More than words

Patchwork Quilts

Kieran and I went to the movies a couple nights ago – such a rare occurrence for us.  What with ticket and treat prices, unless her team is planning a movie outing, it truly is such an oddity for us to go to the movies.  I’m trying to remember back to the last time I went to the movies with her, and unfortunately, I think it was Avatar. Ugh.  So this time we saw The Descendants.  It was something *I* really wanted to see, but I didn’t know that it was something fitting for an 11-year-old.  But as we perused the offerings, the Chipmunks weren’t exactly appropriate for her, and neither of us were up for Mission Impossible.  I offered We Bought a Zoo first, but she seemed to like Descendants better.  After researching the reasoning behind the R rating, I decided that it would be okay.  So we went.  It was depressing – more than the trailers would have us believe.  But it was real.  And for Kieran and me, it was more real than maybe we would like to have faced at that moment – isn’t movie-going about escaping things?  She said the mom in the coma was kind of like her sisters, suspended in life.  At times, yes.  We both cried.  Okay, I did more than she did, but I think that’s because she spent that time trying to make me stop.  And then we went to the mall, and I did my best to laugh louder and harder at everything, to remind her that we were still alive.  (I am fully aware that all five of us are still alive, but sometimes it is most important that I remind this little person, the one who worries the most about us, that we are still alive, that we are, indeed, we are.)

Samantha, you gave me a lot to think about, and I will choose my words carefully with Brenna when I show her the pages, if we get the chance to do so.  I am not so much hoping to show her that she was happy – my intent during those days was to write down the good, but there were many many dark days from the very beginning, and as far as I’m concerned, there are no illusions about that, but I also don’t want the girls to think I focus solely on that.  It’s a delicate balance, that’s for sure.  I guess I’m just hoping to rekindle some feelings for her that she is a part of our family.  I hope I don’t make it worse – I hope it’s not more jarring for her to see these photos and not recognize herself at all.  I completely understand that the girl I can still see so vividly – the one who loved Angela Anaconda, hot dogs, even the color pink – that’s not the girl I know, and I know this can all be attributed to being 16, not 10, but it’s so much more than that.  The biggest difference, aside from the fact that she grew so much apart from us, is that she grew away from us as well.  I know she loves Glee, and turquoise, and peace signs.  That’s not much more than a Google search would find you.  Trying to get to know her would be quite an adventure now – not to say that I wouldn’t want to go on it – but I have a feeling she and I would be going on the same road together, and she gets very frustrated when we try to talk about her feelings, her likes and dislikes, etc.

With our house being what it is right now, suffice to say I have some strange sleeping arrangements.  I actually quite like the couch – it’s pretty comfy.  But Kieran keeps asking me to sleep in her room – I do if she asks, but I never want to force myself upon her.  She is her own person, and that is her space, and to be honest, the twin mattresses are not nearly as forgiving as the sofa :) But when she does ask, I’m always happy to oblige.  Last night, I was in the spare bed across from her, Brenna’s bed, and I realized what I was snuggling beneath – what was so incredibly soft.  It was one of the quilts.  These were the quilts I had waited so anxiously for Target to put on sale when we had the triple bunk bed.  I had wanted so badly for the girls to have matching blankets, wanted them to be 100% cotton, and I admit, I have always had a weakness for patchwork quilts. I’ve never had my own, but I’ve always loved the way they become more beautiful the older they get, and the history that seems to be held within their threads.  I knew these were Target quilts, they weren’t Pottery Barn – we couldn’t possibly afford those, but they were perfect for us. The girls had fought over the color of the room, so each wall was painted a different color, and these quilts were exactly the same.  They really were the perfect fit.  As the years have gone on (a whole decade now), the walls have changed colors, the girls split into two rooms, then Brenna and Ailish have had to go to placement.  There have been many new bedspreads along the way.  But I’ve never let those quilts go.  No, I’m not a hoarder, but I know a useful piece of history when I see it.  They’ve never been stored away – somehow they’ve always been in use somewhere, and though they’ve been through countless extra hot washes, even with bleach involved, they’ve only become more beautiful, more soft, more loved.  Maybe I’m the only one who sees that right now.  But I bet – I bet when Brenna comes home next week (and we just learned yesterday that yes, she will be home for her birthday – yay!) that if I ask her if she remembers anything about those quilts, it will spark something.  If it doesn’t, I won’t be disappointed.  I know that they’ve given her comfort through the years, and they will again when she’s here this time, and in the future. 

