My step-father had surgery scheduled to have cancer removed from his lung.  It was supposed to be sometime in the next few weeks.  However the hospital had an opening and my step-father elected to go in earlier.
I did not receive a call.
Not a one.
My brother called me.  He had asked my parents if they had called to let me know and my step-father said, “Oh yes.” My mother in her grating irritated voice told him, “I’ve handled it.”
To be sure my brother called…
I called the hospital the day after the surgery…
My mother answered the phone, “Hi mom, is dad there or in a test?”
“Hello Theresa,” rumbled out of her throat and through her clinched teeth.  Then…”I can’t get the phone to him.”
Now what I thought was, I have logged more hospital hours than you could ever dream possible with my two sons that have Spina Bifida, never saw a room yet that the phone didn’t reach the bed.  So give him the phone!  Instead I said puzzled and mildly questioning as if to infer she was lying, “You can’t reach the phone to him?”
No answer, instead I heard rattling sounds and the distant voice of my step-father, “Can you hear me?”
“Barely but it’s enough,” I said.
Then he repeated the question and it was a bit closer.
“A little better, it’s okay don’t worry…”
Then… crystal clear, the phone was up to his mouth and through tremendous strain and pain he said, “Hi Theresa.  I’m really glad you called.  I’m in a lot of terrible pain.  But I’m going to get through it.  I’m going to give the phone to your mother.”
As fast as I could I said, “Dad I want you to know I love you and I’m pray…
“
Then, rattle, rattle, clunk.  The phone was returned to it’s cradle as if dropped from three feet up.

More punishment.

Why do I tell you this experience and the one I told yesterday?  Because it has always been my policy to be open and honest with you.  The same applies with this.  I want you to get a “fly on the wall” unveiled honest perspective of what’s been happening.  Also, what I’m going through since the !BLAM! of my parents and to let you know my “maskless,” raw gutted responses…
There have been two (well three really, blogged about that before: click here and here for those posts):
1)  My initial response to the card (yesterday’s post) and the call was anger and hurt.
2) It took me about an hour or two to climb on top of those emotions both times.  To pull back and remember, what I knew going in, that my parents are doing the best they can and they always have.  But I’m not going to sit here and lie to you and say I waved my hand and said, “Phish, hey it’s okay, not a problem I knew to expect this.  This has been their history and really, my parents are just doing the best they can.  I know that my step-father had a horrible, frightening childhood since he told some about it and my mother, although she claims to having a Disney childhood, has all the earmarks that that is anything but the truth.  People don’t get the way she is for no reason, we are all products of our environment… Soooo, they’re doing the best they can.”

Honestly I wish I could say that that was my immediate reaction.  I wish that all my healing had rendered me to that level.  But it hadn’t.  My humanity and the child that is still in me took over.  More about that tomorrow…

Night, love ya,
Theresa Jane

Thoughts since the !BLAM!…

A great metaphor for the forgotten child.

!BLAM!ming my parents was one of the best things I’ve ever done.  I feel so different inside.  I’m experiencing transformation daily.  I let my parents know that I was a forgotten child in all their violence, drama, and destruction.  And I did it calmly.  No screaming, no yelling, no my parents yelling back…  I let them know in a controlled, clear adult manner that what they did effected me.  That I’ve never stood up and said.  I had always basically summarized: “You and dad were terrible.  You were out of control…”  This time I let them know what they did hurt.  How I felt.  How I was effected.  That I remember what they did to each other and me.  It was REAL.  It happened.  It destroyed me.  I’m tired of it not being acknowledge and them expecting me to just go on as if, to quote my mother, “We were just a family who had problems”.   Good God, it was more than that.

I grew up in that mess.  I was a child.  I had to find a way to survive.  Through my private sessions with my couch/therapist… I discovered that I never came out of survivor mode.  Possibly the best way to describe it would be to say, I functioned like a vet who suffers with post war trama: flashbacks/jumpy/edgy/suspicious/on alert/ready to protect and defend…

Not me. Just a great pic for here

I have lived on “survive mode” since I was a child.  It has only been until the last 7-8 months that I can say I am finally, really, really coming out of that state.  Out of the “training” I went through at home, when I grew up and my brain was forming.  The way I processed life, my psychological state of being, formed and letting that go and even seeing some of it was a very difficult thing to do.  A very tough row to hoe.  Those ways of being were what allowed me to survive what I lived through.

Letting go took two things: A committed couch who wouldn’t give me any way out and my unwavering commitment… leaving appointments with swollen red eyes or swearing a sailors stream of cus when it came to the session I just left, “what did that son of a bitch know about anything…”

Since leaving home I have searched for my healing.  Tried many things.  So I could live normally.  Feel normally.  Like other people.  It wasn’t until 6 years ago this January 2nd that I really found the source of my healing.  That’s when I found my life couch and he had a system (birthed from the book he had been writing: Red Book and Cotton) and through it I found the way out.  However it’s taken a lot of work and it wasn’t until the last 7-8 months that I can I say I have had the earth shattering break throughs that could allow me to say, “Now I’m really starting to live my own life.  I feel it.  I see it.  The lingering effects are falling off in chunks… finally.”

That’s not to say that through the years I haven’t seen major changes in my life, emotions, reactions, how I deal with life around me.  It’s just to say that all that work finally added up to the “Wow” I see and feel in me today.  And the !BLAM! rocketed me.

I know I’m not done.  I have more work to do.  And I will, “Sell all I have in search of the pearl of great value”…that being my wholeness.  I have to be whole.  I have to feel like a confident adult who has value and worth.  I have to be happy from the inside and not from what happens on the outside to “make” me happy…  So I’m not stopping…

Love ya,
Theresa Jane
-if you are clueless about what I’m talking about when it comes to what I did when I !BLAM!med…

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3dcbzTwu7Y&hl=en_US&fs=1&]