Zoopolis

in case you were wondering

Hey. So, this is awkward. Here I am, acknowledging that you are a person with an internet connection who might read all this one day; who might, say, have sent me all the cards from the baby shower when you were pregnant with me to make a point, and who expected me to keel over with misery and die, and is looking for proof. Who, maybe, when people ask you — when you talk to people, which in my experience is not often — how many children you have, and maybe you answer, “one.” But still googles me, sometimes, maybe.

Who still needs me to fail to justify your actions. Who is still angry because I didn’t fail, and I didn’t die, and I keep succeeding at the things that matter to me, instead of the things that matter to you.

Upside Down (br#20)

If I’ve known you through at least one spring and not just from a hobby like dance socials, you’ll have heard me wax rhapsodic about native spring ephemerals.

To sum up: gorgeous flowers that appear in difficult environments after a long struggle, and only for a short time. You can see the appeal, metaphorically speaking.

But it hit me a few years back that this is a very anthropocentric way of viewing spring ephemerals. Why would I view their lives in the dirt as a preamble? They’re plants. Surely that’s where the bulk of any plant’s life is lived. Just because the green and blooming parts are where we can see them doesn’t mean that they’re the important parts, to a plant.

Let’s try to look at this instead from the plant’s point of view:

on finally getting a diagnosis and the experience not being what one expected (br#10)

Once upon a time, a 28-year-old diabetic Canadian walked to her routine pregnancy appointment and heard from a nurse, staring at the floor, that the doctor was going to want to talk to her about the ultrasound results.

It was a tiny, casual moment; and it split my life into before and after like the peaks of a mountain range split a watershed into east and west. Before, I was a young Canadian with a chronic illness that was well controlled, a predictable and boring job, a suburban house, and a healthy and thoroughly planned pregnancy. After, I was sobbing with my head on the steering wheel of my car, wondering how the doctor could be so sure this “mild” form of dwarfism wasn’t fatal if she didn’t know what it was.

I guess what I did next was what anyone would do in that situation: I tried very hard to get the information I would need to prove that we were still climbing up to a mountain peak, instead of tumbling down the unforeseen other side of the mountain.

Continue reading “on finally getting a diagnosis and the experience not being what one expected (br#10)”

Hansel and Gretel and What Came Next

A little break:

Next to a great forest there lived a poor woodcutter with his wife and his two children. The boy’s name was Hansel and the girl’s name was Gretel. He had but little to eat, and once, when a great famine came to the land, he could no longer provide even their daily bread.

One evening as he was lying in bed worrying about his problems, he sighed and said to his wife, “What is to become of us? How can we feed our children when we have nothing for ourselves?”

“Man, do you know what?” answered the woman. “Early tomorrow morning we will take the two children out into the thickest part of the woods, make a fire for them, and give each of them a little piece of bread, then leave them by themselves and go off to our work. They will not find their way back home, and we will be rid of them.”

You remember this: how they were brought out and abandoned in the woods, with only a piece of bread to eat, and how Hansel’s cleverness with the bits of flint or shiny pebbles brought them home again. (But is it really cleverness, to return to a home where you had been left to die?) You may not remember, because in later editions this was changed, that it was the children’s mother, and not their stepmother, who argued to leave them in the woods.

They knocked on the door, and when the woman opened it and saw that it was Hansel and Gretel, she said, “You wicked children, why did you sleep so long in the woods? We thought that you did not want to come back.”

But the father was overjoyed when he saw his children once more, for he had not wanted to leave them alone.

Not long afterward there was once again great need everywhere, and one evening the children heard the mother say to the father, “We have again eaten up everything. We have only a half loaf of bread, and then the song will be over. We must get rid of the children. We will take them deeper into the woods, so they will not find their way out. Otherwise there will be no help for us.”

The man was very disheartened, and he thought, “It would be better to share the last bit with the children.”

But the woman would not listen to him, scolded him, and criticized him. He who says A must also say B, and because he had given in the first time, he had to do so the second time as well.

The children were still awake and had overheard the conversation. When the adults were asleep, Hansel got up again and wanted to gather pebbles as he had done before, but the woman had locked the door, and Hansel could not get out. But he comforted his little sister and said, “Don’t cry, Gretel. Sleep well. God will help us.”

You remember this too. And it’s very likely that you were too young to think of it when you were told this story as a young child, but now you see the mother’s gaslighting, the father’s cowardice, and Hansel telling his sister not to cry very reasonable tears.

You remember that they were brought out to the woods and left again, and this time Hansel’s cleverness could not bring them home; so instead these hungry children stumbled on a cottage made of food, and they couldn’t help themselves. They ate it.

She took them by the hand and led them into her house. Then she served them a good meal: milk and pancakes with sugar, apples, and nuts. Afterward she made two nice beds for them, decked in white. Hansel and Gretel went to bed, thinking they were in heaven. But the old woman had only pretended to be friendly. She was a wicked witch who was lying in wait there for children. She had built her house of bread only in order to lure them to her, and if she captured one, she would kill him, cook him, and eat him; and for her that was a day to celebrate.

(Now we would call this grooming.)

Witches have red eyes and cannot see very far, but they have a sense of smell like animals, and know when humans are approaching.

When Hansel and Gretel came near to her, she laughed wickedly and spoke scornfully, “Now I have them. They will not get away from me again.”

