Poetic License

The holidays brought a welcome break from work and a lot of time to think. In the past, too much time on my hands would have spelled trouble, but I found myself pretty happy, even on the days in which physical pain kicked my butt. Almost every day of my vacation, I made the trip to my son’s house to check on his cats, make sure they ate something, and scoop the litter box. Do I know how to party or what? (He had a couple of friends taking other shifts, but one of them got sick mid-way through the week and couldn’t do it.) I also engaged in some physical activity – cleaning his house and mine.

Physical and mental activity is good for me. Getting out of the house is good for me, even if it is only to go see the grandkitties. I’m pretty happy most of the time now, unlike in the past when I would suffer from terrible depression, especially in winter. The only thing that is different about me now is that I am a cancer survivor. I wake up every day (even on work days) happy to be alive and looking forward to what will come next. It wasn’t my first brush with near-death, but it was the longest slog back to a cautious state of health. It’s nearly impossible to explain to someone who hasn’t had a history of clinical depression followed by cancer (or some other lengthy recovery from illness). I really do wake up each day so grateful!

We’ll come back to that, but let me share a couple of insights that have hit me in the last 24 hours.

1. We get what we think we deserve.
2. We don’t control anyone else’s thoughts or behavior.

Sound simple enough? Yes, these insights have come to me before, but they were really hitting me over the head on New Year’s Eve and this morning, and I guess I was finally ready to hear it.

As I mentioned to my sister the other day, I’m working through some anger at our mother. My sister practically worships our mother’s memory and seems to forget she was never a saint. Now, I’m not saying our mother was an evil person, but she was a broken person who never seemed to want to get better. She loved her misery. I’ve spent so many years and so much money in therapy working out the shit I saw and lived through in my childhood. This has resulted in my stepping away from some family members when they continued to try to walk all over me or belittle me or make fun of me. I’ve worked really, really hard in my life. Too hard for me to let that happen to me anymore. Unlike when I was a child, I now control what I allow in. My sister has so much guilt, though, thinking she could have been better to Mom. I’m constantly reminding her of how much she did, how much several of us did, to try to make Mom’s old age a better one. It was money, and time, and effort, and sometimes neglecting our own needs and families.

For example, I used to spend my vacation (and therefore my husband’s vacation) traveling back “home” to visit with Mom and my younger sister. The last time my ex-husband went with me, I found him sprawled across the guest room bed, on our second day there, in the middle of the afternoon.

“What are you doing?” I asked him. “Come out and visit.”

He glared at me. “Maybe this is your idea of a vacation,” he spit, “but it isn’t mine. For once, I’d like to go somewhere that isn’t Fitzgerald.”

I was stunned. I mean, the small Georgia town wasn’t my idea of fun either, but I was brought up in a home in which every “vacation” was a trip back “home.” That ended it, though. We rarely went to see Mom anymore, other than to pass through to pick up my nephew on our way to Universal Studios. He could have handled that in a much better way. The next time he spent any time with my mom was during her final illness (because I’d just had a neck fusion and couldn’t drive). Mom loved him. She sometimes hated me, but she adored Paul. Maybe that was part of the reason I was so baffled. We had been married at her house and she had fed us many times when we were hungry.

I just figured that I was the reason he didn’t want to go. Again, I was being treated the way I thought I deserved. Had I believed I deserved better, I wonder if the marriage would have survived those earlier years.

We married too young. We both could have communicated better than out of anger.

Another memory came to me as I was waking up this morning. Over the years, it was turned into a bit of a family joke. It wasn’t until this morning when I really acknowledged how much it hurt me.

When we were fairly early in our marriage, just a couple of years in, I once fell violently ill with either a stomach flu or food poisoning. It hit me in the middle of the night with chills, fever, and stomach pain. My body shook with chills, but sweat poured off me. It was a rare night when Paul was home rather than being in the “field” on training maneuvers.

I tried to get out of bed to go into the bathroom to vomit. My legs were too weak, as was the rest of me, to rise from the bed. All I managed to do was to roll to my left and hang my head over the side of the bed.

From his side of the bed, he mumbled something like “What are you doing?”

“I just threw up. I can’t get out of bed,” I chattered through my teeth. “I’m sorry, Paul!”

I was apologizing for making a mess. But I was also apologizing for being sick.

