You want to know something? It turns out to be impossible just to write down the major events in your life in chronological order--to make the timeline, my original intention in beginning this blog.
It's impossible because of a fundamental design flaw: namely, that you dion't know the major events of your life! As you go to write them down, you think of dozens of other events associated with the one you've mentally picked out as 'significant' or 'major,' and who's to say that the dozens of other events aren't every bit as important as the one(s) you've picked out to go on the timeline?
Try it...you'll see. You start to write something down, but then you want to explain it, to elaborate, to call up the memories around that event. And pretty soon, you're hopelessly lost. That's what's happening to me! Lost in the Glop!
Monday, November 29, 2010
Monday, Nov. 29, 2010
I promised I'd write 50m000 words in November! Argh! i figure that's about 162 pages or something. Anuyway, today I'm in the mood for writing, or I was.
All I ever wanted to do was tell my Family's Story. Which means, I wanted to tell the story of my four brothers' and three sisters' lives--not even my parents' story, but my siblings'. They were substitute parents for me in mabny ways. Wanting to tell the Family's Story has always held me back. I realize now that I have only my own story to tell--only my own--that's all I've ever HAD to tell, to give. Even if I were to try to tell the stories of my brothers' and sisters' lives, I'd still be telling MY story because all I can do is tell you the way I have taken in their lives.
When you live in a big family and are born near the bottom of the pile, you are kind of infused, maybe even infected, like with a virus. The virus is The FAmily, and you never get over it or outgrow it. I can remember visiting my Family in California, even after my mother had both died. I felt the Family Glop invading me before I'd even arrived, and after I'd arrived, I was desperate to maintain some kind of protection from the Glop, from being sucked into the quicksand that has no visible shape or smell or color but which is no less--and probably more--powerful for not having a physical form. I can remember at the airport, on the way home, the Glop still pulling at me--I remember grabbing a paper napkin from one of those airport cafes and trying to write down impressions, snatches of dialogue, the patterns I'd discerned in the way my brothers and sisters interacted with one another and with me. How urgent I felt to get it down, to get it out--away from me--to push back against the Glop!
The Glop is comprised of patterned ways of being. For instance, when I telephone one of my two remaining sisters now (the third is in a nursing home and for all intents and purposes 'gone'), I know exactly the tone of voice they will use and the tone in which i will respond--regardless of what we say to each other, regardless of the content. We could be calling to communicate tragedy, to recommend a good book, to pick a fight--the tone in each case is entirely predictable, and it feels like a kind of slavery, a kind of bondage, there is no freedom in it.
I am not here talking about a tone of voice, per se--the timbre or quality of someone's voice is beyond their control, I think. I guess I am talking about the patterns of affect communicated by the tones of voice used. Either Betty or Sharon at this point will answer a call from me with, "Jeannieeeee," with a higher pitch on the Jean, then sliding into a lower and extended 'eeeee.' The affect is....what? Surprise? Like I never call? Yes, perhaps some surprise, since I don't call often, but the tone conveys oh so much more than that.
Each is telling me something like this: that they are surprised I am calling since I've moved back to Chicago and presumably do not wish to be part of the family anymore, for which I am culpable, but for which I am forgiven because of their love for me. The tone says, "Come home, come back to the Glop." And there is nothing in it, nothing, that is spontaneous, that belongs to that unique moment in time in which we happen to be speaking on a telephone to one another.
Is it just that I've 'grown accustomed to [their[ voice,' like Professor Higgins grew accustomed to poor Eliza's? I don't think so. The voice thing is just part of it. There are patterned ways of behaving, too, and patterned ways in which I RESPOND that drive me nuts. It's as if I have no control over myself but am somehow induced into responding however I do. This is true of all families; to escape these patterns, we leave home. Then we try to set up the same patterns with whomever we meet or marry. It makes one ponder the meaning of 'free will' indeed.
And how DO I respond to my brothers, to my sisters. What is the 'phatic communication,' to use an old Hayakawa expression? To my sisters I think I am saying, "I am not you. I am not like you. I think even that I do not like you. But I love you, and I would be hurt if you didn't say you loved me. I reject you and all that you stand for, but you are not allowed to reject me. I still depend on you, on my relation to you, and I am furious about that. Remember that I am superior to you--smarter, left home more completely but still have not forgotten my roots, still share the Family sense of humor. I still want you in my life, even though I have left you, and I don't know how to have you in my life." That is the 'music' behind whatever words I use.
But to my brothers: that is harder. The eldest is now dead, thank God. He can no longer terrorize my life or my dreams. In fact, he has been out of my dreams now for about 15 years, but for many years before that, I would wake startled, feeling that "John is here," the way I felt from the age of about eight or nine through my teens and early adulthood. I know the older brothers and sisters would be shocked at my saying 'Thank God' that John is dead, and I do not say it with any malice. I didn't hate him, in the end--he was too pathetic a figure. There was so much intelligence, charm, wit about him, in spite of the schizophrenia that made him the terror of my childhood.
Yet I can be thankful that he is gone from my life permanently. I will never again receive an embarrassing letter or package, as I did all through college and even after, marked with large, elementary-school handwriting in three or four different colors, with sayings, quips, added here and there, sometimes salacious ones. I don't ever have to find one of those missives in my mailbox again and try to hide it so noone will know that I have a crazy brother, one who has power over me.
I can sleep in my bed, safe from his attempts at intrusion. I no longer have to ask the question, "Where is John sleeping?" to know where I can sleep, how I can be safe from his nighttime wanderings. Never again do I have to come home to a house we worked hard to clean, to hold together, to decorate, to find that he has sawn off some part of the furniture or to smell the pure bleach he has poured onto the kitchen floor to 'clean it.' I don't have to stay up to all hours listening to his theory for doping out the horse races, 'the red ball' and 'the blue ball' theories, watching him draw crayoned symbols next to particular entries in the racing form, only to have him accuse me of [patronizing' him by my forced attention.
What did force my attention to him anyway? Why was I the 'chosen' one to sit with him late into the night, he in a t-shirt and boxer shorts that offered all too open a showing of his penis. His bony adam's apple stuck out of his neck, and he reflexively and obsessively wiped his nose with his hand. Often he smelled of excrement because he didn't wipe himself well at the toilet. He was the tallest of the four boys, six foot three; I was the tallest of the four girls, five ten and a half. Is that why I felt I had to sit up with him? He asked me to; that's all I can say, and I didn't feel free to say no or it's too late or I have to get up to go to school or work tomorrow. I was afraid of him, and he knew he had power over me.
When we live through traumas in our early years, we never think to ask, "Where were the others? The parent, the sibling, the grandparent, the witnesses: how did they feel? What were they thinking? Who left me alone to deal with what I couldn't?"
John was fifteen years older than I. He had power over me. Perhaps he had less power with my older brothers and sisters? Did anyone even know that I was sitting in the breakfast nook of the kitchen of the house we had finally been able to move into, the window to the backyard dark, having to peer closely at the insane markings of a madman and pretend interest, even excitement, over what he was imagining to be true? And if they knew, why didn't anybody try to help me out? Or was there a rotation worked out that was unknown to me--did the others have to take their turn listening to the red ball and the blue ball theories? Not my older brothers, certainly. They had power over John, although John was the eldest, and Bill and Paul three and five years younger. They were younger, but they were sane, they were healthy, they had jobs, they had lives; that's why they were more powerful than their eldest brother.
Al, perhaps, the youngest of the brothers, only three years older than I and the only brother to whom I felt close, the only one who didn't threaten me: perhaps he had to wait up to listen to John's horse racing theories. Sharon, the baby, was always too fragile for anyone to demand anything of. Betty and Helen were in and out of the house as they went in and out of their marriages, not home consistently enough to be drafted into horse-racing-theory duties. And he would not have asked Mama.
John never called Mama by any maternal label. He would sometimes refer to her as "Mrs. Wishard," or "Ruth Wishard." When we were younger, he talked about the King and Queen, apparently referring to our parents. Yet, when my father paid a visit to the one and only house we'd ever owned, after many years' absence, John used 'Dad' and so sweetly and simply wanted his attention. His father was no doubt forgiven because he wasn't around. My mother, who wrapped his urine-soaked garbage in fresh newspapers to that the garbage truck would deign to pick up our trash, never merited a loving glance, not even a name: not Mama, to John, nor Mom, nor Mother, nor Ma. His rage at her must have burned with white-hot intensity. Yet it was never my mother that he threatened, physically. He was hospitalized the first time after having pushed Betty--an act he later denied and probably in all honesty could not remember.
He was not physically violent, for the most part. But he slammed doors so hard they became shaken off-plane so that they wouldn't close correctly anymore. He banged the doors to express his rage, which he often formulated as one kind of prejudice or another, identifying the perpetrators of the horrors against him with which he had to live, the takers-away of his life, the robbers who had left him poor and empry, as the Mexicans when we lived near the Mexicans or the "Negroes" when we lived near black people. And he terrified us when it was just girls living at home--my mother and we four sisters. He slept on a bed in the street-level San Francisco basement at that time (you can see that I do not want you to believe that we mistreated him), and he would come roaring up the basement stairs, naked from the waist down, demanding that one of us couple with him, and slamming the doors, as usual. Then we would lie awake in the two befdrooms upstairs (we all slept with one another since there weren't enough beds to go around), the lights off, not daring even to get up to go to the bathroom, praying that he would settle down, hoping that he would not hurt us.
Yes, he was in the hospital many times, but in those years, in the '50s, they didn't have the drugs they have now. They gave him Thorazine, and that helped a little; it kind of slowed him down, But he wouldn't stay on it. After the last hospitalization, he decided not to come back home to live--this hurt my mother's feelings, but it was brilliant for him. And it saved my life; I can see that now. Perhaps it saved his too.
He died only a few years ago, from stomach cancer, in a public hospital in Sonoma, where he had become a fixture in the community. The doctor who ministered to him called Bill, an attorney, to say that John had told the doctor that Bill had Power of Attorney for Health Decisions. It was clear that the doctor was willing to believe that such a document existed, and for the best reasons: he recognized the schizophrenia. He also recognized that my brother was very intelligent, that he depended on his family in many ways, even though he lived apart, and that he was quite sanely making use of my brother's intelligence in order to help him feel solid in the decision he'd made not to have surgery--a decision the doctor said would have been his own, had he found himself in John's situation.
I spoke to him once before he died. He called me by my first name, Marilyn--he was one of the few that ever called me that. And his message was the same as the one I heard coming from my sisters and from my brother Paul : he quite explicitly said, "Marilyn, you are part of this family." I had said nothing to inspire that comment, but apparently they all could read my mind, even my crazy brother. And even though he had decided many years before i did not to live with the others, he could still make me feel guilty for not 'being a part of the Family,' as he--and the others--perceived.
It is interesting that two of my brothers have not expressed to me some kind of disappointment or judgment or opinion, even, of my seeming to have split myself off from the rest of the family. Bill has tried to leave the family for his whole life, with variable success during different phases of his own life, and Al I think has never perceived me as having 'gone away' in any important way, no doubt because I feel close to him.
You see, it felt to them like a sacrilege for anyone to 'leave the Family,' as it came to feel to my nephew a sacrilege for me to have left the Lutheran faith. Adherence to the Glop, identification with the Glop, was a way to hold the Glop together, but also a way to hold oneself together: I am a part of this Family, therefore I am. In how many plays or novels has someone been ejected from a family! "You are no longer a part of this family!"--words that inspire fear, shame, dejection, humiliation, even despair. But to leave voluntarily--ah, that is a different story.
All I ever wanted to do was tell my Family's Story. Which means, I wanted to tell the story of my four brothers' and three sisters' lives--not even my parents' story, but my siblings'. They were substitute parents for me in mabny ways. Wanting to tell the Family's Story has always held me back. I realize now that I have only my own story to tell--only my own--that's all I've ever HAD to tell, to give. Even if I were to try to tell the stories of my brothers' and sisters' lives, I'd still be telling MY story because all I can do is tell you the way I have taken in their lives.
