hurt
...and so I come back to the long-lost blog, however briefly, to catalog just what's happened to me in the past few weeks. In hopes of easing my life just a little by setting it all down. Or maybe it's a cry for help. I don't know.
Remember that time-lapse scene in The Virgin Suicides, when the house that had been the envy of the block becomes rotted away and overgrown over time? When the big tree in front of the yard gets cut down as the yard gets overgrown? When the parents, unable to deal with their daughter's suicide, retreat into their inner selves and let the family implode?
My family's disintegrated over the past couple weeks. The house we grew up in is that time-lapse house.
Ordinarily, you might think that this is me being overdramatic at having very little sleep (don't ask) along with a lot of stress. But this has actually happened to me: in the space of a couple weeks, so much has happened on my family's emotional lanscape that I'm left with very little. I'm still processing. But let me start at the beginning...
- My mom got put on new medication for her Parkinson's -- which is already something a bit scarring for us to deal with on its own: advancing degenerative mortality. Where my mother is a prisoner in her own body, as she has both the tremors and also the freezing spells, where she can't move without medication. If I get in a political frame of mind, as I'm wont to do, I sometimes wish for Bush to get Parkinson's just so he'd feel what it's like to be my mom, and maybe so he'd stop treating sick people like speed bumps on the road to courting religious zealots.
My mom willingly switched medications without telling anyone, least of all my dad or either of her children, because she had the devil's choice of increased freedom of movement at the cost of vivid, disturbing hallucinations. Hallucinations that were frequently sexual in nature. Hallucinations that often featured frightening monsters, as if old children's nightmares had come to life. Mardi Gras parades outside. People sitting in the living room. My dad having sex with, and hiding, male prostitutes. Yes, she had all these.
Yet, everything was "just fine" when I'd call her. She even concealed how many times she was falling down (sometimes 5 or 6 times a day at the worst). She kept the hallucinations secret, even while her frustration with Dad was brewing and boiling over -- she interpreted her hallucinations of him as gospel truth, while the other hallucinations were easily dismissed.
So she kicked him out of the house -- and told me one night when I called her to catch up.
The problem then became what to do about her health, now that she was living alone -- something that couldn't stand. She immediately went about auditioning home health aides from companies around the area.
But the bottom fell out when she fell pretty hard one day; luckily, this was when a friend of the family was visiting, who called 911. A fire truck arrived, and the fireman put the fear of God into her by saying the next time she fell, she'd be greeted by paramedics who would take her to the hospital, where she would have to deal with the superbugs that hospitals are full of.
- So my sister flew out, and she put my mom in an assisted living facility this week.
It's best for my mom. I don't have to worry about her physical safety any more, and these places have medical staff on call 24 hours. I have the utmost confidence in my sister's ability to pick out a nice place, but it's a lot to deal with.
- I had to talk my sister down from a nervous breakdown the other night. She broke down and cried, a long time -- for a number of reasons, including the fact that she hadn't slept for four days, moving stuff in to my mom's new place, but also because she'd found out some things about my dad, some of which I knew before but had blocked out, but some of which was new, and disturbing, information. So she was also crying out of anger: she was threatening never to talk to our dad again. Permanent estrangement.
- Twisted stuff I knew about my dad before:
- He was late for their honeymoon in England by two days. The reason given was some travel snafu.
- He wasn't in the delivery room when I was born. The reason given was that he had papers to grade, or that he had a class in the morning.
- Yay uncomfortable subjects! He was never really interested in sex with my mom. They had it rarely, if ever -- though not for a lack of desire on her part. There's been some speculation that he might be closeted, but this has been rejected by everyone -- I met a girlfriend he had while he was divorced, however briefly, although she might've been a beard for him in front of his son. None of us see it in his character.
- My parents were in and out of counseling, unbeknownst to us kids or anyone else in their lives -- a complete secret to everyone, as they were the appearance of a model suburban family -- for many years, starting almost immediately after they were married. They finally divorced once I finished taking the bar exam in 1998.
