I said recently that I was not going to rant in a particular post about what it's like to grow up and realize that your parents were much less functional than you thought they were, but would post it later. Since my subconscious has apparently decided that I'm going to write a post today (or merely the clumsiness of declining eyesight) I guess I'm going to write about it now. It's certainly been the biggest thing on my mind of late.
I've always had a very....precise memory. Granted, that has changed as I've gotten older and more abused. Being in a car accident in 1992 and spending a week and a half on morphine (to which I'm seriously allergic) did a lot of harm to that, and being in another car accident in 1999 that caused spinal and brain damage nearly destroyed it entirely, but after 15 years of neurofeedback and neuron-repairing supplements and drugs, it has gotten about as good as it probably ever will. As a child, I remembered entire conversations and would repeat them in detail upon request--at the intense annoyance of my mother. I usually won arguments, especially when they involved previous conversations or promises made, because I would quote the entire conversation word for word, even when it made me look bad.
So, OK, yeah, I could be an annoying kid. I was right, and knew it. Largely, I only made it known when I was at home, and when a dispute happened. I didn't speak much at school. If I had done the same thing at school, they might have decided to advance me just to get me out of their hair.
Gee, I kind of wish I'd thought of that at the time.
I never would have done it, though. I had far too much...unwillingness to be noticed.
By anyone.
I was a quiet child on the whole. I was also an only child which, in retrospect, is probably a very good thing. As such, I spent a lot of time playing alone in my room. On weekends, I spent a lot of time playing in the neighborhood with the neighborhood boys, mostly because there was only one neighborhood girl (except the year when there was another one), and I wasn't very girly. I rode a bike, I played in the creek, I climbed trees, we built forts, and I got into theological arguments with the boy across the street.
Yeah, so I wasn't the most normal kid. But I was generally quiet.
I was never close to my mother. Early on, she pushed me towards my father, making sure I learned to say "daddy" before I learned "mama". I idolized him, and spent a lot of time learning, or trying to learn, all the things he did. I helped him work on cars, work in the darkroom developing film and pictures, helped him with carpentry and furniture refinishing, helped him with the household electrical systems, helped him with the plumbing, and, in 1976 when he was let go from the firm he'd been with for several years and opened his private practice, I went to work for him as an office assistant.
I tried to get close to my mom many times over the years. She tried to teach me how to sew periodically--much to the distress of her sewing machine. My hand-sewing was atrocious and not functional (though I did, eventually, learn to sew buttons on), and whenever she tried to get me to sew on her machine, I broke the needle.
Needless to say, she stopped letting me use her machine.
As I got older, and my mother went back to college, I spent more time trying to interact with my parents on their level. One of the things I did was hung around and listened to them talk. Alas, most of that was not talk so much as argument.
I noticed fairly early that they often seemed to be having two separate conversations. I learned a lot about philosophy (because that was my mother's course of study) and got to hear an awful lot of two separate viewpoints that were never...constructively compared.
When I was 9, in early 1979, the argument was so bad that my mother packed a suitcase and threatened to leave.
I pitched a fit. I'd never pitched a fit like this before--in general, I didn't pitch fits, but now I did. I demanded that she not leave, and screamed it so loud, standing in the driveway, that I'm fairly sure the neighbors heard me, and possibly thought I was being tortured. To compensate, my mom and I went to see the Steve Martin movie The Jerk at North DeKalb Mall.
I begged her not to leave, but on the most basic level I wanted her to go. She was unpredictable, unstable, and did not seem terribly attached to me. Yet instead of watching impassively as she drove away, I screamed and bawled to keep her from leaving. I often thought, in the intervening years, that this had been an enormous mistake. However, it made her happy, so she did not take anything that night out on me, and I did enjoy the movie. In truth, I was afraid of her for a long time.
When I was a teenager, I started seeing the instability as more of an issue. I transferred to Open Campus and took psychology, and realized while I was taking Abnormal Psych exactly what was going on. I consulted with my dad after I figured it out, and he confirmed it: she was paranoid schizophrenic.
It turns out that "figuring it out" when you're 16 is a whole different flavor of understanding from watching it become more and more obvious until the police take it into their own hands to have her evaluated and getting a formal diagnosis when you're 45.
For one thing, no matter how clear my own deduction was, and no matter the (information) confirmation by friends with a much greater understanding of psychology than my own, the formal diagnosis made it much more real. It's one thing to look at a situation and think, "Hey, yeah, this describes and explains the behavior very well." It's another thing entirely to look back over the past thirty years or so, after having a formal diagnosis, and say, "It's absolutely true. She was schizophrenic. How do I know what parts were real, and what parts were her delusion?"
I guess I will never know. I catch myself sometimes, in the middle of conversation, starting to tell a story from my mom and then stopping myself because I don't have verification from anyone else, so I have no idea if there's any truth to it.
I will end this with the thing that she started talking about a few years ago that really started me realizing how....well, crazy she really could be.
We were standing in the dining room of her house together, looking out the windows. She started grumbling about the scrub pine at the back of her property and how she hated pine trees.
Of course, I've always loved pine trees. I love the way they smell, I love the bark, the pine cones, the fact that you can make a tea from the needles that will help with a cold, the fact that every part of a pine tree is useful when they die, but they're beautiful when they're alive. I just love pine.
I said something to that effect, and she started ranting about how they killed people, they were dangerous, they would make you shrivel up and die. She gave an example (that I have not been able to verify, of course) of a family that had moved into a shack in the middle of a pine forest, and they had all turned black and died. She was adamant that it had been caused by the pines, and would hear nothing of my statements about the bioflavanoids found in the needles, or any other benefits they might have, and refused to believe me even when I provided scientific studies.
I guess at that point, I really started to figure out that you can't argue with insanity.
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