Early the next morning, before they awoke, she got up, went to their beds, and looked at the two of them lying there so peacefully, with their full red cheeks. “They will be a good mouthful,” she mumbled to herself. Then she grabbed Hansel with her withered hand and carried him to a little stall, where she locked him behind a cage door. Cry as he might, there was no help for him.

Then she shook Gretel and cried, “Get up, lazybones! Fetch water and cook something good for your brother. He is locked outside in the stall and is to be fattened up. When he is fat I am going to eat him.”

Hansel was clever, with the pebbles and the stick to fool the witch; Gretel, cry as she did, was right and brave, and was the one who killed the witch. And once she was dead, pushed into the oven the witch used to bake bread, they filled their clothes with her gold and jewels, and went back home to their parents.

(But is it your home, if you have repeatedly been abandoned there?)

They began to run, rushed inside, and threw their arms around the father’s neck.

The man had not had even one happy hour since he had left the children in the woods. However, the woman had died. Gretel shook out her apron, scattering pearls and precious stones around the room, and Hansel added to them by throwing one handful after the other from his pockets.

“I’m so happy to be home!” said Hansel.

“I’m so relieved you didn’t starve!” said the father. “My goodness, that’s a lot of gold. We won’t starve now!”

“Don’t you feel sorry for abandoning us, though?” asked Gretel. She’d had to kill a woman. An awful woman, but still. The ashes of the crematory oven were still on her hands and apron. The smell of it was still in her nose.

“How could you say such a thing?” asked their father. “She made me do it. You know what’s she’s like. I didn’t want to.”

“But you did,” Gretel said. “You didn’t have to. You could have left her in the woods.”

“You’re so ungrateful,” said Hansel. “Here we are now with all this gold and our home back and our father safe and all you can talk about is the past. Can’t you let it go?”

“Forgiveness is important,” said the father. “Especially with family! Can’t you think of what I’ve been through?”

“Fuck that,” said Gretel.

She gathered up her share of the gold and jewels and went away, with her brother calling her selfish as she left. She bought a little cabin far from the woods and lived there alone, every day working to make it more comfortable, spending a little bit of her gold on cushions and bedding, towels and curtains, good food and garden flowers. Every time with her brother’s accusations of her selfishness ringing in her ears, quieted with some difficulty when she reminded herself that it was she, after all, who had killed the witch. “All he did was sit in a cage and eat,” she thought.

“Can you believe how she abandoned her father?” the neighbours asked. “Left her brother all alone to care for him! Family just doesn’t matter to some people anymore.”

“Hmm,” said other neighbours, brows knit and nodding vigorously. Whether they agreed or not was unclear.

Gretel painted the outside of her house in happy colours. Sometimes, lost and hungry children would knock on her door.

“A woman living alone,” the neighours said. “Luring in kids. Watch out, she must be a witch.”

Gretel laughed, and laughed again as she fed the children, laughed to see them eat, laughed as she put them to bed. Then would often cry. She would cook and clean, and for many years, try not to see the shadow of her brother’s cage in the corner as she did so; no matter what and no matter how long, she was never again able to bake bread. The oven stayed cold.

For many years she lived alone. If you lived alone, no one could abandon you to die, and you couldn’t abandon them, either.

I can’t yet see what she did after that. What do you think?

hierarchy (br#2)

I’ve spoken to a number of psychologists over the years, and one exchange has been common to all of them. They nod their heads, mention something I said about mom, and say, “have you ever heard of narcissistic personality disorder?”

Indeed I have, kind therapist; thank you for pointing out that there is something seriously wrong with my mother.

It’s funny; we claim to deplore and despise narcissism in individuals, while celebrating and defending it in culture; and, much like how we see gaslighting everywhere and in everything without seeing the denial that inextricably results, we see narcissism everywhere and in everyone without seeing the destructive hierarchies it creates.

slaying the monster (br#11, again)

For as long as I can remember, I have been my dad’s therapist. Since my early memories are vague to non-existent, I can’t say for sure when it started, but I do have some fuzzy memories around the age of 9, outside at night in our backyard, with no one around, and Dad unloading. How he hated his job. Wished he hadn’t given up hockey; might have ended up in the NHL. Wished he hadn’t got married or had kids. How his mom had chased him around the house with a butcher knife growing up and locked him in the closet when he misbehaved, but he knew she really loved them and how devoted his dad was for not leaving her. And how mom treated him. Controlled the family finances. Berated him for not being a ‘real man.’ How much he loved her anyway, and would never leave.

These were not things he should have told his young daughter (or later, his teenaged and adult daughter; I’m aware of how inappropriate the conversations in the previous post were). I hated it.

I used to think he just put on a brave face in public and then unloaded on anyone in private, but now I think the unloading was just for me; no one else heard these stories (at least no one else in the family seemed aware of them when dad got sick and I was trying to get other people to see what was happening; it’s possible he told them and they “forgot”). The point of the family scapegoat, after all, is to be a sort of garbage disposal where everything bad in the family is put. Every bad feeling, every piece of bad luck, every bad decision by any family member, every bit of blame.

These were things he should have told a peer–another adult, a friend, a therapist. Or, if mom hadn’t been a disaster human, his wife. He told me.

