Tag: family dysfunction

Memoir - Childhood Traumas

Was My Mother a Spy?

theotherkeighin

I am struggling today. A simple question from Becky after a visit to the cemetery to see our Mom and Grandparents graves led me down a rabbit hole and began to piss me off the further I went. 

The question was “When was Grandma Vivian born?”

My Mom’s mother has only the year of her birth and year of her death listed on her headstone, and with almost no contact with my Mom’s side of the family, there’s very few people who might actually know. A few hours of online searching, I finally caved and got a Newspapers.com subscription and started searching there. Lo and behold – Grandma was born May 8, 1928 and she died November 20, 1965 at 37 years of age. 

I found the wedding announcement for her and Grandpa, the details about their wedding bringing a smile to my face because it’s the kind of announcement that we don’t have anymore. It read like something out of a magazine for a celebrity rather than a rural town gathering of only twenty guests. 

After I’d exhausted all my searching for her and Grandpa, I started searching for my Mom. Finding all the newspaper clippings from us kids being born, her obituary, or the things I already knew of, I also found things I didn’t. I learned that my Mom was the school reporter in grade school (I knew she had been in high school), and she reported monthly in the local paper what her class was up to starting in 5th grade. She was in choir, band, and joined every literary contest and club she possibly could. It is no secret to us kids that our mother could write, but I’d had no idea that she’d been interested in it since she was a child. 

I learned that in 6th grade, her and Dad were both on the honor roll – which was a surprise to me because while I knew Mom was usually top of her class, the way Dad would tell it, he was smart but sucked at school, normally a problem student who had an issue with authority and didn’t test well. I learned that my Mom also didn’t shy away from public speaking or performing as one article talked about her giving a “humorous reading” at a literary event in 8th grade. 

The warmth of feeling like I had yet another similarity to her, as well as sharing them with Stefanie to show her the pieces of her I think she got from Mom even if she doesn’t really remember her, was short-lived as I sat and thought about it though. Left in its place is an almost bitter upset at the people who are continuing to withhold information about her from her kids.

When I started working on the book about my childhood, specifically one centered around the trauma my Dad inflicted on those around him, this led to a lot of questions about my Mom. I wanted to know her not from the people in Dad’s life who knew her as his wife, but people that grew up with her and knew her BEFORE Dad. I wanted to understand who my mother was before my Dad’s manipulation kept her tethered to him. In another life, I’m sure I should have been an investigative journalist because I pick up on these little threads of something just not adding up and I become almost obsessive.

This has extended fully to what everyone is hiding about my Mom.

I’ve known people who were absolutely awful human beings, that when they passed away no one would really talk about them. It was almost like that old saying “If you can’t say something nice…” applied when talking about them. I get not wanting to speak ill of the dead, and I’m typically a person who will be quiet about it, or find at least one redeeming quality about someone rather than to speak ill of them because even the most heinous people still have people that love them right? I don’t ever want to be the source of pain to someone who is doing nothing more than grieving someone they loved. 

But I can assure you, this does not apply to my mother. 

Janice (McBroom) Anderson by all accounts was a selfless, funny, and extremely intelligent woman for the majority of her life. A quick-witted instigator that was always up for a good joke or a laugh. Anyone who has ever known her has all said the same thing. This is not just my opinion as the daughter that lost her at fifteen. If you ask anyone who knew her, they will say one of two things – she was the funniest person they knew or she was the kindest person they knew. But if you ask them to elaborate or to tell you specific things about her that made her uniquely her, the vast majority will trail off or not reply at all. My Dad’s family will talk about her, her family and former classmates from her hometown however will not. 

I live in one of the towns she lived in as a child, still very close connected to the town nearby that she mostly grew up in, she has several cousins in the area who I’ve reached out to, even her own brother, and all of them remain VERY tight-lipped about my Mom. One of her cousins has blocked me completely on social media after telling me to come back by and she’d pull out pictures from them when they were kids. The few other cousins who have actually responded to me when I’ve asked about her and if they’d be willing to let me pick their brains about how Mom was when she was younger have all acted like it’s an imposition but that they’d be willing to talk about it if I come meet with them in person. The problem here is, when I’ve then tried to lock in a date to do this, I typically get left on read status, no reply given. It makes it increasingly difficult to meet with them when they will not reply to a message, phone call, letter, etc.

This has left my imagination to wander rampantly and the only conclusion I can come up with is that she was a spy and they’re all in on the secret. 

Realistically, I know that is not the case, it’s probably something far more simple than that, but as the girl who just desperately wants to learn about her Mom, I can tell you that their silence is infuriating. It seems like it’s one big cosmic joke that the universe has played on me, to rob me of even more of my connection to her than my father already did with his years of systematic manipulation over her memory. 

