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.

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.

"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.

Genetic Counseling for the Donor Conceived

I'm getting to the point where I'm posting enough stuff my half-siblings know that, if they stumbled across this blog for whatever reason, they would be able to identify me.  This makes me nervous, but not nervous enough to stop posting.  Obviously.

My half-brother Hans emailed me the other day to say our uncle had tested positive for some sort of mutation that puts people at higher risk for specific types of cancer.  He said our father had asked him to let me know in case I wanted to get myself or my daughter tested.  Below Hans' note was a series of emails between my biological father and my uncle's wife.  She had the job of informing my uncle's family members that they might want to get tested.  There was a limited amount of information exchanged.  The emails were from several months ago, but the dates showed my biological father just had forwarded them to Hans to forward to me this week.  It reminded me vaguely of how people who find out they have an STD are supposed to reach out to everyone they've been intimate with.  "Hey, it's Joseph.  Yeah, the Joseph who sired you about 30 years ago.  Good times, huh?  So anyway, I tested positive, and it turns out you might want to get yourself tested too..."  I wish I had more known half-siblings, just to add to the comic effect.

I had a check up scheduled with my doctor for just a few days later, so I brought a print-out of the email chain to my appointment and asked my doctor what he thought of genetic testing.  I'd assumed he would say there wasn't much point in it if I'm not planning to have more kids and there is nothing actionable I can do with the results anyway.  When I'd brought up prenatal testing before conceiving my daughter, my OB/GYN at the time had said, "What for?  If you don't even know your family medical history, how can we know what tests to run?"  I hadn't known who my biological father was back then or anything about his family medical history, but I thought there were standard tests doctors could run for common disorders. 

To my surprise, maybe because I have more family information now, my current doctor had a different reaction.  He referred me to a local cancer center that does genetic counseling and strongly recommended I do it.  He said that, while there isn't often something actionable to be done with a heightened cancer risk, there might be more screening options in the future, and the field of genetics is progressing constantly so it would be good to have my results on file.

I called the genetic counselor to make an appointment.  She asked me if I had a copy of my uncle's report because there was relevant information in it that they could use in testing me.  I told her I might be able to get a copy.  She stressed the importance of it until I finally explained that my biological father was an anonymous sperm donor and I'm still a secret to most of his family, said uncle probably included.  I told her I would ask my brother for the report, but I wasn't sure I could get it.  She told me it was okay.  While it's useful information and would inform what genetic tests would be done on me and would probably make my testing cheaper, they can work without it. 

Then she asked me to compile a list of every  member of my extended family who has had cancer too, as well as which type of cancer and at what age it developed.  I know some of that.  I know what I know anyway.  I don't know when their various cancers developed, but I know they all died soon thereafter or as a result of the cancer, and I know when they died, so surely that counts for something.  My information isn't lacking enough that I would try to ask for more anyway.  Most of the cancer in my family is on my father's side.  All of the "lady cancers" are, and those are the ones whose risk are heightened the most dramatically by this particular gene mutation.

I told my brother thank you for the information and thank you when he got me the extra pages from our uncle's report.  He's always very prompt in his replies.  I didn't mention that I already have heightened risk for colon cancer, which I inherited from our father's genes, in spite of our father pointing out in the email chain that he thinks he got "the good genes" because he hasn't yet had the same colon issues his brother or mother have had.  I'm not going to tell any of them the results of my genetics testing either, both because I don't think they want to know and also because I want to have information they don't have for a change.  I'm not mad at my half-siblings.  They are nice and kind to me, but I'm angry at my father every time I remember he exists, not just for this.  I get so angry when I think of him that I often cry in impotent rage, and I don't want anyone in his family to know that.  I want them to think I'm calmer and cooler than them, as I've always pretended to be.  I do not want them thinking I'm irrational and ungrateful or expecting too much.  I will take what I can get.  I will take months' old forwarded emails indicating that my daughter and I might want to get ourselves checked out for new and exotic cancer risks, carefully funneled through a third party so that I don't dare take liberties with my father by responding to him directly.  I know I have more than most DC people already.  But I'm still angry.  

Bright Side:  At least it's not ALS.  I scoured my raw genome data from 23andMe, and I'm definitely not getting ALS.

Breaking Up with My Mother

Near the end of our relationship -- just before the several months of silence that preceded my wedding -- my mother left me some rather fucked up voicemails.  I've mentioned them here before.  Sometimes I would come home from work to a happy morning voicemail chattering away about wedding cakes and an angry afternoon voicemail calling me an ungrateful little bitch.  Sometimes there were more than two.  I still have them.  Almost all of them.  My voicemail at the time was set up to send mp3 files to my gmail account, and I didn't delete them.  I starred the most fucked up ones so I could find them later if I needed to build a case against her or I guess just feel sorry for myself in a masochistic sort of way.

I listened to two of her starred voicemails the other day for the first time in at least five years.  I'm not entirely sure why, though I have wanted to post them here for a long time.  I've run across them before in my email, but I have avoided them until recently because I anticipated they would make me feel bad or start shaking like I used to whenever I heard her voice.  It was the first time I've heard her voice in at least five years.  I didn't start shaking, so that was good.  I didn't cry either, which is also good.  They were a lot meaner than I remembered.  Pretty much every time I run across an old email or story about her, I'm surprised again by how much worse it was than I remembered. 

In both the voicemails I listened to, she said something along the lines of, "Answer me this one question and I'll leave you alone forever.  What did I ever do to deserve the way you treat me?"  That might not be verbatim, but I don't want to listen to them again to check.  Take my word for it that it's close enough.  And the answer to her question is that she did very little to deserve the way I treated her.  I was kind to her.  I tried to help her and make her happy.  Bear in mind that these voicemails were before I ever cut ties with her, when I tripped over myself trying to save both my parents at the expense of most other things in my life.  Most people would have considered me a good daughter, or at least that's what they say out loud.  She didn't deserve the way I treated her.  She didn't have to because she was my mother and I loved her and felt responsible for her. 

After I got married and my mother stopped contacting me again and my dad made his threat to let himself die of infection rather than live in a nursing home, my husband I moved.  That was when we bought our house so that my dad could move in with us.  My mother hadn't reached out to me in the ten months following my wedding, and I didn't reach out to tell her I was moving. 

