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I realised two very important things during this past week.
- I am Broken – Humpty Dumpty broken
- There is a glimmer of hope in knowing how ‘unfair’ the world is, and yet still building a life worth living.
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There is a state that all Mammals are affected by called ‘imprinting’. It is a psychological affect that simply means: meaningful relationships ‘imprint’ certain behavioural expectations for future relationships. Our earliest relationships, i.e. our parents, leave the strongest imprint.
Neither of my parents are particularly great role models. Their behaviour as nuturers is far from favourable.
Now, I have never nor will I ever, blame my parents for how I turned out. Purely and simply – it’s just not helpful. It won’t heal me or help me move forward.
But if I’m being honest with myself, both my parents were terrible Parents. Narcissism was entrenched in both of their psyches, they both drank heavily, they blamed others for their situations in life, they both believed that they were ‘innocents’ being taken advantage of by others and both of them were terrible with money. And they had four children in the space of three years (twins in the middle).
All four of us kids suffered different mental trauma from our parents’ decision making. As I’ve said – I don’t blame them or necessarily hold them accountable. I do however believe that being exposed to two very selfish adults as our first role models, was always going to cause havoc to our growth as healthy human beings.
And it did.
I have been especially conscientious in trying to discover who my Mother was and where she came from. I have been back to her homeland, South Africa, eight times. My siblings have only been twice and once respective to their age, when we all travelled with Mum in our childhoods. My Father refused to ever go with her. In my adult years I attempted to have written relationships via letter and then email, with my cousins and second cousins. I spent time staying with my Mum’s best friend and both of her elder brothers and their wives.
I listened to stories that were full of equal amounts of fact and bias. One of my Tannies (Aunts), couldn’t wait to tell me how selfish my Mum was, when she got a job as an air hostess and left South Africa in her mid 20’s. Apparently abandoning her parents in the process. Over the years in between and since my visits, I have been able to put together a very accurate picture of my Mother and where she came from. It was a stifling and emotionless upbringing and it’s little wonder that she wanted to escape.
If only she had learnt from all of this experience.
My Father is another another story altogether. I’ll keep it short by saying – he was/is Gay, had a Mother who favoured him and who disliked men (although she had three husbands), has no relationship with any of his three siblings, had no relationship (at all) with his Father, was flamboyant and very social and couldn’t hold down any job for more than two years.
A Role Model of Stability, wouldn’t you say?
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Yesterday one of the few girlfriends that I still allow a relationship with, H, dropped by with a healthy Subway lunch. Despite being utterly flat out in her own busy life, she scrounged the hour to come and see me.
We barely had half an hour of quick ‘what’s happened this week’ exchanges, when an elderly ex-customer from my Purple Paper House days came to the front door.
Now I’m not proud to admit this, but FUCK! – I just wanted an hour with my friend without interruption – so we both just sat still and silent pretending noone was home.
This didn’t deter her!
She went around the back of my property and came in the back door. Fuck!
No hiding now.
So she came in and interrupted our afternoon and talked about herself , etc etc. H of course had to leave (school pickup) and so I was stuck. I’m a really crap liar so I couldn’t find a way to extricate myself from the situation 😦
In the end I just subjugated to her presence, got her a glass of water and offered her a seat. I listened to an hour of her and her husband’s health problems, her son’s love life and money woes, etc, etc. Then, without warning, she turned the conversation onto me and my love life (or lack of) asking where my boyfriend from two year sago was, where my other two (dead) dogs were, was I working, what about my family?
I wasn’t prepared for the constant peppering of questions, and subsequently became ’emotional’. Eventually I blurted out that my life sucked and I was only alive because I had to be.
She then proceeded to apologise, exclaim that it was unfair for me to have to stay alive because others said I had to and finally asked me what manner I had planned to use in case of suicide !!!
I then got a twenty minute run down of the safest ways to kill myself, that were painless and trauma-less (for me assumably). She gave me three solutions of suicide saying a number of time, “I probably shouldn’t be telling you this, but . . . “. I was also told that I could contact Dr Nietchke but would have to lie about being depressed and possibly my age as well.
I honestly didn’t know what to say. I was dumbstruck!
After she’d been here an hour, she decided to leave.
I felt like crawling into bed and never getting up again.
Ever!
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When you drop a raw egg, it’s not just the shell that breaks.
As the shards of the shell come to rest after a breakage, the real chaos and destruction becomes evident. The life-force of the egg, the yolk, is now compromised. It cannot be ‘put back together again’.
Despite decades of research, therapy and effort I now realise that I have been concentrating my efforts on putting back together my shell. The outer casing that is presumed to be the whole of the entity. I didn’t even think of the yolk.
And I’ve realised this truth, too late!
pialosophy 