When you live in a big family and are born near the bottom of the pile, you are kind of infused, maybe even infected, like with a virus. The virus is The FAmily, and you never get over it or outgrow it. I can remember visiting my Family in California, even after my mother had both died. I felt the Family Glop invading me before I'd even arrived, and after I'd arrived, I was desperate to maintain some kind of protection from the Glop, from being sucked into the quicksand that has no visible shape or smell or color but which is no less--and probably more--powerful for not having a physical form. I can remember at the airport, on the way home, the Glop still pulling at me--I remember grabbing a paper napkin from one of those airport cafes and trying to write down impressions, snatches of dialogue, the patterns I'd discerned in the way my brothers and sisters interacted with one another and with me. How urgent I felt to get it down, to get it out--away from me--to push back against the Glop!
The Glop is comprised of patterned ways of being. For instance, when I telephone one of my two remaining sisters now (the third is in a nursing home and for all intents and purposes 'gone'), I know exactly the tone of voice they will use and the tone in which i will respond--regardless of what we say to each other, regardless of the content. We could be calling to communicate tragedy, to recommend a good book, to pick a fight--the tone in each case is entirely predictable, and it feels like a kind of slavery, a kind of bondage, there is no freedom in it.
I am not here talking about a tone of voice, per se--the timbre or quality of someone's voice is beyond their control, I think. I guess I am talking about the patterns of affect communicated by the tones of voice used. Either Betty or Sharon at this point will answer a call from me with, "Jeannieeeee," with a higher pitch on the Jean, then sliding into a lower and extended 'eeeee.' The affect is....what? Surprise? Like I never call? Yes, perhaps some surprise, since I don't call often, but the tone conveys oh so much more than that.
Each is telling me something like this: that they are surprised I am calling since I've moved back to Chicago and presumably do not wish to be part of the family anymore, for which I am culpable, but for which I am forgiven because of their love for me. The tone says, "Come home, come back to the Glop." And there is nothing in it, nothing, that is spontaneous, that belongs to that unique moment in time in which we happen to be speaking on a telephone to one another.
Is it just that I've 'grown accustomed to [their[ voice,' like Professor Higgins grew accustomed to poor Eliza's? I don't think so. The voice thing is just part of it. There are patterned ways of behaving, too, and patterned ways in which I RESPOND that drive me nuts. It's as if I have no control over myself but am somehow induced into responding however I do. This is true of all families; to escape these patterns, we leave home. Then we try to set up the same patterns with whomever we meet or marry. It makes one ponder the meaning of 'free will' indeed.
And how DO I respond to my brothers, to my sisters. What is the 'phatic communication,' to use an old Hayakawa expression? To my sisters I think I am saying, "I am not you. I am not like you. I think even that I do not like you. But I love you, and I would be hurt if you didn't say you loved me. I reject you and all that you stand for, but you are not allowed to reject me. I still depend on you, on my relation to you, and I am furious about that. Remember that I am superior to you--smarter, left home more completely but still have not forgotten my roots, still share the Family sense of humor. I still want you in my life, even though I have left you, and I don't know how to have you in my life." That is the 'music' behind whatever words I use.
But to my brothers: that is harder. The eldest is now dead, thank God. He can no longer terrorize my life or my dreams. In fact, he has been out of my dreams now for about 15 years, but for many years before that, I would wake startled, feeling that "John is here," the way I felt from the age of about eight or nine through my teens and early adulthood. I know the older brothers and sisters would be shocked at my saying 'Thank God' that John is dead, and I do not say it with any malice. I didn't hate him, in the end--he was too pathetic a figure. There was so much intelligence, charm, wit about him, in spite of the schizophrenia that made him the terror of my childhood.
Yet I can be thankful that he is gone from my life permanently. I will never again receive an embarrassing letter or package, as I did all through college and even after, marked with large, elementary-school handwriting in three or four different colors, with sayings, quips, added here and there, sometimes salacious ones. I don't ever have to find one of those missives in my mailbox again and try to hide it so noone will know that I have a crazy brother, one who has power over me.
I can sleep in my bed, safe from his attempts at intrusion. I no longer have to ask the question, "Where is John sleeping?" to know where I can sleep, how I can be safe from his nighttime wanderings. Never again do I have to come home to a house we worked hard to clean, to hold together, to decorate, to find that he has sawn off some part of the furniture or to smell the pure bleach he has poured onto the kitchen floor to 'clean it.' I don't have to stay up to all hours listening to his theory for doping out the horse races, 'the red ball' and 'the blue ball' theories, watching him draw crayoned symbols next to particular entries in the racing form, only to have him accuse me of [patronizing' him by my forced attention.
What did force my attention to him anyway? Why was I the 'chosen' one to sit with him late into the night, he in a t-shirt and boxer shorts that offered all too open a showing of his penis. His bony adam's apple stuck out of his neck, and he reflexively and obsessively wiped his nose with his hand. Often he smelled of excrement because he didn't wipe himself well at the toilet. He was the tallest of the four boys, six foot three; I was the tallest of the four girls, five ten and a half. Is that why I felt I had to sit up with him? He asked me to; that's all I can say, and I didn't feel free to say no or it's too late or I have to get up to go to school or work tomorrow. I was afraid of him, and he knew he had power over me.
When we live through traumas in our early years, we never think to ask, "Where were the others? The parent, the sibling, the grandparent, the witnesses: how did they feel? What were they thinking? Who left me alone to deal with what I couldn't?"
John was fifteen years older than I. He had power over me. Perhaps he had less power with my older brothers and sisters? Did anyone even know that I was sitting in the breakfast nook of the kitchen of the house we had finally been able to move into, the window to the backyard dark, having to peer closely at the insane markings of a madman and pretend interest, even excitement, over what he was imagining to be true? And if they knew, why didn't anybody try to help me out? Or was there a rotation worked out that was unknown to me--did the others have to take their turn listening to the red ball and the blue ball theories? Not my older brothers, certainly. They had power over John, although John was the eldest, and Bill and Paul three and five years younger. They were younger, but they were sane, they were healthy, they had jobs, they had lives; that's why they were more powerful than their eldest brother.
Al, perhaps, the youngest of the brothers, only three years older than I and the only brother to whom I felt close, the only one who didn't threaten me: perhaps he had to wait up to listen to John's horse racing theories. Sharon, the baby, was always too fragile for anyone to demand anything of. Betty and Helen were in and out of the house as they went in and out of their marriages, not home consistently enough to be drafted into horse-racing-theory duties. And he would not have asked Mama.
John never called Mama by any maternal label. He would sometimes refer to her as "Mrs. Wishard," or "Ruth Wishard." When we were younger, he talked about the King and Queen, apparently referring to our parents. Yet, when my father paid a visit to the one and only house we'd ever owned, after many years' absence, John used 'Dad' and so sweetly and simply wanted his attention. His father was no doubt forgiven because he wasn't around. My mother, who wrapped his urine-soaked garbage in fresh newspapers to that the garbage truck would deign to pick up our trash, never merited a loving glance, not even a name: not Mama, to John, nor Mom, nor Mother, nor Ma. His rage at her must have burned with white-hot intensity. Yet it was never my mother that he threatened, physically. He was hospitalized the first time after having pushed Betty--an act he later denied and probably in all honesty could not remember.
He was not physically violent, for the most part. But he slammed doors so hard they became shaken off-plane so that they wouldn't close correctly anymore. He banged the doors to express his rage, which he often formulated as one kind of prejudice or another, identifying the perpetrators of the horrors against him with which he had to live, the takers-away of his life, the robbers who had left him poor and empry, as the Mexicans when we lived near the Mexicans or the "Negroes" when we lived near black people. And he terrified us when it was just girls living at home--my mother and we four sisters. He slept on a bed in the street-level San Francisco basement at that time (you can see that I do not want you to believe that we mistreated him), and he would come roaring up the basement stairs, naked from the waist down, demanding that one of us couple with him, and slamming the doors, as usual. Then we would lie awake in the two befdrooms upstairs (we all slept with one another since there weren't enough beds to go around), the lights off, not daring even to get up to go to the bathroom, praying that he would settle down, hoping that he would not hurt us.
Yes, he was in the hospital many times, but in those years, in the '50s, they didn't have the drugs they have now. They gave him Thorazine, and that helped a little; it kind of slowed him down, But he wouldn't stay on it. After the last hospitalization, he decided not to come back home to live--this hurt my mother's feelings, but it was brilliant for him. And it saved my life; I can see that now. Perhaps it saved his too.
He died only a few years ago, from stomach cancer, in a public hospital in Sonoma, where he had become a fixture in the community. The doctor who ministered to him called Bill, an attorney, to say that John had told the doctor that Bill had Power of Attorney for Health Decisions. It was clear that the doctor was willing to believe that such a document existed, and for the best reasons: he recognized the schizophrenia. He also recognized that my brother was very intelligent, that he depended on his family in many ways, even though he lived apart, and that he was quite sanely making use of my brother's intelligence in order to help him feel solid in the decision he'd made not to have surgery--a decision the doctor said would have been his own, had he found himself in John's situation.
I spoke to him once before he died. He called me by my first name, Marilyn--he was one of the few that ever called me that. And his message was the same as the one I heard coming from my sisters and from my brother Paul : he quite explicitly said, "Marilyn, you are part of this family." I had said nothing to inspire that comment, but apparently they all could read my mind, even my crazy brother. And even though he had decided many years before i did not to live with the others, he could still make me feel guilty for not 'being a part of the Family,' as he--and the others--perceived.
It is interesting that two of my brothers have not expressed to me some kind of disappointment or judgment or opinion, even, of my seeming to have split myself off from the rest of the family. Bill has tried to leave the family for his whole life, with variable success during different phases of his own life, and Al I think has never perceived me as having 'gone away' in any important way, no doubt because I feel close to him.
You see, it felt to them like a sacrilege for anyone to 'leave the Family,' as it came to feel to my nephew a sacrilege for me to have left the Lutheran faith. Adherence to the Glop, identification with the Glop, was a way to hold the Glop together, but also a way to hold oneself together: I am a part of this Family, therefore I am. In how many plays or novels has someone been ejected from a family! "You are no longer a part of this family!"--words that inspire fear, shame, dejection, humiliation, even despair. But to leave voluntarily--ah, that is a different story.
Saturday, November 13, 2010
Sat. morning, Nov. 13, 2010
It's new for me to write in the morning....usually everything I have to do in a day crowds in and crowds out any attempt to write. I have 45 minutes this morning before I have to leave for work. Karen has taken the dog to the dog park, the house is quiet. I am writing for a change instead of reading.
I wonder if I am not capable any longer of truly creative writing; when I read what I've written, which I shouldn't do, it sounds to me not as good as the poems written by my grandson's fourth grade class. I have to just get some stuff down and not read it and plow on; at least I'm putting down SOMETHING, some information if nothing else. I am frustrated by having written other short pieces about my life that aren't included here...I may go to the trouble of copying them into this timeline/narrative so that the girls can at least see that there are times when I have been able to express myself well in memoir.
So when I had to stay in the hospital overnite about ten years ago (?), I was panicked when I couldn't leave the next day until my internist had checked me out, and he couldn't get to the hospital until two in the afternoon, and then Karen and Jenny didn't come for me until some time after that. When I got home, Karen and Jenny were talking companionably, and I thought they were just going to go on with their lives without me. So this I can trace back very directly to my childhood experience in the hospital.
I was in psychoanalysis after six years of psychotherapy with Polly: from 1987, the year after my mother died, to 1992. I went four times a week, traveling from Lake Villa all the way to downtown Chicago, then making up the hours I'd missed at work. At that time insurance covered about half the cost!--something they would never do now. After being out for a year, I went back for another year of treatment. Jenny had her first breakdown in 1988, I had the thyroid surgery in 1989. The psychoanalysis was overshadowed in a big way by Jenny's illness and recovery attempts.