I didn't hear from her again for three years, when she finally found me on Facebook.  She sent me this message:

I miss you, I love you. I sent you an anniversary card but it came back. Just wanted you to know I am getting the help I need and would love to be in contact with you again. I am living in a group home called Butterfly Glen and it helps. My address is 12986 Appleton St Cincinnati, OH and my phone number is 513-555-9876. I would love to hear from you. I was diagnosed with bi-polar disorder and am being treated for it. I feel much better. Love forever and always, Mom

My first reaction was shock.  Not at the content so much as the fact that it was her.  Sort of like how I used to start shaking whenever the phone rang.  Flushed face, pounding heart.  I'm not sure if it was more fear or excitement.  I find them hard to tell apart. 

I didn't know what to say.  I wanted to tell her good job.  I wanted to praise her for getting help, even if the help she was getting was not by choice.  I knew from my dad that she had only ended up at Butterfly Glen because of another "suicide attempt" after both her parents died and she was going to have to find someone new to take her in and take care of her.  No one retrieved her from the hospital's psych ward, so she had been released to Butterfly Glen, an assisted living home I presume she selected from a short list based on its name.  She has always loved butterflies.  Butterfly everything.  Also, it's a shithole -- I've looked online.

The problem with responding to her was that I didn't want to renew contact.  It felt like an abusive ex with a drug abuse problem was reaching out to say she'd gotten clean and was ready to be together again.  Why?  I'm fine now and it was so hard to break up -- why would I ever walk back into that?  I want her to be happy and healthy, but what I don't want her to be is my problem.  I reached out to my best friend, Jerry.  I explained that I didn't want to have to deal to my mother again but that I felt I owed it to her until the next time she went off the deep end.  "Don't respond for three weeks, and I bet she'll comply," Jerry said.  Jerry knows my mom.

The fact of the matter is that I don't know if my mother was still abusing prescription drugs at Butterfly Glen.  I have no idea how much of what she was on or how diligent her doctors were.  I thought back to how she'd been before the muscle relaxants and the sleeping pills and god knows what else.  Back when I was thirteen and younger.  Her behavior wouldn't have been mistaken for bipolar disorder back then, before the drugs.  And that's when I started remembering some of the stories I've told here, and I realized I still wouldn't want her in my life.  No version of the mother I've ever known would be someone I would choose to have in my life.  Life is easier without her. 

I explained to my therapist, "The more I think about my childhood, the more the good memories are colored by the things I know now.  It seems like the love I felt for my mother was mostly Stockholm Syndrome." 

She replied, "Maybe it was."  I didn't expect that response.

I didn't reply to my mother's Facebook message.  She sent me another a few months later on my birthday, but I didn't see it until even later because it was in my "other" inbox, where unsolicited messages from strangers go.  She wrote:

Happy Happy Birthday!!! I can't believe that 30 years ago today you came into my life and changed it forever. I wanted to update you on family events. I'm sure that Dad told you that Grandma Wilkes died in May after your wedding. Uncle Jim died last November and Grandpa Wilkes died on August 4th this year. All I have left is Dante and you and Michael. I'm living in a great group home called Butterfly Glen I am being treated with medication and group therapy for Bipolar disorder. I am doing great and the only thing that could be better would be to hear from you. I don't want anything from you just to hear from you and to know where you are and what you're doing and how you are doing. Love Forever and Always, MOM

I was pregnant with Eliza at the time.  I never replied.

Bright Side

If you don't yet know the identity of one or both of your genetic parents, and you don't yet have life insurance, consider buying a life insurance policy in 2016.  The forms generally ask for family medical history, and if you don't know yours, your life insurance can actually be a tad cheaper than it would be if you knew just how sick your biological family really is.  I got life insurance between finding out I'm donor conceived and finding out who my biological father is, and my family medical history for those forms was half the length it is now that I've found him.  It's called "plausible deniability."  Might as well force something useful out of parental anonymity.  Happy New Year's Eve, Everybody!

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 Found My Address -- and a Contingency Plan

Dear Jerry,

My dad says my mom finally looked up my name on the internet and found me.  My address is on the first page of hits, so it's an investment of about 5 seconds.  I figured it was only a matter of time, but 2 years is a pretty good run.  It's pretty obvious she is in the mania stage right now, based on my dad's email below.  I'm wondering how long this one will last and if she is still living at that group home and if she is or was on any kind of stabilizing medication while there.

My phone number doesn't appear to be listed online yet, but even once it is, caller ID makes it easy enough to avoid 513 calls that aren't from my dad or you or your family.  I doubt she'd take the 8-hour drive to show up on my doorstep if she hasn't been able to reach me by phone in 3+ years, but if she did, I have no idea how one is supposed to handle that situation.  I imagine she would take a bus like she did when she accosted my dad in Cleveland and then take a taxi to my house, and then say she can't leave because she'd need to call another taxi and doesn't have enough money for it to take her anywhere anyway.  Have you ever heard of someone in this situation?  My first thought was that I would call the local police, but I think they'd just say they don't want to get involved in a domestic squabble and that she hasn't committed any crime and she'd be left sitting outside my house waiting for me to make a move.  I'd like to have some kind of contingency plan that doesn't involve giving her money or letting her into my home.  -- C

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Paul Rossetti <stargazer23401@aol.com>
Date: Sun, Mar 13, 2011 at 3:53 PM
Subject:
To: Christina R. Martin <christina.r.martin@gmail.com>

By the way, you'd better watch out. Evidently your mom has access to a computer, and is with it enough to have found you there.
She's also told Dante she is going to sue me for another $500 a month for monthly maintenance. I'd sure like to know who's putting her up to all this.
Love, Dad...
___________________
DON'T SWEAT THE SMALL STUFF, IT'S ALL SMALL STUFF...

For a couple years after I stopped communicating with my mother, I still feared her showing up on my doorstep, as noted in the email above.  I had moved halfway across the country since the last time she knew my address, but my new address was highly findable.  When Michael and I bought our house, our county published our names, address, and the purchase price of our house, as they do with all real estate purchases.  For awhile it was the first thing that came up in a Google search for my name, and it worried me.

I live a full day's drive from my mother, but I imagined the craziest things she could do, such as taking a taxi to get here and demanding I pay the thousand dollar cab fare because she had no money, or something similarly ridiculous.  I worried about this scenario a fair amount, and sometimes it kept me awake at night.  How would I get rid of her if she showed up?  What if she threw a fit in my driveway and said she couldn't leave because she had no phone, no car, and no money?  I couldn't control it.  I can't control anything she does. 

