Sputterpub's Blog

I fell in love in college, and I hoped then it would last forever. Kent was smart, funny, good-looking, and athletic. As we progressed to almost living together we developed a few areas of friction. Of course. I guess I thought then that it would be good for the relationship if I didn’t make a fuss. I swallowed little irritations. I viewed some bad scenes as normal vicissitudes in an intimate relationship, and I tried to wait them out. I didn’t believe Kent when he said he was breaking up with me because I wasn’t fully present with him. I knew even then that no one tells the full why about a breakup, at the time of the breakup, because no one has the perspective yet to understand the why. But something stuck. I acquired a suggestion, I guess, that my anger might drive a guy away, but my suppression of anger wouldn’t keep him.

The therapy wasn’t refined at first. Learning to be angry meant I cycled from too much to too little like a drinking duck toy: bobbing back and forth while slowly locating the middle ground of healthy expression. That’s how I see it anyway. Sometimes a friend lets me know, even now, after I’ve been too much. At first Claire used the adjective “draconian” about me. I looked it up and resented it. She still does it now and then, but that’s probably just sibling stuff; I don’t think I deserve it. I’m more a Mistress of Indignation (or maybe a Queen of Sarcasm).

I haven’t married. I’ve had relationships that lasted years and included shared vacations and savings accounts and almost cohabitation, but no one’s ever proposed. Claire insists that I could have made it happen, especially with Kent’s successor Charlie; she says it’s been my choice to stay single.

But I don’t know. I’m still not good at fighting with a lover. I seem to be better in an affair with an unhappily married man than I am with an available guy. And spending the time I have with unhappily married men, remembering the terrible teenage years of my split-up family, I don’t exactly have a positive viewpoint about marriage. Claire’s 40th wedding anniversary will occur in three months, I like my brother-in-law and I love my niece, but I wouldn’t want the union she has.

Mostly I think it’s Dad’s fault. Except for his absence, he was perfect. I knew his love was unconditional. His complaints about me were minor; he cherished me and I luxuriated in his affection. After the divorce Mom started drinking a lot, dating a bunch, marrying a few times. She was cute, but she wasn’t much there for me. And she was kind of slothful. She didn’t do the laundry or dusting as often as was needed. I had to take on those tasks. To this day I’m the best ironer I know.

Cindy has a similar history. (Her expertise is laundry-folding.) Her folks didn’t divorce till she was 14 but there were several separations in the years before the final decree, so she endured the unstable split-home experience. Her father wasn’t physically affectionate – sometimes I think all her therapy is about needing a paternal hug – but he was patient and understanding and ever ready to take a walk with her. Her mother was vain and favored Cindy’s older and younger brothers; she must have thought a daughter would raise herself. She didn’t even rise to the maternal occasion when Cindy told her that Uncle Edward had exposed himself to her and asked to touch her panties. Cindy and I have learned what the term “self-referential” means by contemplating her mom.

Anyway, we agree that it may be our dads’ fault that neither of us is married. The simple fact is we haven’t met guys as fine as our fathers. We haven’t been able to imagine signing on for a lesser man.

Mostly. Maybe. My dad died five years ago and Cindy lost hers last summer. My mother is demented and in a memory facility and Cindy’s, who has been losing her mind and body for the last decade, passed yesterday. Neither of us achieved any resolution with our moms.

I’m still angry about the way Dad went. The doctors ignored his low (fit) resting heart rate when they calibrated his pacemaker, and then they called his strokes little TIAs; as we learned after he died, he’d been enduring a succession of brain bleeds that added up to catastrophe. But he’s gone, and his personality left before his body did.

I’m angry about Dad, and maybe ready to be angry with a man of my own. I’m not likely to marry – I’m statistically too old for that – but I’m not dead yet.

I’m so tired of hearing the usual question about long therapy: if it’s so good, why are you undergoing it forever? That one is about as annoying as the “how-will-those-tattoos-look-as-you-age?” nonsense my niece has to hear.