This provided a few benefits (for him): as a child, I could not hold him accountable, could have no expectations for him to better his situation or get help. All I could do was listen. And since I was the family scapegoat, I could not speak up myself; all the infrastructure had been put in place to discount anything I might say. I would not be believed. He felt better about his situation, had no pressure to change, could keep up the public persona of a happily married man, and his daughter paid the price — but that’s what she was for.

Cohen, in that quote at the end of the last post, says: “Offender and bystander denials belong to a wider category of speech acts known as ‘accounts,’ ‘motivational accounts’ or ‘vocabulary of motives.’ Motives, Wright Mills argued, are not mysterious internal states, but typical vocabularies with clear functions in particular social situations. … verbal statements of motives are initial guides to behaviour…. An account is adopted because of its public acceptability. … The denials we see are those offered in the expectation that they will be accepted.”

Men don’t accidentally rape drunk women; they look for drunk women to rape because they know the excuse will largely be believed, for example.

Dad was a complicated guy. He was abused badly throughout his life. He also was a terrible father to me. He was in denial about the abuse he himself experienced, and he denied the abuse they both subjected me to.

And denial works the same way from animal mistreatment up to genocide and climate change. It’s like a car vs. one of those robo-trucks in the tar sands: the scale is very different, but the basic mechanics are the same. The bigger machine just has bigger consequences.

During WWII, there was a small village over the hill of one of the main concentration camps. The residents of this village had clear view of the train line into the camp, and regularly saw trains full of people arriving and later departing empty. Their houses and outside property were, every morning, covered in ash — the specific kind of ash from cremation. And yet, when the war ended and the camp was liberated, every resident of that village claimed they had no idea of what had gone on there.

And you may remember Josef Fritzl, a man in Austria, who imprisoned his daughter in a secret basement for over 20 years to rape and father seven children on her, three of whom were raised by Fritzl and his wife (the girl’s mother), who claimed when the case was made public on the daughter’s escape in 2008, that she had no idea what was happening in her own home. The clues would have been all around her; the doors she wasn’t allowed to open or go through, and the babies who just appeared on their doorstep with notes from a “runaway” daughter.

You do this too. I’ll get into that a little bit more at the end, but while you’re busy being outraged, let’s talk about what is going on here:

Denial and gaslighting are two sides of the same coin.
Both only work when there is a total lack of curiosity.
Curiosity is punished variously depending on whether the authority is a nation-state, a family, or something in between.
It is further reinforced through social mechanisms.

Denial and gaslighting are two sides of the same coin

There is no denial without gaslighting. If denial is a car, gaslighting is the engine; the car might look shiny and new, but it’s a mirage; and the engine inside runs on “I know what this looks like, but let me tell you what’s really going on; everything is fine.”

Both only work when there is total lack of curiosity

Fritzl’s wife had to quash her questions about what was behind that locked door for decades. That village had to clean ashes off their property every day for years without allowing themselves to voice how strange those ashes were.

This comes back to the double-knowing because of course, on one level, they knew. Just like Dad clearly knew that going to the oncologist alone was bad, that the overdose caused the blood clots and bruising, and that they were being addressed through medication (knowledge based on observed facts and evidence), and also knew that my mother saved his life by making him drink beet juice (knowledge based on how dangerous it was to contradict my mother).

If you have a question, you squash it: I’m sure it’s nothing. I don’t want to leap to conclusions. S/he’s probably just having a bad day. There’s two sides to every story. Who knows what the truth is. Someone so respectable could surely not be capable of what I thought I just saw. But he’s always been nice to me.

Curiosity is punished variously depending on whether the authority is a nation-state, a family, or something in between

A nation-state can imprison or kill those who challenge its version of the truth, and this is a popular solution to curiosity in any totalitarian state. If asking questions is a threat to your life, most people won’t. So journalists and environmental activists are jailed or killed, and it keeps most people from being too interested in the truth.

A religion can threaten your immortal soul if you challenge its human leaders. An organization can kick you out and derail your life’s ambitions (eg. sex assault in the military or sports organizations).

A family can kick you out too. Or threaten to. Or physically punish you. Or withhold the things you need to survive.

It is reinforced through social mechanisms

But by far the most common, and possibly the most effective, means of keeping people quiet is to cast those who speak out as the bad guy. That is how mom was able to control dad: he was a hockey-playing 6’2″ MBA with a great job; she was a 5’4″ high school student (until he paid for her college education). On paper there should have been no contest, and in reality he could have left at any time with no physical consequences. Until he got sick, she couldn’t hurt him; until I was 12, all the income was in his name. But she’d tell him he was bad — selfish, crazy, not “a real man” — and he’d crumble and give her everything she wanted.

Political dissidents are dangerous enemies of the state, lying, trying to destroy civilization. Religious members who accuse priests etc. of harm are satan-worshipping enemies of the sacred. Soldiers or athletes who raise the alarm about coaches or doctors aren’t team players, are jealous, are just trying to tear a good man down. Under Stephen Harper, climate activists were painted as “foreign-funded radicals,” anti-Canadian, and tax law was used to persecute them.

It works because most people won’t know what the facts are, and sometimes those accusations — that dissidents are lying and violent, that accusers are angry and jealous, that someone is just trying to get attention — are true, and most people, if they can’t discern the facts to their own satisfaction without effort, won’t bother.

Positive Illusions

When these deceptions are harmful, we call it denial; when it helps, we call it “positive illusions.”

