Ollie Ollie Oxen Free!

I'm working my way around to the full story of the past few months, which will take a while for many reasons; least of which is that I tend toward verbiose. :)  I've also been allowing myself the space to slowly process events, and I've been thinking about how to approach it, because it's been a series of events that have required a lot of thought and patience while I watch the big picture unfold.  In the recovery world we have a catch phrase; "more will be revealed."  I've always taken it to mean that when I don't know what to do, how to handle a situation that seems overwhelming or that I just can't quite grasp my part in, my job is to remain open and objective... and wait until my internal processors reveal the truth.  I've been waiting and a resolution is at hand.

In the meantime, I've been thinking about safety and what it means to be safe.  I had such a skewed definition of safety in my childhood, adolescence and younger adult life under the omnipresent cloud of my FOO.  Safety meant, in that clan context, that I had to stay within the lines that they drew for me.  Step out of the family mandate and WHAM! pay the price.  From small things - choosing a different political view than the FOO, even a weak one, to large - revealing the sexual abuse perpetrated by my father, I was taught early on that any time I acted outside of the 'best interests' of The Family, I would suffer for it. 

It was logical - if I kept doing what they told me to do, kept being who they said that I was, they didn't lash out.  Sure, they attacked me in subtle ways and eroded my sense of self on a daily basis, but as long as I didn't take a real stand against them, they didn't excercise that ultimate of dysfunctional family WMDs: banishment.  Safety became defined by this framework for me.  It was all about what they said was good for me, what they said I could or couldn't do, even who they said I was. 

I was told repeatedly as a child that I was 'clumsy.'  So I was.  In the last four years of NC, I've noticed that I hardly ever drop anything, fall down or run into walls anymore.  I was told as a teenager that I would 'always be heavy,' and I became very large indeed.  As a young lady and after the birth of my first daughter I worked all the time to support her and became thin.  They told me that I 'looked sick.'  And I was.  Amazing what our minds can turn into beliefs and how our bodies translate that into reality.

So, safety  became a misconceived perception for me.  It meant the ultimate maintainance of the status quo and sacrifice of anything (and sometimes everything) in order to simply keep my role in the family.  I could only be loved by them when I stayed in the mold that they'd cast for me.  If I needed any further proof of this, well, look what happened when I did finally make a stand; violence and eventually ostracization ensued. 

Fast forward four years.  I've maintained healthy boundaries and learned how to protect myself and my FOC.  I've not only learned a true definition of safety; I've learned how to create safety.  I'm happy.

In April, I took a rare, rare, rare day off from work.  DH and the DD's were in work and school and I had some of that most precious commodity - time.  Enjoying my day at home, I received a phone call from a number that I didn't recognize, but it wasn't local, so I didn't think to screen it.  It was one of the Minions of NM, her brother, my uncle.  Here's the last communciation that I received from him, almost four years ago, prior to the April phone call:

Vanci,
When I talked with (your brother) last week and found out that you had not called or gone by to see (your mother), I was extremely upset.  She was in such pain, and she needed you, and you let her down.

 

No hurt you could possibly have suffered from any family member can justify the unhappiness you have brought to everyone's life.  You have deprived (your husband) of (your brother and brother in law's)friendship, you have deprived (your nephew) of (your daughters') company and them of his, you have alienated a sister that could have been a life-long support, and you have removed from your girls' young lives the guiding and love your parents can offer.  And you have done so much damage to yourself in creating all this misery that I doubt you will ever be able to atone for it.

 

But most of all, you have behaved toward your mother without conscience, and I will never forgive you for that.  She remains the best person I have ever known, and you have quite literally shortened her life.

I honestly believe you are seriously disturbed mentally-- so much so, in fact, that I don't think you are even capable of realizing it.

I loved you specially, and it hurts me to lose you, but I consider it done.

Uncle Minion

When I received this email - almost four years ago - I didn't respond.  It seemed pretty clear that responding would be akin to finding a brick wall and beating my forehead against it.  (A little background - NM had just had surgery on her knee, Uncle called me to say I should go see her - I told him I'd think about it and took a week to try to figure out how I could visit her and say, "Hey, get better, but don't violate my boundary and contact me even though I'm violating that same boundary right now..." and then I opened my email in box and saw this.)