When Jenny first broke down and had to go to the hospital, I blamed myself entirely--me and Karen. I wrote out a long history of every way in which I felt I'd done wrong by her, from conception through the present day, and sent it to her therapist and her psychiatrist. I hoped they could repair the damage I'd done. Besides the damage in her early childhood, when I would fly into rages because she was so shy or because I couldn't get her potty trained, I just knew that my divorcing and deciding to be in a relationship with Karen was the cause of her breakdown.
By now I both know better, given the biological underpinnings of the disorder, but also accept that all of the stress I experienced inside myself and in my life with Ed and then with Karen was transmitted to both her and Julia and affected them profoundly. How could it be otherwise? -- But that Jenny would not have broken down to the point of needing hospitalization had there not been there a biological vulnerability about which I knew nothing, that I didn't know existed. You have to remember that the genetic origins of major mental illness were not understood or broadly accepted in the mental health community back then--only twenty years ago. I had no idea that my kids might be genetically loaded for mental illness given the illness in my own family, my own struggles with depression, and then the severe obsessive-compulsive disorder in their father.
I see now, though, that even though all of the bad stuff I did--my hysteria, my ignorance, my depression--contributed to both Jenny's and Julia's unhappiness and struggles, all of the good stuff I did was also taken in, and that they use the good stuff every day of their lives, just as I use the good stuff I got from my very imperfect mother--her resilience, her love of words, humor, literature--that Irish wit--her insights about people, her compassion, her willingness to see and take responsibility for her own deficits, her intelligence, her love of order and cleanliness, her care for her children--these are not inconsiderable gifts, piled up against her narcissism, her sometimes neglect, her preoccupation with sex and being sexually attractive to men as a be-all/end-all, her materialistic strivings at times, her corruption.
And from my father, what is there to pile against his abuse and neglect, his absolute madness? The love of music, including his voice, the seeking for God despite his own living in Hell, the tenderness involved even in his sexual molestation--at least he didn't hit me, force me, coerce me--just seduced me. Also his own conviction of his own sinfulness, which was the best he could do in the face of his obsession with sex. And although his preaching to others was hypocritical, to a degree he was mostly preaching to himself, trying to get control of himself, condemning himself, trying to scare himself with God's doom out of behaviors he knew were deeply wrong. That's not nothing. And his love of the Bible, which my mother also loved--he had Welsh in him, the love of words and music. They named their first son after my mother's father and the disciple whom Jesus loved, John, but the middle name was Milton! That tells you something!
As I'm writing this I forgive them both and hope they have come to some kind of peace. I no longer feel the rage for and fear of my father and can accept my mother as a failed person, as well as an accomplished one.
I wonder if I am not capable any longer of truly creative writing; when I read what I've written, which I shouldn't do, it sounds to me not as good as the poems written by my grandson's fourth grade class. I have to just get some stuff down and not read it and plow on; at least I'm putting down SOMETHING, some information if nothing else. I am frustrated by having written other short pieces about my life that aren't included here...I may go to the trouble of copying them into this timeline/narrative so that the girls can at least see that there are times when I have been able to express myself well in memoir.
So when I had to stay in the hospital overnite about ten years ago (?), I was panicked when I couldn't leave the next day until my internist had checked me out, and he couldn't get to the hospital until two in the afternoon, and then Karen and Jenny didn't come for me until some time after that. When I got home, Karen and Jenny were talking companionably, and I thought they were just going to go on with their lives without me. So this I can trace back very directly to my childhood experience in the hospital.
I was in psychoanalysis after six years of psychotherapy with Polly: from 1987, the year after my mother died, to 1992. I went four times a week, traveling from Lake Villa all the way to downtown Chicago, then making up the hours I'd missed at work. At that time insurance covered about half the cost!--something they would never do now. After being out for a year, I went back for another year of treatment. Jenny had her first breakdown in 1988, I had the thyroid surgery in 1989. The psychoanalysis was overshadowed in a big way by Jenny's illness and recovery attempts.
When Jenny first broke down and had to go to the hospital, I blamed myself entirely--me and Karen. I wrote out a long history of every way in which I felt I'd done wrong by her, from conception through the present day, and sent it to her therapist and her psychiatrist. I hoped they could repair the damage I'd done. Besides the damage in her early childhood, when I would fly into rages because she was so shy or because I couldn't get her potty trained, I just knew that my divorcing and deciding to be in a relationship with Karen was the cause of her breakdown.
By now I both know better, given the biological underpinnings of the disorder, but also accept that all of the stress I experienced inside myself and in my life with Ed and then with Karen was transmitted to both her and Julia and affected them profoundly. How could it be otherwise? -- But that Jenny would not have broken down to the point of needing hospitalization had there not been there a biological vulnerability about which I knew nothing, that I didn't know existed. You have to remember that the genetic origins of major mental illness were not understood or broadly accepted in the mental health community back then--only twenty years ago. I had no idea that my kids might be genetically loaded for mental illness given the illness in my own family, my own struggles with depression, and then the severe obsessive-compulsive disorder in their father.
I see now, though, that even though all of the bad stuff I did--my hysteria, my ignorance, my depression--contributed to both Jenny's and Julia's unhappiness and struggles, all of the good stuff I did was also taken in, and that they use the good stuff every day of their lives, just as I use the good stuff I got from my very imperfect mother--her resilience, her love of words, humor, literature--that Irish wit--her insights about people, her compassion, her willingness to see and take responsibility for her own deficits, her intelligence, her love of order and cleanliness, her care for her children--these are not inconsiderable gifts, piled up against her narcissism, her sometimes neglect, her preoccupation with sex and being sexually attractive to men as a be-all/end-all, her materialistic strivings at times, her corruption.
And from my father, what is there to pile against his abuse and neglect, his absolute madness? The love of music, including his voice, the seeking for God despite his own living in Hell, the tenderness involved even in his sexual molestation--at least he didn't hit me, force me, coerce me--just seduced me. Also his own conviction of his own sinfulness, which was the best he could do in the face of his obsession with sex. And although his preaching to others was hypocritical, to a degree he was mostly preaching to himself, trying to get control of himself, condemning himself, trying to scare himself with God's doom out of behaviors he knew were deeply wrong. That's not nothing. And his love of the Bible, which my mother also loved--he had Welsh in him, the love of words and music. They named their first son after my mother's father and the disciple whom Jesus loved, John, but the middle name was Milton! That tells you something!
As I'm writing this I forgive them both and hope they have come to some kind of peace. I no longer feel the rage for and fear of my father and can accept my mother as a failed person, as well as an accomplished one.
Friday, November 12, 2010
Nov. 12, again
There is a needle, and he wants to put it in my arm. Nobody tells me why, and I only know one thing: that needle is not going into my arm. I'm screaming bloody murder while the doc tries to hold me down to put the needle into my vein, and Mama steps outside the room. She's embarrassed again--this time by my screaming.
They admitted me for observation, inserted the IV to keep me hydrated and because they couldn't give me anything by mouth in case they had to operate later. But they didn't bother to tell me any of this.
It's early in the gray San Francisco afternoon the next day. I am sitting at the end of the hall atop some kind of suitcase that they must have packed for me although God knows I didn't have anything. I'm done with the hospital, my stomach doesn't hurt anymore, but they haven't come for me. I wait and wait. The afternoon light begins to fade into evening. Finally they are there. They had wanted to bring me home to a surprise, a new dress for me. I would gladly have traded the new dress for their coming earlier.
It is Betty getting back on the bus after she dropped us off at Long Beach. It is abandonment that I have been sure of for the rest of my life. Yesterday a fifty year old client said, "I am so afraid that people will just forget about me and go on with their lives without me." Yes.
They admitted me for observation, inserted the IV to keep me hydrated and because they couldn't give me anything by mouth in case they had to operate later. But they didn't bother to tell me any of this.
It's early in the gray San Francisco afternoon the next day. I am sitting at the end of the hall atop some kind of suitcase that they must have packed for me although God knows I didn't have anything. I'm done with the hospital, my stomach doesn't hurt anymore, but they haven't come for me. I wait and wait. The afternoon light begins to fade into evening. Finally they are there. They had wanted to bring me home to a surprise, a new dress for me. I would gladly have traded the new dress for their coming earlier.
It is Betty getting back on the bus after she dropped us off at Long Beach. It is abandonment that I have been sure of for the rest of my life. Yesterday a fifty year old client said, "I am so afraid that people will just forget about me and go on with their lives without me." Yes.
Nov. 12, 2010
1981, the divorce:
"There were times when we'd try to repair." Karen and I went through a self-imposed separation for three months. During that time I was sitting in the living room at 1201 and said, "I've been gone." Ed was encouraged to hear me say that, that I realized that. We talked at the kitchen table about maybe trying to repair, to get together again, but he said, "I'm thinking of my woman in Washington, her breasts that fit into champagne glasses." I know it sounds insane, and I've never forgiven myself for it, if that's any comfort to you girls (if you're reading this), but I couldn't stand it that he'd said that, that that was what he was thinking, that I could feel the excitement in him. I suppose he was punishing me; I can't blame him for that. But, worse, he wasn't even punishing me, he was just rejecting my body, unable to give up his 'woman in Washington who had breasts that fit into champagne glasses.' I couldn't get over the narcissistic injury, it sent me away from him again, inside. I'd always been self conscious about having small breasts and even considered breast enhancement surgery at one point, but I didn't make it past the interview with the surgeon because it included taking pictures of my current breasts and the whole thing felt pornographic.
I see in writing this how fragile, how confused I was. I was just spinning in my own fragmentation, while my kids were in or entering puberty. Terrible timing, terrible trauma for them. I remember announcing the divorce to them in the upstairs bedroom at 1201, not that Ed hadn't already mentioned it in the car on the way home from the Unitarian Church some weeks or days before. I remember Jenny saying, "Oh no, we'll have to be in therapy forever." And when I talked with them about where they wanted to live, Jenny had said, "Mom, are you kidding? We don't have any choice! Dad's crazy!" I had thought they might be so ashamed of me, they wouldn't want to live with me. I figured their father could at least give them a more stable life.
In the early days of this mess, before or after I'd asked Ed for the divorce--I think after--I was trying to get Karen to see how bad this was for me. There was a way in which I felt I couldn't get to her, couldn't get her to feel the pain I was in. I wrote down on a small piece of paper what I was experiencing, just bullet points:
That was one moment in which I felt that she could stand to be in touch with my pain.
After she'd told me that she'd been in a reenactment and that she thought it was based on her own prior experience of having been seduced by a therapist when she was in her early twenties, I'd thought and felt so many things, but among them was, "Now she needs me."
I should absolutely never have gone into treatment with her, nor should she have let me. But for both of us, it was a way, perhaps, of going into a relationship that was structured and in that sense 'safe.' I didn't have to deal with feeling attracted to a woman; I could be attracted to a good therapist instead. And of course she was protected by my becoming her client, so she didn't have to take seriously any 'real' attraction to me.
But the vaunted protections of the psychotherapy structure didn't work; they didn't protect us from the underlying need to feel close and valued by one who understood us profoundly. And I did begin to understand Karen profoundly, and it goes without saying that she understood me profoundly as well.
Yet nor did we have protection outside the psychotherapy, since as soon as we admitted that we were involved in a 'real' relationship, we entered a whole new world of pain. Now Karen was not my therapist, and her full needs could blossom. Oh, there's way too much to say here....the sexual relationship, the power relationship, the family relationships, the financial stuff, the struggle between her paranoia and my grandiosity and narcissism, not that she didn't have plenty of those too....at least I'm less paranoid, but she couldn't stand my getting my feelings hurt all the time. But though my getting my feelings hurt sounds like paranoia--since I attributed malice at times when there was none--the quality of my doubts and Karen's was and is profound. For instance, before she was in psychoanalysis (and she'd had years of treatment before that), she often believed that I would suggest a course of action simply because I was trying to control her--or that I would object to a proposed course of action on her part simply because she had proposed it. She once said to me, "I never have any needs, so if I ever want something, you should let me have it."
