Who's The Boss?
Currently I am sitting and writing this in my bathroom, on a twin mattress I usually keep propped up by the scale. Why this odd situation? Because items bathroom is one of the only spaces in my new home where I can sit for any extended period of time. I also sleep in here, watch TV in here, obviously bathe in here, which I do each night because as I said there aren't many other spaces I can be. The reason is that I have a condition where I'm highly prone to chemical allergies, something I've known since before my daughter was born in 2007. I can't breathe around new furniture; feel madly nauseous around brand new carpeting; get headaches and fits of exhaustion around fresh hardwood floors. This problem has driven me from new apartments, or had me sleeping in kitchens, or even paying exorbitant amounts of money for new beds for my daughter made by the Amish. Anything, so as not to expose myself to these crazy chemicals that do god knows what as the makings of homes and lives travel across the sea lanes from China.
Recently I took a chance and brought a new, never been lived in, home. I did this against my better judgement, knowing I would go through at least an uncertain period of sickness. I desperately needed a place large enough for my mom to live, and this was the only home I could find. I should explain that my daughter's father, who also lives with us, is not my romantic partner but my gay best friend. Jason and I have lived together since freshman year of college, where we met when I was just seventeen years old. We've lived together ever since, always promising to some day have a child. But we don't sleep together in the same bed, so we need at least a four bedroom house, when trying also to provide for my mom. In this case, we have a five bedroom house, in the hills outside Austin.
That doesn't sound worthy of anyone's sympathy, but as I sit here the heat is on - must be, because it's thirty degrees outside - and even in my safe bathroom space, I have the beginnings of a headache and my stomach is clenching with sickness. Soon my skin may start to prickle and itch, or my nerves dance and shake. This invisible allergy is not shared with anyone else in my home. But it is something I must deal with. What's more, I must accept that I am dealing with it because I refused to consider the option of buying a smaller, lived-in home and having my mother live alone.
My mother is sixty-nine years old, in relative good health. She compulsively eats a double cheeseburger and fries every day like clockwork, and is overweight, if not obese. Yet, she likes to brag that her recent heart calcium test came back from her doctor's scot free. She is going to live to be ninety she says; with the genes in our family, I believe it, too. She doesn't exercise. She barely walks. She no longer wears a bra and instead remains in her nightgown, shuffling around the house in slippers, napping for two to three hours every afternoon. She has aged mightily in the twelve years since her husband left her, and since I have taken her in.
Last night there was a raucous lightness in the air. Palpable. I spoke happily and loudly, giddily danced my girlfriend around the kitchen as Ella Fitzgerald crooned, "Can't Help Loving That Man of Mine". The reason was my mother had finally left her room, and even joined us for dinner. Since I was a young girl, my mother has dealt with any disturbance - anger, depression, disappointment, pain, loneliness, fear, but mainly, rage - by sealing herself off in her bedroom for days on end. Usually, pills are involved. When I was young, there was Percocet and Valium, and a handful of other "housewife drugs" prescribed for pain, of which my mother has cornered the market on. Without the pills, I'm convinced she wouldn't have the physical fortitude to lay in bed for days on end, not eating, not drinking, just laying there, drapes closed in manufactured darkness.
As a small child, maybe nine or ten, my grandmother, who raised me, would send me into my mother's room to convince her to come out. OCD is a family issue. My mother has it, my grandmother, my sister, and I, all experience some shade of the disease. My grandmother's OCD whispered to her that my mother would try and kill herself in there all alone, which was why I was sent in, to talk her out of it. Other times, grandma's OCD said my mother might try and kill us. My grandma took me aside during these times, planning escape routes through the house, whispering furtively about where she'd hidden knives I should use for self-defense, schooling me on how to contact her at work. These conversations were nothing if not disturbing, creating an itch at the back of my brain, a gnawing uncertainty that - maybe grandma was crazy - and maybe she just might be right.
But nothing was as bad as being sent in to my mother's dark room, to talk her out of suicide. I would stand there, shifting my weight back and forth, searching for the right words in my nine year old brain, suicide prevention. I would think of what someone might say, if a life hung on the line. Reasons for living, I couldn't know yet, but only imagine. Sometimes my grandma provided me ready made answers about how my sister and I needed my mother. How much we would miss her if she was gone. How we loved her, and really wanted her to be happy. I repeated these words like a puppet, but they rang hollow in my skull, as I detached like a balloon loose from its string, soaring as high above my body as I could. Mainly I was just afraid. Everything in that room scared me. The heavy smell, my mother's arm draped across her eyes, the palpable feeling of hatred and rage I mistook for decades as depression. My mother, like a mole, loved darkness. To this day, in direct contrast, I must always be flooded in light. There was a closeness in my other's room, a womblike hole I longed to run away from and never return. I was never sexually abused as a child - nor can I fully imagine what that horror must be like - but being trapped in that room at those moments, in inappropriate adult situations, held down as it were with no hope of exit, I think if anything is close to sexual abuse and the screaming need to be in control of one's body than that certainly is it.