Maybe that’s all that really matters – I’ve been so preoccupied with this idea that the past was meaningless.  That all of the efforts I made to not only capture it but to create it to begin with were for nothing, but that’s not really true.  If we just give comfort in that moment, even if it’s never remembered again, more importantly because it probably won’t be remembered, that’s the most important part, right?  In a way, I’m kind of the same as that quilt.  After 16 years of motherhood, I’m a little (okay, a lot) worn, frayed at some edges, and my colors may have faded in some places – but I hope in a lot of ways I’ve grown softer too.  I hope that I can give her that same sense of comfort, even if she doesn’t have the sense of history.

And while we're on the subject of comfort, if you could just take a moment and go to this site and read about Cole.  His 5th birthday is on Monday, and it will most likely be his last, and his cousin would love for him to receive as many birthday cards as possible for his big day.  He loves Spongebob and farms, if you'd like to personalize, but I'm sure he'd love whatever you could send.

Worth Remembering

Thank you – thank you for reading that last post.  Thanks for responding.  That was really hard to write.  As much as I write about lifting the stigma of mental illness, I have completely ignored the stigma of sexual abuse – just another part of my story.  I can campaign endlessly for my girls, but it’s difficult for me to talk about my own history.  Funny how I worked so hard not to inconvenience anyone in my own life about my history, and yet I don’t care how it inconveniences those in the lives of my girls to hear about their lives.  I guess it’s just part of the Mama Bear.

Back in November, I found an article online that spoke to the connection between schizophrenia and memory deficits.  Before this, I guess I hadn’t really fully grasped that this was a part of Brenna’s condition, but that night on the phone, just in conversation, I asked her about it.  “Oh yeah,” she responded matter of factly. “I have no memory of anything before 2009, and even stuff that happens now, I forget half the things that happen unless people remind me.”  Huh.  Huh.  That’s pretty tragic.  Sure, in some ways, it could be a gift, because it means she’s forgotten hospitalizations, she’s forgotten the beating, she’s forgotten the dramatic meltdowns that happened here that brought her to the point we are now.  But it also means she’s forgotten every bit of real home life she ever had.  The only life she’s ever really known is that of being in an institution.  That breaks my heart.

When I first started scrapbooking, back when Ailish was a baby, it was therapeutic for me, in that I was trying to see something good – it was kind of my way of putting the gratitude journal right on the page, even though I didn’t format it that way.  But that was my intent – yes, she screamed all the time; yes, Brenna’s tantrums were frequent, but the girls were awfully cute, and there were good moments, and that’s what I was trying to celebrate.  As I found online communities like TwoPeas, and my pages got better, it became therapeutic for me in a different way, as it became a real creative outlet, but my intent was still the same – find the good.  I didn’t realize at the time that I was documenting something so that I could help her remember that we had a home life, that we loved her, that we had rituals and inside jokes, and we did family things – that we really were a family.

The last pages I made for us were the books I made for Brenna and Ailish, for Christmas 2008.  Creatively, I think I could go back – I still think the paper is cute, and I’m not so tortured by the idea that everything I do has to be Hall of Fame-worthy, especially considering it doesn’t exist anymore, but it’s just going backwards to those times is so painful – it’s sort of like revisiting a story where the kids are playing happily in the yard, yet you’ve seen all of the foreshadowing, you know the earthquake/volcano/hurricane is coming and nothing about their lives will ever be the same again.  Documenting anything from 2006-present (from when they left home) feels like a disloyalty to them.  Just like that stupid 9’ tree that has been on hold until we are back together, I have been putting our memories on pause as well.  I get that it sounds kind of irrational as I write it down, especially since I have a child here who has spent a significant part of her childhood from 2006-present here in the house, and she’s done an awful lot of living – but I’m guessing she’ll argue there’s only so much you can document about swimming, and I did make her a Shutterfly book about that last year :)  And then again, I wonder, is there a point to making these books at all?  Will they have an emotional connection to the words and photos in those books?  If they do, will it be a good one, or will it be sadness or the lives they lost, and by they, I mean all of them, because Kieran lost that life too – the life of having three sisters together at home.  I think the girls like to look at the early pages, of them as babies, but I’m not sure how the words would resonate with them.  It’s something I think about, and then the thinking just kind of overwhelms, and I end up putting it off for another day, and those days turn into years, and here we are, with the mounds of unused paper and photos and oodles of guilt to go with it.