For goodness sakes, psychotherapy for chronic conditions has to be kind of chronic itself. Or at least occasional. It’s not like emergency medicine. It’s more like gardening.

And I’m not continuous; that’s Cindy. She’s the one who’s been seeing at least two therapists for over 30 years. I started in college, went in and out of it through young adult relationships, found Tom-my-miracle-worker, and now I go in for half a dozen sessions every now and then. When I need to.

It all began with anger management. Not the way we mean it now. I had to learn how to be angry. Or how to show my anger. Or in hippie-talk, own my anger.

See: I was a good girl. I was the light of my parents’ life. They were babies when they had me – he was 27 and she was 25 – energetic and liberal and somewhat arty in post-war LA, and they took me everywhere with them. I was a pink-and-white bundle of plumpness, with curling gold hair and round blue eyes. My mother was beautiful and my father was a manly veteran. We looked good.

I don’t remember any resentment when my younger sister arrived. My parents never told me about any sibling issues they had to handle. We’re less than three years apart, and we’ve always been different but loving. You know how families assign roles. I was put in the pretty slot, and Claire became the artistic one.

I always behaved. Claire pushed at some of their rules, but I was the obedient one. The responsible one. Like the fairy tale princesses: as good as I was beautiful (except in the fairy tales it’s always the youngest sister who gets those adjectives).

At least, that’s how I remember it. I’ve heard some cousins reminisce about those times and there have been statements about me being stubborn sometimes. And the face burn when I was 11 was definitely an accident caused by me – the barbecue was already lit and about to flare beyond smoke when I sprayed it with the starter, and I’m sure that must have been a direct act of disobedience on my part (my father’s anger at me, if any, was swamped then by his rapid care of me and his annoyed attention to my hysterical mother).

So yeah, my behavior must have been imperfect at times. Surely I must have thrown a few fits or toys. But I don’t remember those events. I recollect my obedience and cooperation. I remember my father praising me as a good girl.

Our nuclear family exploded when I was 12. My parents divorced and my dad moved out. They were careful to tell me and Claire that it wasn’t our fault, that it really didn’t concern us, that they both loved us and would always be there for us, but Dad left and weekend breakfasts changed. That was the first thing I noticed. We’d always had pancakes or waffles on Sundays and after the divorce we either made our own breakfast, at Mom’s, or went out to the pancake house with Dad. Mom always slept in. Dad always went out. It was never as it had been.

We weren’t the only divorced family, in LA, in the 1960s. Sometimes it felt like we were in the majority. So there was no stigma at school.

But home changed forever. And looking back on it, so did I.

From then on, I didn’t exhibit anger to men. Certainly not to Dad, but also not to uncles, teachers, and when the time came, boyfriends. I think I thought I was behaving as an appropriate female person. It wasn’t till I was through college and starting psychotherapy that I got a clue.

They say hindsight is 20/20. When my first shrink observed that I must have felt responsible, in my own child way, for my father leaving, his words rang clear as a bell and the epiphany shone above my head like a searchlight. No duh. Because no matter how well or often my folks told me that their divorce had nothing to do with me, the simple fact is that my reality changed. My dad left. And like any kid, I knew my behavior had not been perfect. At some deep inner level I must have concluded that, if only I’d been better, our family might still be intact. I didn’t go so far as to blame me for them, but I couldn’t eliminate the idea that I was there and I must have had something to do with it.

Certainly I felt anger sometimes in that decade between 12 and 22. But I inhibited myself. I prevented myself from expressing it lest I be deserted. I must have converted what was righteous anger to confused hurt. I swallowed back tears instead of tirades. I learned how to depress myself.

The cascade of their insistence and my defiance only got worse over the next 10 years. She pummeled me with epithets like lazy, and he restricted my choices owing to what he saw as my lack of commitment and common sense. My parents tried to govern what I ate, how I dressed, when I slept, how I felt. I wasn’t even allowed to be sick unless they agreed (Mom sent me to school sick to my stomach, and only picked me up after I threw up across several desks, because she had determined that my stomachache was “in my head,” even though we’d been out to dinner the night before with her father, where they made me eat rich food I didn’t like. And I’m sure my bout of daily headaches that same year (fifth grade) would have been much shorter if Dad hadn’t decided my squinting was an affectation and they’d had my eyes examined).