What I can control is how I react, so I hatched a contingency plan so I wouldn't lose any more sleep imagining this stupid scenario.  First, I had to decide what else I had control over and what I would be willing to do.  I have control over my house and my property and my body and my money.  These were all things she had seemed to control up until I got my own apartment and a full-time job, so it was easy to forget I was a financially independent adult who could put my foot down. 

I decided I would not pay anyone who brought her to my home.  That would do nothing to benefit me, and no one could legally make me do it ("no one can legally make me" has become a big deciding factor in letting myself say "no" to things -- I say "no" to a lot of things now).  I also wouldn't give her money or let her into my home under any circumstances.  I could just imagine her kicking off her shoes, lying down on my couch, and declaring squatters rights or something.  I know squatters rights don't work that way, but it would still be harder to make her leave once she got inside.  I also wouldn't drive her anywhere in my car.  I refuse to put myself in any situation in which she could try to abduct or kill me, likely or not, and I also don't care for the inconvenience.

What I would do is tell her politely and firmly that she is not welcome at my home or on my property and that, if she doesn't leave immediately, I will call the police.  No conversation, no "hearing what she has to say," just my telling her politely and firmly to leave.  If she said she couldn't go because her cab already left and she had no phone and no money and it was raining -- my god, the rain -- and she had nowhere else to go, I would be willing to give a little to ease along the progress of the situation.   

If it were raining, I would give her an umbrella I don't mind parting with forever.  We have at least one cheap, collapsible umbrella that is sort of half-broken but still in use because it's small enough to fit in a backpack.  If it were raining, she could have that (envision "I am a benevolent god" meme here).  I would bring the cordless phone to the door (after locking the door behind me while I went to fetch it so that she couldn't sneak in) because if she tried to steal it or break it, I have two others and they don't work beyond my yard anyway so it would just be amusing to me.  I would let her call someone on my cordless phone to retrieve her, and if she swore she had no one, I would call her a cab myself.  I would allow her to wait at the curb for the car rather than calling the police on her immediately.  There would be a time limit on how long I would allow her to wait in sight of my home, and it would be based on how long it typically takes a cab to come.  Maybe 30 minutes.  I might be willing to pay a taxi driver in cash to take her to a bus station or airport, but I would give no money to my mother directly, and if she came back, I would not pay another cabbie again.  I consider this very generous of me since paying the cabbie in the first place isn't my job and calling the cops is free.  

If she came back again or refused to go in the first place, I would call the police, and they would come and remove her because the police in my town are very helpful and I am a thirty-something, affluent, white woman, while my mother looks like a crazy homeless person.  I forgot this fact a lot when I was younger.  I am an affluent white woman, I have power, and the amount of respect I receive from strangers has increased dramatically since I entered my thirties.  Even if my mother tried to claim she has a right to me and everything I own because she is my mother, the cops wouldn't accept that because it is crazy and not how America works, even if it's how my mother's mind works.  I would calmly and quietly explain that my mother is severely mentally ill, refuses any sort of treatment, and that I haven't been in contact with her for the last seven years for this exact reason.  I would express a subdued but believable amount of fear and, now that I have a child, mention protecting her.  They would take my mother away from my home because it's their job and also because I know how to behave in a variety of situations and she does not.  I have no problem calling the police as many times as necessary.  And unlike my dad, I have no qualms about pressing charges if it came to that.

I also had a clever plan in which I would sneak out the back door, go to my neighbor's house, sneak us both back in through my kitchen door, and have my neighbor answer the door to tell my mother I had sold the house and moved.  I think it would take too long to go get my neighbor though.  It might be worth trying if my mother were higher functioning and more dangerous, but I think the flat out rejection of sending her away or calling the cops would be equally effective at getting rid of her in the long-term.  She doesn't handle rejection well, and I don't think she'd be willing to put herself out there a second time.  I think she would crumple.  Sometimes I think if I were to look her dead in the eye and state point blank, "You aren't worth the trouble," she would explode into a pile of ash.

[Edited:  Re-reading all this I realize my contingency plan has changed.  I would tell her to leave and then call the police.  I wouldn't give her an umbrella or call her a cab or let her wait at the end of my driveway for a ride.  I would just call the police.  Apparently I don't have the patience or benevolence I had four years ago.  Oh well.]

Post-Divorce Antics

The following email chain took place a year after the last time I spoke to my mother.  It was awhile after my parent's divorce became final, when my mother had moved in with her parents and finally made an effort to cash the spousal support checks my dad had paid her for the entirety of their separation.  Because she had ignored the checks for months and then couldn't find them, the court had replaced them with a $30,000 mega-check.   

Dear Jerry,

I can hardly fathom how much junk food one could buy at Walmart with $200. 

My dad's lawyer sends him regular notes on what he's been doing on his case (i.e., "why I'm charging you another $250" notes -- just think how much junk food he could buy from Walmart!).  He's ultra-professional and the notes normally just state quick little facts.  Which is what makes the attached note and its tone of exasperation slightly amusing. 

I'm so glad my mother doesn't have my current phone number or know what state I live in.  Dante said she's been trying to call me, looking for the next check ever since the check for $30k went through, but the phone number she has is from two apartments ago.  -- C

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Paul Rossetti <stargazer23401@aol.com>
Date: Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 4:37 PM
Subject: Fwd:
To: Christina R. Martin <christina.r.martin@gmail.com>

Here's the note. By the way, She's calling Dante on a daily basis now. Looks like she's trying that with my lawyer. I'm damn glad she doesn't have my number or address. Dante also said that when she tried to cash the $30k check, the bank would only give her $100 until it cleared because of its size. She then took that $100, borrowed another $100 from grandpa, took a cab, and went to WalMart, and bought twinkies and other junk food. She's also off one of her meds, which explains her behavior, I think.

Love, Dad...

July 7.          Annie Rossetti attempted to call me at 11:20am and at noon. Both times I refused to talk with her with explanation through my secretary that she has a lawyer and I am not permitted to talk with her. She clearly is having mental health problems right now again. That may be worse than they have been. She states that her personal property is to be turned over to her by July 31^st and that she took a cab and went by the house in Cincinnati recently and the locks were changed and she could not get in.  She threatens to file a contempt of court. She said she has tried to talk to her own lawyer and her own lawyer will not talk with her anymore. All of this was in a long winded voice mail to me. She claims she will file a contempt of court against client.