She was a strange combination of primitivity and genius; on the emotional level she was and is a genius, everyone says so, yet unable often to use the emotional insight she so easily has into others to analyze her own emotions. Then again, I want to say that she understands her own emotions as profoundly as she does those of others--it's more like she can't stand to see, to acknowledge, what she really thinks and feels. She has a problem with guilt.
However, as we've lived with each other these thirty years, she's come so far in being able to know, acknowledge, tolerate, understand, and, sometimes now, even empathize with her own feelings. And it makes her a different person to live with--a better person.
And I've improved, too....I have been able to conquer my separation anxiety almost completely. I say 'almost' because when I was taken in to check my heart, when it was beating too fast, I got quite anxious the next day when 'no one came to pick me up'--there is a direct reference to childhood here. Maybe I'll try to write that here:
I am eleven. There is a terrible pain in my stomach. My mother and my older siblings, whichever group of them were living at home at the time, are standing around uselessly as they peer down at me writing on the couch in the front room of our three-room apartment.
"Connie has a broth, she says it will help her," Bill says, carrying up from the apartment of our neighbors below a quart jar with a dark brown liquid in it.
My mother gives me a cup of the broth. The pain gets worse. Now I can't stop staggering to the toilet on the back porch. Everyone gets scared, an ambulance gets to our house, although we have no phone and I have no idea how they got it there. I am being carried down the long staircase, then down the concrete steps of the porch to the high landing, now down the steps on the side, finally to street level. I am aware that it is my brother Bill who carries me.
The hospital room at Denver County is big and empty, the ceiling looks a long way off from where I am lying on the flat bed. There is a screen made of cloth stretched over tubing at the foot of my bed. The walls are a bleached yellow. The skimpy hospital gown ties in the front and is partially open. Mama stands in the room; she averts her eyes.
"I'm embarrassed," she says, "your knees are dirty."
A young man with glasses stands enters the room, stands over me. He has one hand behind his back; I know there is a cigarette in that hand. He opens my gown and runs the tip of a safety pin over my lower right belly.
"Can you feel that?", he asks.
I wonder why he is running the sharp end of a pin over my stomach I tell him I can feel it, it kind of tickles.. The pain I had felt at home is gone. He turns to my mother.
"When did your other girls start their menses?", he asks.
I don't know that word, but I know what he's asking.
"About 14," Mama answers.
The next thing I know there is a needle.
"There were times when we'd try to repair." Karen and I went through a self-imposed separation for three months. During that time I was sitting in the living room at 1201 and said, "I've been gone." Ed was encouraged to hear me say that, that I realized that. We talked at the kitchen table about maybe trying to repair, to get together again, but he said, "I'm thinking of my woman in Washington, her breasts that fit into champagne glasses." I know it sounds insane, and I've never forgiven myself for it, if that's any comfort to you girls (if you're reading this), but I couldn't stand it that he'd said that, that that was what he was thinking, that I could feel the excitement in him. I suppose he was punishing me; I can't blame him for that. But, worse, he wasn't even punishing me, he was just rejecting my body, unable to give up his 'woman in Washington who had breasts that fit into champagne glasses.' I couldn't get over the narcissistic injury, it sent me away from him again, inside. I'd always been self conscious about having small breasts and even considered breast enhancement surgery at one point, but I didn't make it past the interview with the surgeon because it included taking pictures of my current breasts and the whole thing felt pornographic.
I see in writing this how fragile, how confused I was. I was just spinning in my own fragmentation, while my kids were in or entering puberty. Terrible timing, terrible trauma for them. I remember announcing the divorce to them in the upstairs bedroom at 1201, not that Ed hadn't already mentioned it in the car on the way home from the Unitarian Church some weeks or days before. I remember Jenny saying, "Oh no, we'll have to be in therapy forever." And when I talked with them about where they wanted to live, Jenny had said, "Mom, are you kidding? We don't have any choice! Dad's crazy!" I had thought they might be so ashamed of me, they wouldn't want to live with me. I figured their father could at least give them a more stable life.
In the early days of this mess, before or after I'd asked Ed for the divorce--I think after--I was trying to get Karen to see how bad this was for me. There was a way in which I felt I couldn't get to her, couldn't get her to feel the pain I was in. I wrote down on a small piece of paper what I was experiencing, just bullet points:
- I could hold it together inside when I was mowing the acre of lawn outside the house, not with the tractor but by hand; when I'd finished, the desperation moved in again.
- Everything felt unreal to me; only contact with my kids felt real.
That was one moment in which I felt that she could stand to be in touch with my pain.
After she'd told me that she'd been in a reenactment and that she thought it was based on her own prior experience of having been seduced by a therapist when she was in her early twenties, I'd thought and felt so many things, but among them was, "Now she needs me."
I should absolutely never have gone into treatment with her, nor should she have let me. But for both of us, it was a way, perhaps, of going into a relationship that was structured and in that sense 'safe.' I didn't have to deal with feeling attracted to a woman; I could be attracted to a good therapist instead. And of course she was protected by my becoming her client, so she didn't have to take seriously any 'real' attraction to me.
But the vaunted protections of the psychotherapy structure didn't work; they didn't protect us from the underlying need to feel close and valued by one who understood us profoundly. And I did begin to understand Karen profoundly, and it goes without saying that she understood me profoundly as well.
Yet nor did we have protection outside the psychotherapy, since as soon as we admitted that we were involved in a 'real' relationship, we entered a whole new world of pain. Now Karen was not my therapist, and her full needs could blossom. Oh, there's way too much to say here....the sexual relationship, the power relationship, the family relationships, the financial stuff, the struggle between her paranoia and my grandiosity and narcissism, not that she didn't have plenty of those too....at least I'm less paranoid, but she couldn't stand my getting my feelings hurt all the time. But though my getting my feelings hurt sounds like paranoia--since I attributed malice at times when there was none--the quality of my doubts and Karen's was and is profound. For instance, before she was in psychoanalysis (and she'd had years of treatment before that), she often believed that I would suggest a course of action simply because I was trying to control her--or that I would object to a proposed course of action on her part simply because she had proposed it. She once said to me, "I never have any needs, so if I ever want something, you should let me have it."
She was a strange combination of primitivity and genius; on the emotional level she was and is a genius, everyone says so, yet unable often to use the emotional insight she so easily has into others to analyze her own emotions. Then again, I want to say that she understands her own emotions as profoundly as she does those of others--it's more like she can't stand to see, to acknowledge, what she really thinks and feels. She has a problem with guilt.
However, as we've lived with each other these thirty years, she's come so far in being able to know, acknowledge, tolerate, understand, and, sometimes now, even empathize with her own feelings. And it makes her a different person to live with--a better person.
And I've improved, too....I have been able to conquer my separation anxiety almost completely. I say 'almost' because when I was taken in to check my heart, when it was beating too fast, I got quite anxious the next day when 'no one came to pick me up'--there is a direct reference to childhood here. Maybe I'll try to write that here:
I am eleven. There is a terrible pain in my stomach. My mother and my older siblings, whichever group of them were living at home at the time, are standing around uselessly as they peer down at me writing on the couch in the front room of our three-room apartment.
"Connie has a broth, she says it will help her," Bill says, carrying up from the apartment of our neighbors below a quart jar with a dark brown liquid in it.
My mother gives me a cup of the broth. The pain gets worse. Now I can't stop staggering to the toilet on the back porch. Everyone gets scared, an ambulance gets to our house, although we have no phone and I have no idea how they got it there. I am being carried down the long staircase, then down the concrete steps of the porch to the high landing, now down the steps on the side, finally to street level. I am aware that it is my brother Bill who carries me.
The hospital room at Denver County is big and empty, the ceiling looks a long way off from where I am lying on the flat bed. There is a screen made of cloth stretched over tubing at the foot of my bed. The walls are a bleached yellow. The skimpy hospital gown ties in the front and is partially open. Mama stands in the room; she averts her eyes.
"I'm embarrassed," she says, "your knees are dirty."
A young man with glasses stands enters the room, stands over me. He has one hand behind his back; I know there is a cigarette in that hand. He opens my gown and runs the tip of a safety pin over my lower right belly.
"Can you feel that?", he asks.
I wonder why he is running the sharp end of a pin over my stomach I tell him I can feel it, it kind of tickles.. The pain I had felt at home is gone. He turns to my mother.
"When did your other girls start their menses?", he asks.
I don't know that word, but I know what he's asking.
"About 14," Mama answers.
The next thing I know there is a needle.
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
11-10-10
I find a note from a draft of this timeline:
1972--I'm feeling desperate in the marriage.
I realize I wrote this down b/c I remembered that it was 7 years after the wedding that I could no longer contain my feelings of dissatisfaction and loneliness. We had a painful conversation on the porch at 1201. Ed said he had been treating me as an extension of himself--Karen was to say the same thing, years later, when I was in crisis in relationship with her.
Here's another item:
1980: (before that, I think...maybe as early as 1978; oh, I see I corrected this to 1978) - Ed is going to Vin.
This was Vin Rosenthal, a therapist Karen referred Ed to to try to break the obsessive compulsive disorder that was ruining his life: the first of the many benefits, as well as challenges, that Karen was to bring into our lives. Julia also had consulted with Karen early on, when I was in therapy with her, about a neurotic symptom involving someone chasing her up the driveway at 1201. My kids told Karen stuff they didn't tell me....like all this phobic stuff going on with Julia, and that Jenny had fallen off a horse during her riding lessons, which Jenny told Karen in the kitchen as I was cooking the night we had her over for dinner in the spring of 78, after she'd taken the job as our new Director. I was horrified to hear this and asked why she hadn't told me...she looked at Karen and said, "That's why.", meaning, I guess, that she knew I would freak out.
1980: Things come to a head with Karen. I tell her I can't go on in the therapy b/c I'm in love with her, she tells me she thinks she's in a reenactment of her seduction by her own therapist, this is a whole story in itself. I'm horrified, traumatized, furious, and in another piece of myself, glad.
I think maybe this is the story I really need to write.
1980-81: We all go to est, except for Julia, who's too young. Or am I mixing that up with Julia being too young to sit with the meditation master and receive a mantra?
1980 or 81: Ed's therapy with Vin comes to a climax: he's to practice not washing his hands after he pees. This is an agony for him, and he sits with me on the bed in our room at 1201: "Do you understand that tomorrow there will be headlines in the newspaper that malaria has spread here?": -- he meant b/c he hadn't washed his hands. I was appalled, frightened, and wanted to reach him. I said, "Is there any part of you that knows that's not true?" I can't remember what he said, then, but this moment between us feels still vital to me, a moment we shared in his tortured life, in which I felt very connected to him and honored, even, to be a part of confronting at last the demons that had controlled his life and cost him so much.
1981: I ask Ed for a divorce. I remember his body rising from the bed. I do not forgive myself. Later that day, I tell Karen that I have been 'very brave,' and she says, "I hope you have not been braver than you can afford to be," and, "If you hurt Ed or the kids, I'll kill you." Right.
I go to Morris Sklansky at the Institute for Psychoanalysis to tell him my plight and ask for advice. This is Karen's referral for me. He interviews me twice and says, "You are desperate for the love of a woman." I say, "I don't think I can give her up." He says, "Well, you're not eighteen." He refers me to Dr. Jensen, the monster of Michigan Ave. I am falling apart, of course; I know this is absolutely terrible news, my loving Karen, made worse by having been in treatment with her. Jensen is brutal, tells me I'm acting like an infant, won't hear of anything like a real love for Karen. I begin to fantasize about smashing her windows on my hands or hanging out of the window, several stories up. Eventually I tell her I'm quitting b/c she doesn't like me. She says she doesn't like my behavior. I quit. Go back to Maurice Sklansky, tell him I'm desperate and it's not working with Jensen, he refers me to Lieff. She tells me I'm about 14 months old, emotionally, and that I'm going to leave my kids like my mother did me. For some insane reason I arrange a session with her for the kids, she tells them (I think she was drunk) that she had saved them from my leaving them.