I felt so bad for Brenna today – in therapy, she said she hated Christmas, hated having the whole happy thing shoved down her throat (totally agree), but also hated having to try to come up with presents for us because she didn’t feel like she knew us at all anymore, and didn’t feel like she was a part of our family at all.  That made me feel so awful.  There is only so much we can do from 1,000 miles away.  We talk to her every night, and try to include her in our lives as much as we can.  But when your illness has stolen your whole familial foundation, it makes it very hard to move forward from that.  I don’t know – I’m hoping hoping (we still don’t know for sure yet, and we only have a week to go) that she will be out here for her birthday, and maybe we can really sit down with those scrapbooks and help remind her that she’s a part of us.  I don’t know how to make that link with her, especially when we aren’t with her every day – we do our best to remind her, but she seems really confused and frustrated by this whole idea of family, and I don’t want to push her too far.  I know how we feel – we love her immensely, but we don’t know how to reach her, or how far to go without causing more damage, so we tread lightly.

I don’t really have the answer here…I was going to say something more, but isn’t that the whole point?

Protection

I was thinking today about the fact that 16 years ago on this day, my labor began.  Sometimes when I tell people that story, they look at me incredulously – I know, it sounds unbelievable, right?  I wish I had the tape from the machine to show them the contraction lines…but then again, no.  There’s my need to verify my story, to prove that I’m right, when my word should be enough. The truth is the truth.  I really did have strong contractions – not so strong that I was dying, but strong, consistent contractions for seven days straight. On the 8^th day, we moved to Pitocin, and an epidural, and 23 hours after I started all of that, and three hours of really intense pushing, Brenna was finally born, and we learned the reason behind the arduous labor – her head was stuck awkwardly in the birth canal, and the contractions were not doing the job they were intended to do.  I always worried that the beginning set the tone for us.  Not that I resented her, but that I had gotten it all wrong from the start.  Me.  As if I were the one who positioned her in that way.  Not that she did it either, but ultimately, being the mother, I blamed myself for not being able to just easily pop her out.  I mean, it couldn’t have been a picnic for her either, right?  I watched her heart rate dip, I knew it wasn’t easy.  And then when breastfeeding was so difficult too – no, this was not how motherhood was supposed to be.  I blamed myself completely.

As I thought about all of this today, I thought maybe I should share – maybe it was time – to share why it is so easy to blame myself.  Because it is such an important part of who I am, even though I would like so much for it not to be, and maybe by talking about it just a bit, it will lose a bit of its importance.

I spent a good deal of my childhood trying to stay out of the way.  Many of my siblings might disagree, but they were there for the early childhood part.  I will admit, I was a totally different child while they were still at home, but there is a huge fracture between those times in my life.  Once the last sibling was out of the house and it was just me on my own at home, at around age 10, my life completely changed.  From that point on, the bulk of the house maintenance fell to me, and I was tasked with the bulk of the household chores, and to make dinner for my dad every night.  This is kind of getting off the subject, but suffice to say, from that point on, I just wanted to not make trouble.  I didn’t want to bother anyone – it seemed like both of my parents had so much on their plates, I didn’t want to trouble them with anything of my own.

But something happened to me a few years later.  I was abused by someone we knew – not once, but several times.  At first, I tried to convince myself it wasn’t what I thought it was.  But after several more incidents, I finally had to tell someone what was happening.  When my mom found out, she was angry.  But she wasn’t angry at the person who did this to me – she was angry at me.  She told me I had to have done something to make this happen.  Why was I being so dramatic?  I must have been confused.  I needed to get my head on straight.  And no, we weren’t going to breathe a word of this to my father.  We weren’t going to go and get him all upset over nothing.

