Unraveling

It takes years for incest survivors to forgive themselves for loving a perpetrating parent. I had to learn to honor, instead of hate, what I did to survive. In my family of attorneys, I learned that “truth” was something determined by others through majority opinion. My case decided by the jury of my mother and sisters who didn’t believe me (my father had already died by the time I decided to face my traumas) seemed to be closed forever.

If I hadn’t gotten cancer, I’d wager that my mother would have reneged much sooner on our agreement to build a new relationship. The sessions with my therapist had plunged my mother dangerously close toward remembering her deeply buried past. Now that I no longer tended to her emotional distress, my siblings likely absorbed my cast-off burden. But no one had wanted to hear the truly gruesome stories of her childhood. Not her husband, not her friends, and certainly not her grown children. She, too, was silenced. She, too, bore the marks of someone whose resilient core came from shutting up about the truth.

Stuffed in a recycled coffee can in my basement are essays my mother wrote during a community education course for senior citizens. Her prattling prose in these essays rehashed topics she had often repeated in conversation ad nauseam. Yet in reading between the lines of those very stories, I parsed out snippets of the truer stories she pushed out of her conscious mind.

Giving voice to the incest provided an accelerant for the embers of sibling resentment toward me. It may have seemed to them that cancer once more cast me as the attention-grabbing, ungrateful baby of the family. To me, our alliances depended on being miserable all together, bonding over having to deal with our mother’s eccentricities. Stepping out of the toxic circle of enablement and instead toward recovery – especially with my truth – was grounds for banishment.

I remained deeply captive to the power of silence imposed upon me during childhood traumas. It was re-inscribed with frightening intensity whenever we visited my family. Beneath the sounds of forced amiability I thought I detected seething animosity and fear. I had disobeyed by sisters by confronting our mother about the incest. My need to heal likely meant that I’d been selfish, burdening my siblings with cleaning up the mess I made.

The thought of my mother seeking counseling never seems to have occurred to anyone except me. In casting off what I had been carrying for years, of not only my trauma but also my mother’s, I seemed to have broken a family oath. It didn’t seem fair that I should have died for the sake of taking all those secrets to the grave, though. Perish the thought that I would value my life in and of itself.

The Mirror Cracks

Dave and I traveled one summer’s break to visit various family and teachers. On a whim, I called Mother and offered to stop in. Excited at the opportunity for an impromptu visit, Mother told us to drop by in the afternoon after her visit to the dentist. “A routine check-up, there’s a sore tooth I need him to check, I’ll be home to make us coffee.”

As soon as we walked into the house, it was clear that the appointment had not gone as planned. Mother was confused and in pain to the point of slurring her speech. The dentist had extracted two teeth. She didn’t remember how she gotten home, nor could she remember whether she had driven to the pharmacy en route to pick up medicine. All she could do was mumble and massage her jaw, dabbing at blood trickling out of one corner of her mouth.

The helpless expression on Mother’s face alarmed me. I felt also confused at the mixture of compassion and rage blooming within me. It seemed the tables had turned, and now she had been helpless child in the dentist’s chair. I knew exactly her agony. She knew it too, by the way her eyes locked with mine for several seconds before I finally looked away and busied myself with helping her.

While the pharmacist prepared her prescription, I set about brewing tea bags for salt compresses inside her mouth. I also fashioned a cold compress for her jaw. Mother silently watched me the whole time I bustled through her kitchen and handled her condition with expert ease. Finally, she spoke, holding my gaze again.

“Well, this is something, you taking care of me in this condition.”

“Mother, hush. Bite down on this tea bag, we have to stem the bleeding.”

“I bet you have wanted this scenario, all those years…”

Finally!  Accountability! Wait, no. She was goading me with a dangerous stare I recognized from long ago. Her eyes, hooded but now so very bright and clear, bored into me as before. Whining howls gathered volume between my ears. I turned on the radio to NPR.

