3. May 2009 by gennyfer.

      The luster of the pearls caught my attention. They lay atop my mother’s dress shimmering slightly when she moved. To a two-year-old a pearl necklace looks like a toy, most jewelry does. I stretched out my tiny dimpled fingers, reaching for the pretty prize around my mothers neck. She brushed my hand away, told me “No.” I pulled my hand back but the lure of the pearls was too much for my toddler fascination. I reached out again and grasped the pearls in my delicate looking pudgy, surprisingly strong, babies grasp. I yanked on the strand, trying to bring it closer. The pearls flew apart bouncing all over the wooden floor, rolling everywhere I could see.

      This is just my imagining of the event. Having spent five full years of my life with one two-year-old after another I have some experience with how they explore their environment. I’m guessing I was not an especially precocious or out of the ordinary two-year-old. It’s likely that the way I was at two was similar to at least one of these five children I know so well. My imagined memory is probably close to the truth. I stop there because I do not want to imagine what happened next. If I dwell on it I shudder at the punishment I must have received for this single, very normal childhood misdeed. I do know that every significant misdeed, real or imagined, that my mother lectured me about from that point on, included a mention of the pearl necklace I ruined.

     When I brought home poor grades from school, “I should have known when you broke my pearls.” When I didn’t clean my room, it was just another validation about what she should have known after the pearls. When I was a freshman in high school, we got a series of prank calls. I got a serious lecture because I must have given my number to someone. She brought up the pearls. When mom passed away and we read her journal, sure enough the broken strand of pearls was spattered through her writing in the same way they must have spread across the floor.

Among her things, tucked away in her jewelry box, was a bag of pearls, mixed in with the threads that had once strung them together. In the same way that she held on to them in her mind for most of my life she held on to them physically. A simple, not premeditated, annoyance caused by a small child. A broken, easily restrung, pearl necklace.

     My husband and I were out a the monthly art walk held in Portland. We came across a crafter selling jewelry. She was chatting with us while casually stringing a pearl necklace. The simplicity of her actions struck me. Sometimes the things we dwell on are the easiest to fix. The walls we construct that imprison us, sometimes this becomes a life sentence, may be as small as a garden border. If we are willing to see them the way they truly are we could just step right over and be out in the world.

     This tale, my pearl of wisdom, is what makes me feel the most anger towards my mother. It hurt and carved away at my self worth growing up, this being in an endless “time-out”. At the same time this pearl necklace makes me the saddest for her too. What kind of prison is it to be mentally ill like that? How alone do you make yourself when you can not see past even the smallest faults of the people that love you? She was so achingly lonely, throughout her entire life. I wish that she had been able to heal in some way. My heart aches to think of all the joy she missed imprisoned by her mind.

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15. April 2009 by gennyfer.

The feeling of Friendship was near.

 But as always came The Great Fear.

 That old, old wall That is much too tall

 Would appear and say, “Now listen hear.

 ‘I’m right and you’re wrong.”

 Is such an old, old Song. and we must

 Remember

 We too belong in - it’s grip.

 For to Fight it would mean we must rip

 apart some walls.

 As soon as one of them falls it may mean that

 We might see

 And just possibly have to be part of a

 Sharing community.”

 The “great fear” freezes me. Resistance, (being uncomfortable) seems to be of help in the thawing process. It provides some type of reminder that it is possible to try – if only for a very brief glimpse. The image of thawing an iceberg comes to mind.

Occasionally there are reminders that it is important to acquire some knowledge: for example via Alchemy, astrology, Tarot - There is surface knowledge and there is a reflection of something deeper. “I” slows down now - Bawa’s letter must be read again and again as it is a strong reminder that provides the emotional center with some type of relief.

Glimpse of body neglect are strong, yet in a strong way they are ignored.

These seem to be my demons, Bawa, and this is only surface.

The opening prayer to God in our behalf. “You alone can bestow that Treasure of Peacefulness and Patience and Tolerance.”

Excerpt from a letter written to one of our Mother’s teachers from the late 1970s:

As a result of your brief mention of the Tarot cards, I am now pursuing the study once again. My task is to study three cards a day. About eight years ago I left the study of the cards, and now it seems that much of the information has dissipated. Consequently, it seems important to pursue the study once again.

Comments:

From Frank:

     I am sure all of you are nodding your heads in knowing agreement after reading this little excerpt from my mother’s notebooks. I imagine all of your parents were rigorous followers of some ancient Indian guru just like Bawa, and spent there down time every night pouring over Tarot card books and Astrology charts. That’s completely normal, right? What? What’s that, you say!?! Your parents didn’t do that? They didn’t constantly have some mystic teacher’s advice to follow. Some ancient form of divination to guide them through every decision in life, some weekend retreat to go off to and get that old timey religion? How could they make it through their lives without an I-Ching coin throw or a tarot card reading or an astrological chart to guide them? It just doesn’t seem possible to me.

