Category: PTSD

generations

I’ve been thinking a lot about my mother over the last few weeks. Her illnesses. Her pathology. Her recurring cries for help.

She unfortunately married an abuser. Who, over ten years after they were divorced, began to abuse me. When I think back to telling her I was abused…I wonder if then, right then, she gave up almost completely.

My aunt and I believe that my grandmother was also abused by a family member. And we are sure there are more. How my father figures into this history of abuse is not something I will ever know. I am sorry if something happened to him, in the way that I am sorry when I hear of any abuse. But it is not a consideration when I face his abuse of me. After all: I am not an abuser. My aunt (whom he also abused) is not an abuser. My mother, abused by her own father, was not an abuser.

It is a myth that victims of abuse go on to abuse. It is a dangerous and wholly inaccurate assumption, one which partly absolves perpetrators of responsibility and accountability. The truth is, abused in childhood or not: the decision to abuse is down to the abuser. It is the abuser’s fault. No one else’s.

All of the abused women in my family have tried, and mostly succeeded, to break the intergenerational line of sexual abuse. My mother’s attempt to save me from her suicidal and infanticidal actions — her more or less throwing me from her sinking boat onto the boat which appeared to be floating, my father’s — was also an attempt no doubt to save me from her abusive past, and the fear of how she might harm me. She said to me many times that giving me up was the hardest thing she had ever done, and that she was wracked with grief for over a decade afterward, until I went to university. Later, when I told her about my father’s abuse of me — all of her sacrifice must have seemed for nothing. Must have destroyed whatever she had left, on all fronts.

Two and a half years after she died, I am finally going through her things. As I’ve known for a while, this is all — somehow — my next book. The photo above is I believe her graduation photo, from high school. She went on to the University of Texas at Austin and did a double major, in English Literature and Maths. She was smart. Very, very smart. The loss of herself over her lifetime is heartbreaking. So much promise, so much life. She was 79 when she died, destitute and completely alone in a high security nursing home, trailing a number of psychiatric diagnoses. In the pandemic. Despite our years of trauma with each other, it was the thought of her dying alone which really undid me, the night I received the email.

This short excerpt from my memoir — now titled Leaving Locust Avenue — recounts when I told my mother about my father abusing me.

***

Back [at university] for my final semester, I now begin to tell everyone else in my life about my father’s abuse of me. My close friends, including Lia and Dan and Alice (two of whom, it turns out, have their own stories of abuse), and, at my therapist’s urging, my mother. The longer I hang onto this, she says, the more damage it does. The longer I protect people, the more I hurt myself.

            So. I ring my mother after that Christmas and Winter Term, back in my house at Oberlin. And, after she becomes angry at me for being in therapy ‘again’ and why am I not yet ‘over’ my early life with her, I tell her.

            She is speechless. Apoplectic. Understands now why I came to live with her [when I was 17]. Wants to know more details than I can possibly say right now. There is so much I can’t yet say.

            And soon after, within a couple of weeks, more secrets. My mother herself starts having flashbacks, and begins to remember being abused by her own father at a very young age. She tries to tell me details, but I cannot listen. I don’t want to listen. She tells me instead some of the things my father did to her – demand that she sleep with him after their divorce, when he was already remarried, nearly rape her when they were married, follow her, spy on her.

            This all makes an awful sense, but it’s a weight I cannot carry, and she clearly cannot help me. My mother and I drift apart again. She enters a downward spiral, which leads more than once to hospitalisation and psychosis, and I find that I must stay close to the people I love, and whom I know love me, the people who know right from wrong even when I can’t see it, especially of course R. By the summer after my senior year at Oberlin we are living together, and by August we are engaged, despite my mother’s protest of ‘not needing to get married’, but thankfully with Ommie and Granddaddy’s blessing.

paying the price

Over on Twitter (X now, yuck) I’ve been in conversation with writer and activist Elizabeth Shane about hypervigilance. I suspect that this kind of alertness to surroundings, to approaching/imagined danger is extremely common in survivors, if not universal.

I explore how hypervigilance affects so many areas of my life in another post, on expecting disaster.

In this same post, I mention that my elder son was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. This happened when he was 12. My hypervigilance meant that he was never in danger (unlike so many at diagnosis) — but this reality did not stop me from the crashing feeling that somehow I had not done enough: I had not kept him safe from harm.

When E was diagnosed, my world collapsed. I remember leaving him in hospital and coming home that first night, sobbing uncontrollably into his pillow. This remains the sharpest and most wrenching grief I have ever experienced. I remember what I was feeling: how can this happen when I have tried so hard? I have made it through everything life handed to me — why make my boy suffer too? I knew beyond doubt that he would suffer. That he was watching his life change on a dime, forever, and there was nothing any of us could do about it.

Type 1 diabetes is a life-threatening, completely life-changing, autoimmune condition. Developing it has nothing to do with diet or environment; the propensity is likely hard-wired, which means that it’s inevitable in some people. Type 1 is most often diagnosed in young people, and there are millions of families around the globe who face this particular grief — the grief of their child losing a carefree life, losing aspects of their childhood. From then on, every bit of food, every outing — and for several years, every night — is dominated by blood sugar readings, 24/7. From that moment, we could never just ‘jump in the car’ or ‘just go for a walk’. Everything had to be planned. Everything changed. This is the way it is for every family. It’s an intense, encompassing grief for the life we can never have again.

Four years later, also at age 12, our second son evidenced another chronic condition, hEDS (which, it turns out, I have too). He suffered an intractable knee dislocation which sent him miles in an ambulance to the hospital, having to bear excruciating pain. For eight years afterward, until we located a good surgeon, he lurched from crisis to crisis, emergency to emergency, pain to pain. As is common, he has numerous other chronic co-morbidities from hEDS. His life too had been turned upside down. Again: I had hoped to have one child with an ‘unencumbered’ life — but this was not to be. It took a long time for me to accept that I couldn’t ‘save’ him either, that I couldn’t make everything better. Let me at least make his life lighter.

I had wanted my own early suffering to be worth something. To matter. I wanted those difficult years to ‘count’ in the balancing out of Good and Bad. I had endured the Bad; surely now my children were due the Good?

The truth is: there are no scales of justice. Living through abuse does not mean that later life will be free of more bad luck. There is no such thing as ‘getting what you deserve’. Life doesn’t work like that, either for good or ill. We all know that finding our way through the lifelong damage of abuse is not counterbalanced by our abusers suffering in kind. The huge majority of abusers are never brought to account, either formally or informally. Whereas we, we all know, continue to pay the price they never pay.

When first one then the other of my two children had to face their life-long disabilities, I had to face that the neglect and sexual abuse of my early life did not somehow secure their wellbeing. I had to face that life never was and never has been fair. And that I had suffered for no apparent reason. For a long time, this realisation tore me apart. I had so wanted — so wanted — everything now, after my childhood and young life — to be just fine. To have borne what I did so I could accumulate Good Things for the future.

Over time I guess that I have learned — we have learned — to live with injustice, to navigate it. It’s been a necessary lesson. To value where we are now — rather than look for a time when we will be free of all this. None of us have had it ‘easy’, whatever that means. (I tend to think no one has it ‘easy’.) But somehow, through everything, we have cultivated genuine love. Genuine kindness. Genuine and fierce ties that bind us together, even when stretched over thousands of miles. I’m proud of us. The cost at times still feels immense — the grief bottomless, the suffering of no real use — but we got here, and for that I will be forever grateful.