I'm getting worse by the day.; At first, if I were with Karen, I'd be okay. Then one day I was with her and 'it' didn't go away. 'It' was the beast that was now chasing me. I never knew when it would appear....irrational, insane fears that I couldn't shake, appalling experiences of .... I didn't know what to call it. There were several weeks during which I prayed I would get breast cancer b/c it would kill me. I knew I couldn't commit suicide w/o hurting my kids, but to die of a disease was acceptable. Then I started closing my eyes when I was driving. I want to say, 'my eyes would close,' b/c I didn't have a sense of doing it willingly.
I can't remember how I got to Polly Everett, the intake social worker at the Institute, probably through Karen. I went to see her twice a week in her tiny office, just room for a desk and a chair next to it. I supposed that's all they thought she rated. She helped save my life by just listening....she wasn't appalled, as the psychoanalysts had been, by my being involved with my therapist, she let me just talk, she didn't say I was bad, as the others implicitly did, she didn't challenge my love for my kids. She just listened and didn't judge, and I slowly slowly began to heal. It took six years, and by the end of that treatment, I felt ready to do psychoanalysis. I told Polly how she'd helped me with my deficits...she said she didn't see any deficits, just depression, and that she knew I'd be okay if I could feel connected. She said Ed hadn't met my self object needs. She too was dubious about Karen and said something just once, like, "She--referring to Karen-- didn't really understand anything." That could have ended the relationship right there, but I forgave her b/c could see how she would see it that way. She never said anything challenging about Karen again and just focused on whatever I presented. Of course she would have to attack Karen; Karen had violated every rule of psychotherapy by becoming involved with me. I understood this.
1981--divorce, Ed in terrible pain, I'm falling apart, gone to be with Karen a lot. There are times when we try to repair...
1972--I'm feeling desperate in the marriage.
I realize I wrote this down b/c I remembered that it was 7 years after the wedding that I could no longer contain my feelings of dissatisfaction and loneliness. We had a painful conversation on the porch at 1201. Ed said he had been treating me as an extension of himself--Karen was to say the same thing, years later, when I was in crisis in relationship with her.
Here's another item:
1980: (before that, I think...maybe as early as 1978; oh, I see I corrected this to 1978) - Ed is going to Vin.
This was Vin Rosenthal, a therapist Karen referred Ed to to try to break the obsessive compulsive disorder that was ruining his life: the first of the many benefits, as well as challenges, that Karen was to bring into our lives. Julia also had consulted with Karen early on, when I was in therapy with her, about a neurotic symptom involving someone chasing her up the driveway at 1201. My kids told Karen stuff they didn't tell me....like all this phobic stuff going on with Julia, and that Jenny had fallen off a horse during her riding lessons, which Jenny told Karen in the kitchen as I was cooking the night we had her over for dinner in the spring of 78, after she'd taken the job as our new Director. I was horrified to hear this and asked why she hadn't told me...she looked at Karen and said, "That's why.", meaning, I guess, that she knew I would freak out.
1980: Things come to a head with Karen. I tell her I can't go on in the therapy b/c I'm in love with her, she tells me she thinks she's in a reenactment of her seduction by her own therapist, this is a whole story in itself. I'm horrified, traumatized, furious, and in another piece of myself, glad.
I think maybe this is the story I really need to write.
1980-81: We all go to est, except for Julia, who's too young. Or am I mixing that up with Julia being too young to sit with the meditation master and receive a mantra?
1980 or 81: Ed's therapy with Vin comes to a climax: he's to practice not washing his hands after he pees. This is an agony for him, and he sits with me on the bed in our room at 1201: "Do you understand that tomorrow there will be headlines in the newspaper that malaria has spread here?": -- he meant b/c he hadn't washed his hands. I was appalled, frightened, and wanted to reach him. I said, "Is there any part of you that knows that's not true?" I can't remember what he said, then, but this moment between us feels still vital to me, a moment we shared in his tortured life, in which I felt very connected to him and honored, even, to be a part of confronting at last the demons that had controlled his life and cost him so much.
1981: I ask Ed for a divorce. I remember his body rising from the bed. I do not forgive myself. Later that day, I tell Karen that I have been 'very brave,' and she says, "I hope you have not been braver than you can afford to be," and, "If you hurt Ed or the kids, I'll kill you." Right.
I go to Morris Sklansky at the Institute for Psychoanalysis to tell him my plight and ask for advice. This is Karen's referral for me. He interviews me twice and says, "You are desperate for the love of a woman." I say, "I don't think I can give her up." He says, "Well, you're not eighteen." He refers me to Dr. Jensen, the monster of Michigan Ave. I am falling apart, of course; I know this is absolutely terrible news, my loving Karen, made worse by having been in treatment with her. Jensen is brutal, tells me I'm acting like an infant, won't hear of anything like a real love for Karen. I begin to fantasize about smashing her windows on my hands or hanging out of the window, several stories up. Eventually I tell her I'm quitting b/c she doesn't like me. She says she doesn't like my behavior. I quit. Go back to Maurice Sklansky, tell him I'm desperate and it's not working with Jensen, he refers me to Lieff. She tells me I'm about 14 months old, emotionally, and that I'm going to leave my kids like my mother did me. For some insane reason I arrange a session with her for the kids, she tells them (I think she was drunk) that she had saved them from my leaving them.
I'm getting worse by the day.; At first, if I were with Karen, I'd be okay. Then one day I was with her and 'it' didn't go away. 'It' was the beast that was now chasing me. I never knew when it would appear....irrational, insane fears that I couldn't shake, appalling experiences of .... I didn't know what to call it. There were several weeks during which I prayed I would get breast cancer b/c it would kill me. I knew I couldn't commit suicide w/o hurting my kids, but to die of a disease was acceptable. Then I started closing my eyes when I was driving. I want to say, 'my eyes would close,' b/c I didn't have a sense of doing it willingly.
I can't remember how I got to Polly Everett, the intake social worker at the Institute, probably through Karen. I went to see her twice a week in her tiny office, just room for a desk and a chair next to it. I supposed that's all they thought she rated. She helped save my life by just listening....she wasn't appalled, as the psychoanalysts had been, by my being involved with my therapist, she let me just talk, she didn't say I was bad, as the others implicitly did, she didn't challenge my love for my kids. She just listened and didn't judge, and I slowly slowly began to heal. It took six years, and by the end of that treatment, I felt ready to do psychoanalysis. I told Polly how she'd helped me with my deficits...she said she didn't see any deficits, just depression, and that she knew I'd be okay if I could feel connected. She said Ed hadn't met my self object needs. She too was dubious about Karen and said something just once, like, "She--referring to Karen-- didn't really understand anything." That could have ended the relationship right there, but I forgave her b/c could see how she would see it that way. She never said anything challenging about Karen again and just focused on whatever I presented. Of course she would have to attack Karen; Karen had violated every rule of psychotherapy by becoming involved with me. I understood this.
1981--divorce, Ed in terrible pain, I'm falling apart, gone to be with Karen a lot. There are times when we try to repair...
Sunday, November 7, 2010
More, Nov. 7, 2010
1974 to 1978:
This is a really difficult time to try to account for, and it's crucial. I know I met Karen in April 1978, when I had her come in for an interview after she'd responded to YFC's ad for a new Director. I know that by 1980 I'd asked Ed for a divorce. But what led up to these events during the four or five years previous?
It was the era of Women's Liberation. I marched on Springfield with my daughters to suppor the Equal Rights Amendment. I went to hear Betty Friedan with one of my friends from North Shore Unitarian. We had joined Sarah Turner's 'group', and I had presented the Unitarian Sexuality program to the group; some of the members, especially Bill Browning, thought the material was pornographic. I taught a course for kids called "Free To Be You and Me" at the kids' school. As I became closer to Sarah and Chris, I began to wonder with them or rather with them as an audience whether it wouldn't be nice to 'be with' a woman, sexually and romantically, rather than deal with men, who seemed so difficult. Sarah used to like to talk to me about it and woujld ask 'what we would do together.' I said I didn't know, exactly, but I was sure it would be good...I don't know how much I was equivocating in this since I think I'd already fantasized about breasts and perhaps also about oral sex with a woman.
It was an era of crossing boundaries, of women feeling solidarity with one another. Ed was hard enough to live with, but now I attacked him on ideological grounds as well. Still, I never fantasized about being sexual with any woman in the group, just felt an interest in the direction of women. I had been talking to Ed for years about having 'a nameless longing.' But I'd never connected that longing with a yearning to be with a woman.
Until Karen.
Karen's was the only resume and cover letter without gross typos and/or spelling errors sent to YFC in response to our ad in the social work journal for a new Director. When I saw degrees from Shimer and U of Chicago, I was impressed. She was a regional director for DCFS, and I didn't think we had a chance of getting her, but she did agree to come in for an interview. Later she shared that this was the first time she'd actually gone out and applied for a new job; she'd been recruited for all of her prior positions.
The Counseling Center at that time was housed on one of the upper floors at the local nursing home. I interviewed Karen in one of the rooms that had been an office for the nursing home. It was a longish, rectangular room, with one wall all windows. It was early April, but happily sunny, the light streaming in from the windows. The floor was bare wood, dark, the way they made them in buildings constructed a hundred years ago. A long couch covered in white vinyl was set along the wall opposite the windows. Karen sat at the end of that couch nearest the door. I sat three feet directly in front of her on an old fashioned wooden chair, the kind with rungs underneath. I hooked the heels of my medium-height black patent leather pumps over the rung underneath me and leaned slightly forward as we conducted the interview. As she conducted the interview, that is: she wanted to know the budget of the Center ($57,000 a year), how many employees (our current Director and one half-time counselor; a volunteer kept the books). She asked about our commitment to serving marginal populations.
It was probably the mention of what I took to be her commitment to serving people with serious mental illnesses that impressed me most of all. She told me she'd worked in a psychiatric hospital with severely impaired youth and that two of her former patients still corresponded with her. She said they were schizophrenic. I had two schizophrenic people in my own family.
She was a small woman, six inches shorter than I, and her dress was unremarkable except for its almost stereotypical representation of 'social worker' boilerplate garb: an A-line beige gabardine skirt, tailored white blouse (shirt, really), navy blue blazer, medium-heel navy pumps. No jewelry to speak of--a couple of rings on the smallest hands I'd ever seen on an adult. Makeup was little to nonexistent--a bit of lipstick, maybe some powder. Her dark blonde hair was short, straight, and thin--cut to fall just past her ears. The eyes set wide apart and deep, the nose straight, small mouth, high forehead, strong chin.
The force emanated not from her appearance, but from her voice and a sense of presence about her that felt almost palpable.
There I was, leaning out of my spare wooden chair, my long legs hooked beneath it, my full dark cotton skirt with a bit of lace at the ruffle edge, my natural ecru cotton blouse with three-quarter sleeves with ties that swung while I talked. My hair thick, dark brown, wavy, medium short. I was six inches taller and probably thirty pounds weightier, but Karen seemed to me to carry all the force in that room.
I was taken. At the end of the interview, I was completely unaware, until he spoke, that our Counseling Center Vice President, a local business leader, was sitting next to me, had been throughout the interview, although he'd not said anything, not asked one question. Now suddenly he spoke, expressed a wish that her undergraduate degree had been in business rather than sociology. I hope I tried not to show how irrelevant he and his opinion felt to me.
She came back for a second interview, this time with the entire Board. Everyone felt in the presence of excellence; it;'s hard to miss when you see it. She was fed up with DCFS and its political shenanigans, wanted out, saw the chance to get in on the ground floor to grow a little community agency. She told us she'd take the job at the salary we could afford if she would guarantee health care. Our business board members took care of that, and by May we had her on board.
After that group interview, I approached her outside the house of our Secretary, where we'd gathered for the interview, both of us on the way to our cars. I started talking to her about my life, my brief experience in therapy with the current Director some years in the past. I knew vaguely that such conversation was inappropriate. It was the first signal that boundaries were becoming softened.She responded minimally, straightforwardly, appropriate without rejecting my approach, which only drew me more.