            I am not going to talk to Annie Rossetti and even when I get a voice mail from now on I am just going to ignore it rather then take the time and record it in the file and pass it on to client. Unless Paul instructs me by email to do so I will be ignoring any messages from her.

The Time My Grandmother Visited My Mother as a Ladybug

Once when I was in my early twenties, my mother told me she hadn't felt like going to church that Sunday.  "But then I saw a ladybug, and I just knew it was your grandma telling me I needed to go to church." 

What makes this idea slightly less crazy is that my uncle used to call my grandmother "Ladybug" as a nickname.  What makes it slightly more crazy is that my grandmother was still alive at the time, recovering from a surgery or sickness that kept her from church that particular Sunday, but otherwise fine. 

Methodists don't usually have animal familiars, so I suggested my mother ask her mother, "Did you visit me in the form of a ladybug yesterday?" to confirm.  I don't think she ever did.

Mother Takes Her Cut

At the end of my sophomore year of college, I applied for and accepted a campus job as a Resident Assistant.  My payment was a rent-free studio efficiency apartment that would normally cost a little over $10k for the school year.  In order to accept the job, I had to quit my mail room job I had worked since freshman year.  It had been my sole source of income during the school year.

Because my RA apartment didn't come with a meal plan, I had no way to pay for food.  I also had no way to pay for the phone line the school required me to have, or clothes or anything else.  My social security checks were still being kept by my mother to pay for my books and tuition.  My parents kicked in a lot toward tuition, and I paid for the rest with a hefty academic scholarship and student loans.

After my explanation of the situation -- that she wouldn't have to pay for my housing and could redirect funds toward the things I'd previously paid for with my mail room job -- my mother agreed to give me a monthly allowance so I could buy food and necessities.  I believe it was $150 per month, if I recall correctly.  I know the budget I worked out allowed me to spend $20 per week on food, so I had to stop buying whole grain healthy stuff and eat a lot more ramen.  Unfortunately, that was the same year I was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, so I had a lot of doctors bills, and I had to pay bus fare three times per week to get to the hospital for my initial follow-up appointments and some related blood tests.

I called my mother and told her I needed more money to pay hospital bills, and she screamed at me for daring to pay any of them in full.  ALWAYS put them on a payment plan, she told me.  NEVER pay hospital bills in full!  I hadn't known.  I asked for payment plans going forward, but I still needed more money.  I was barely getting by, and my boss got mad whenever I argued that I didn't have money to eat restaurant food with the other RAs.  My boss expected me to pitch in an equal amount whether I ate their food or not.  My mother eventually gave me a little more money and purchased me a small supplemental meal plan through the school so that I could eat larger, healthier meals occasionally.  Then she spent somewhere in neighborhood of $70 -- more than three weeks' worth of grocery money in my world -- to send me a Hershey's Chocolate Tower of Treats made up almost exclusively of foods my doctors had told me to avoid, such as nuts and popcorn.  I had even told her about the diet restrictions before she sent it.

After graduation, after my mother went off the deep end, my dad mentioned the monthly allowance I had lived off of for those last two years of college, except the figure he quoted to me was more than double what I had received.  "She told me you hated me," he said.  "She said I had to give the money to her because you would never accept it if it came from me directly because you hated me so much."  And then she had taken a more than 50% cut for herself.  Every single month.  I'll let slide the fact that she told my dad I hated him because parental alienation was old hat with her and shouldn't have come as a surprise.  But knowing I was struggling, hearing me cry over the phone that I couldn't afford anything and was embarrassing myself in front of my boss, she made the repeated decision to take her cut.  Every.  Single.  Month. 

My dad didn't even control their money.  He only ever bothered controlling his own comparatively tiny social security checks, which were about 10% of their total monthly income.  The rest was all hers.  About $9k per month, all hers, at least $6k of which should have been disposable income.  I guess she wanted more.

[Edited:  I forgot to factor in my tuition and their various car payments -- I don't even remember how many cars they would have been paying off at that time -- when I said they had $6k in monthly disposable income.  I was going on what their finances looked like when I took them over a couple years later.  I think their mortgage payments were less back then, before the refinance, but I don't know by how much.  They might have had as little as $4k disposable income per month. Of course that number also factors in if my mother had paid both the home equity line of credit payment and my tuition rather than paying the HELOC payment every month and then immediately borrowing against it again to pay my tuition, which is what she said she did (in one of her "you are why we're poor" rants).  Actually, she said she paid for at least one car with the HELOC too, so that payment wouldn't have been extra.  Never mind.  I can't even picture what finances looked like when my mother was in charge of them.  I've tried before, and that way madness lies.]

Consolation Prizes

I've mentioned here before that, as a child and teen, I had a habit of looking for "consolation prizes" when bad things happened to me.  Some people call them "silver linings."  Sometimes they were good things that might not have otherwise happened; sometimes they were simply lessons I'd learned.  I liked to believe everything happens for a reason because it makes everything life doles out so much easier to swallow.  I fell out of that habit though.  I want to get back into it.  Here are some consolation prizes for which I'm thankful.  They might get a little weird.

1) I'm thankful my mother is as low functioning as she is.  It's terrible for her, and of course I would prefer she be her best self and happy, but if she has to be cruel and work against me, being severely mentally ill and low functioning to the point that strangers can tell is a good thing for me.  It made her easier to cut from my life.  When I told people the truth about things she had said and done, no one seemed to doubt me.  I still have relationships with some of my extended family (the ones I like best) and do not feel like I have to fear what she says about me to them or to strangers anymore because I appear sane and trustworthy and she does not.  She also does not have the stick-to-it-tiveness to hire a hitman or steal my identity (fingers crossed) or anything else she might dream up against me in her darkest hours.

There are a lot of people with parents who have personality disorders and the like who aren't quite so lucky.  A high functioning parent who has a tendency towards cruelty and viciousness is a terrible thing.  It can make people call you a liar and treat you poorly.  It can make you doubt your own sanity.  My mother's spiral into darker depths saved me from that.  I did go through the self-doubt as so many of us do, but I know it was easier than it could have been, and for that I am thankful.

