Note – this was written in August 2022 and was meant to be the opening to the memoir I have wanted to write for sometime now. It is worth mentioning that this is actually the beginning of my ICU story, because this gives you a small glimpse into my mindset only a short month before I would be on life support in the ICU.
I had a plan.
It’s a joke between me and my younger sister. Me, the one who plans for absolutely everything, pencils into her schedule how many minutes she’s allowed to have a meltdown, basically. Okay, so maybe that’s a tad dramatic, but you know the type. They’ve made more rom-com movies about my type than almost any other stereotype, and it never looks further at the female lead than to say that she is a control freak. I would like the world to really know that the ones who are typically planners and have everything scheduled are typically the ones who likely have some deep-seated trauma where they felt completely blindsided and unprepared. That trauma, when not dealt with, turns into a kind of incessant need to plan for everything so you never experience that kind of pain again.
Damn it! Here I go again – giving away the plot within the first paragraph. Allow me to start over.
My name is Samantha, and I’m a control-freak.
Except that I’m not, not really.
Yes, my day job is rooted in being an exceptionally good planner (i.e. control freak), and handling things calmly enough in a crisis that whole teams of employees actually believe I know what I’m talking about enough to blindly follow my lead. Some call it herding cats, others call it project management, but I digress. This isn’t about my day job (see first paragraph).
My plan was to get back into writing and also to write a memoir of sorts about my father… you might say kill two birds with one stone. I won’t, because I’m a writer and writers aren’t supposed to use cliches. However, I started writing a memoir about my father and found out that I used cliches more than any other descriptors. Then it became almost a game that I decided to keep up with so I was sure to only get rejections when I tried to publish the aforementioned memoir.
See what I did there?
That’s called self-deprecation and I tend to do it a lot. This can also be a trauma response.
I promise not to keep up like this throughout the whole thing. I have a point, somewhere in this tangled mess, I just have to find it.
Right! I had a plan…
That plan was to process unresolved issues with my estranged father… but I found that to be too, um, painful… not something I was ready to do so I switched gears and decided to write a memoir about my mother and about being a mother… a Mom-oir if you will. As luck would have it (or God’s dark sense of humor, whichever you believe), in the midst of struggling to write a mom-oir, my estranged father decided to die, yet again screwing up my plans and now all bets are off.
Damn it – no more cliches – bad writer!
If I can find a way to get through this process (with minimal cliche use), my hope would be that you can find some humor here, a small distraction from your day perhaps, or an understanding about things you didn’t realize were happening in your own family. I think that’s my biggest push behind writing this all out… being my family’s scapegoat has led me to believe that I am nobody… and if I can break family cycles that have produced one emotionally damaged child after another, then why can’t everyone? I know it’s not easy, and sometimes that might be all you need…someone else who tells you how they did it.
Mustard Seed Mama 