By the time I entered adolescence, their insensitivity had achieved epic proportions. Dad continued to demand that I spend one weekend day with the family (Saturday humiliation, when all I craved was some time with my friends in the public library). Mom developed ever more specific and elaborate ideas about the ensembles I should be wearing. Her response to my (normal!) complaints about my hair was to drag me to beauty colleges for brutal haircuts and primitive straightening solutions (bad as the seventh grade frizz was to my eyes, it was far worse when the straightener made my hair break off at my brow hairline; the dark brown bristle that then grew in was impossible to mask behind my bangs).

My friends had clothing allowances but I had to shop with my mother. That not only meant missing out on the mall culture (an experience more important to Mom than to me), but it also included explicit humiliations when she yelled from outside my dressing room for “a bathing suit with a bigger bottom” or otherwise broadcast what we now call TMI to staff and customers. Mom longed for me to be what she considered a normal girl – into makeup and peroxide and shrieking with the other girls – but then she restricted my ability to interact with the girls she would have me befriend. That was similar to the way she ran my “diets;” telling me not to eat sweets during the day and then offering an ice cream reward, after dinner and with her, if I had what she taught me to call a “good” day.

And every time she got mad at me, which was pretty often, she resorted to the “no common sense” and “lazy” accusations, now elaborated with the theory that my undesirable behavior was the product of a friend’s influence (the friend being whomever I wanted to be with at the time).

She was a push-me-pull-you and Dad was kind/cruel. I think his interest and affection were sincere. But he had expectations that were impossible for me to meet. He wanted me to be petite and delicate. I had inherited his medium-large frame and big features. He expected my hair to shine with young health and he acted like I prevented that by applying lotions and conditioners. But I had curls like his, humidity-tightened into frizz, and there’s no way to get our type of hair to shine. When he gave me jewelry (which happened on big occasions like my 13th and 16th birthdays), the piece was simple and classy and way too small for me to wear well (a single cultured pearl on a thin gold chain disappeared on me). The experience was painful, and that had nothing to do with the chain.

They wouldn’t let me walk alone at night, even when I was 15. They wouldn’t let me walk at night with a friend. They didn’t take my guitar-love seriously and wouldn’t help me acquire one, because Dad said that I was fickle and wouldn’t stick with it. And it wasn’t something I could take care of myself; my parents didn’t let me work till I was a senior in high school, and they set my allowance unrealistically low. As it happened, I acquired a sick used acoustic guitar with holiday/birthday money. To the extent it had any tone, I ruined it by refinishing its water-damaged body.

In similar fashion, when my eyesight (which kept getting worse till I was full-grown), had me in coke-bottle spectacles and I lusted for contact lenses, my father made me wait years, because “it takes a lot of determination to adjust to them.” (No it didn’t, I learned without surprise, when I was 18 and in college and finally allowed them).

That’s just some of it. I won’t lengthen this complaint by describing his attempts to pop my pimples or hers to govern my sex life. But I will insist on this: I did NOTHING to deserve all their shit.

I had to get married before they let me be. Not the best reason to wed. And I was by then so full of fight – not sweet or petite or shining – that I was anything but a successful wife. My parents were sad about the divorce, but not all that surprised – they’d already pegged me as difficult, and the marital result was just one more bit of evidence.

But time passes. Dad died two years ago. I promised him then I’d care for Mom. And she has become gentler as she fades. Within weeks I’ll be an old orphan. Soon I’ll have time to be sweet.

Sweet? Sweet? I’ll be damned if I’ll be sweet. That’s all my parents wanted of me, as early as I can remember. So it’s the last thing I’ll give them.

For the longest time I found no fault with them. I was unhappy and frustrated but everyone could see they were doing nothing wrong. They doted on me. I was their sun and moon. The problem had to be me.