Needless to say, I was very shocked when I answered the phone and it was Uncle Minion.  He was calling to tell me that NM was in ICU in the hospital with double pneumonia and failing kidneys and that she probably wasn't going to make it.  I'll leave the discussion of what fourteen years of narcotic painkiller abuse does to one's kidneys for another day, and just say that it was apparent that her condition was grave.

I talked to DH and did some soul searching, and ultimately decided that it would by in my best interests to make the effort to go visit her.  I didn't want to leave a stone unturned that I would regret later on.  We made it as safe as possible; DH went with me and we visited very late in the evening ("thinning out the herd," was what DH called that tactic,) and stayed only a short while.  Ultimately I felt good about having done what I felt was the right thing.  She recovered, and other events have taken place since, but I told you all that so that I could tell you this for now.

On the day we were planning to make the trek to ICU and confront possible, probable, crazyness, my counselor asked me this question: "Vanci, what are the safe places in your life now?"

I immediately started rattling off the list; my home, my work, my friends, my DH, my DD's, my in-laws... every relationship that I have.  Every place that I willingly spend time.  Every repose I have is restful and safe.  None of those people or places choose to intentionally try to hurt me on any kind of regular basis, none of them want me to be anything other than the Vanci that I am.

What a shift, eh?  With that new and improved and true definition of safety tucked in my heart, I was able to saddle up and take myself into - and out of - a potentially dangerous situation.  Unscathed.  Why?  Because I had all those safe little loving memories and pieces of joy with me all the time.

I am truly blessed.  And safe!
Love,
Vanci

Making Life More Fair

The majority of my day to day life is full of contentment; there's peace and safety, joy and humor, satisfaction in jobs well done, lots of learning and growing.  It's all good, most of the time, and when it's not, I've gotten very good at reminding myself that the dark clouds on my internal horizon are fleeting and infrequent.  And I've been given a built in sort of barometer to measure my attitude against - I happen to work in a place that is filled with some largely, well, unhappy people.

They tend to complain a lot.  I'm overgeneralizing, I know, and lumping a whole melting pot of personalities together under the umbrella of 'they,' but I'm talking about the vague sense of unrest, melancholy and joylessness that runs through the place as an undercurrent, so I feel okay about the blanket approach.

Every time I walk into the breakroom that all the departments in the building share, if there is another soul in the room, it seems that there is a gripe that needs to be aired.  Today there was carrot cake and angel food cake in celebration of one of our co-worker's birthday.  I walked into the room and commented on how nice the cakes looked.  There were two ladies sitting at the table eating cake.  One complained that there wasn't any chocolate cake.  The other complained that the cakes were ruining her diet. 

I thought, but did not say, "Oh shut up!  There's cake!  Free cake!  Two choices of cake!"  There is a part of me that reacts strongly, almost viscerally, to what I perceive as ungratefullness on the part of others.  I think this can be directly linked to the unfairness that I was shown from an early age by NM and EF and later in life by OS and YB too.  It's something that's difficult for me to talk about, though, because I was also taught early on that I am not allowed to notice or comment on the unfairness - my FOO firmly believed that lack of acknowledgement of a practice, behavior or thing has the magical ability to - poof! - make the unwanted thing just go away.

I was taught that I could not acknowledge the unfairness my parents excercised in how they treated their children, and that if I did need to point out the unfairness, well, that just meant that I was a whiner.  There was something wrong with me, don'tcha know... Didn't I understand how hard they were trying to support me?  Didn't I know that I was not an easy child to raise?  Didn't I realize that it was easier for me to take care of myself than it was for OS or YB, as I was so capable?  Really, they wanted me to believe, they were just leveling the playing field for me. 

Here's how it worked ~ school was easy for me, they said, becuase I'd always seemingly effortlessly acheived A's in all my classes.  Yes, all my classes, forever, at least until the 10th grade.  I skipped the 8th grade entirely, just went from 7th to 9th, and still carried A's.  It was more difficult for OS and YB, my parents explained, so really what they were paying compliments to OS and YB for on those report cards with A's and B's and C's was effort.  Which, of course implied that my A's came with no effort, and therefore I deserved no or less praise for my accomplishments.  I was minimized, as were my, ahem, efforts.