Most people think they are above-average in intelligence, looks, accomplishment and driving ability. Most people in happy relationships think their partners are more desirable, attractive, and intelligent than they are. Most people think their children are better than other people’s children. People have unrealistic and factually incorrect positive illusions about themselves, their loved ones, their talents, where they live, what they do, and who they follow.

And they need to.

Psychological experiments show repeatedly that these positive illusions are essential to healthy mental functioning. In fact, people who see the world as it is and have realistic and fact-based estimations of themselves, their place in the world, and their loved ones, are most often clinically depressed.

So: do you want to be depressed, or do you want to be wrong?

Because it’s the same mechanism: the need to believe that the people around us and our situations are better than they are, so we can function in groups and face tomorrow with grit and optimism, is the same mechanism that abusers and dictators exploit to get away with really terrible shit.

Normal people believe people are generally good, have good intentions, and can be trusted; and therefore expect everyone they meet to act that way. 99% of the time, this is how society functions, and it makes the world better. The problem is the 1% of the time when the person does not have good intentions; they will keep expecting the bad actor to mean what they say this time, to follow through on their words with actions, to be a good person with good intentions who doesn’t mean to cause harm and can (and wants to) change. This is exactly the wrong thing to do.

Oh the house of denial has thick walls

and very small windows

and whoever lives there, little by little,

will turn to stone.
Mary Oliver, Hum Hum

Denial is a small, airless room; but it feels safe.

It doesn’t manage or improve the situation. It manages our feelings about a situation that remains out of control. It helps us tolerate the intolerable, instead of changing it.

Sometimes we’re powerless to change a situation, and denial is the best we can do to get through it. This is where victim denial comes from — I’m going to go along with this because the alternative is worse.

Sometimes we’re not, or not completely. Sometimes we can bust the windows open, let in some light and air. Sometimes we can leave, and slay the monster. Sometimes, the monster is only a little angry dog, and it only wins because everyone is too afraid of being accused of being the monster themselves, to go outside and confront it.

Any problem can only be solved if you first look it squarely in the face and see it exactly as it is.

Once, when I forgot to sweep after I got home from school, mom didn’t speak to me for three months. And I don’t mean passively; I mean if I entered a room where she was and said hello, she would get up and leave.

Months later, when she was speaking to me again, and I was again trying to tell her how she was hurting me in the hopes that things would change, I reminded her of this.

She said, “That didn’t happen.”

Dad, who’d been sitting next to her on the couch watching TV and trying very hard to ignore our conversation, quietly said, “Yes it did.”

She turned and looked at him with real hate in her eyes.

This was one of two times I’m aware of that he stood up for me, and I’m sure he paid a price for it, but that price was not catastrophic. He didn’t end up sick or in the hospital; he wasn’t homeless or unemployed; mom got mad and probably said some unkind things. But he’d been so trained in his own powerlessness and the belief that the exercise of any power or control of his own made him a bad person that he just … didn’t.

What a difference it would have made for both of us if he could have done this more often. He had every marker of privilege and respect our society values; he could have slayed the dragon, if he’d ever left that room for more than a second.

You are certainly doing the same thing. Any systemic abuse such as racism, misogyny, or transphobia, runs on denial: the victims deserve it; people who complain about it are attention-seeking bad actors (virtue signaling, “woke”); if the victims just did a better job of pretending to be like the oppressors, everything would be fine; and The Real Problem is people who make social exchanges awkward by bringing it up. Assuming you’re one of the majority that is at least concerned about climate change, if not increasingly afraid of it, every day you say nothing about it, quash your own feelings in order to have smooth social interactions because you’re afraid of criticism or social exclusion if you speak up: congratulations, that’s denial. You’d rather participate in the destruction of human civilization than have people think badly of you.

A Handy Guide to The Small Dark Room:

Is the statement true? If it is true, it’s neither denial nor a positive illusion.
If the statement is not true, is someone paying a price for it? If the lie has no victims, it’s not denial or gaslighting. If someone is paying the price for that lie, it is.
If the lie has a victim, is that person or group relatively or completely powerless, compared to the liar? If it’s yes, and that person is you: hang in there, do what you can to get through it, and ask for help where it seems likely you’ll get it.
If the lie has a victim who is relatively or completely powerless, and it is NOT you, then you have a moral responsibility to intervene.

No buts.

denial 101 (br#11)

When my dad was diagnosed with glioblastoma, my first reaction was grief. My second was panic. Not that he was sick and certainly going to die soon, in a lot of pain. But that he was going to be helpless and dependent on his wife. I have very few clear memories of my childhood, but I didn’t need them to know that dad was in for a bad time.

I called him as often as I figured I could without her punishing him for talking to me, and I wrote a lot of those conversations down. That had been a practice for a while by then whenever she cut me off to punish me for something and she hadn’t yet gotten around to making him cut me off too. If I didn’t, I knew, I’d never be able to believe later that they had happened. I had three separate text files on different devices that I would add to with one of those conversations shortly after they happened. They’re not all neatly collated and a lot of them are disjointed and fragmentary. I have cut and pasted one of those text files below, with some minor commentary where the conclusion to a particular scenario wasn’t known at the time. Some of the worst conversations are in the other text files, so this should be thought of as representative, overall, of what I’d heard and witnessed. As this particular situation unfolded I wrote down one or two of our very rare in-person visits as well.

It was a first-class education in the mechanics of denial on a small scale. What I want you to pay attention to is the nature of his responses when I introduce a fact, something true, into the narrative he’s been told to believe.