For the longest time. Oh I had some complaints as a child and my share of angst as a teen, but that was all normal, to be expected, nobody’s fault at all. That’s what it takes to grow up and be a separate individual, everyone said.

But eventually I learned that it’s up to the victim to define abuse. I am the victim. I was abused.

They didn’t beat me. There were some complaints about my laziness and lack of common sense, but I don’t think anyone would have categorized their statements as verbal abuse. I was fed, clothed, sheltered, guided, loved.

I was abused.

My first days were lived in Lenox Hill Hospital in New York. The year was 1950 and the protocols were peculiar. Back then the doctors thought they were in charge of childbirth. They thought nothing of knocking out a laboring woman and extracting the baby from her. Then the nurses took over. Swaddling was a procedural issue. Feeding was by clock and of chemicals. The idea was that the experts – doctors, nurses, and then the nurse-taught mothers – had to train the baby to eat, sleep, and even shit on schedule.

When we came home we brought the baby nurse with us. Of course I have no memory of her. And yet I know she was older, rigid, Germanic in attitude. Dressed in white clothes and ugly shoes. I know that as much attention was paid to sterilization of all the bottle equipment as to me.

My parents loved me, but they didn’t hold me enough. Too often they arranged me in my crib, clean-diapered and clad in adorable pajamas amid sheets, blankets and bumpers that matched, and left me alone there, to figure out my path through tears to sleep.

They fed me when I wasn’t hungry and withheld the bottle when I was. Mom gave me gloppy “solid” food before I wanted it, and then was quite insistent about me swallowing it. She put me in the dresses she wanted me to wear. Carted me to places she wanted to go (that would have been okay, within reason, but the woman was a compulsive shopper, and she never had the time or interest for cartoons or playgrounds or mud). Mom even decided, months too early, when I should be done with diapers, and then took steps that included shame, bribery, and an enema, to bend my colon to her purposes.

I objected before I had language. By the time I was three I was articulating some complaints. But my objections and opinions were classified as willfulness, stubbornness, selfishness. A cascade of misunderstanding developed.

Dad laid down rules from on high. He often said the ship of our household was NOT a democracy. Mom jabbed with petulant demands: “I just want it that way,” or “because I said so,” or “Just do it, dammit!” were typical of her responses to my questions. She also had a tendency to lash out when frustrated (“aggravated” was her word), slapping with her right hand or poking with whatever kitchen implement she happened to be holding. It was up to me, alone, to form my bottom-up, grass-roots campaign for personal freedom.

There was a time-line of parental mistakes. The toilet-training debacle was triggered by the birth of my baby brother. Mom was as confident with this infant as she’d been insecure with me; he was the light of her life, and I could “damn-well walk on my own” as long as she had him in her arms. I was suddenly a big girl expected to do much for myself, alone.

I already had some contempt for her then. Her maternal shyness had put me off, had made me turn toward my doting besotted father. But this was in the early years of their marriages, when they fought a lot and he acted parental toward her. So I witnessed him treating her with disdain and disapproval. Of course I mimicked him to the extent I could. Of course that didn’t improve the mother-daughter relationship.

Next up was the tonsillectomy. I was five, the hospital stay was overnight, my parents didn’t tell me what was going to happen. They turned me over to smarmy or cold medical people, and left me to deal with them on my own. As it happened, my parents returned for me the next day. But I don’t remember anyone telling me that they’d be back for me, and by the time they showed up, I was an altered me. I’d learned not to count on them. I didn’t see them as demons – I knew they still loved me and I depended on them to keep the food and shelter coming – but I no longer viewed them as gods.

That experience made me a little more difficult for them. Definitely more willful and stubborn. And my more adamant attitude led her to increase the “no common sense” accusations and him to engage in some head-to-head disagreements which, when he didn’t prevail, “forced” him (his word) to restrict my activities or withhold from me things I coveted. Then I started diversifying my desires, in an attempt to find some that were attainable. Dad’s response to that was to conclude that I was spoiled and didn’t know what I wanted, and to make me wait longer for whatever, ostensibly to give me time to REALLY decide I wanted it.