This is a really difficult time to try to account for, and it's crucial. I know I met Karen in April 1978, when I had her come in for an interview after she'd responded to YFC's ad for a new Director. I know that by 1980 I'd asked Ed for a divorce. But what led up to these events during the four or five years previous?
It was the era of Women's Liberation. I marched on Springfield with my daughters to suppor the Equal Rights Amendment. I went to hear Betty Friedan with one of my friends from North Shore Unitarian. We had joined Sarah Turner's 'group', and I had presented the Unitarian Sexuality program to the group; some of the members, especially Bill Browning, thought the material was pornographic. I taught a course for kids called "Free To Be You and Me" at the kids' school. As I became closer to Sarah and Chris, I began to wonder with them or rather with them as an audience whether it wouldn't be nice to 'be with' a woman, sexually and romantically, rather than deal with men, who seemed so difficult. Sarah used to like to talk to me about it and woujld ask 'what we would do together.' I said I didn't know, exactly, but I was sure it would be good...I don't know how much I was equivocating in this since I think I'd already fantasized about breasts and perhaps also about oral sex with a woman.
It was an era of crossing boundaries, of women feeling solidarity with one another. Ed was hard enough to live with, but now I attacked him on ideological grounds as well. Still, I never fantasized about being sexual with any woman in the group, just felt an interest in the direction of women. I had been talking to Ed for years about having 'a nameless longing.' But I'd never connected that longing with a yearning to be with a woman.
Until Karen.
Karen's was the only resume and cover letter without gross typos and/or spelling errors sent to YFC in response to our ad in the social work journal for a new Director. When I saw degrees from Shimer and U of Chicago, I was impressed. She was a regional director for DCFS, and I didn't think we had a chance of getting her, but she did agree to come in for an interview. Later she shared that this was the first time she'd actually gone out and applied for a new job; she'd been recruited for all of her prior positions.
The Counseling Center at that time was housed on one of the upper floors at the local nursing home. I interviewed Karen in one of the rooms that had been an office for the nursing home. It was a longish, rectangular room, with one wall all windows. It was early April, but happily sunny, the light streaming in from the windows. The floor was bare wood, dark, the way they made them in buildings constructed a hundred years ago. A long couch covered in white vinyl was set along the wall opposite the windows. Karen sat at the end of that couch nearest the door. I sat three feet directly in front of her on an old fashioned wooden chair, the kind with rungs underneath. I hooked the heels of my medium-height black patent leather pumps over the rung underneath me and leaned slightly forward as we conducted the interview. As she conducted the interview, that is: she wanted to know the budget of the Center ($57,000 a year), how many employees (our current Director and one half-time counselor; a volunteer kept the books). She asked about our commitment to serving marginal populations.
It was probably the mention of what I took to be her commitment to serving people with serious mental illnesses that impressed me most of all. She told me she'd worked in a psychiatric hospital with severely impaired youth and that two of her former patients still corresponded with her. She said they were schizophrenic. I had two schizophrenic people in my own family.
She was a small woman, six inches shorter than I, and her dress was unremarkable except for its almost stereotypical representation of 'social worker' boilerplate garb: an A-line beige gabardine skirt, tailored white blouse (shirt, really), navy blue blazer, medium-heel navy pumps. No jewelry to speak of--a couple of rings on the smallest hands I'd ever seen on an adult. Makeup was little to nonexistent--a bit of lipstick, maybe some powder. Her dark blonde hair was short, straight, and thin--cut to fall just past her ears. The eyes set wide apart and deep, the nose straight, small mouth, high forehead, strong chin.
The force emanated not from her appearance, but from her voice and a sense of presence about her that felt almost palpable.
There I was, leaning out of my spare wooden chair, my long legs hooked beneath it, my full dark cotton skirt with a bit of lace at the ruffle edge, my natural ecru cotton blouse with three-quarter sleeves with ties that swung while I talked. My hair thick, dark brown, wavy, medium short. I was six inches taller and probably thirty pounds weightier, but Karen seemed to me to carry all the force in that room.
I was taken. At the end of the interview, I was completely unaware, until he spoke, that our Counseling Center Vice President, a local business leader, was sitting next to me, had been throughout the interview, although he'd not said anything, not asked one question. Now suddenly he spoke, expressed a wish that her undergraduate degree had been in business rather than sociology. I hope I tried not to show how irrelevant he and his opinion felt to me.
She came back for a second interview, this time with the entire Board. Everyone felt in the presence of excellence; it;'s hard to miss when you see it. She was fed up with DCFS and its political shenanigans, wanted out, saw the chance to get in on the ground floor to grow a little community agency. She told us she'd take the job at the salary we could afford if she would guarantee health care. Our business board members took care of that, and by May we had her on board.
After that group interview, I approached her outside the house of our Secretary, where we'd gathered for the interview, both of us on the way to our cars. I started talking to her about my life, my brief experience in therapy with the current Director some years in the past. I knew vaguely that such conversation was inappropriate. It was the first signal that boundaries were becoming softened.She responded minimally, straightforwardly, appropriate without rejecting my approach, which only drew me more.
Nov. 7, 2010
1974-76:
When I go into therapy ca. 1980, my therapist decides that the years when Julia started kindergarten and then first grade, 19775-76, were crucial for me. I could never resonate with this, but I think her thought was that Julia was the last anchor to 'home' being the place where my days were defined by my kids' needs?? It's odd that we never explored this more thoroughly.
There is a period when my mother is visiting, staying in the apartment at 1201, but Julia is....going to Patty's house after school? That would be when she was in kindergarten. I guess Jenny is coming home to 1201 when my mother is there, but I know I didn't get home until after my teaching day ended and I'd picked up Julia
--about 5 o'clock.
There is the trip to Disneyland in California on the train with the Trendlers; that must have been right around 1973 or 1974, Julia still small. I wonder if Ed has all these dates written down in one of his memo books.
1971-2?
My father dies soon after we come back to Libertyville. Al calls to tell me that he is fading, and that if I want to see him I'd better come soon, but I call the Salvation Army nursing home where he is staying, and the nurse says if I want to see him I should come NOW. I ask what he is dying of; she says he's just ready to die, and that they often go that way. I fly out the next day, Al picks me up at the airport, it's nighttime, we drive to his house. He wonders out loud if it makes any sense to go to the nursing home that night and warns me that Dad won't recognize me probably. He decides against it, but still....he calls the nursing home to find out that his father had died a few hours earlier.
We visit the minister who will lead the memorial service. I do not get to see my father; he's chosen to be cremated. I explain to the minister that this was an abandoning father, one who beat his sons and sexually abused his daughters, but I can tell he is not getting it or else not buying it. Apparently Dad had done an outstanding job at the Salvation Army, converting people, singing hymns with his guitar, which he had learned to play, apparently--this impressed me more than anything else, that he could have learned to play a musical instrument. Betty had told me that when she was a young adolescent who took piano lessons, she would play for Dad at his self-styled preaching sessions. Now I learn that he had been capable of the concentration, the determination, and the skill to apply himself to learning to play a musical instrument on his own. I guess here was something I could be proud of about him.
In the event, the minister preached a sermon about forgiving a man his faults and sang, accompanied by his own guitar, "How many paths must a man walk down...before you call him a man." I wanted to say, "More paths than this one did!" I felt heartsick that all the sins against his family were 'forgiven' by a man who never lived through any of it. By now the tenets of Christianity felt pretty useless to me.
We went to the cemetery; I saw the plaque in the ground that marked the place his ashes were buried. Some days later, I had a dream in which I saw my father in his casket; in the middle of his forehead was a big dark mark, like a bruise. The casket was up high, in a kind of barn, set on rafters.
I have two memories of my father's relationship to me when I was a child that could be called positive. Neither is unmixed with fear and distrust, but still feel kind of normal. When I'm about four or five, he's put me on top the icebox, maybe six feet off the ground. I am hunched down, in a crouch. He is standing before me, his arms out, telling me to jump, that he'll catch me. I am too terrified to jump. I don't think I thought he wouldn't catch me or that he wouldn't try to catch me, at least, but it was too great a leap of faith.
At about the same age, I am playing in the front yard of the house at 124 Pearl, when my father tells me not to leave the yard. But a friend who lives at the end of the block wants me to come over to play. I leave the yard and go to her house. My father finds out and at dinner that evening confronts me in front of all my brothers and sisters at the table. I have no memory of my mother's being present. I can just see Dad at the head of the table, bellowing down the table at me, "Marilyn Jean, confess that you left the yard when I told you not to."
But this is something I will not do. He is getting more and more angry, his face and neck are getting red, and my sister Helen, sitting next to me, advises me to just admit that I did it. She is afraid that he will beat me, as he has my brothers. But I sit tight. I know he won't hit me. I have a secret with him.
The year must have been 1943. This may have been during the time that my mother had gone to San Francisco, leaving my sister Betty in charge of all of us kids. Ultimately, Betty sent her a wire demanding that she come home or Betty would herself leave. She came home. It is after her return that Betty says she kicked my father out of the house, we lost the house, we can't live together any longer, and by 1945 Al, Sharon, and I ar shipped off to Long Beach.
When I go into therapy ca. 1980, my therapist decides that the years when Julia started kindergarten and then first grade, 19775-76, were crucial for me. I could never resonate with this, but I think her thought was that Julia was the last anchor to 'home' being the place where my days were defined by my kids' needs?? It's odd that we never explored this more thoroughly.
There is a period when my mother is visiting, staying in the apartment at 1201, but Julia is....going to Patty's house after school? That would be when she was in kindergarten. I guess Jenny is coming home to 1201 when my mother is there, but I know I didn't get home until after my teaching day ended and I'd picked up Julia
--about 5 o'clock.
There is the trip to Disneyland in California on the train with the Trendlers; that must have been right around 1973 or 1974, Julia still small. I wonder if Ed has all these dates written down in one of his memo books.
1971-2?
My father dies soon after we come back to Libertyville. Al calls to tell me that he is fading, and that if I want to see him I'd better come soon, but I call the Salvation Army nursing home where he is staying, and the nurse says if I want to see him I should come NOW. I ask what he is dying of; she says he's just ready to die, and that they often go that way. I fly out the next day, Al picks me up at the airport, it's nighttime, we drive to his house. He wonders out loud if it makes any sense to go to the nursing home that night and warns me that Dad won't recognize me probably. He decides against it, but still....he calls the nursing home to find out that his father had died a few hours earlier.
We visit the minister who will lead the memorial service. I do not get to see my father; he's chosen to be cremated. I explain to the minister that this was an abandoning father, one who beat his sons and sexually abused his daughters, but I can tell he is not getting it or else not buying it. Apparently Dad had done an outstanding job at the Salvation Army, converting people, singing hymns with his guitar, which he had learned to play, apparently--this impressed me more than anything else, that he could have learned to play a musical instrument. Betty had told me that when she was a young adolescent who took piano lessons, she would play for Dad at his self-styled preaching sessions. Now I learn that he had been capable of the concentration, the determination, and the skill to apply himself to learning to play a musical instrument on his own. I guess here was something I could be proud of about him.
In the event, the minister preached a sermon about forgiving a man his faults and sang, accompanied by his own guitar, "How many paths must a man walk down...before you call him a man." I wanted to say, "More paths than this one did!" I felt heartsick that all the sins against his family were 'forgiven' by a man who never lived through any of it. By now the tenets of Christianity felt pretty useless to me.
We went to the cemetery; I saw the plaque in the ground that marked the place his ashes were buried. Some days later, I had a dream in which I saw my father in his casket; in the middle of his forehead was a big dark mark, like a bruise. The casket was up high, in a kind of barn, set on rafters.
I have two memories of my father's relationship to me when I was a child that could be called positive. Neither is unmixed with fear and distrust, but still feel kind of normal. When I'm about four or five, he's put me on top the icebox, maybe six feet off the ground. I am hunched down, in a crouch. He is standing before me, his arms out, telling me to jump, that he'll catch me. I am too terrified to jump. I don't think I thought he wouldn't catch me or that he wouldn't try to catch me, at least, but it was too great a leap of faith.