Moving

[before diagnosis, after divorce drama]

Dad: So we took the house off the market.

Me: (pause) Oh?

Dad: Yes. It was too much for your mother.

Me: I see?

Dad: Yes. Too much work. The cleaning and everything–she said she was too tired and it was too much and I wasn’t doing enough.

Me: (pause) I bet she did.

Dad: Yes. So we’ve taken it off the market and we’ll think about what to do next.

Me: Any thoughts?

Dad: Well, we like the M. house. It’s a nice house. It’s a lot of work though and I am really sick of gardening. (laugh)

Me: It certainly is. That garden is enormous.

Dad: Yes! It would be nice to move but we’ll stay here for now.

Me: Right.

Dad: Maybe we’ll try again next year.

Me: But … I mean, Mom isn’t going to be less tired, is she? So how will you …

Dad: Well, I’m going to tell her that next time she needs to be living somewhere else already so that she doesn’t have to worry about the cleaning and everything.

Me: Hmm.

[This was the last conversation I had with him for over a year, until he got sick, as she was punishing me again by cutting me off and again forced/manipulated him into doing the same. They only started talking to me again because he got sick–him because he was terrified and of course no one can talk about being terrified with mom, and her because she wanted me to come back and pretend she hadn’t been ignoring me for two years so I could do all the care for dad.]

~~~

Dad: My doctor said we could get a referral to a Kingston hospital if we wanted.

Me: (pause) Oh?

Dad: Yes. Apparently they have excellent cancer care there.

Me: I bet they do. Are you thinking of moving then?

Dad: We’re considering it. It’s just this house–you know, I can’t go anywhere because I can’t drive.

Me: I can see that.

Dad: The B. house, I can’t live in it because of the stairs. But everything is a short walk away. Maybe we could find a little bungalow in a town where we could walk to things.

Me: Right. But … are you up to moving?

Dad: Oh! Well … hmm. (pause)

Me: It’s a lot of work. And last time–

Dad: Mmm. Ah. (pause) No decisions yet.

~~~

Dad: Yes, and I think we are going to start seeing if we can find a little bungalow.

Me: That would be nice.

Dad: Something like yours. You know when your mother was saying she wanted a divorce, and I was starting to look around, I thought I might like a little house like yours.

Me: That would make sense. No stairs.

Dad: Absolutely. Stairs won’t work. We can’t do stairs. At least I can’t do stairs.

Me: But are you up for moving right now? It’s a lot of work.

Dad: Well, we are just talking about it right now.

~~~

Dad: Your mother still wants to move. We asked the doctor and he said, yes, he can make a referral for us in Kingston. So that’s good.

Me: Mm hmm.

Dad: So I’m fixing up the house. Getting the floors refinished, taking out the skylight, things like that.

Me: (pause) That sounds like a lot of hard work, considering?

Dad: Hmm. Yes. Thankfully the floor refinishers will move the furniture.

Me: Uh. Yes, that sounds like a good idea.

Dad: We’re fixing up the B. house, too. It’s a nice house but I can’t live in it. The stairs, you know.

Me: Yes, that does sound like it wouldn’t work.

Dad: Yes. Even if I get over this we’re going to get older and then we won’t be able to use the stairs.

Me: I agree.

Dad: And if I end up needing surgery again, then I can’t use the stairs! So.

Me: Right. Definitely.

Dad: Still nothing definite. We are just talking. But maybe a bungalow.

Me: That makes good sense.

~~~

Dad: We are downloading our furniture. Some things we just can’t move. Like the tractor…

Me: No you definitely won’t want a tractor. Could you sell it with the house?

Dad: Maybe! Maybe. We’ll see. And the desk.

Me: Oh yes, the desk.

Dad: We’re going to bring it over on Easter. I’m disassembling it now. It’s pretty heavy, even when you take it apart.

Me: Hmmm.

Dad: Yes. Do you have a burly friend to help with the moving?

Me: Not really, no. Lots of friends but I can’t say any in the “burly” category.

Dad: I didn’t think so. Ha! Can’t see Siobhan moving a big old antique desk.

Me: No, me either.

Dad: You know I don’t get the feeling you actually want the desk.

Me: Well–don’t get me wrong. It’s beautiful. It’s a lovely piece of furniture and I understand it’s important to the family. But it’s also big and we don’t really have a space for it here. Plus it’s not really practical for computers or things like that.

Dad: Oh!

Me: Yeah.

Dad: Well … I guess we could sell it.

Me: I have to say, I thought it you brought it over, I might just sell it.

Dad: Yes, we could sell it! And then give you the money. After all, it’s your desk!

Me: That might work.

Dad: It’s your desk! You should get the money! Yes! Let me ask your mother about that.

