03 - The Story of My Parents

Writing out what I know of my parents helps me to stare at the story I've been telling myself this entire time and how it's shaped what I think of myself and my past. Looking over the last couple entries, it's...clear that I have a lot of big emotions to work through about it, even now.

I tell myself that the only thing I got from my mother is a broken brain. I may have dodged schizophrenia (so far), but I can never trust my own mind knowing that there's something fundamental that skews my perspective. I can never be sure that I'm seeing the information I gather clearly, that I'm interpreting it reasonably, and that I'm making good decisions based on solid assumptions -- especially when emotions are involved. Everything has to be viewed through that filter: what if this is my mental illness?

All I know about my mother I learned from her mother (my maternal grandma) and that one phone call. Even among my siblings, she's a distant mystery. But at the same time, I think we all have this attitude that makes us naturally distrustful. It feels like we all have this ingrained expectation of unjust treatment that the world is too happy to oblige. We've all dealt with this outlook in our own ways, and I'm not sure one is any better than the other.

I don't like that I've shaved my mother down to nothing but a broken mold that created seven misconfigured children. She's become this bogeyman, some cautionary tale of what happens to poor black people without access or support. At the same time, I live in fear of growing older and putting the ones I love through the prolonged sadness of watching my mind disintegrating, erasing the person that lived there. I worry that one day, I'll be more trouble than I'm worth, and that I'll be stuck somewhere and forgotten, buried in an institution or a home before I've actually died.

It breaks my heart to think about what happened to her, and how...ill-equipped we are as a society to even deal with something like this. We don't have the will to really...sit with the difficulties of this experience. We don't know how to treat the people suffering from this humanely. We have no will to investigate or treat this. It's not pondered in our art or culture. We can't even talk about it as a family. So it's this little black spot within us, too sensitive to really touch but affecting everything we do.

My mother is why I developed such a strong interest in psychology and mindfulness. I want to figure out how to bridge the gap between my skewed perspective and the reality of things, through writing, and art, and crafting a language that allows me to feel understood. I think, deep down, I need to understand myself. There's just so much that I can't...explain, because I don't have the words for the way my thoughts move and connect. It's frustrating, and it makes me feel alone. It makes the future where I'm some crazy asshole, locked in a box and alone, seem a lot closer.

My adopted mother is...a whole different tangle of trauma to work through. She was always so mean and it honestly felt like she never really wanted to spend that much time with us. But at the same time, I know how much she worked to make sure we were provided for. Every year we got new clothes and materials for school. She even gave us a little bit of spending money for field trips. She instilled in me a sense of deep responsibility for the people around me, and I think the way I try to keep working if I have even a little left in the tank is down to her. I try to make cleaning, straightening, etc. an automatic thing, something I can do with my hands without thinking about it.

But even now, I think about how little I felt loved as a child, or even liked. I did whatever I could to be tolerated by whoever had authority; most of the time I was quiet and dissociating with a book in the corner. I developed an Avoidant Attachment style that stifles me to this day, and I don't feel safe in relationships because the fundamental one I grew up with felt so conditional.

When she told me that she would have hated me if we were closer after I came out, it confirmed my worst fears about this woman who raised me. She didn't love me. She didn't even care enough to love me.

It makes me feel fundamentally unloveable, or at least...not even enough of a person to be considered for such a strong emotion. There's always this voice in the back of my head telling me I'm weird, not even in an interesting way, that no one cares if I fall down into my own internal spiral and never come out again.

I never had a mother who loved me. One was mentally incapable of it, and the other just didn't.

I never had a father who taught me anything. He disappeared into the bottle, and then into a blizzard when I was a teenager.

I don't have memories of being in a family as a child. I mostly remember the worst things my adopted mother ever said to me, or the one time I talked to the woman who gave birth to me, or the haunted eyes of my adopted father.

Every time someone talks to their family, or shares a memory of how they celebrated holidays, it's a reminder of everything I don't have. I don't have a childhood birthday, or Christmas, or Halloween memory. Just fear and abuse and alienation. That's all I have if I look back on my past.

But there has to be a better way to spin this story, hasn't there? There has to be some version of this story that allows me to keep the lessons and let go of the pain of it. Maybe I'll see a path there in time.