Tag Archives: trauma

Stuffing

01 Tuesday Oct 2019

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I was eleven or so. One afternoon my parents called me into the living room for some minor task, and inquired almost angrily what my deal was.

My face working, I stammered out that I was trying not to cry.

Well, what did I have to cry about?

I had cut my finger just moments earlier, while peeling an apple in the kitchen.

So why didn’t I cry?

“B-bec-cause y-you told m-me n-not to,” I wailed.

Oh, well then, cry away! I was told, with the largesse of a Victorian philanthropist, and I burst into tears.

I don’t recall being told not to cry, but I’m sure that I was. My mother was sexually abusing me nightly, although my conscious recollection boiled down to an eternal blazing fury: I hated my mother, but didn’t know why. My dad, on the other hand, as ignorant of the abuse as I, merely beat me a lot with his belt, mainly for not cleaning my room. To this day, when I hear somebody sweeping, there is a flashknot in my stomach.

But despite the abuse and neglect, I was not allowed to cry. What to do? I stuffed it, of course, and those tears waited with corrosive patience until an excellent therapist coaxed them out in my 40s. It took a lot of therapy, and to this day I am what’s called a “stress crier.” It’s a pain in the butt, if only because my sinuses swell from all the mucus and I can get a migraine from the pressure unless I hit myself with four sprays of fluticasone, which tastes unpleasantly of an incongruous lilac but works well.

I still stuff emotions, primarily anger, but I’m working hard on that. I write the feeling words large and circle them in my journal. The result is something that looks a lot like cantankerousness: I suffer fools badly, and have started to show up for myself.

I am trying to turn into a cranky old lady; to further this end, I have stopped dying my hair now that I’ve buzzed most of it off. My face still looks ten years younger, due mainly to genetics, not smoking, and sleep and hydration, but the crop of silver on top is like a snake rattle: Step over my log with caution, because I’ve been here for a few many turns around the sun now, and I have learned how to bite.

I nipped somebody this morning over something small, and was amazed at the level of satisfaction it afforded. (There is somebody who has taken it upon themselves to walk the website I manage, and if they find a 404 link, they email all of upper management. It’s been annoying for eight years, and I finally had enough. I told him that this tactic just made me look bad, and I would appreciate being given a private heads-up, being the webmaster and all.)

I’ve been chanting to change my karma, and (coincidentally I’m sure) had the most stressful month since I was homeless. I thought meditation was supposed to mellow you out, but maybe the mellow has to clear away a whole lot of muck before it rests easy in your soul. What do you think?

Pain

04 Thursday Jul 2013

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Five weeks ago I gave myself a brutal sprained ankle, with the upshot that I’m not going to be going to the fireworks tonight–there’s still some residual inflammation, and the two miles would do me in. Hell, I’d be done in when I got there, and I don’t know if that beautiful rumble in my chest would pump out enough serotonin to compensate for the weedy little voice inside whining, “When do I get to sit do-o-own?” We live close enough to the action that we’ll be able to hear them–not loudly enough–but not see them at all. Which makes it worse.

(Hmm, what if I take one of my crutches . . .? What if I just open up a big #10 can of get-over-it?)

I also have arthritis in my knees, and I seem to recall this keeping me home last year. This is unfair, seeing as I got my magic cortisone shots this week, and all that hurts are these two or three acid-dipped rubber bands running up the inside of my lower calf. I’d love to go; to take my son, who is new to the Big City and Real Fireworks (set off by professionals who do not get their heads blown off). But there it is: I’m a wussy. There’s only so much soldiering through I can do.

The thing about this is that I’m a pain champion. Screw that tired labor/childbirth stuff (which I escaped via cesarean, therefore sullying my resume)–I get repeated kidney stones! (Women swear they’re worse, and I’ve lost count–probably 30ish, with two serious kidney infections to boot.) And I once had a bowel obstruction. I wanted to go to my emergency room, so at 5 am (thinking I just had a kidney stone, because that was how acute the pain was) I walked half a mile to the subway, changed trains, endured the longest 5 minute cab ride of my life, and showed up able to get the concepts “kidney stone” and “puking NOW” across. I get migraines! Champion, I tell you!