“Let’s try and find some good music to distract us, Mom. I think I hear Dave coming back with your medicine.”

“What are you doing, why are you doing this, you could…”

“Hush, Mother. We don’t speak of these things any more. Remember our agreement. I know how to help you on this.”

I pressed the cold compress into her hand and placed it up on her jaw. Then I hightailed it back into the kitchen to meet Dave, who was unpacking the pharmacist’s items. I seethed to him in a whisper.

“This is my chance to let her have it, and she’s asking for it!” I shook and clenched my fists, teetering on the verge of an explosion.

“Hey, Sadie, nope. Look at me. That’s not the way to go.”

“Dammit, this is my chance!”

“Bad idea. I know you’re angry. Let’s talk about this later. I want to hear you, but right now we need to be present and take care of this. Come on, you can do this”

Dave rightly assessed the moment as an “emergency stabilization of Sadie” call. His steady calm voice re-tuned my listening as he talked sense into me. I soon calmed and re-placed the wall locking down my vengeful hurt.

All those years of wanting to hurl back at her what she had caused, yet I couldn’t follow through. Some part of me yelled “I hate you, chicken” inside my head. I stuffed my rage with the ever-powerful, ever-familiar silence mechanism that had worked for years. When I returned to the living room, my mother had returned to a blurry-eyed and mumbling old woman in pain. She had forgotten the moment. I would not.

Tressie arrived with a plate of food for Mother, surprised to see us, and seemed annoyed by my recounting what Mom and been through and how we had helped her. Making no pretense of kindness toward anyone, not even Mom, Tressie clearly wanted us gone. We soon left, leaving behind also a cloud of nasty sounds at the house that I had sensed. For the first time, I realized that those sounds were distinctly from my older sister’s rage. Frightening.

Dave drove us to his family’s house next as I rocked and railed in the passenger seat and spun around in a murky emotional brew. Unleashing the sounds I had silenced during the visit, I felt catapulted back into the dentist’s chair. The feelings from trapped memories of dental procedures merged with newfound rage that my mother was unwilling or able to admit her accountability. Once again, Dave and his family were tasked with putting me back together.

Change Back!

Mom began to relapse back into telling me about her problems with her other children. Routinely stopping her with “Mom, I can’t hear this stuff anymore, remember it’s just you and me talking?” she would pause and then switch to another topic. Her interest in our lives seemed conditional, to the extent that she could suggest her role in our accomplishments. “See, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree!” Alternatively, she would bridge something going on with me to something my siblings were doing. It reminded me of Sheltie dogs corralling everyone into a group, the way she tried to group us together as one hive mind.

The inevitable disintegration of Tressie’s renewed relationship with me played out like the famous five-note motive in the first movement of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7 (Leningrad). It begins harmlessly, childishly even, in a playful mood with the strings and woodwinds.. Shostakovich composed his melody to depict the slow advance of the German army into Leningrad/St. Petersburg during the second World War. Each iteration of the tune in Shostakovich’s first movement of this symphony accrues more intensity through subtle dissonances and thickening textures that distort the original tune’s cheerfulness. By the time the tune arrives to its exploding endpoint nearly fifteen minutes later, the terrifying chaos of the music portrays a brutal German invasion arriving in St. Petersburg, a horrific hateful rage exploding in epic sonic proportions.

This music perfectly narrated, for me, my interpretation of the buildup of Tressie’s manipulation of me and of our mother, and the explosion she detonated over an acre of land. It effectively obliterated any hopes of reconciliation. Like the Shostakovich melody, Tressie’s seeming initial charm presented ever-upbeat yet vacuous conversation topics. Only after I let myself trust her did the menacing sounds emerge. Her betrayal of me over a small parcel of land ripped off the mask of geniality.