He mumbled something else and then rolled over and pulled the covers up to his chin, falling asleep again I think. Maybe he was lying there pretending not to be awake for fear he would have to help clean up. This would not have been a new thing for him. In the very dysfunctional household where he grew up, the kids learned that if there was a mess (usually from a dog) in the morning, whoever found the mess had to clean it up. I witnessed this firsthand one time. I was sleeping on the couch in his living room, and he and one of his brothers were asleep on the floor. I smelled a bad odor and opened my eyes to see piles of dog poop (thankfully rather solid) around the living room and between the two sleeping boys.

“Paul,” I whispered. “Wake up! The dog had a major accident.”

He lifted his head slightly and looked around. “Go back to sleep,” he said.

“What?”

“If you see it, you have to clean it up, and I’m not cleaning up after David’s dog.”

What followed was the longest two hours of my life. I didn’t want to go against him, so I lay there pretending to be asleep, too. Finally, David woke up, strolled into the living room, and said, “Oh my God!”

When he was done cleaning it up, he shouted through his parents’ door, “Mom, don’t ever buy that cheap ass dog food for Sheba again!”

Never mind that someone should have taken the poor dog for a walk before noon.

So it shouldn’t surprise me that Paul lay there in the bed while several more times I failed to be able to stand and walk. Several more times, I threw up on the floor. Instead of getting up to get me a trashcan or a bag, instead of being alarmed by my condition and offering to help me, instead of taking me to the hospital for fluids, he lay in the bed. After the alarm went off, he saw to Stephanie, and then he got ready for work. I spent the next day cleaning and scrubbing once I was able to get up. And now he laughs about it. He quotes me and makes pattering sounds.

For nearly 15 years, I have blamed myself for our divorce and have let others blame me. Oh, they might not say it aloud, but much like my father, my ex-husband can be a very charming guy. Everyone loves him. He’s such a joker and even more of a flirt. I tend to be more outspoken but also very uncomfortable around people. Perhaps they read that as me not being the “nice one” in the relationship. Trust me. Had I not believed he loved me, had I not believed we could always work on things, I probably would have left within the first five years.

But we were friends, and I had grown accustomed to his way of being with me. And deep down, I thought he was what I deserved, because my mother had told me “no white man will ever want you after you were with that black man”. Never mind that I lost my virginity to rape. I was soiled goods in her mind. The racism in this paragraph is hers and hers alone.

For the record, I actually liked the guy who raped me, well, before that night anyway. I was sneaking around to see him, not believing he could ever hurt me. But then he drugged and raped me, and my mother took me for care to a doctor in the next town over so that no one would know what happened to me. I didn’t learn about this until I was 25, and then I was finally able to piece together what had happened to me. I lost 2-3 days of my life to my brain’s built-in protection mechanism to shut out the memories I couldn’t bear to face. She was my mother, so I guess this is what I deserved, right?

When things at home went from bad to worse, I left my mother’s home at 16 and went back to Texas to live with my sister and finish high school. For my trouble, my mother called my sister – and then one of them informed my school – that I was a whore. They said I couldn’t be trusted and that I was “troubled”. My sister believed our mom, because I guess I was so different than my siblings that surely there was something wrong with me.

I took the chilly treatment from my sister’s husband and my school, took the fact that my sister seemed angry at me most of the time, took the abusive letters from my mother, and I tried to start a life with Paul right after graduation. I married him, my best friend from high school, at the tender age of 20, when neither of us knew ourselves or each other well enough to make a lifetime decision. I thought it was – all of it – just what I deserved and no more.

Now, lest you get the feeling that I want you to hate my ex-husband, I don’t. He and I have a friendship now, if for nothing more than the sake of our son and the memories of our daughter. There’s plenty of blame to go around. But I’m tired of folks thinking I was the bad guy for leaving him after Stephanie died. Like I said, plenty of blame on both sides.

And I’m not responsible for what you or anyone else thinks of me, but I’m serving notice that I’m no longer taking all the blame. I am acknowledging that I am deserving of a better, quiet life. I’m deserving of love, in whatever form it takes, and respect.

Maybe part of what got me thinking about all of this was the movie “Something from Tiffany’s”, which I watched over the holiday. In the end, and I know I’m not spoiling it for you here – it’s an old story, the heroine decides not to marry the guy she’s with. She decides she deserves better.

I’m grateful that I found that movie, because this past week was another notch on the healing post for me. I needed to get that message where I am and when I got it. As a friend says, “Sometimes the universe hits you with a clue-by-four.”

Though I was technically “alone” at the holidays this year, I’m never really alone. I’ve got me, babe, and I am enough.

May you get everything good in the new year. And may you believe you deserve it.

Peace, Jude