2) I'm thankful the dad I grew up with isn't biologically related to me.  Maybe it wouldn't have made a difference, and maybe his health problems are mostly related to his paraplegia rather than genetics, but I don't see any way being related to him would have made my life better.  He's not so nice, and I'm pretty sure I got at least a few extra IQ points from my hyper-educated biological father.  I'm 99% sure my parents would agree with that too -- no matter how mad they got at me, they never seemed to stop believing I was significantly smarter than them.  Plus, now that I know who my biological father is, I have siblings with whom I'm on speaking terms.  Even if we never become close, just being their sister is something I treasure.

3) I'm thankful for the parts of my parents that wanted me to excel.  They had the same high expectations of me that I had for myself, and they were willing to put money into my education.

4) I'm thankful for the parts of my parents that wanted me to shut up and leave them alone.  Had they been exclusively helicopter parents who overprotected and coddled me, I might not have become self-sufficient as easily, but when they were sick of me, I had to figure out how to handle things myself.  I learned how to stick up for myself, physically and financially and (sort of) emotionally.  Perhaps I could have learned these skills via good parenting instead, but from what I've read, only about 50% of people have fully functional parents anyway, and I got what I needed, so for that I am thankful.

5) I am thankful I am hypersensitive and couldn't take anybody's shit even as a child.  Most of the things I have always hated most about myself can be traced back to being hypersensitive -- crying easily, getting upset easily, even fainting easily -- but I know there are ways this quality has actually served me well.  I think Dante would have abused me in worse ways had he not known I would scream and tell our parents.  My complaints and tears were a great source of irritation for my parents, but at no point did I just shut up and accept what was dished out, even when it would have been easier for all involved.  I hated that about myself -- the tears and complaints felt like more of a compulsion than a choice -- but in hindsight I think it was actually an effective defense mechanism in that house.  I have worked to change gears as an adult, especially since I have control over my own situation now and can usually just get myself what I need rather than complain about it, but I think being willing to complain is still useful.  When I can't take matters into my own hands and the most reasonable thing to do is file a formal complaint or call the police, I can do that, and that's a useful thing to know.

6) I am thankful for my childhood perfectionism and terror of doing anything wrong.  This is another quality I have spent a lot of time hating about myself.  It took me until my twenties to realize I was going to get yelled at just about the same regardless of what I did, so I spent my entire childhood and college years trying to be perfect.  I wasted a lot of time I could have been having fun feeling completely stressed instead.  If I did things just so, my parents would be happy and no one would yell at me, I thought erroneously.  However, as stressed as it made me, I did get good grades, and those helped me get out.  I stayed out of trouble and -- because I tried so hard to be perfect  -- when that still wasn't enough, I was eventually able to see that it wasn't my fault.  Accepting that your parents' bad behavior isn't all your own fault can be really hard, especially when they can point to things you might have done to provoke it (I'm going to let you in on a secret -- it still isn't your fault).

From what I've read, there are two routes children of unpredictable parents tend to take:  attempted perfection and rebellion.  I attempted perfection while Dante rebelled.  While I believe rebellion would have been more fun and I might still have turned out fine, attempted perfection has landed me in an okay place, so I'm making peace with the route I took.  Besides, I'm really glad I didn't turn out like Dante.  He still lives in that house.

6) I am thankful I was slightly fat as a child.  I honestly think I might have been in better health my entire life had I been raised by parents who fed me reasonably and occasionally took me to the park, but since I wasn't and I did spend all of my childhood slightly fat and miserable about it, I learned about nutrition and exercise myself, which has served me well.  Had I been as thin as Dante, I might never have forced myself to learn these skills and might thus have worse health now as an adult, as I know Dante does because he posts about it in online forums under a username I'm sure he thinks is anonymous. 

7) I am thankful my parents didn't allow me to go to therapy.  Maybe I would have recovered more quickly if I'd had professional help earlier, but I've also heard of people who learned not to trust therapists at all because of how their parents used their mental health against them.  The parents accused them of being crazy and painted fantastic pictures for their therapists of what terrible, troubled children they were.  I can only imagine how that would have broken me down.  Because my parents didn't allow me to go to therapy, it was something I reached out for on my own when I got out, and it has been gloriously helpful.  In my opinion, therapy is the #1 life hack of all time.

Learning to Breathe (After Life in a Moldy Hoard House)

The title isn't a reference to something profound.  This post is literally about overcoming sinus problems associated with growing up in a wet, moldy hoard house.

I've mentioned here before how my childhood home had a flooded basement.  My parents said the house was built on an active spring, and they never had a sump pump installed.  The basement flooded every time it rained until, eventually, there was at least an inch of standing water over the basement's concrete floor even when it hadn't rained in days.  There was visible mold on the books and papers in the basement.  We weren't allowed to open the windows in the house either because "Dante is allergic to pollen," so the air in the house was perpetually stale and damp.  I lived there from birth until I left for college.

I have had severe sinus congestion for as long as I can remember.  When I was a child, my mother took me to the doctor regularly with sinusitis and upper respiratory infections, for which I was on antibiotics far more than any doctor today would prescribe them.  I remember being on either Amoxicillin or Augmentin for what seemed like most of elementary school.  I was prescribed them enough that I knew the drug names and what they were.  Even when I went to the doctor with what I can only assume were stress-fueled stomach aches, he told me, "You have an upper respiratory infection.  Here's a prescription for Augmentin." 

I can't remember the last time I took antibiotics for something and the problem didn't return within two weeks.  It was sometime before high school anyway -- I started researching and trying my own home remedies after that, and I found ones that worked.  I always finished all my antibiotics too, so that wasn't the problem.  I was just on prescription medications A LOT as a kid.  A lot more than should have been necessary.

My mother attempted to aid my congestion by keeping a humidifier in my bedroom, which at best probably exacerbated the problem.  She insisted on pointing it at my bed since that was where my breathing problems really bothered me, so my bed was damp whenever it was time to go to sleep.  When I redirected the humidifier so that it wouldn't dampen my bed, she would notice on her regular bedroom searches and move it back.  I finally had a talk with her about that -- both about the wet bedsheets and about how moisture dissipates through the air -- and thankfully she seemed to understand.  She also gave me a tiny Vick's inhaler with a sort of mild menthol scent.  It didn't seem to do anything, but I sniffed it obsessively in my bed at night for the first decade of my life in an attempt to be able to breathe through my nose.