To this day, I love my grandmother deeply. She's been dead now for some time. Looking back on those moments in my mother's room, I know my grandmother never should've put me in that position, but I don't blame her. Perhaps, as I've thought many times, it's easier to forgive one's grandparents what one can never overlook in one's parents. Or maybe it's that, at the root of it all, I knew then and know now that my grandmother truly loved me. When I was sick, she was the one who brought soup and Coca Cola. When I was hungry, she picked boiled chicken for chicken and rice. At night, after a long day at work, she would come into my room, rub my legs, and try to garner whatever small amount of conversation my teenage brain would allow. My sister and I both acknowledge we probably wouldn't have lived through those times of mother's retreats - would literally have not had food to eat or any means to make it - if it were not for my grandmother doing her best to keep it all together. So when I look at those times, those nights, some of them Christmas Eves when I would rack my brain for what I had done to cause my mother to hate me so much and leave our side, I don't blame my grandmother. I blame my mother. And drugs or not, ultimately it was her fault.
This New Year's my mother fell into a similar funk and cordoned herself off in her room. The anger I felt as I chanted in front of my Gohonzon each morning was almost unfathomable. She was right there, steps away, locked behind her massive white door, but it didn't hold her. Her disgust and sadness leaked out over everyone, just as it did when I was a child. Only now I did not allow myself to believe, as I had so many other times, that because I had asked for something for myself - for her to move out - that this would ultimately mean she would try and kill herself. I told myself suicide was not on the table. It took reining in years of good home training to the point that my neck and jaw locked, my fists clenched against my thigh, but I told myself over and over like a mantra that that was not the case.
When she finally emerged on New Year's Day after a series of hostile text messages back and forth, that same old lightness came over me. That headiness, that intoxication. My mother is here! She's back with us! And probably on some gross cellular level, she loves me!
I didn't want to feel high. I didn't want to feel happy. My nervous system is just trained like a dog to respond. Pavlov rang his bell, and I salivated. I rejoiced. But with everything inside me, I didn't want to. Forty-eight years old, living in my own home, with my own family, and she is still the one so squarely in charge.
Recently I took a chance and brought a new, never been lived in, home. I did this against my better judgement, knowing I would go through at least an uncertain period of sickness. I desperately needed a place large enough for my mom to live, and this was the only home I could find. I should explain that my daughter's father, who also lives with us, is not my romantic partner but my gay best friend. Jason and I have lived together since freshman year of college, where we met when I was just seventeen years old. We've lived together ever since, always promising to some day have a child. But we don't sleep together in the same bed, so we need at least a four bedroom house, when trying also to provide for my mom. In this case, we have a five bedroom house, in the hills outside Austin.
That doesn't sound worthy of anyone's sympathy, but as I sit here the heat is on - must be, because it's thirty degrees outside - and even in my safe bathroom space, I have the beginnings of a headache and my stomach is clenching with sickness. Soon my skin may start to prickle and itch, or my nerves dance and shake. This invisible allergy is not shared with anyone else in my home. But it is something I must deal with. What's more, I must accept that I am dealing with it because I refused to consider the option of buying a smaller, lived-in home and having my mother live alone.
My mother is sixty-nine years old, in relative good health. She compulsively eats a double cheeseburger and fries every day like clockwork, and is overweight, if not obese. Yet, she likes to brag that her recent heart calcium test came back from her doctor's scot free. She is going to live to be ninety she says; with the genes in our family, I believe it, too. She doesn't exercise. She barely walks. She no longer wears a bra and instead remains in her nightgown, shuffling around the house in slippers, napping for two to three hours every afternoon. She has aged mightily in the twelve years since her husband left her, and since I have taken her in.