So nothing happened.  But it did happen.  Everything changed for me.  It wasn’t long before I left home for good, and just a few weeks after I turned 18, I left for California.  Just a year before she died, she admitted to me that she believed me all along, but that it was easier not to.  She figured I could handle it – I was a strong girl, a smart girl.  I would be okay.  I didn’t know what to say to that.  At the time, I thanked her for her honesty, but on the inside, I was screaming – I was your child! But that’s a pretty common theme now, and one that I think directly stems from that incident.  There are many times when I know that I am being disrespected, or something’s happening to me that I absolutely don’t want to have happening, and I just put my head down and let it wash over without standing up for myself, all the while on the inside, I am screaming my head off.  As soon as I walk away from whatever it is, be it an encounter with a salesperson, a disagreement with someone, even when someone asks me to do something and I really don’t want to do it, but I do it whatever it is, I berate myself repeatedly for not standing up for myself, and yet somehow, I just go into this lockdown mode.  So I kind of treat myself like my mom did – rather than go back and fight for whatever it was I needed, I just kick myself for not standing up in the first place.  I do this – a lot.  A lot.  I’ve been through therapy about this – paid several professionals to analyze this little dynamic of mine.  And yet I can’t seem to shake the pattern.

The funny thing is, when it comes to my girls, all bets are off.  I am Mama Bear, capital M capital B.  Don’t mess with my cubs.  The moment I realized Brenna had been beaten at her placement in Texas, I flew out there to file a complaint, take pictures, do everything I could within the limits of our situation to make it right.  I told her over and over again that this was not her fault, that she did not deserve it.  When the review process was finished and I realized that the person who beat her would not be fired, I immediately demanded that both girls be moved from their placement.  I’m not writing this to say yay me – I am writing it to say that unfortunately, bad things do happen to kids sometimes.  It’s awful, and yet, my point is that it’s not so much what matters the first time around, what really matters is how the adults in that child’s life react to what happens.  That’s what really matters.   If they spring to protect that child, they will notice.  They will realize that they are a person worth protecting, and that will mean everything to them.  Maybe it doesn’t mean a whole lot to the people around them, but I can tell you, more than two decades later, it means a whole lot to the child involved.

Begin Again

The road to hell is paved with good intentions and all of that...that notwithstanding, I really was intending to write here on Sunday.  But actually, Sunday was quite productive:

After what has become a yearly tradition of cleaning the kitchen, or at the very least, scrubbing down the stovetop and the countertops, once Kieran awoke, we decided to tackle some other areas.  These were big things to tackle, but after the great purging I did just a few weeks before, I was feeling energized.  She and I went after the hallway outside the girls' rooms.  We quickly had boxes filled with books, clothes and the last remnants of toys the girls had hung onto.  Shelves were cleaned out and dusted, prepped to hand off to Kieran's old school's Goodwill fundraiser.  This got Kieran so motivated that she took down the litle Christmas tree in her room, and then tore apart her bathroom, weeding out make up, soaps and a host of cups and bowls that Ailish must have put there before she left.  Once we'd made a sizable dent in the upstairs, Kieran was feeling so emboldened that she made me attack the most daunting task of all - the medicine box on the kitchen island.  I don't know why we keep it there, or even why things stay in there.  Probably because I don't want to look at them and be reminded - oh yes, there's the Zyprexa that cost a fortune and did nothing but make B drool. Huh, there's the Ativan that just made Ailish more paranoid.  Sprinkled in amongst the epi-pens, anti-psychotics and anti-anxieties is Ibuprofen, cold medicines, anitbiotics, and inhalers for Kieran, and meds the girls have brought home on visits and forgotten to take back with them.  It's a motley mix of bottles that is so overwhelming to ponder that usually, I just give up.  But Kieran put her foot down.  We went through each bottle and determined whether the meds were expired, the likelihood of them being used again, and whether there was a better place to store them (we have a pill graveyard in another part of the house).  And just like that (although it wasn't just like that - it took us about an hour), we reduced our towering terror to a manageable container of medications.