The other explanation – and one that is 100% plausible as well – is that they know as well as everyone else does, exactly who my father was and what he was capable of. The one cousin who talked with me briefly before blocking me on social media made a comment about how Mom would get twitchy almost if you stopped by the house and stayed close to the time Dad would get home from work. Everyone knew you never knew what kind of mood Dad would be in from one minute to the next. She wouldn’t elaborate further on what (if anything) she’d actually seen of Dad’s temper and mood swings, but it was almost like it was an unspoken rule when visiting Mom that you were expected to leave the minute Dad got home if not before. 

I know from talking to an aunt of mine that she carries regret for not stepping in when Mom died to take us kids from Dad. My own daughter has asked me on several occasions if I carry animosity towards the family for not stepping in when Mom died and to be honest, I don’t. I say that because I believe Dad had the majority of the family fooled about how bad he actually was at times, and also because without the things I lived through with him, I honestly don’t think I’d be the person I am, or the parent I am today. So no, I don’t have blame towards anyone but him, and at times, Mom, for not leaving him. My questions about Mom are not to try to make anyone in the family feel guilty for leaving us kids alone with Dad when she passed, it is solely for the purpose of learning about my mother from people who knew her that aren’t trying to manipulate my memory of her. 

Until that happens though, given the amount of secrecy that still follows any mention of my mother in these small towns she grew up in – I’m just going to have to believe she was a spy and that information about her is classified.

Memoir - Childhood Traumas

I Don’t Know How to be Here

theotherkeighin

I absently take a sip of the soda on my desk as I read through another email, unlit cigarette in my other hand, as I chew on my lower lip deep in thought. The email is from my lead developer explaining that another process failed when they were pushing changes to production. What it really means is probably another three conference calls to explain to stakeholders why my project team has another delay in getting the new risk monitoring tool in place. In the world of post-Covid shutdowns and supply chain issues, risks to supply chains are all the hype now. 

Unfortunately, that’s the division I work in as an I.T. Project Manager. 

The hyper chirping from my cell phone interrupts me from typing a reply, and I look down to see the smiling face of my oldest daughter’s Facebook picture on my phone. Checking the clock to see how far I am from my next meeting, I answer.

“Hey sweetheart,” I say.

“Whatcha doin’?” she asks and I can tell from her tone she has tea to spill. 

“Working.”

“When’s your next meeting?”

“You’ve got twelve minutes,” I laugh, looking down at the video feed. She’s in her car, parked in front of her house from the looks of the background and she grins.

“Good, I’ll keep an eye on the clock.”

Kaylee launches into an animated story about the girls at one of her jobs, complaining about her typical workday with a problem co-worker. I give appropriate reactions, only half listening as I continue to work through a presentation I’m giving in my next meeting, refusing to let guilt eat me alive as I do so. 

“And it’s not like she even had to be there today, Mom, she just likes coming in to start shit…” Kaylee continues and I have to smile. If I didn’t, if I took the time to appreciate these moments and really sit and think about how much my 21-year-old self missed out on, I’d probably just cry. This thought almost spirals me down into a rabbit-hole of depression as I hear my mother’s voice in my head – “I’ll tell you when you’re older.” 

“‘Ope – you gotta go,” Kaylee stops abruptly.

“Sorry baby, are you working tonight?” I ask, focusing on the screen. 

“Nope, maybe just dashing with Dad.”

“Okay, I’ll call you later, after dinner and stuff.”

“Okies.”

“I love you!”

“Love you Momma, Byeeeee!”

She grins in her wide, almost-dimpled grin and hangs up, leaving me to take a deep breath and sit back against my chair. 

It isn’t until much later in the day when I think back to the call with her that I realize that I never thought I’d live to see this moment – my oldest out of the house, grown and living away from me. I think about her younger sister’s graduation coming up within a few months, and the finality that comes with it. 

Why is it finality?

There is a little Hag that has set up residency in the back of my brain most days, and she is a bitch and a half with getting me to second-guess myself. This voice though, isn’t the Hag. This one is a much softer, more baritone voice, one I equate with being God or the Holy Spirit if you believe in that sort of thing. 

It’s final because I don’t know how to exist past this.

And there it is, in raw truthfulness, I forgot to plan for what comes next… what comes after.

“You should be good at the after,” the calming voice says. 

“Why?” the Hag chuckles. “Because she’s done such a bang up job in this After?”

Cackling laughter drowns out any positive reply, and as I tune all of it out, the pit of my stomach drops to the lowest point it can as anxiety starts to make my hands tremble. 

Nothing good ever happens in the After. 