Years before he died, my father divided a parcel of land on the property into four lots for each of his children. We each owned an acre of land, free to do with it what we wished. Dad was under no illusion that any of us would build a house on these plots. He saw them as gifts of investments that we could cash in on at some point. Better than taking out a bank loan, we could sell our acre.

I had forgotten about these parcels until I mentioned to Tressie that Dave and I were planning to take out a loan to cover some bills. Tressie and Finch both had sold their parcels years ago, and she suggested I sell the acre instead. “Give Lee first refusal, then call my realtor if he doesn’t want it.” Neither of us considered telling Mother about the transaction, since it was a gift from Dad, and only an acre. The four original parcels had no bearing on our mother’s property. The sale went through rather quickly.

When Tressie mentioned to our mother, during a routine phone chat, that I had sold my land, she went ballistic. “Tressie, if you had anything to do with this, I will disown you” she screamed into the phone. And with that, my sister pivoted to safeguard her own space in the family. Perhaps also, her stake in a future inheritance. Never admitting that she had indeed been involved in this transaction, I remain in possession of a letter in her handwriting that confirms her role.

Mother sent me a scathing email, accusing me of using the sale of land to punish her. Tressie later reported that she’d tried to discuss the matter with her  but learned that she had never forgiven me. “Unless you are willing to admit, in writing, that you lied about everything, Sadie, then Mother wants nothing to do with you.”

Stunned, I retreated into depression. Looped on my stereo for several weeks, I played the slow movement of Mahler’s Symphony No. 6. Composed to pour out his lamenting grief, presumably over the death of his daughter, I let the haunting oscillations between major and minor modes rock through me to voice the pain. Dave finally intervened with the insistence that I return to therapy.

Recapitulation

I returned to Dale’s office.  She was therapist number nine in my history of dealing with PTSD from “my past.”  I Now I was back to work through the trauma of present betrayal, of my mother disowning me for selling a single acre of land. Never mind that it had been bequeathed to me by my father, or that my two sisters had sold their respective acres years ago. Tressie’s denial of having any involvement in these matters severed all pretense of her caring about anyone except herself. Finch, not surprisingly, aligned herself with Tressie. Once again, I was shut out of the family. The whole mess played out yet another variation on the theme of toxic family alliances.

I sought Dale’s counsel to disengage myself from these relationships so mired in the past that they left my soul in tatters. I needed help, again, to work through my feelings of despair over the fact I would forever be wrong; forever be denigrated as the troublemaker; forever be held responsible for Mother’s sorrow. Catapulted back to the vault of shame that once enveloped me as a child, I returned to therapy to reclaim my present life as an adult.

I thought my mother and I were forging a new relationship, moving forward together. But the heart of our family dysfunction beat with too fierce a denial for that to ever work. Mother remained captive to its power, unable to face the traumas of her own childhood and thus unable to fathom that she had replayed her memories onto me. Whatever gains from the reparative work my mother and I had undertaken, it all evaporated in her fury over an acre of family land.

Sadly, I had to again forfeit the relationship with my brother Lee in the collateral damage. The unwritten rule of family was that I was either all in or all out.

With Dale’s help, I worked diligently through a fresh layer of grief. Her aim for my continued healing centered upon the core sense of my identity. Drawing out new awareness from old memories, Dale encouraged me to consider more thoughtfully my capacity for autonomous creative thought and action.

Dale guided me through exploring the humming that had been coursing through my inner life. Gradually, we parsed from its sounds a semblance of feeling and memory that led me toward the words I needed in order to talk about the consequences of selling my acre of land. By the time I reached my birthday, I could finally cry about what had happened. I also composed a poem to mark another year of being exiled

It seemed my sisters had succeeded in destroying the relationship I had with my mother. With me safely out of the way in far-off Minnesota, Tressie and Finch could restore the silence of the Family Secret. The narrative they pitched was that I had lied, hurt my mother for it, and sullied the family honor. They would make certain I would pay for that.

I had to mourn my mother as dead already. I mourned for the child in me that didn’t get the mother she needed.