- Twisted stuff I didn't know about my dad before:
- Once Dad arrived in England for his honeymoon, he went on the town for a couple days and enjoyed himself while not telling my mom.
- When my mom was sick with the valley fever -- an autoimmune disorder that can easily kill -- she was laid up in bed with an IV in her arm at home, under constant home nursing care. We were little kids at the time. My dad almost never went in to see her, even in their own house -- he was always doing something else. This was so bad it even came to the attention of the nurse, who had to say something to Dad.
- Throughout their time together, he would casually belittle her.
- Recently, when my sister got my mom into assisted living, she found out that he knew about the hallucinations but also didn't tell us, when he should've known better. Also, he couldn't be bothered to say goodbye to his daughter when he left to go back to his apartment on the other side of town.
- When I asked my sister's asshole husband if there was anything we could do for her, since she'd shouldered all of the responsibility herself in getting Mom into assisted living -- and had a breakdown as a result, his two-word response was "breast implants."
- One of the really hard things, aside from all of the above, is that now my sister and I have a new wedge to work through in addition to her asshole husband: how we feel about Dad.
Maybe this is me just trying to survive with some shred of my family life intact, but my hope would be that we just take Dad for what he is: always pleasant to be around, and always a charmer, but he never makes the first move -- he never calls his children, and he's always somewhat clueless. So we take what we can get from him. I hope.
My sister feels differently -- she says she alternates between anger, frustration, and pity... which is entirely justified, but makes me sadder than many things out of all this.
- I'm depressed most of the time now, although there are flashes of brilliance with my wonderful wife and my wonderful son, who still makes me laugh and love, even now. If I didn't have them I don't want to think what state I'd be in right now. Zombiegrrrl says she doesn't like it when so many of her friends are missing joy from their lives, and to some extent that's true. I don't know how to work through this, where I had something before with my family, even if it was somewhat damaged -- but it was something. Now I have... something else. The closer relationship that I wanted with my sister is going to be filtered through her overgrown frat-boy husband, as well as the wedge Mom's entry into assisted living, and our dad's past and present behavior, has put between us.
I hate that.
- It's very hard to focus on work, for obvious reasons. Complicating matters is the fact that it's just a job, and I'm trying to engineer a career change at the same time, no matter how slowly, stupidly and half-assedly. Also depressing is the fact that everyone in a position to know has told me that I shouldn't go about my desired course of action -- taking journalism classes here and there. Also depressing is the fact that a starting salary in journalism is somewhere around $30,000.
- It's hotter than fuck, which just makes me pine for those days when I'd have thumpa thumpa music on the car stereo as we'd drive over the Golden Gate Bridge. I miss that so much.
- I miss the friends I had back in the Bay Area. Having Sha here was awesome in so many different ways, but it made me really, really miss those days when we'd have barbecue/game parties in our patio, or when I'd visit Minnie and Vim up at their place for all-day game sessions. Yes, I idealize the past -- those days were few and far between, when most often it would just be the daily grind with many of the same worries. And we weren't in as good financial shape as we are now...
- LM hasn't been sleeping well recently. Last night he woke up at 2AM, and every 15 minutes after that. Mer says it's time to start "Ferberizing" him -- letting him cry it out, in hopes that he might be able to work out being alone in a bed by himself.
- I'm so tired.... I just want the pain to end.
The basic conclusion I've come to is that my dad was the shittiest husband ever, but a great father. I don't understand so many things, though, since these drips and drabs of information come out from a woman who's had a lifetime of husband-focused bitterness, most of it entirely justified. It also doesn't jibe with all available evidence -- after all, when we'd visit them for the holidays, they'd be all lovey-dovey with each other, even writing mash notes in Christmas cards to each other.
Yet, I expect, that might've been playing it up for the kids, just like everything else they did out of some entirely misplaced desire to protect us.
Off to bed. Sleep can only help.
Entry about good stuff tomorrow or soon after. Because I need to make one.