I suppose it’s the particular sort of pain–you can grit your teeth against a constant agony. Work on your breathing. Advice: don’t overdo this. I once had a stone obstruct (no good very bad life threatening) and the blob of clay I saw sent me home accusing me of “drug-seeking.” (N.B.: I wanted Toradol, which does nothing interesting to you at all.) I just wasn’t showing enough pain. In vain did I tell her that I had learned the hard way that crying doesn’t give the nice people in the E.R. the information they need. Letter in her file. Heh.

But when every step sends a needle of fire up my leg I whimper like the sissy little girl I really am. And it’s almost healed now, too. You should have seen me a couple of weeks ago, with the kids waiting on me and trying not to glare at the men who didn’t give me their seats on the train. (Five times out of six, seat-givers are women.)

I am, of course, no stranger to psychic pain, and I’ve had a boatload of that too. Sometimes I soldier, sometimes I whimper. Sometimes I try to figure out if watching all that CSI means I might not get caught, bwah ha.

But fireworks have always made it better. I was in the hospital in Indianapolis once (hyperemesis with daughter, sigh) and they had a huge window overlooking the river where they were setting them off. Best fireworks seat ever; mood a trifle dampened by it being in a cancer surgical ward; been puking for four days straight–all day–but . . . fireworks, man!

How much can it possibly hurt?

Waiting

29 Wednesday May 2013

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My 22-year-old son moves in with me tonight. As I write, he is boarding in Cincinnati and will show up at Logan in about two and a half hours. I hope. My son is a lot like me; he has adventures, and with the whole state of Ohio to have them in–whoa nelly! Anything could be happening, and since “phone” is still an exotic concept of which we speak, there’s nothing I can do but wait.

As always, there are complicating factors–maybe it will thunder, maybe it won’t, and maybe Logan will get a wild hare up its ass and throw down some dramatic security measures for Mrs. Obama, here today to talk to the Marathon Bombing survivors.  But as of now Delta assures me things are A-OK, and I refuse to hear any threatening music in the background. Instead, I wait here at the office until it’s a reasonable time to go wait at the airport.

I won’t bore you with the details, but I’ve been waiting for eleven years. After a court battle, custody of my two children was split between the parents, and through an unusual combination of power, spite, and the judge’s overlooking the concept “visitation order,” I’ve seen my son four times in the last decade. I can never forget burying my face in his curls that one last time before getting behind the wheel to take his silent and gray-faced older sister back to what used to home, and would be spun into a two-person home again, but for a while was just the place where we lived with an empty room.

That was eleven years ago, and after adventures, my daughter and I now have a happy (if too-tiny) home which we share with a cat and two ferrets. The adjustments will now have to go the other way: buying more food and toilet paper rather than less, having to house him on the couch instead of letting odds and ends fill a room without an occupant.  No more slouching around our bachelorette pad semi-clad. Our family is bigger now, with all the excitement and stress that entails.

My own adjustment has to go the other way too. In order to keep it together at least for a few months, I sat as hard on all that horrible ugly pain as I could. I’ve survived many nightmares, but this was the worst.  I couldn’t dissociate away from it, and nothing helped–nothing except focusing on my daughter, who was dealing with her own trauma over a judge who hadn’t believed her and had taken her little brother away. Shutting myself down was all I had, and it wasn’t healthy.

I have to open the cupboard, now that it’s safe, now that it’s over. As I write this, my Pandora is playing the title music from Star Wars–which seems only appropriate. I’m one of those annoying people whom John Candy apostrophized at the end of Planes, Trains and Automobiles: “What? Was your mother a key grip?”–I have to sit through all the titles or It Doesn’t Count. The resolving chord, that weird little MPAA symbol. (My tribe has no apologies now that movies have occasionally started rewarding us with extra scenes as Easter eggs. Bwah ha, oh daughter pacing in the lobby!)

I waited. Am waiting. They’re running the list of post-post-production assistants, and my son’s plane has left Ohio (with him on it oh please) and is in fact running twenty minutes early. Tomorrow I will have the nuisance of tiptoeing through a morning routine that doesn’t involve lolling on the couch, and in the days after that, so many little annoyances involved in getting my country mouse installed in the Big City. Many annoyances. Sibling opera. Crowded house. Can’t wait.