[Next I heard the desk–which was actually an aunt’s, though I’d never been told that–had been returned to its rightful owner. Which is a happy ending, for the desk and my aunt. But I’d never been told that was happening, until I got a thank you email from the aunt. Neither of my parents ever mentioned it again. Here’s the thing: mom took the desk to hurt my aunt; it was a nice piece of furniture and in her mind, everything nice should be hers, so I’m sure she didn’t even think of it as stealing. It was hardly ever used, and she kept it in a prominent location so visitors would see it, including aunt H. She was determined to call it ‘mine’ and give it to me, not to do something nice for me–I’ve made it clear the whole time I didn’t want it, but she enjoyed forcing me to accept things I didn’t want and making sure I said thank you and punishing me if I didn’t–but to hurt aunt H. To ensure she never got it back. And when she found out I truly just wasn’t going to be forced to accept one of her unwanted ‘gifts’ this time, instead of using me and the desk to hurt aunt H, she used aunt H and the desk to hurt me. And roped my dad into it, while he was terminally ill–and on chemotherapy–and doing all the work to move their house. She’s been using relationships as tools to hurt and punish her targets for as long as I’ve been alive. Shockingly to me, some of her targets just sit around wailing and waiting to be used and tossed aside again.]

[Oh–and I didn’t see them on Easter. Or hear from them on Easter. Apparently that plan was only convenient when it fit into her goals of hurting aunt H via her beloved desk.]

~~~

Dad: We’re getting the B. house ready to move in to.

Me: (pause) Oh?

Dad: Yes. It’s coming together. Slowly but surely.

Me: Hmm? So … have you given any thought to how you will manage the stairs?

Dad: Well, the back stairs are better than the front … umm, the front stairs … well, we’re going to go down for a week, and …

Me: (sigh)

~~~

After they moved into the B. house he “mysteriously” ended up with a wedge fracture in his spine, “probably from a fall.” He never walked again. He never stood up again. He spent his brief remaining time in a wheelchair.

Rescue Animals

Dad: Your mother told me she wants a divorce.

Me: Oh, Dad. I’m so sorry.

Dad: Well you know she hasn’t been happy in our marriage for a long time now.

Me: Yeah, I know.

Dad: Yes. And so, now she wants to separate.

Me: How are you doing?

Dad: Oh. (pause) I’m ok. I’m ok.

Me: What happened? Was there anything or…?

Dad: Well, you know your mother loves rescue animals.

Me: Yes. I had picked up on that.

Dad: Well she’s been wanting to get some rescue goats.

Me: Really?

Dad: Yes.

Me: There are rescue goats?

Dad: There are rescue everything.

Me: Hmm.

Dad: And I said, I don’t want to get rescue goats. We have five rescue dogs and I already spend a lot of time taking care of them and cleaning up after them, you know.

Me: I do know.

Dad: And I don’t have time or energy to take care of more. And I know she won’t do it. So I said I didn’t want rescue goats.

Me: Right.

Dad: And she said so she wants a divorce.

Me: (pause) Wow.

~~~

Dad: We got rescue chickens!

Me: Oh?

Dad: Yes! Last week! We picked them up!

Me: There are rescue chickens?

Dad: Yes! Laying hens, you know, when they slow down the farmers usually send them to be slaughtered for pet food.

Me: Right.

Dad: And your mother, you know her and rescue animals.

Me: I do.

Dad: Well so she wanted to get some rescue chickens. And here they are! We’ve made them a little coop.

Me: I see.

Dad: (laugh) They are pretty cute! And they do lay some eggs. Maybe I will be able to eat them. [my mother is vegan and would not allow my father to consume animal products after she converted. They both presented it as ‘his choice,’ but when the nurses brought him a roast beef meal in the hospital after his brain surgery, his response was to stare at it, and say, “oooooh … quick, help me cut it up so I can eat it before your mother gets back.” He actually laughed with joy as he ate it. In this context, I think having a supply of eggs she would allow him to eat probably did seem like a great treat.]

Me: That would be nice.

Side Effects

Dad: Well what happened, you know, I had to go to see the doctor by myself because your mom was very busy at work that day. And I got confused. I thought he said that when I have a headache I should take six pills but what he said is that I should take 6 mg–which is the same dose as always. One pill.

Me: So you were taking six times your dose?

Dad: Yes!

Me: Wow. So that’s …

Dad: That’s why they think I have blood clots now. I’m taking blood thinners for those.

Me: Right. And …

Dad: Needles! Of course you know all about that.

Me: I sure do. Dad, I really don’t like the idea of you going to those appointments by yourself.

Dad: Neither do I! But sometimes your mom can’t make it. It’s ok. The volunteers drive me down and pick me up.

Me: But still.

Dad: Your mom is quite angry at the doctor. She thinks he should have written it down. [Note: it was ALREADY written down because it was his ACTUAL PRESCRIPTION] I guess though I just should have been more focused.

Me: You have a brain tumour. I don’t think that’s a realistic expectation.

Dad: Still. You know. If I’d paid better attention.

Me: Dad, no. This is why you need someone with you, who can be a second set of ears. It’s not reasonable to ask yourself to function normally right now.

Dad: Well … I don’t want to be there by myself, but sometimes …

Me: You know if you tell me when your appointments are I am happy to be there with you. Just tell me.

Dad: Oh, umm … but now I’m on blood thinners. The clots will clear up.

~~~~~

Dad: The bruises are getting better.

[The bruises are livid and cover both of his forearms. The colour of port wine, each is angry and centred around a circular scab the size of a pencil eraser.]

Me: Really? They still look pretty bad.

Dad: Oh, they were much worse. Much worse. They were all like this before. [He points to one that is blood-coloured.] But they got me on the thinners and then they started getting better.

Me: So this is … related to the clotting, then?

Dad: That and the blood stuff … the … what are they, platelets!

Me: Oh, right. So that’s getting a bit better too, then?

Dad: Yes. Slowly. Now that they’ve changed the medications.