That's just one example of the way the game was played.  I swallowed it for years without complaint, largely because I didn't want to appear to be ungrateful.  I was trained to be grateful for scraps from the metaphorical table of love and affection, all while watching the golden children be fed a feast.

The saddest part to me is how well ingrained this minimization and de-humanizing became.  Right as the planet was cracking four years ago, we had our final Christmas with the FOO.  It was a typical one - NM and EF 'hosted' the festivites which worked out well for OS and YB as they (mid-30's and late 20's respectively) lived at the family home, too.  So, true to scapegoat form, I was the only family member who lived outside the clan bubble.  I packed up my DH and daughters... and the gifts... and the food... and the games and everything else Christmas-related and we hauled the 15 miles out to the clan compound.

I cooked a lot of the meal and helped to clean it up - again, this was an expectation fulfilled rather than a gift of service on my part.  The time came to open presents and everyone sat in a circle with their 'pile.'  OS and YB and even OS's husband had HUGE piles of gifts in front of them; 25-30 each, all but three or four from NM and EF.  My DH had about eight gifts in front of him.  I had one very large box.

I'd asked for pots and pans.  I normally hesitate to specify what kind of gift I would like - I'm not sure if this is due to my inner knowledge that 'they' wouldn't get me something I really wanted anyway or if it's because I was conditioned so early on and so consistently with the idea that it was my role to be grateful for whatever I received, even if it was only scraps.  But I was starting to grow and change before that last Christmas, and I was becoming stronger and clearer.  So, when I'd been asked what I would like for Christmas, I responded in a relatively normal way.  I asked for pots and pans.  Simple enough, right?

I noticed the gift count, but I thought, "Well, I'm sure that my gift was just more expensive than all the smaller gifts OS and YB have. Maybe they just packed a bunch of gifts into one big box."
When I opened the large box, it was full of pots and pans, alright.  Dusty, used pots and pans wrapped in newspaper.  EF explained that he 'just couldn't find any nice pans' that I would like, so he'd decided to take a bunch of his used pots and pans and give them to me instead.  Some of the pans still had little flecks of crusted-on food in them.

I swallowed the hurt and the pain and the shame and the absolute heart-break of the validation that I was, in fact, less important to my parents than my siblings and I said thank you.  It took awhile for OS and YB to make their way through their piles of gifts, so I watched and smiled and ooh'd and aah'd over what they received.  I played my role to perfect dysfunctional pitch, but there was just a smidge of uncomfortable truth breaking through my defensive walls.  I was so, so uncomfortable, even if I didn't allow it to show through the outer veneer. 

When we, finally, arrived home later that night, DH flipped his lid.  He pointed out the unfairness and wanted to know why I hadn't said anything.  "I can't believe they break the bank on OS and YB and they give you one crappy box of hand me downs!  I can't believe you accept the way they treat you!  They treat their dogs better than you; the dogs had more gifts than you!"  And then he delivered the kicker, the line that really cracked me open - I can still hear his voice as clear as day; "No one else in the entire WORLD is allowed to treat you like they do!  No one!"

 And it clicked for me.  It was only one tangible example of the scapegoating, the unfairness and the cruelty, but it's one of the first incidents that I was able to see from a slightly removed to normal perspective.  It helped me later on as I moved into No Contact with the FOO as a way to remember that I was slighted, that the family was 'out to get me' (and keep me in my place,) and that no matter how they tried to revise history, gaslight me, diminish me or flat out lie, it wasn't true.  It's not really paranoia if people are, in fact, out to get you, is it?

I carry a mental picture of that one box; those dusty/used/scratched up pans.  I take it out when I need a reminder that gratitude is my choice in life, but there's no rule that says I have to be grateful for being kicked around.  I don't have to be grateful for crumbs anymore; I don't need those poisoned scraps.

I'll make my own feast in life, and maybe I'll have a little of that carrot cake in the break room, too.

Love,
Vanci