Poem for My Mother on My Birthday

1 acre of land
$15K
That sent you into a fury
and justified your withholding
(once again)

How quick you were to condemn!
You simply spewed your venom
based on —- what?

Clearly you have no trust
Not of me, not of the world
How tragic your wounds never healed

And so you simply react
based on — shadows, still real to you

I’m done with being the target of your shadowboxing.
You blew it (again)
Do your other children fill the gap from my absence (again)?
When will it be their turn to be your target?
Perhaps they are better at dodging
Perhaps they still believe in trying

I can’t know
I can’t care
I can’t help them

I’m done with waiting for you learn how to
think before you leap
onto your daughter’s fragile soul
with the words you have leftover
after you could no longer use your hands.

Happy Birthday to me.
45, alive, and free.

For the next five years, I heard nothing from my immediate family. Into that void stepped long lost kin from both sides of the family. Cousin Jeff, sons of Dad’s brother, showed up at a conference where I was presenting a paper – the venue was the next town over from where he and his brother and their families lived. Instead of spending an evening working on my conference paper for the next day, I reunited with my cousins and their families.

When Jeff finally asked, “where have you been all these years?” I timidly told them of my exile for telling a family secret. Not one person in that group yelled at me, threatened me, behaved in the manner that my sisters had. They were no strangers to tragedy, either, as their father had also committed suicide over the accidental drowning of their sister.  Without taking sides, they offered that “well, you northern kin were always a bit odd” before moving on to picking a restaurant for a celebratory dinner.

On my mother’s side, the two daughters of her brother John stepped in more closely. One had unwittingly included me in a group email to me and my siblings about meeting her during travels that would take her past Marthasburg. Although I didn’t meet her during that trip since I was now banished, I proposed meeting her and her sister in Boston. Dave and I were headed there to launch our annual vacation with his mother and siblings. We hadn’t seen each other in nearly thirty years. It seemed as though we had known each other all along.

Reconnecting with my maternal cousins proved supportive beyond familial kinship. In their family, the stories of what happened to my mother and their father had been shared quite frankly. Their father – my Uncle John – had determined that he and his wife Aurelia should be forthcoming about the past so that they could prevent it from happening it again.

Uncle John’s wounds from his abusive alcoholic father were severe, with emotional holdovers that plagued him at times in adulthood. Yet for all he endured, he told his daughters that his sister Katrin had it much worse. When she moved out of the family home before even graduating from high school, he felt glad she could escape, even though it meant an escalation in abuse upon his body. Uncle Joe also told his daughters of the truth my mother had blurted out in therapy: Our grandfather had indeed shot someone, and he went to prison for it.

Much of the noise clattering around inside went still as soon as Uncle John’s daughters confirmed the hellish childhood I suspected my mother had endured. I must have absorbed the frequencies my mother’s wounded soul. No more. And no longer would I heed my sisters’ hissing condemnation that I had lied. They were to me complicit actors in suppressing the truth. Unfortunately, they were now in a dominant role over our mother’s care.

On my fiftieth birthday, quite unexpectedly, my mother left a voicemail on my cell phone. Wishing me a happy birthday, she told me I didn’t have to call back. She simply wanted to let me know that she thought it was great that I was fifty years old. Also, that she loved me.

I called back. Of course I called back.

Away from the policing eyes of Tressie and Finch, my mother and I found ways to connect. Lee had negotiated the truce at her request, understanding that she needed peace more than she did vengeance.

As much as we could in the final years of her life, she I chatted on the phone, and I visited with her a few times. We found creative ways of bypassing the obstacles her other two daughters had created to separate us. But I worried about the toll on Lee, who was increasingly tasked with undoing the nefarious acts undertaken by our sisters. They seemed to hate him as much as they hated me, and I believed that they’d made a hostage out of our mother. She had money, and they seem to have conspired to take it all for themselves.