At the age of eight, I tested positive for a mold allergy.  The doctor recommended I not keep bouquets of fresh flowers in my bedroom since plants are often a source of mold spores and he didn't know about the basement.  My mother now had a better reason than ever not to allow us to open the windows.  On the days when the weather forecast said the pollen count was low, the mold count was typically high from recent rain, so we stayed in our climate-controlled house and breathed the moldy air together.

When I was around eleven my dad introduced me to Dristan.  It's a medicated nasal spray that works like magic on even the worst congestion.  I wondered why he hadn't given me some earlier, but I didn't know it was highly habit forming or that it increases blood pressure and causes perpetual post nasal drip (that last one isn't even on the box).  I didn't learn any of that until I'd been using it for months, when I started noticing I had to use it more and more frequently to keep being able to breathe.  My dad had been using Dristan compulsively several times per day for twenty years at that point, so I guess it didn't occur to him to tell me any of the box warnings.

I weaned myself off Dristan for the first time when I was a senior in high school.  It was hard.  It meant enduring even worse congestion for several days until the withdrawal period wore off, then going back to the poor congestion of my childhood.  I started using it again my freshman year of college when I came down with a sinus infection.  I had sinus infections frequently growing up, and they would swell my entire nasal passage shut.  I couldn't sleep.  In college, using Dristan again seemed like less of a problem than not being able to sleep for several days in a row.

I weaned myself off the Dristan again a couple more times over the years.  Each time I started using it again was because of a sinus infection (which I treated by simply waiting for it to pass) and a complete inability to breathe through my nose.  I tried asking my doctor for help when I read that a prescription steroid nasal spray can help get through the withdrawal, but he said I should simply stop taking Dristan and learn to breathe through my mouth forever like everyone else.  Not terribly helpful.  I eventually developed a weaning process that made the withdrawal easier.  I also discovered the decongestant pseudoephedrine, which isn't habit forming when taken orally, such as in OTC allergy pills.  I also started using a neti pot regularly, which helped enormously.

When I was in my mid-twenties and had been off the Dristan but on oral decongestants for awhile, my doctor noticed that my blood pressure was higher than it should have been for someone so young.  He wrote it off to being nervous about being at the doctor's office, but I suspect the pseudoephedrine had something to do with it.  When I got pregnant, my blood pressure at every checkup was suddenly better than it had been in years.  It also happened to be the first time in years that I wasn't taking any kind of decongestant to aid my breathing.

I used Dristan again recently when I came down with a bad cold.  I find if I use it for three days or less there is no withdrawal period, and I managed to stop after two days when the congestion from the cold started to abate.  I was pleased with myself.  Dristan is a nasty beast, and being able to breathe through one's nose is highly addictive. 

Now that I'm getting older, I'm trying to manage my blood pressure better.  High blood pressure and heart disease run in my family on both sides, as does dying young (50-ish) of heart attacks.  I eat well and I exercise, and now I don't use decongestants regularly either.  I can breathe better now than at any point in my life thanks to discovering the SinuPulse Elite (I paid like $90 for it on Amazon, and it is worth every penny).  It's essentially an electric, pulsating neti pot.  It's like the Neti Pot 2.0.  I use it twice a day, spiked with a dash of Alkalol once a day (which doesn't appear to be a habit forming substance, but if you know things about it, I'd like to hear them).   I also drink enormous amounts of water.  My sicknesses still seem to last longer than they do for my husband or daughter -- I don't think my immune system will ever be quite as strong as theirs -- but my congestion isn't worse than theirs anymore.  I no longer dread going to bed at night and trying to breathe.  It probably also helps that, when I saw mold starting to form in one corner of my house from a leak in the roof, I immediately got the roof and drywall fixed. 

And my basement has TWO sump pumps.

The Time I Told My Mother the Truth About Everything

This is an excerpt from an email I sent my best friend on the day I told my mother "The Truth As I See It."  It happened a couple years before my wedding, on the day my mother received divorce papers from my dad.  I count that phone call as one of the most important conversations of my life and one of the few times I was honest with my mother about her behavior and refused to back down when challenged.  I believe this conversation was at least part of the reason my mother has reached out to me to reconnect but has never once asked me why I stopped talking to her.  I said what she needed to know (if she heard it).

I mention unofficially diagnosing my mother as bipolar in this email, which in hindsight I kind of wish I hadn't done, though I thoroughly believed it to be true and that proper treatment -- especially a prescription mood stabilizer, which was one of the few things she didn't already seem to be taking -- could make her better.  She did receive a formal diagnosis of bipolar disorder a couple years after this phone call took place, but I no longer believe it to be accurate.  More on all that another time.

Dear Jerry,

My mom was served the divorce papers today.  She called me sobbing and, when I answered, said, "I just called to say I love you."  I acted sympathetic and didn't say much until she started in on my dad, at which point the invisible string that my voice had been hung up on just broke and I announced loudly, "You sold ALL OF HIS STUFF," and basically told her the truth on just about everything.  I didn't yell, but when saying things I'd wanted to tell her for a long time, I announced them loudly like an orator.  I was still gentle through a lot of it though, particularly when talking about mental illness, and she was the only one who cried.  I told her she is bi-polar.  I told her she should be on meds for it and not on meds for EVERYTHING else.  I told her she appears to have Munchausen's syndrome and her car wrecks seem to be on purpose ("You think I rolled the car ON PURPOSE?!"  "Yes.").  I told her maxing out someone else's credit card is NOT OKAY, regardless of her defense that it was "only $500."  When she complained that no one speaks to her, I told her it's because she acts crazy now.  When she asked why I didn't call her at Christmas, I told her I didn't want to get yelled at.  When she acted shocked and asked, "What?" I repeated myself, only more loudly and enunciating better.  I did this every time she acted shocked at something I said.  I asked her if she didn't remember yelling at me and leaving voice mails in which she called me a selfish little bitch, or if she really believed it didn't hurt me.  She said she only remembered calling me that when I didn't send cards to my grandmothers.  I don't really remember how she said it, but it came out that she thinks I am bad for that, and I can't really remember that part through the haze of anger... 