At about the same age, I am playing in the front yard of the house at 124 Pearl, when my father tells me not to leave the yard. But a friend who lives at the end of the block wants me to come over to play. I leave the yard and go to her house. My father finds out and at dinner that evening confronts me in front of all my brothers and sisters at the table. I have no memory of my mother's being present. I can just see Dad at the head of the table, bellowing down the table at me, "Marilyn Jean, confess that you left the yard when I told you not to."
But this is something I will not do. He is getting more and more angry, his face and neck are getting red, and my sister Helen, sitting next to me, advises me to just admit that I did it. She is afraid that he will beat me, as he has my brothers. But I sit tight. I know he won't hit me. I have a secret with him.
The year must have been 1943. This may have been during the time that my mother had gone to San Francisco, leaving my sister Betty in charge of all of us kids. Ultimately, Betty sent her a wire demanding that she come home or Betty would herself leave. She came home. It is after her return that Betty says she kicked my father out of the house, we lost the house, we can't live together any longer, and by 1945 Al, Sharon, and I ar shipped off to Long Beach.
Monday, November 1, 2010
Nov. 1, 2010
1974 or 1975 (will look this up and correct):
Graduate NU with MA in learning disabilities and a teaching certificate in special ed, K-12.. Start teaching special ed class in North Chicago school in January. Very hard, I feel like I can't do it. Get call from SF, they're shipping Mama back to me, noone out there can do anything with her. She arrives just as I am starting the new job. She complains every day that I leave her alone all day; we install her in the 'apartment' at 1201. A few months later, I stand against the blackboard in my classroom and know that something's very wrong. I'm no longer eating much--another clue. Go to the doc, I've got a bleeding duodenal ulcer, he hospitalizes me, Condell, forbids calls from my mother, I call her to say I'll be home soon, she says I can't take care of her and everyone else, including Ed, and that she's going home to SF. I also call Special Ed of Lake County and tell them that I'm in the hospital with an ulcer and quit. Bud and Emma have moved out and are living in an apartment at the end of Winchester Road.
1973-77, about:
Attend North Shore Unitarian, get involved with encounter group there which develops into 'The Group.' I go on to get teaching job in l.d. at two public elementary schools in Libville, Rockland and Butterfield. The marriage is in trouble, Ed is b y now working for Argonne Natl Labs.
Graduate NU with MA in learning disabilities and a teaching certificate in special ed, K-12.. Start teaching special ed class in North Chicago school in January. Very hard, I feel like I can't do it. Get call from SF, they're shipping Mama back to me, noone out there can do anything with her. She arrives just as I am starting the new job. She complains every day that I leave her alone all day; we install her in the 'apartment' at 1201. A few months later, I stand against the blackboard in my classroom and know that something's very wrong. I'm no longer eating much--another clue. Go to the doc, I've got a bleeding duodenal ulcer, he hospitalizes me, Condell, forbids calls from my mother, I call her to say I'll be home soon, she says I can't take care of her and everyone else, including Ed, and that she's going home to SF. I also call Special Ed of Lake County and tell them that I'm in the hospital with an ulcer and quit. Bud and Emma have moved out and are living in an apartment at the end of Winchester Road.
1973-77, about:
Attend North Shore Unitarian, get involved with encounter group there which develops into 'The Group.' I go on to get teaching job in l.d. at two public elementary schools in Libville, Rockland and Butterfield. The marriage is in trouble, Ed is b y now working for Argonne Natl Labs.
Nov. 1, 2010
Early Fall 1967:
We are living in townhouse on Laguna in Boulder. Jenny is about ten months old, crawling. I am pregnant again, without intending to be. I am spotting and call Evelyn, Paul's wife, who lives in Denver with her brood of 6 kids, ask her if spotting is normal early in pregnancy, she says no, and I go to the doc. He tells me not to lift heavy things and on the way out he calls out to me, :oh, by the way, if nothing happens, come back in in a few weeks anyway because sometimes it can die in there.' Call Ed, crying, he's at the lab as usual and has no reaction; he;s overwhelmed by his own life, internal and external. I'd had to drop Jenny off at a neighbor's she's not used to, and she was quite frightened. I go home, pick up Jenny, lie on the couch, but of course I can't just be on bed rest, I have a baby to take care of. Within maybe 48 hours, I think, I'm hemorrhaging, go to hospital in ambulance, that's a whole other story. Have miscarriage.
1968: buy house on Bates, move in. Trying to get pregnant again, having trouble, but finally do, then spot some again, and I feel hopeless, but it stops. Pregnant latter half of 1968, goes easier than it did with Jen.
Feb. 11, 1969: Julia born, Betty comes out to stay with Jenny and Ed while I'm in 7th day adventist hospital in Boulder.
1970-71: I do some graduate work in English lit. at U of Colorado, Boulder. We're involved in anti Vietnam war politics.
1971: Ed loses job at NCAR, we move back to Libertyville, live with Ed's folks at 1201. Jenny is four and a half, Julia not quite two.
Ed teaching at UIC.
1972-3: I'm feeling depressed in marriage; Jen in Butterfield school, I put Julia in nursery school in Lake Bluff while I start graduate school at NU in learning disabilities.
We are living in townhouse on Laguna in Boulder. Jenny is about ten months old, crawling. I am pregnant again, without intending to be. I am spotting and call Evelyn, Paul's wife, who lives in Denver with her brood of 6 kids, ask her if spotting is normal early in pregnancy, she says no, and I go to the doc. He tells me not to lift heavy things and on the way out he calls out to me, :oh, by the way, if nothing happens, come back in in a few weeks anyway because sometimes it can die in there.' Call Ed, crying, he's at the lab as usual and has no reaction; he;s overwhelmed by his own life, internal and external. I'd had to drop Jenny off at a neighbor's she's not used to, and she was quite frightened. I go home, pick up Jenny, lie on the couch, but of course I can't just be on bed rest, I have a baby to take care of. Within maybe 48 hours, I think, I'm hemorrhaging, go to hospital in ambulance, that's a whole other story. Have miscarriage.
1968: buy house on Bates, move in. Trying to get pregnant again, having trouble, but finally do, then spot some again, and I feel hopeless, but it stops. Pregnant latter half of 1968, goes easier than it did with Jen.
Feb. 11, 1969: Julia born, Betty comes out to stay with Jenny and Ed while I'm in 7th day adventist hospital in Boulder.
1970-71: I do some graduate work in English lit. at U of Colorado, Boulder. We're involved in anti Vietnam war politics.
1971: Ed loses job at NCAR, we move back to Libertyville, live with Ed's folks at 1201. Jenny is four and a half, Julia not quite two.
Ed teaching at UIC.
1972-3: I'm feeling depressed in marriage; Jen in Butterfield school, I put Julia in nursery school in Lake Bluff while I start graduate school at NU in learning disabilities.
Sunday, October 24, 2010
October 24, 2010; timeline continued
Fall of 1965 to Summer 1966: I think I have the flu, go to the doctor, the one who had fitted me with a diaphragm as means of birth control. He diagnoses the flu and puts me on some kind of medication. He takes some urine?, I think, for a pregnancy test, just in case; calls me a few days later to say the pregnancy test is positive and I need to stop taking the medicine and go to an OB/gyne; he refers me to Dr. Pildes, on Michigan Ave. in Chicago. Ed and I go to Dr. Pildes who confirms the pregnancy, and Ed feels like a hero. I am delighted and also very nauseated. Ed asks the doctor if my feeling so sick is normal, especially because some of the stuff that induces the nausea seems so crazy, like the deep blue color of some towels we had, or the soot that comes in through our apartment window in Hyde Park. The doc says it's all completely normal; he asks if there is anything at all that I would want to eat....I can't keep anything down....I say, "persian melon"? He tells Ed to go find me some persian melon.
I am desperately nauseated for the first months of the pregnancy. At one point I lose 7 lbs. in a week, and the doc puts me on an anti-nausea drug (not one of the dangerous ones), in suppository format, and tells me to keep soda crackers at my bedside within easy reach so that when I first wake up I won't have to move anything but my arm to get the crackers and eat them, then lie still for some time before getting up. I'm to use the suppositories immediately after meals and go to bed and try to sleep. This regimen allows me to get through the first months, after which the nause tapers and is gone from the fifth month on.
April 9, 1966: Gregory Scott, Sharon's baby, is born in San Francisco. Prior to his birth, Sharon had thought she would adopt the baby out through Lutheran Services, but after he is born, she wants to keep the baby. Sharon is hospitalized at UCSF for schizophrenia. There is discussion between Sharon, the family, and doctors about what to do for the baby. For a while the baby is hospitalized with Sharon, but she proves unable to care for him.Helen takes the baby for a time, in foster care, until Sharon is stabilized and out of the hospital. Sharon tries to take care of Gregory on her own for a time but panics and calls Helen, who comes over and sees the baby with crib marks on his side, indicating he has not been picked up or turned in his crib for some time. Sharon is again willing to give the baby up for adoption, but the family, whoever that is at this point--I was not involved--does not want her to adopt the baby outside the family. Helen and Walt agree to take the baby, and eventually adopt him. Sharon is intermittently hospitalized, lives at home, I think, when not in the hospital.
I am desperately nauseated for the first months of the pregnancy. At one point I lose 7 lbs. in a week, and the doc puts me on an anti-nausea drug (not one of the dangerous ones), in suppository format, and tells me to keep soda crackers at my bedside within easy reach so that when I first wake up I won't have to move anything but my arm to get the crackers and eat them, then lie still for some time before getting up. I'm to use the suppositories immediately after meals and go to bed and try to sleep. This regimen allows me to get through the first months, after which the nause tapers and is gone from the fifth month on.
April 9, 1966: Gregory Scott, Sharon's baby, is born in San Francisco. Prior to his birth, Sharon had thought she would adopt the baby out through Lutheran Services, but after he is born, she wants to keep the baby. Sharon is hospitalized at UCSF for schizophrenia. There is discussion between Sharon, the family, and doctors about what to do for the baby. For a while the baby is hospitalized with Sharon, but she proves unable to care for him.Helen takes the baby for a time, in foster care, until Sharon is stabilized and out of the hospital. Sharon tries to take care of Gregory on her own for a time but panics and calls Helen, who comes over and sees the baby with crib marks on his side, indicating he has not been picked up or turned in his crib for some time. Sharon is again willing to give the baby up for adoption, but the family, whoever that is at this point--I was not involved--does not want her to adopt the baby outside the family. Helen and Walt agree to take the baby, and eventually adopt him. Sharon is intermittently hospitalized, lives at home, I think, when not in the hospital.
Friday, October 22, 2010
Timeline
Oct.. 22, 2010
Here goes my second effort at just posting a timeline of events in my life, without commentary!
12/26/38 Birth, 7th in sibship of 8; Helen names me Marilyn Jean, but I'm always Jeanie at home unless someone's mad at me. Except Helen...she tries to keep Marilyn alive out of pride in her naming job.
1942-44: Sexual abuse by father
1944: father has left; we live in different houses in Denver
Summer 1945: Al, Jean, and Sharon sent to Long Beach on Greyhound with Betty; Betty doesn't stay; the three of us live with Helen & Karl Meyer, of whom we have no knowledge, and we're not told that this is the plan or when or if we'll return to the family. I'd completed first grade in Denver, started second grade in Long Beach. I'm officially Marilyn outside my family, from then on.
Christmas 1945: Betty and Helen suddenly show up at Meyers' house in Long Beach to take us 'home' to my brother Bill's 3-room apartment at 776 Oak Street in San Francisco. My eighth birthday, tears stream down my face, I have no awareness of 'crying' or of 'being sad.' Betty, Helen, Bill, Al, Sharon and I live in the apartment. Bill and Betty support us; Bill with his Veterans' Benefits and a job as an usher at the Haight Street movie theater, where he got free popcorn, Betty from working somewhere. I start 3rd grade at John Muir; Sharon starts kindergarten and is terrified; Bill walks her to her first day at school.
