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?