What I know about the After is that it promises to be ALL NEW, but the advertisements never mention all the pain. What I know about the After is that you’re expected to continue on and put on a happy face even though you’ve just had your life completely shaken up and torn apart, but you don’t talk about the Before because no one really knows how to handle it when they’ve never been in the Before one minute and in the After the next.

The Before for me is a place where I’m fighting with Andy over whose turn it is on MarioKart, or yelling at Stefanie to put my markers away before she ruins them. The Before is hearing Mom from the backroom cussing out a ref while watching a Bulls game on TV. The Before is a home that while dysfunctional at best, still has a rosy warmth of a life being lived here. Even the shag carpet, while somewhat scratchy, is soft enough to sleep on. That’s the Before. 

The After is waking up to find out the glue that made everything rosy and warm is gone like a whisper on a breeze. It’s the suffocating blindness you feel when you think about all the things she didn’t prepare you for before she left, or the bitter taste of guilt when you curse the heaven’s for taking her but leaving him. The After is the bleeding soul that is stitched back together with a child’s hope that the sweet and caring side your father is showing you at the funeral, isn’t only because he’s center stage right now. 

The Before is a place where you daydream on a sunny day, that the miles of cornfields surrounding you are ocean waves of some destination you’ve not yet made it to, but the After is the realization that it’s a drought and there is no more water anywhere. 

They are harsh realities, the Before and After, one you long for and the other you learn to navigate. You learn to tell people ‘thank you’ when they offer condolences after learning you lost your mother as a child, instead of bursting into tears at the mention of her. The After is spent never telling anyone how you feel you’ll meet the same fate as her, that you live every moment of your life as a mother yourself planning for a time you’re not around so your kids never have to go through what you go through, and never have questions they can’t get answered. 

In the After, you become a planner… of everything. You don’t need to save so much for college because your life insurance will cover the expense of it – because you convince yourself that your kids will be in the same cycle that you were thrust into at fifteen, which also happens to be the same cycle your own mother experienced at eleven. You write journals for grandchildren you will never get to meet, spouses you will never know, and you try to capture every thought, opinion, memory, as if you can somehow bottle the essence of a single person for another to hang onto when they pass. 

So what happens when the After is now something different – it’s not a death, but new beginning?

I hadn’t planned for this After… the one where I lived to see my children become adults in a way my mother and grandmother never did.

Memoir - Childhood Traumas

Monday’s Child

theotherkeighin

I was born on an August Monday in central Illinois. 

According to the almanac it was a typical 80-degree day, having lived in Illinois most of my life, I can tell you it was likely humid and that my father was probably ready for Summer to move its happy ass along. 

The old nursery poem says “Monday’s child is fair of face, Tuesday’s child is full of grace…” and so on. I think it’s worth noting here that all three of my siblings were born on Tuesdays, as well as both of my parents. Not sure it really has any significance but I believe I’ve been the black sheep of the family from almost the minute I was born. Either way, grace has never been my strong suit. Not that I think I am fair of face either, I believe I look too much like my Dad for my face to be considered fair or feminine by any means, but I digress. 

My Mom used to tell people that I had colic until I was five, while I know that’s biologically impossible, I was labeled early on as being far more difficult than my older sister. 

Becky and I are textbook opposites in almost every single way. It’s only been as adults that we’ve kind of begun the task of laying our armor down and finding a common ground for us to just be sisters. There are a lot of things that I think both of our parents did to keep us at odds with one another, but I don’t know that it can be wrapped up as simply as that. Becky, in my mind, fit the image of The Golden Child in my childhood. But again, us being opposite and all, she will tell you she was the black sheep. One of the rare things we agreed on though, was that Dad was almost always mad at me for something.

I know from Becky’s memory of my early infancy, Mom and Dad always fought. Loud yelling, Mom would mostly just cry, and Dad would scream and yell, slam doors, throw things, and so on. I know that some of my earliest memories are of Dad yelling or breaking something. 

I’ve discussed it with several people recently, including even with a few cousins, this general kind of ilk my father seemed to have towards me for doing nothing more than existing. I’ve tried to determine if there was ever one single moment that I could point to and say “Ah-ha! That’s the cause of it!” but all of us come up short. Becky even remembers it the same as I do: Dad was just always upset with me. 

While I’m sure that this is a feeling that is expressed by all kids at some point with their parents, Dad openly admitted it to me once, when my youngest had done something to make my blood completely boil during a family get together. I’d gone outside to smoke a cigarette and gather my wits before I lashed out at Trysha. She hadn’t done anything wrong per se, it was just a look on her face or the tone of her voice, to be honest I don’t even remember now. I just remember being overcome with murderous anger at a six-year-old. 