Sometime between 1945 and 1948?, Mama comes out to join us in San Francisco, as do Paul and John. There are then 9 of us living in the 3 rooms. John attempts molestation of me and Sharon many times; Paul effects molestation with me; Bill makes a gesture in that direction. Helen and Al take care of us. There is a toilet in the apartment, but to take a bath we have to use a shared bathroom outside our front door, in the hall that connects the rooms at the front of the flat with our rooms at the back.
From 1948 or 1949 to 1953, I take care of Sharon and cook for the family; Sharon and I do the housekeeping, with Helen and Betty's help on weekends. Mama is working at Armour's Meat Packing in South San Francisco, has to leave the house at 5:00 a.m., can't remember what time she gets home. We go to the Methodist Church intermittently. I remember the German words inscribed on the altar cloth: "Ich bin das Brut des Lebens," I am the bread of life. I squirm around in the pew and Al and Helen say I'm crazy and don't want to sit with me. In Sunday School, an old guy plays a big bass drum as we sing, "Come to the church in the wild wood, oh come to the church in the dale." Church is a safe place, like school.
1953: I graduate ninth grade at Everett Junior High School. Bill and Betty (and Helen, I think) make enough money that, with Bill's GI Bill, they manage a down payment on a two bedroom house at 319 Faxon Avenue in the Ocean Avenue neighborhood of San Francisco, a middle-class residential neighborhood close to the street car line to downtown. Things are looking up! Our first decent house! Helen and I go over that summer and wax the hardwood floors on our hands and knees with Johnson paste wax. Somebody gets furniture on credit; our life has never been so good..
1953-1956: George Washington High School, at that time one of the best high schools in S.F. They'd take kids from out of the district, and Al went there. I entered just as he was graduating. Johnny Mathis sang Babalou in his old voice--a blues voice--at the last assembly Al was at, and I was there somehow. I graduated as 'Outstanding Girl.' I had one friend: Penny Pritchard, my second friend. My first was Riva Apte from John Muir; she found boys and went off the rails by the time we were at Everett Jr. High. As for me, I knew that my brothers wouldn't seriously mess with me anymore after I'd started my period because now I could have a baby, so I loved these years....I felt free of fear of invasion for the first time. I took two buses to get to the school. I got to know public transportation in San Francisco. It was great.
1956-1961: College is not in the cards; Bill got through SF State, and Al was going to City College, but for a girl to go to college was unheard of. Remember my high school teachers aghast that I wasn't going to college, but I felt virtuous, 'supporting my family.' My first job was in the steno pool at General Mills in San Francisco; ended up as receiptionist in Graduate Studies Office at the new HQ of SF State on Ocean Avenue. I'd read the college catalogs that came in.
1961-1964: U of Chicago on a loan, a scholarship, and parttime job. Start out premed and change to English literature. Stop using Marilyn, start using Jean as my first name.
March 1964: Meet Ed, go out with him, it's pretty serious by the time I leave for California, where I've been admitted to Berkeley in English lit. We kiss and make out before I leave, and I'm sexually aroused for the first time in many years. We promise to write. I write him in the car on the way home, as Helen drives in her new little Malibu.
September 1964: I start grad school at Berkeley, after summer months at home; I work thru the summer as an office temp. I have a Woodrow Wilson Scholarship to Berkeley, but I spend most of that money during the summer on my family. Sharon is clearly in some kind of trouble; she spends days at Stern's Grove, drinking coffee and walking in nature. She has not been able to keep a job since returning to San Francisco after a failed attempt at college at Concordia in River Forest.
The Woodrow Wilson people forgive me after I write them a letter explaining the difficult circumstances in which we've always lived. I must not have spent all of it, though, because I live in a room off campus and am admitted to classes. The problem is, I can't stop thinking of Ed. I consult a counselor there and explain that I'm on a scholarship and feel guilty for not doing the work b/c I'm obsessed with thoughts of Chicago boyfriend. She tries to ease my conscience.
December 1964: Ed comes out to visit me, we're both terribly sexually aroused and interested in each other. We decide I'll quit Berkeley and come back to Chicago, try to go to the U of C, where he's working on his thesis in physics..
Early 1965: I come to Chicago, we have intercourse for the first time in a pulldown bed in small apartment we've rented. I'm unimpressed with the intercourse, but the relationship has become serious. He proposes somehow and we tell his parents later that Spring that we're going to be married in June. They'd been planning a tour of the Norwegian fjords but give us that trip for our honeymoon as a wedding present.
June 26, 1965: Married at St. Paulus Lutheran Church in San Francisco; Al officiates. I wonder if I'm really married b/c my own brother was the minister. All three of my sisters are bridesmaids, Sharon the Maid of Honor. Bill walks me down the aisle. Sharon breaks down at the wedding reception, which Bill is paying for--by now he's married a wealthy older woman. She's hysterical and hangs onto me when I'm ready to go.
September 1965: I'm pregnant without knowing it. I become violently nauseated. Ed is at first outraged because we hadn't planned the pregnancy, then feels like a hero because his sperm got by all our precautions. His only problem is he wanted to have finished the PhD before we had a baby. We hear from San Francisco that Sharon had that summer gone off, just after our wedding, slept with a longshoreman in a sleazy hotel, gotten gonnorhea and was pregnant. She also had a psychotic break. Her baby was due in April 1966; mine in June.
Here goes my second effort at just posting a timeline of events in my life, without commentary!
12/26/38 Birth, 7th in sibship of 8; Helen names me Marilyn Jean, but I'm always Jeanie at home unless someone's mad at me. Except Helen...she tries to keep Marilyn alive out of pride in her naming job.
1942-44: Sexual abuse by father
1944: father has left; we live in different houses in Denver
Summer 1945: Al, Jean, and Sharon sent to Long Beach on Greyhound with Betty; Betty doesn't stay; the three of us live with Helen & Karl Meyer, of whom we have no knowledge, and we're not told that this is the plan or when or if we'll return to the family. I'd completed first grade in Denver, started second grade in Long Beach. I'm officially Marilyn outside my family, from then on.
Christmas 1945: Betty and Helen suddenly show up at Meyers' house in Long Beach to take us 'home' to my brother Bill's 3-room apartment at 776 Oak Street in San Francisco. My eighth birthday, tears stream down my face, I have no awareness of 'crying' or of 'being sad.' Betty, Helen, Bill, Al, Sharon and I live in the apartment. Bill and Betty support us; Bill with his Veterans' Benefits and a job as an usher at the Haight Street movie theater, where he got free popcorn, Betty from working somewhere. I start 3rd grade at John Muir; Sharon starts kindergarten and is terrified; Bill walks her to her first day at school.
Sometime between 1945 and 1948?, Mama comes out to join us in San Francisco, as do Paul and John. There are then 9 of us living in the 3 rooms. John attempts molestation of me and Sharon many times; Paul effects molestation with me; Bill makes a gesture in that direction. Helen and Al take care of us. There is a toilet in the apartment, but to take a bath we have to use a shared bathroom outside our front door, in the hall that connects the rooms at the front of the flat with our rooms at the back.
From 1948 or 1949 to 1953, I take care of Sharon and cook for the family; Sharon and I do the housekeeping, with Helen and Betty's help on weekends. Mama is working at Armour's Meat Packing in South San Francisco, has to leave the house at 5:00 a.m., can't remember what time she gets home. We go to the Methodist Church intermittently. I remember the German words inscribed on the altar cloth: "Ich bin das Brut des Lebens," I am the bread of life. I squirm around in the pew and Al and Helen say I'm crazy and don't want to sit with me. In Sunday School, an old guy plays a big bass drum as we sing, "Come to the church in the wild wood, oh come to the church in the dale." Church is a safe place, like school.
1953: I graduate ninth grade at Everett Junior High School. Bill and Betty (and Helen, I think) make enough money that, with Bill's GI Bill, they manage a down payment on a two bedroom house at 319 Faxon Avenue in the Ocean Avenue neighborhood of San Francisco, a middle-class residential neighborhood close to the street car line to downtown. Things are looking up! Our first decent house! Helen and I go over that summer and wax the hardwood floors on our hands and knees with Johnson paste wax. Somebody gets furniture on credit; our life has never been so good..
1953-1956: George Washington High School, at that time one of the best high schools in S.F. They'd take kids from out of the district, and Al went there. I entered just as he was graduating. Johnny Mathis sang Babalou in his old voice--a blues voice--at the last assembly Al was at, and I was there somehow. I graduated as 'Outstanding Girl.' I had one friend: Penny Pritchard, my second friend. My first was Riva Apte from John Muir; she found boys and went off the rails by the time we were at Everett Jr. High. As for me, I knew that my brothers wouldn't seriously mess with me anymore after I'd started my period because now I could have a baby, so I loved these years....I felt free of fear of invasion for the first time. I took two buses to get to the school. I got to know public transportation in San Francisco. It was great.
1956-1961: College is not in the cards; Bill got through SF State, and Al was going to City College, but for a girl to go to college was unheard of. Remember my high school teachers aghast that I wasn't going to college, but I felt virtuous, 'supporting my family.' My first job was in the steno pool at General Mills in San Francisco; ended up as receiptionist in Graduate Studies Office at the new HQ of SF State on Ocean Avenue. I'd read the college catalogs that came in.
1961-1964: U of Chicago on a loan, a scholarship, and parttime job. Start out premed and change to English literature. Stop using Marilyn, start using Jean as my first name.
March 1964: Meet Ed, go out with him, it's pretty serious by the time I leave for California, where I've been admitted to Berkeley in English lit. We kiss and make out before I leave, and I'm sexually aroused for the first time in many years. We promise to write. I write him in the car on the way home, as Helen drives in her new little Malibu.
September 1964: I start grad school at Berkeley, after summer months at home; I work thru the summer as an office temp. I have a Woodrow Wilson Scholarship to Berkeley, but I spend most of that money during the summer on my family. Sharon is clearly in some kind of trouble; she spends days at Stern's Grove, drinking coffee and walking in nature. She has not been able to keep a job since returning to San Francisco after a failed attempt at college at Concordia in River Forest.
The Woodrow Wilson people forgive me after I write them a letter explaining the difficult circumstances in which we've always lived. I must not have spent all of it, though, because I live in a room off campus and am admitted to classes. The problem is, I can't stop thinking of Ed. I consult a counselor there and explain that I'm on a scholarship and feel guilty for not doing the work b/c I'm obsessed with thoughts of Chicago boyfriend. She tries to ease my conscience.
December 1964: Ed comes out to visit me, we're both terribly sexually aroused and interested in each other. We decide I'll quit Berkeley and come back to Chicago, try to go to the U of C, where he's working on his thesis in physics..
Early 1965: I come to Chicago, we have intercourse for the first time in a pulldown bed in small apartment we've rented. I'm unimpressed with the intercourse, but the relationship has become serious. He proposes somehow and we tell his parents later that Spring that we're going to be married in June. They'd been planning a tour of the Norwegian fjords but give us that trip for our honeymoon as a wedding present.
June 26, 1965: Married at St. Paulus Lutheran Church in San Francisco; Al officiates. I wonder if I'm really married b/c my own brother was the minister. All three of my sisters are bridesmaids, Sharon the Maid of Honor. Bill walks me down the aisle. Sharon breaks down at the wedding reception, which Bill is paying for--by now he's married a wealthy older woman. She's hysterical and hangs onto me when I'm ready to go.
September 1965: I'm pregnant without knowing it. I become violently nauseated. Ed is at first outraged because we hadn't planned the pregnancy, then feels like a hero because his sperm got by all our precautions. His only problem is he wanted to have finished the PhD before we had a baby. We hear from San Francisco that Sharon had that summer gone off, just after our wedding, slept with a longshoreman in a sleazy hotel, gotten gonnorhea and was pregnant. She also had a psychotic break. Her baby was due in April 1966; mine in June.
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