When she said my father took the money away from her and that she would have to live without lights and heat, I explained that, if the bank account is empty, it's because she empties it every month.  Several thousand dollars every month.  I explained that I am handling their money now.  I explained that it comes to me so that I can pay the house payments that she would not.  I explained I had been instructed to put the rest back into their joint account each month, leaving my dad with nothing, so that the automatic withdrawal bills could be paid and she could blow through the rest the way she always does ("Blow through?"  "Yes."  "You think I BLOW THROUGH money?!"  "Yes.").  She said she spends money but (or because?  I can't remember) she has no other vices.  She said she doesn't own furs or diamonds; she pays bills and sometimes buys things for other people.  She said that nothing will make people happy.  We weren't happy when she was spending no money, lying on the couch all day refusing to move, eat, or bathe, and that we aren't happy now that she is out spending money.  What do we want from her?  I said, "We want you to act like a normal human being." 

She cried a lot.  She said we used to be best friends.  I told her she used to be the center of my world.  I told her she used to be my entire support system and that she dropped me in college, or in high school really, and I was forced to get over it.  She claimed it was the menopause.  I told her she should have admitted to it then rather than just yelling at me and accusing me of changing.  I told her she is bi-polar.  Again.  She said she might as well take all of the pills she has and end it all.  I confessed that I had thought about suicide in the last few months too, and then she cut me off to tell me about her problems some more.  Honestly, it's what I expected to happen.  It was more of a test than a confession.  But a normal person would have at least acknowledged the fact that the other person had spoken.  I realize it's hypocritical, but I hated her for not caring even a little bit.  I told her that, kill her or not, most pills don't just put you to sleep, they make you sick and kill you painfully (it's true -- I've read it in books).  I told her to think that over before making any rash decisions.  

She told me what a good mother she was, and how she made me independent.  I'm VERY independent, I told her.  Still, I confessed things I maybe shouldn't have told her, like how much it matters to me what she says to me and the fact that she doesn't seem to care about me.  I told her how fucked up it makes me when she calls and yells at me.  I told her that being told I'm a bad person doesn't make me a better one.  And I announced over her complaints, perhaps a little callously, that I know that's all I'm good for -- being her punching bag and something to bitch at -- to which she replied "no" and then returned to bemoaning her own sufferings, interspersed with bitching about how I don't send people greeting cards.

I guess that's why it doesn't matter how much I told her.  She doesn't care enough to hear it.  Ever.  I know it was a bad day.  I know it only makes sense that she would be upset about being sued for divorce and be focused on her own pain.  I know today might not have been the best day, after years of mostly silence, to announce The Truth As I See It.  And when she wasn't criticizing me or saying horrible things about my dad, and I had a chance to relate to her, I felt bad for her.  But she couldn't leave it alone for long, and I couldn't feel bad WITH her, because it wasn't just today.  It's her.  This will sound ridiculous, but I can't think of a better way to say it:  there is a quote that Christmas isn't a day but a state of mind.  So is the worst day of your life.  And she keeps that day alive in her heart all year round, and it makes sense to be focused on your own misfortunes on the worst day of your life, so maybe it makes sense to her to act this way.  Or maybe I'm trying to make it make sense to me and I'm giving her too much credit.  It's been a long time since she showed an interest in another human being, so it's hard to tell.

I don't envy her situation, but I don't pity her either.  She makes her own choices.  Her life hasn't been happy, but it has been in her control.   If you are unhappy, you have to decide whether or not to do something about it.  Doing nothing is still your choice.  It's just a stupid one.  I asked her to do something about it.  I asked her to see a different psychiatrist and be evaluated for bi-polar disorder so that she can get better.  She asked why she should bother.  I told her, because it isn't all about her, and if she cares about her mother as much as she claims to, she will do it to make her happy.  We'll see.

The Bad Things I Did as a Baby

My mother had a series of stories she would recount as evidence of how much trouble I had been as a baby.  She might still tell these stories, but I no longer talk to her, so for me they stopped a few years ago. 

The first one was my birth and the time surrounding it.  My mother had scheduled a c-section to happen a couple of weeks before I was due to be born because I was positioned transverse, with my spine perpendicular to hers.  The first thing I did was to "turn on her," into the standard head-down birthing position so that the doctor told her to skip the c-section and wait for my due date.  "You turned on me before you were even born," she used to half-joke.  She'd wanted the c-section.

The next thing I did was to be born.  I "ripped her from end to end," she liked to say.  This was her hyperbolic way of saying there was some amount of vaginal tearing.  Episiotomies -- or cutting so that the baby doesn't cause a vaginal tear while coming out -- were standard back then, but she said I was born too fast for her doctor to make a cut.  Small tears are considered pretty standard now, especially since episiotomies are no longer considered a great idea, but I didn't know this until I had a child of my own.  I also caused her pain when I was born.  I was also born a week and a half late and larger than the average baby.  I was also born facing upward, "spine to spine," which was wrong.  I thought this was very abnormal until I had a child of my own and the first thing I saw was her face.  It happens, I guess.

The next thing I did was biting down when nursing.  She said it was very painful, so she took to spanking me every time I did it.  I was too young to remember any of this, but she liked to talk about it.  After a few times being spanked while feeding, she said I refused to nurse anymore, and she considered me weaned.  She discovered the next day that I had caught chicken pox from my older brother.  I was two months old. 

When I was a few months old, my mother said she found me sucking on a vaporizer insert from the humidifier she kept on the floor of the living room.  She said she had to miss a favorite TV show to take me to the emergency room.  She always referenced that "Who Shot JR?" episode, but I've looked it up and that aired before I was born, so I'm not sure what show I actually made her miss.  She has never mentioned me needing actual medical treatment once we got to the hospital, so I presume I was fine.

When I was a little older and started pulling myself to stand, I fell and cut my head open on the corner of the coffee table.  She had to take me to the emergency room again.  She didn't talk about this event as much, so I assume there wasn't anything memorable on TV at the time.  She said I didn't need stitches but got a butterfly bandage.  I still have the shiny little scar on my forehead, but no one else notices it.  It's very small.

I also cried.  I also wanted to be held.  I wanted to be carried, despite the fact that I was heavy and "too big to carry."  I used to wake up during the night and call out for her, asking for water.  I don't know why she didn't just let me sleep in a real bed so that I could get my own water, but I remember sleeping in a crib.  I must've been at least three, and I was toilet trained, but I couldn't get out of bed to use the toilet during the night.  Still, I didn't wet the bed a single time since I can remember.  I remember crouching behind the bars of my crib, pretending to live in a cage at the zoo.  My mother said she had to take me to the doctor because I would go days without using the bathroom at all.  She said the doctor laughed at her overly careful parenting and said that I simply had a very large bladder, nothing to worry about.  I think now that I was probably dehydrated, something I was first hospitalized for the month before I started kindergarten.