I did take a little break to have some coffee with my dear friend Lisa, which was such a treat.  It is rare that we have a chance to sit down and chat, and though it was way too brief, I was so glad that we did get that opportunity.  I really miss those moments with my friends.  And after that, I did go to Target, where the Christmas stuff was 70% (not 75% - what's up with that, Target?), starting to get into my oh-so-tempting purchase area, but I'm not sure if it's my bah humbug spirit or my purging mood or a combination of both, but nothing appealed to me, not even one roll of wrapping paper, which is usually my Achilles heel, and we are completely out.  I decided I would rather, gasp, take my chances on a fully priced roll of wrapping paper (which, let's face it, you can always find one at 55% off at Kohl's) than to store it all year.  Nope, all I bought at Target were three pair of scissors which we can use all year round.

See, it's not in my nature to hoard anything - I am at my heart and soul a purger, but then I am afraid I'll throw something away that I might need in the future.  For example - Sunday night, I went through one of my online mailboxes, which somehow contained more than 700 unread emails.  I actually thought they were real emails - turns out they were all spam/virus type, but were dated 2008/2009, so they were well buried.  To get to these emails (remember when there was a "View/All Unread" button? It doesn't exist anymore, or at least not with this program - I have two different email addresses, and this one doesn't have it), I had to go page by page to find them, and wow, what a walk down memory lane.  Seems I saved every Girl Scout email ever written - just in case, you know.  I mean, I may have had over 700 unread, but including the read messages, there were almost 8000 messages in my box.  My other email program won't even tell me the truth - it just says "many"  Anyway, I started to delete anything in between the spam emails too, thinking I may not need the flyer for a Junior workshop from 2008.  Just a thought.  Even though it was kind of cool to walk down that memory lane, and it made me realize how much I miss my leader friends, and our monthly meetings.  I may not miss the volunteer exhaustion so much, but I really do miss my friends, and when I run into them, we always promise to get together, but without that structure of needing to get together once a month, it just doesn't seem to happen.  When I got back to page one of my emails, back to 2001, back to emails from my mom, there are emails from my dad, sprinkled in there are emails from scrapbook magazine editors and scrapbook supply companies and clients - it's like an anthropological dig.  A whole other life I lived.  Sure, I don't have to save every email, but a few are worth the kilobytes.  So I knocked it down to 6000 emails in my box - I know, I know, I could have done so much better, but that literally took me hours, so that's going to be a project for another day!  I'll probably need Kieran around to kick my butt encourage me every step of the way.

Still haven't heard if Brenna will be coming home for her birthday.  The reservations have been made, but at least they are refundable if we get a no, but I hope she can - I would hate for her to spend her birthday, especially her 16th, alone.  It's one of those bittersweet milestones, as I watch my Jan96 mom friends celebrating their kids' 16th on Facebook, and realizing that so many of their kids will have birthdays and years so different than ours.  I know this - every day I know this - and yet this milestone is one of those that really reminds me.

But I'm not wallowing - not yet, anyway.  Ask me on the 12th.  Especially if she's not here.  For now, I'm waiting for Kieran to finish her french toast so that we can do her nebulizer and I can take her to practice.  Then I'm headed to the gym for my first workout of 2012 (I know, I feel a little guilty, but oh well - I took two days in a row off, it's not going to kill me).  And when I pick her up, we'll grab a little food, and then we're going to tackle some more clutter.  I'm hoping before she heads back to school that we'll be clutter free! (Or at the very least, clutter-lite :)

Gratitude:

1.  Cleaner spaces - seeing the floor.  Goodness.

2.  The promise of a clean slate.

3.  Sleeping in - as much as I love running in the dark, I forgot how much I enjoy sleeping in!

4.  Hulu Plus - Kieran and I have been catching up on whole seasons of shows we didn't know we'd like. 

5.  Two more weeks of school break - I love the chance to see my girl without the background of the holidays.

Doing my best to keep up my end of the bargain on this whole good 2012 thing...