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.
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