Last night there was a raucous lightness in the air. Palpable. I spoke happily and loudly, giddily danced my girlfriend around the kitchen as Ella Fitzgerald crooned, "Can't Help Loving That Man of Mine". The reason was my mother had finally left her room, and even joined us for dinner. Since I was a young girl, my mother has dealt with any disturbance - anger, depression, disappointment, pain, loneliness, fear, but mainly, rage - by sealing herself off in her bedroom for days on end. Usually, pills are involved. When I was young, there was Percocet and Valium, and a handful of other "housewife drugs" prescribed for pain, of which my mother has cornered the market on. Without the pills, I'm convinced she wouldn't have the physical fortitude to lay in bed for days on end, not eating, not drinking, just laying there, drapes closed in manufactured darkness.
As a small child, maybe nine or ten, my grandmother, who raised me, would send me into my mother's room to convince her to come out. OCD is a family issue. My mother has it, my grandmother, my sister, and I, all experience some shade of the disease. My grandmother's OCD whispered to her that my mother would try and kill herself in there all alone, which was why I was sent in, to talk her out of it. Other times, grandma's OCD said my mother might try and kill us. My grandma took me aside during these times, planning escape routes through the house, whispering furtively about where she'd hidden knives I should use for self-defense, schooling me on how to contact her at work. These conversations were nothing if not disturbing, creating an itch at the back of my brain, a gnawing uncertainty that - maybe grandma was crazy - and maybe she just might be right.
But nothing was as bad as being sent in to my mother's dark room, to talk her out of suicide. I would stand there, shifting my weight back and forth, searching for the right words in my nine year old brain, suicide prevention. I would think of what someone might say, if a life hung on the line. Reasons for living, I couldn't know yet, but only imagine. Sometimes my grandma provided me ready made answers about how my sister and I needed my mother. How much we would miss her if she was gone. How we loved her, and really wanted her to be happy. I repeated these words like a puppet, but they rang hollow in my skull, as I detached like a balloon loose from its string, soaring as high above my body as I could. Mainly I was just afraid. Everything in that room scared me. The heavy smell, my mother's arm draped across her eyes, the palpable feeling of hatred and rage I mistook for decades as depression. My mother, like a mole, loved darkness. To this day, in direct contrast, I must always be flooded in light. There was a closeness in my other's room, a womblike hole I longed to run away from and never return. I was never sexually abused as a child - nor can I fully imagine what that horror must be like - but being trapped in that room at those moments, in inappropriate adult situations, held down as it were with no hope of exit, I think if anything is close to sexual abuse and the screaming need to be in control of one's body than that certainly is it.
To this day, I love my grandmother deeply. She's been dead now for some time. Looking back on those moments in my mother's room, I know my grandmother never should've put me in that position, but I don't blame her. Perhaps, as I've thought many times, it's easier to forgive one's grandparents what one can never overlook in one's parents. Or maybe it's that, at the root of it all, I knew then and know now that my grandmother truly loved me. When I was sick, she was the one who brought soup and Coca Cola. When I was hungry, she picked boiled chicken for chicken and rice. At night, after a long day at work, she would come into my room, rub my legs, and try to garner whatever small amount of conversation my teenage brain would allow. My sister and I both acknowledge we probably wouldn't have lived through those times of mother's retreats - would literally have not had food to eat or any means to make it - if it were not for my grandmother doing her best to keep it all together. So when I look at those times, those nights, some of them Christmas Eves when I would rack my brain for what I had done to cause my mother to hate me so much and leave our side, I don't blame my grandmother. I blame my mother. And drugs or not, ultimately it was her fault.
This New Year's my mother fell into a similar funk and cordoned herself off in her room. The anger I felt as I chanted in front of my Gohonzon each morning was almost unfathomable. She was right there, steps away, locked behind her massive white door, but it didn't hold her. Her disgust and sadness leaked out over everyone, just as it did when I was a child. Only now I did not allow myself to believe, as I had so many other times, that because I had asked for something for myself - for her to move out - that this would ultimately mean she would try and kill herself. I told myself suicide was not on the table. It took reining in years of good home training to the point that my neck and jaw locked, my fists clenched against my thigh, but I told myself over and over like a mantra that that was not the case.
When she finally emerged on New Year's Day after a series of hostile text messages back and forth, that same old lightness came over me. That headiness, that intoxication. My mother is here! She's back with us! And probably on some gross cellular level, she loves me!
I didn't want to feel high. I didn't want to feel happy. My nervous system is just trained like a dog to respond. Pavlov rang his bell, and I salivated. I rejoiced. But with everything inside me, I didn't want to. Forty-eight years old, living in my own home, with my own family, and she is still the one so squarely in charge.
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