I feel stupid and slightly ridiculous admitting I didn't know how much of this was normal baby stuff until I had a child of my own.  I thought I'd been terrible.  I thought I had caused everyone undue amounts of trouble.  I tried so hard to be perfect.

The "Wanted" Child

My Mother's Oral Family History

I have always known who my biological mother is.  She was the same mother who raised me.  But finding out about her family history was harder than finding my biological father.  I haven't found a single person in her family interested in genealogy but me, and our family is full of secrets that we only know from oversharing.

I grew up within a mile of my maternal grandparents and saw them at least once a week for the first eighteen years of my life.  There were certain things I grew up knowing, stories I grew up hearing over and over again, but they were specific and limited.  I knew my grandmother had had ten pregnancies in eleven years.  I knew my only biological aunt had died of SIDS on Christmas Eve and that my then 3-year-old mother had tormented her own mother with the persistent question, "Where is my baby?" for weeks afterward.  I knew my mother had been named after her own maternal grandmother, and that her grandmother had hated her own name so much that she'd gone by her middle name nearly all her life.  These were some of the facts my mother recited to me regularly, just like the story of my birth (I "ripped [her] from end to end") and of my brother's adoption ("she called and said, 'Do you want a peanut?' A peanut is what they called premature babies.")  They were her oral history, and they are embedded in my brain.

I knew my grandmother had gotten married at age fifteen because she wanted to run away from home, but I didn't know she had been running away from her "wicked stepmother."  I knew her own mother had married at fourteen and lost custody of my then 2-year-old grandmother when she became a teenage divorcee, but I didn't know my great-grandfather's name or that he was a college graduate, unlike anyone else in my family for the next 75 years.  Grandma's maiden name was Adams, or Addams* -- I didn't know which -- and my mother hated my great-grandfather for taking Grandma away from her mother.  He "didn't like girls," my mother told me when I asked why Dante had been invited to meet him and I hadn't.  I knew he'd written and self-published a memoir that my mother claimed was a catalogue of his sexual exploits, but I didn't know the name of the book, and I didn't know that he lived within a half-hour's drive of my home for over a decade of my childhood.  I didn't know he was the only person in my family to live to the age of ninety, or that he'd died within a year of "the love of his life," my Grandmother's longtime stepmother.  I didn't know they had given my grandmother a half-sister, who had finished college but who hadn't been able to bear children of her own.  She has an adopted daughter close to my age who has a graduate degree.  They're both on Facebook now.  She looks like a younger, healthier, more affluent version of my grandmother. 

I've mentioned before how my cousin helped me with my search for maternal family by providing old letters our grandmother had sent her.  Our grandmother used to write letters once a week to pretty much everyone she knew who lived out of state.  My cousin had kept several years worth of Grandma letters.  She pulled them out of storage at my request.  She said they shared too much information, that she wouldn't be comfortable rereading them if Grandma had still been alive.  They read more like private journal entries than something you would say to a granddaughter.  Those letters also held names and dates I hadn't absorbed from my mother's oral history.  They gave me search terms, and the knowledge my mother had embedded in my brain filled in the blanks.  My cousin didn't know the things I knew -- even our great-grandmother's first name -- so I was able to fill in some blanks for her too. 

I assume my great-grandmother's first pregnancy ended in miscarriage because she got married at the age of fourteen and didn't give birth to my grandmother until over a year later.  I learned these dates from documents on Ancestry.com.  She got divorced in the 1930s at the age of 18 and lost custody of my grandmother to her ex-husband.  My great-grandfather left my then 2-year-old grandmother with his parents and moved on.  My great-grandmother spent time in the Deep South, though neither I nor my cousin knows why.  My grandmother's letters made it sound like purgatory.  My grandmother lived with her own grandparents until she was eight.  She became close with her father's only sister, whose name I recognized because my grandmother had visited her every week at her nursing home until she died in the 1990s.  At the age of eight, my grandmother moved in with her newly remarried father and the woman she referred to in letters as her "wicked stepmother."  Her father called her the love of his life.  My grandmother wasn't happy there.  As I mentioned earlier, she ran away at the age of fifteen to marry my grandfather.  She didn't know how to cook, and she never learned how to drive.  Neither of them finished high school.  They eloped on my grandfather's birthday, allegedly to distract the court registrar out of asking for proof of my grandmother's age.  It apparently worked.  Their marriage license lists her age as 18.  My eldest uncle was born ten months later.

I've found my great-grandparents' headstones.  My great-grandmother remarried at least once, but she survived her final husband, so even her death certificate doesn't list his full name.  My mother told me she died of stomach cancer, but her death certificate cites cardiac arrest.  I've learned that death certificates list whatever catalyst literally killed the person that day and will never say what led to what killed them, like cancer or diabetes or blunt force trauma.  I come from a long line of ladies who battled their weight, and my great-grandmother relished the easy weight loss that came with dying of stomach cancer.  One of the few pictures I've seen of her shows her svelte figure standing with both legs inside one leg of pants, demonstrating that she was half her previous size and delighted by it. 

My grandmother's aneurism created the same effect.  The weight melted off when she spent months on a liquid diet, unable to swallow most food without choking.  She recovered though and was unhappily battling her weight again by the time she died some fifteen years later.  One of my last memories of her was of visiting her and my grandpa's duplex and witnessing one of her daily weigh-ins.  She had gained weight and was disappointed.  She was in her seventies. 

Mental illness was my mother's best diet.  She lost around eighty pounds when she stopped eating or drinking or getting up from the couch in her early fifties.  She was pleased with the effect and bragged to me over the phone in the days leading up to my wedding.  It was the thinnest she had been since before I was born.  She commandeered one of my dad's old wheelchairs because she had grown too weak to walk.  When I saw her next, she had aged twenty years.  Her formerly thick brown hair was sparse and grey, and the skin hung loose from her face and neck like wax dripping from a candle.  She reminded me of Emperor Palpatine.

My grandfather's lineage was much harder to trace because his parents were never married or lived together, and he never spoke about either of them.  I met one of his half-siblings once as a child, but it turns out there were at least six more.  More on Grandpa next time.