighted to find out at my 20 week prenatal appointment that she was a girl.  I shared the news with my dad, who wished me luck in what struck me as an insulting sort of way and sighed, "Daughters are a lot harder than sons."  I can only assume he was referring to the fact that my spectrum of displayed emotions as a child had extended to feelings that confused him, such as "sadness," while my brother Dante's had tended to stay in the more familiar "violent rage" category.

I wanted to tell him, "I'm glad to hear you feel that way because you are going to be taking care of Dante until you die."  But I didn't.  I was silent.  He is going to be taking care of Dante until he dies.  No one needs to say it out loud.

An Attitude of Gratitude

Some people I went to high school with like to post on Facebook about how, if someone is depressed or having trouble loving life, it's because she is lacking "an attitude of gratitude."  To which I say, "Go fuck yourself."

While I agree that it's great and helpful to look on the bright side and count your blessings, hearing that advice from a third party who knows nothing about your situation can appear to lack empathy and sound a little bit like, "Maybe you'd have an easier time snapping out of it if you weren't such an ungrateful little bitch."  To which I repeat, "Go fuck yourself," and add, "You sound like my mother."

I know this judgment probably isn't what's intended with most "attitude of gratitude" posts and my interpretation is biased by my own experiences, but I also know my experiences aren't unique.  I think audience perspective is worth bearing in mind when doling out blanket advice to hundreds of acquaintances on social media.  Yes, happiness is a choice that comes from within, but implying happy people are doing it right and unhappy people are unhappy because they're doing it wrong is a vast oversimplification of the human experience.  Life is hard.  Maybe we're all just doing the best we can with the hands we've been dealt.

Anyway, I think more helpful advice informs people not what to think or to feel but what to do -- because, while thoughts and feelings come and go regardless of how we try to force them, action is what we actually have control over.  So rather than try to follow "be grateful" or equally unhelpful and invalidating advice, in honor of Thanksgiving today, I am making a list of things for which I am thankful.  Making a list is an action.  It is something I have control over.  Everything on my list of "consolation prizes" belongs here too.

Here is my Thankful list:

1) I am thankful for my BFF Jerry.  We've been best friends since my senior year of high school nearly half my life ago, and she knows my mother firsthand.  I can't even list all the ways she has been important to me and vital to my continued existence.  She is the closest thing I've ever met to a soul mate.

2) I am thankful for my husband.  He works hard and is the most resilient person I've ever met.  This is not hyperbole -- he is the most resilient person most people who know him have ever met.  We have different interests but the same sense of humor, and I never really get bored of spending time with him, even if we're just sitting on the couch watching YouTube videos together.  I ultimately married him because I could not imagine another person who would give me a better shot at being a happy, fully functional person than him.  He's the kind of person you'd want on your team.  I also like who I am when I'm with him.  I feel like myself. 

3) I am thankful for my daughter.  I have never had a greater incentive to keep trying than her.  She is resilient and cheerful in ways I never was as a child.  She is smart and creative and beautiful and legitimately funny.  I hope she somehow develops an athleticism that no known person in her family tree has ever possessed, but even if she doesn't, she is perfection.

4) I am thankful for my home, which is in pretty good shape and which keeps my family safe and warm and dry.  I am thankful for the neighbors who I see when I go outside.  It's so friendly here.  We know each others' names and say hello like we're in a more spacious and physically comfortable version of college.  I am thankful I generally prefer getting rid of things to hoarding them.  I am thankful I generally prefer getting my home repaired to living with issues that make me feel ashamed of it.  I am thankful I have the money to do the things necessary to maintain my home and also that I know how to handle money.  I am thankful my mother taught me about finances, even though she couldn't manage her own.

5) I am thankful for the public library system, which saves me hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars per year in books and videos I can borrow rather than buy and keep.

6) I am thankful for my sun lamp, Yogi brand's St. John's Wort herbal tea, my elliptical machine, Netflix, the gym near my house with all the good weight machines, meditation as described in Pema Chödrön's How to Meditate, and everything else that helps me to feel okay.

7) I am thankful for the people who share their stories and feelings on the internet and make me feel normal and sane.  I am thankful for the people who read what I write and make me feel less alone.  Thank you.

And to anyone reading this who is feeling depressed today because they are alone or feel alone or have to spend time with family and only wish they could be alone, I say, "That sucks.  I'm sorry you're having to deal with that.  Have you tried watching Netflix or, if you're with family, surreptitiously watching Netflix on your iPhone?  I hear the new Aziz Ansari show is good, and I always recommend Firefly for a good distraction.  Have you tried making Bingo boards of all the crazy and casually racist things your mother might say over dinner?  Have you considered cataloging the most ridiculous things your parents say and sharing them with friends or the internet for our mutual entertainment so that you can look forward to their madness rather than dread it?  Have you tried bourbon or cheesecake?  I'm sorry you're having a hard time today.  You're not alone.  I hope you feel better soon."