Mom, from the kitchen: It was the beet juice!

Dad: Oh, yes.

Mom, coming in to the room: Beet juice has micro-nutrients that encourage platelet formation.

Dad: Your mom has been making me drink beet juice.

Mom: And as soon as you did, that’s when the bruises went away.

Dad: It was the beet juice.

~~~~~

His cheeks are so swollen his face is round. His legs and arms are like toothpicks, but with a round belly, like a famine child. He berates himself for being “fat” and says he needs to eat less. He can’t, or doesn’t, make eye contact.

~~~~~

Dad: Really, though. I just should have been getting more exercise.

Me: What?

Dad: You know I spent the whole winter on my ass watching TV. It was not good. Not good! Your mom told me I should have been getting more exercise and she was right.

Me: You couldn’t walk, Dad. You were recovering from brain surgery and you weren’t allowed to use stairs. I don’t think it’s reasonable to ask yourself to get more exercise. Anyone would have spent the winter sitting down in that situation.

Dad: Well. But I spent the whole winter on my ass! Watching TV! Your mom said I should have been getting more exercise, and she was right!

Before dad got sick, I thought of my missing childhood, when I allowed myself to think of it at all, and all the illnesses and the angry doctor, and how my memories started and the illnesses stopped when mom started a full-time job, as a coincidence. That my suicidal depression and rage was probably an over-sensitive over-reaction to a mostly happy childhood, which was abusive sometimes but overall was probably better than most people’s, which I had willfully and perversely blocked out. That I might have issues, and they might have made some mistakes, but I should be mature, let it go, have a relationship with them, and not blame them.

The double-knowing of denial again: I knew it was terrible; I knew it was all my fault.

Then dad got sick.

Losing dad was hard, though not as hard as you probably imagine; I’d lost him so many times. Whenever mom got mad and cut me off, I lost him too, and never knew if or when I’d hear from him again.

I lost mom, though that wasn’t much of a loss, as you may have gathered; I lost my brother, or rather the possibility that the future might have made us closer. And over the next few years, other relatives. That was hard.

Harder was needing to take all of the narrative threads that bound my story of myself apart, such as they were; launder them, air them out, and stitch them back together in the context of what I witnessed. Actually watch, in real time, how denial could kill a person, through refusing to see or admit to what was happening in front of them and to them every day. Understand how thoroughly I had learned to believe a terrible story about myself, because I had been told it by people who had power over me and who I depended on.

You think this is exceptional. You think dad was a special case, something extraordinary.

No. We all rely on little denials to function in the world. And most of us accept the big denials; it can be easier to swallow the bad story about ourselves than to see the world or the people around us as bad in some way, because ourselves we can fix.

The little loops; the way he rewound a minute, repeated an earlier statement, when confronted with a fact or hard question he didn’t have an answer to, that might crack through in some way. The “forgetting.” The double-knowing of denial: you know enough to know what isn’t safe to acknowledge or pay attention to, so you can turn away when it pops into view.

For seven years after dad got sick and then died, I went over my own life, and picked apart every seam put together with a bad story, and let everything sit in a disorganized heap. I had no idea what was true. I didn’t know who my parents were, where I came from, what was real, who I was. All the advice-givers say that stories heal, so I’d try to sew it back together again, prematurely, in any way that seemed relatively coherent; but it wouldn’t work, and it all would fall apart again.

It didn’t matter to me anymore if it felt good, if it was soothing, if it made other people comfortable. It needed to be true.

Of course, this is wildly ambitious when you’re talking about second-hand information and recorded bits of dialogue from people with serious mental health issues who have been gaslighting each other for decades, and you have a wicked case of childhood amnesia. But within the context of these constraints, I wanted as much as possible to tell the truth. To have a story that hangs together and does not loop back or rewind a beat when a hard fact or question intrudes. To not paint over the empty spaces with something either prettier or uglier than is real, but lets the blanks be blank; and yet doesn’t add unnecessary blanks by refusing to look at what is in plain sight.

I may need to come back to this one. There’s a lot to say, and if you haven’t experienced it, it’s hard to believe it’s real; and if you have, you have likely been so conditioned to skip over or look away, that pointing out the loops and rewinds is like pointing out the ultraviolet portions of white flowers to human eyes. There’s nothing there. What are you talking about?

Perpetrators of gross atrocities and offenders against ordinary criminal codes invite the same set of questions: “Why did they do something like that?” Further, “How could they do it, but still believe in the rules they break?” Yet further, “How could they do such atrocious things, yet still think of themselves as good and decent people?”

…Offender and bystander denials belong to a wider category of speech acts known as ‘accounts,’ ‘motivational accounts’ or ‘vocabulary of motives.’ Motives, Wright Mills argued, are not mysterious internal states, but typical vocabularies with clear functions in particular social situations. They serve to realign people to groups whose norms and expectations they have confounded. There is no point in looking for deeper, ‘real’ motives behind these verbal accounts … verbal statements of motives are initial guides to behaviour. An account is not just another defence mechanism to deal with guilt, shame or other psychic conflict after an offence has been committed; it must, in some sense, be present before the act. That is … I must say to myself, “If I do this, what will I then be able to say to myself and others?” …

…Such internal soliloquies are not private matters. On the contrary: accounts are learnt by ordinary cultural transmission, and are drawn from a well-established, collectively available pool. An account is adopted because of its public acceptability. … The denials we see are those offered in the expectation that they will be accepted.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/208984.States_of_Denial

In other words, they’re lies.