I was pacing the width of the driveway at Dad’s house, taking a few drags, trying to take deep breaths and let the anger diffuse in me when I heard the inside door open and then close, Dad’s bare feet padding out to where I was as he lit his own cigarette. The smell of menthol and Brut aftershave wafted on the wind as he came to stand near me. 

“She wasn’t hurting anything, Sam,” he said, that gravel in his voice that lent itself to the raspier tones in my own.

“I told her to stop though, she just doesn’t fucking listen to me!” I growled. This was met with a chuckle.

“I used to say the same about you.”

“It wasn’t that I didn’t listen,” I said. “I’d just make a ‘pukey’ face about doing it.”

“Yep, and that was all it took for me to want to bounce you against a wall.”

“Yea, what is that about?” I asked. 

“Look, I’m not saying it was right or wrong,” he started, “but I knew how much flack I’d gotten over the years for not being able to hide it on my face that I was upset over what I was being told to do.”

“Well okay, but how do you teach someone to stop doing something you still do?” I laughed.

“I don’t know,” he said, softly shaking his head. “I just knew I had to break that willfulness out of you or you’d end up living the rest of your life being miserable just like me.”

It had been one of many conversations I’d had with Dad to that point, and just like the others, the gravity of his words didn’t hit until far later. Looking back on it, I’m almost certain Trysha was doing something that I knew if it had been me as the child, he would have snatched me up and likely forced me to take a nap. He would have shaken me, drug me by my hair to my bed, thrown something at me, or in general flew into a rage over it – and that reason alone was why I’d been so angry at Trysha. 

It would be several years later before I’d experience understanding over his comment and come to the turning point of not wanting to repeat the cycle of parenting with my own children. And it would happen over something insignificant like a cocky look from my youngest, and a comment by my oldest.

Memoir - Childhood Traumas

Which Side of the Story Do I Tell?

theotherkeighin

Remember back in grade school when you used to have to do contrast and compare assignments? Being homeschooled was no different, I had to do them the same as anyone else and I always hated them, but mainly because Mom would put a word count or page limit on the assignments and I typically balked at having my creativity fenced into someone else’s rules. When I started actually laying the groundwork to actually begin writing a non-fiction book about my childhood, those contrast and compare scenarios started firing off in my brain almost immediately, and I’m not going to lie, I kind of hated her in those moments.

See, the problem I have is that there is a lot about my Mom that is held on a pedestal to me, things I cherish about her. In comparison, my Dad is the villain in the majority of my story. There isn’t an easy way in my mind to tell a story that encompasses both of them without it just being a run-on of memories, and I desperately want to find a point here – that’s why I’m writing this after all. To find out what it all means – what lesson do I take away from here?

When I talk about Mom, the majority of it is told in a state of longing. I have a lot of deeply rooted grief for the things about Mom I never learned, that in the fifteen years I had with her I never thought to ask her about before she was gone and I couldn’t. I think back to the song Red by Taylor Swift more often than anything as it relates to writing and capturing the look and feel of a moment.  If I was going to talk about memories of my Mom, it would be delicate pastels – shades of lilac and mint – sweet like buttercream frosting – cozy like a knitted blanket and hot chocolate on a rainy day… comfort. That’s what I dearly miss most about her – comfort. If you think back to the single thing that made everything better when you felt bad as a child, my guess is it’s a maternal figure of some sort… Their hugs are biologically proven to make everything better. 

But back to the color of a story – in contrast to the warm comfort I feel about Mom, when I think of Dad, everything is harsh. It’s the swirling of storm clouds, that ominous green that’s almost black right before everything goes to shit all around you. It’s hot coals, so dark red that they’re black, burning everything in their wake. It’s the TV channel that was always a static mess of black and white lines, screeching in a high enough pitch you couldn’t change it fast enough before you were sure your eardrums were going to burst.

Dad was a land mine, in human form. 

Even writing that now, all I feel is guilt. That little voice in the back of my head (the one that sounds surprisingly like my great-grandmother) starts scolding me the minute I say or think anything negative about him. It’s with my mother’s grace that I worry the most about misunderstanding people, or not having empathy to understand what caused them to be the way they are. But is it really her grace that gave me that, or is it the years of manipulation from Dad that has left me questioning which reality is in fact, real?

Do you get it now, why I never seem to get far when I attempt to write this? Because it’s a constant battle of contrast and comparison – and there is no right or wrong answer. Maybe that’s why I hated it so much as a kid – because it’s a gray area… a matter of opinion which is never wrong or right – it just is. And for a recovering scapegoat, you need the constant reassurance that something is right because your whole life is built on you being wrong at a cellular level. 

Uncategorized

And So It Begins…

theotherkeighin

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.