A gift

Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness

It used to bug the hell out of me, how little of my childhood I remember.

I remember school. Friends. Friends’ birthday parties. The books I read, the movies I saw. Playing board games. Everything about my grandparents’ cottage, right down to the texture of the soil beneath the pine trees, and the sun-warmed boulder I would sit on, dangling my feet in the creek. I remember summer bible camp, possibly a little too well. I remember being sick a lot, with things kids weren’t supposed to get, that didn’t respond to the prescribed medications, and a doctor who was frequently angry with my parents for reasons I didn’t then understand.

I have a handful of memories of my father and brother, and only one of my mother, before middle school. This felt, for most of my life, like a black hole in the middle of my head. I’d walk around it carefully, trying not to get too close to the edge, just in case I fell in. As it turns out, I needn’t have worried: I spent a few weeks trying to remember several years back, and ended up with a wicked case of vertigo. I’d focus on being calm and open and curious about my past, and sit somewhere comfortable and try to project Readiness to myself, and then spend the next hour with my head on my arms trying not to throw up while the room spun around me. I went to a doctor to get medical causes ruled out, and she said if it kept up she’d have to have my driver’s license suspended, and I stopped trying to recover my past and the vertigo stopped. Just like that. And it hasn’t come back, and I haven’t gone digging.

I do know there are things back there that I don’t remember. Not just the years of missing family memories, which left me half-convinced for a long time that I must have been adopted, but things I’ve been told happened to me that I don’t remember, or episodes in old journal entries from my childhood that I should remember and don’t. None of these were happy.

This used to make me feel like a golem. I felt like I’d appeared in my own life half-grown without a history; kind of like Athena, except much less goddess-y. Which parts of me were me, and which parts of me were created and grafted on to the empty spaces, when I’d dumped the memories and the self I would have had?

The memories I do have of my family from those years, with one or two exceptions, are notable mostly for being odd. Like the only one I have of my mother, pressing me to approach another young girl to play because “I don’t want you to end up like me.” This is the only time in my life I can recall her expressing any knowledge that she has any role in her own isolation.

Or that I have no memory of any of the many kidney infections I had growing up, including the one that apparently lasted seven months and was excruciating, but I do remember the bags of empty urine collection bottles under the bathroom sink and the standing medical requisition so that I wouldn’t have to go to the doctor first. And I remember the one I had at 14, sitting in the doctor’s office and the doctor arguing to admit me to the hospital, my dad resisting, and the doctor saying, “Look at her, Bill. She’s really very sick.” Then later, in the hospital, the doctor saying to my father in a sharp tone, “If this keeps up she’s going to end up on dialysis.” The kidney infections stopped. That was the last one.

I read books about how get back the me I would have been. Of course, it didn’t work, and it couldn’t work; you can’t recover from something you don’t remember. I wrote endless lists about the parts of me I thought came from me and the parts of me I thought came from trauma I couldn’t remember, and one day I decided that since I had no idea who the “real” me was or would have been, I was just going to make myself up.

It worked, to some extent. The missing years no longer drive me crazy and I don’t fear them.

I used to be filled with rage about all of this.

I want you to believe me when I say that the absence of loving caregivers in early life is a handicap it is impossible to completely recover from.

You can look up the primate studies, if you like. Google “wire mothers monkeys.” I feel sick when I read about them–because it’s awful, and also because it’s familiar, and I don’t really understand why I didn’t end up banging my own head on a wall in a padded cage somewhere.

So rage is appropriate, and I think, if I stayed there, it would be–really–normal. Expected. (And if you are in that rage, please stay there as long as you need to. Rushing benefits no one, least of all yourself.)

But this box of darkness contained some unexpected gifts.

A very high pain tolerance and vast stores of patience.

An ability to remain calm when people around me are panicking.

A negative role model like no other, motivating me every day to be the best mother I’m capable of being.

A love of books, and creating.

A willingness to stand alone and be an outsider, if I have to, which comes in handy when you’re trying to do the right thing.

Empathy for outsiders, misfits, outcasts, and underdogs.

An instinctive association with those on the bottom of the social hierarchy; knowing the lies that justified my parents’ treatment of me, I can see how those shoved on the lower rungs of our society are lied about to justify our collective mistreatment of them.

And my favourite human.

I’ve never been able to wish that anything had ever been different.

I’ve been furious at my parents, for being who they were and treating me how they did. I’ve been furious at the effect it had on me, at how it broke my capacity to know who to trust, for the walls it erected around me.

But if it hadn’t, I would never have married my ex-husband. If I’d come from a home where people treated kindly those they claimed to love, Echo wouldn’t be here.

And I would never, ever, trade any world with Echo in it for one without.

(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)

Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.

(The Uses of Sorrow, by Mary Oliver)

Once, my parents gave me a box full of darkness: loneliness and anger and despair. I didn’t know it, but my favourite human was the prize.

But I also gave myself a box full of darkness:

The missing memories. The missing years. All of that darkness, and whatever it’s hiding, I think, was the only way a younger me had of getting through. I cut it off, like a gangrenous limb; it would have taken me with it, I think. I mean, I’ll never know, obviously, because I don’t remember.

But once, I gave myself a box full of darkness. And that, too, was a gift.