     To say that my mother was not herself would be putting it mildly. My mother was always dedicated to someone else’s teachings, or readings, or influence. She would not, could not, make a decision or have an original thought on her own. Everything in her life had to be checked and double-checked with a teacher or a guru or the cards or the coins or the stars. In many of my mother’s notes there are I-Ching symbols written in the margins. She even needed some form of divination to confirm what she was writing for herself.

     Now I imagine, since we have established that perhaps all of you are not familiar with some of this whacked out stuff I am talking about, that you are scratching your heads right now, thinking, “What in the hell is an I-Ching coin toss, and who is this Bawa guy, really?” And didn’t she mention Alchemy? Most of that stuff you can look up on the internet pretty easily, although I would have to recommend Paolo Coehlo for the Alchemy part. As for Bawa (first up on google search), he was her first Guru, and also one of my earliest memories. I remember what a powerful man he was. He made quite an incredible and lasting impression on me.

     My mom had a definite way of finding very powerful masters. I think the frustrating part was that she was never satisfied. If one teacher didn’t give her the answer the way she wanted it, she would find another. The tarot cards not falling the way she wanted? Time to read her palms. Or consult another astrologist. Some of you might glance in the paper at your astrology for the week, or even get updates daily online. My mother took down over 60 pages of elaborate hand written notes on her last astrological charts. 60 pages! Here she was in her sixties, having done countless and extensive astrological charting in the past, still trying to make some sense of it all for herself. That was the problem with her. Enough was never enough. There was no end to it. There were never any answers to satisfy the hole in her soul. Something was disconnected deep inside her, and she was never able to make that connection. In the end, her life looked a lot like a crossword puzzle with a bunch of the letters still missing.

From Gennyfer:

I wonder if she wrote this poem about herself or if it was in frustration with someone else. If it was about her it was perhaps a glimpse she had into how closed off she was from other people. She was often part of spiritual groups. She fled from the values of her family that seemed materialistic to her yet it seemed to me that she never noticed while she was blithely wading in to the next spiritual discipline, that these groups were at least as flawed as the family she came from. She chose people to follow in an endless quest for self-improvement but what she really wanted was to be seen as special.

      She would join a group and maneuver herself in to a position of leading in some way. There never seemed to be relationships that were with people she saw as equals. She either followed or led. I don’t think she ever really experienced a “sharing community” even in one relationship. She was often unforgiving and would walk away from these groups and friends over small or imagined slights that would leave people who genuinely cared about her feeling hurt and baffled.

      She was intolerant of the messiness of life, she was afraid of the unexpected, terrified of making a mistake or being viewed as wrong. She consulted many divining tools through out her life. Tarot cards, the I-Ching, astrology were turned to again and again to explain anything that confused her and to help her make decisions. I never sensed that she felt she could control the events about which she sought foreknowledge. She just desperately wanted to know what was going to happen.

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15. March 2009 by gennyfer.

      Frank says I must write this next. His memories of this part were less clear. Somehow these events burned into my mind. This became a huge stumbling block on my healing journey.

      I don’t remember her name, except that it was beautiful. Her sister was a friend of a friend, whom, I suppose, suggested our home as a place to visit on her weekend furlough from a mental hospital. I suppose they have these weekends away to see how someone will do if released entirely. I don’t know if I knew before she visited us that she had been in the hospital. I think her sister brought her and stayed with us too but those details aren’t clear.

      I do remember that she spent most of her visit with Frank and me. She was ethereal, wonderful in my child point-of-view. She took a long walk with us along the creek that ran beside our town. I remember her telling us, as we stood beside the dam watching the falling water pool in a bubbly froth over the rocks at the bottom, that she thought waterfalls were the most beautiful things in the world. She told me, that she would name a little girl Cascade if she had one or, (and again my memory is fuzzy) that she had a daughter named Cascade. It was the only time I saw her sad that weekend, briefly talking about this real or imaginary girl. She threw off the sorrow, spread her arms wide and shouted “Cascade” a few times while twirling. At about 10-years-old I was just amazed by her.

      The weekend ended. I don’t know if it was that day or the next or even a few days later but it was that week when the call came. After returning to the hospital, she killed herself.

      Mom took us to the memorial service. On the way she talked to us about what had happened. She told us that the woman had killed herself because she had enjoyed visiting us and she knew she could never have a life a wonderful as ours. Before we reached the place where the service was being held, she drove us past the hospital and showed us the window she thought the woman had jumped from.

      I don’t know if there was a note, or if all this was just conjecture in my mother’s mind. It made an impression on me. I lived in such a strange form of hell as a child but was assured in this drastic way, that my life was wonderful, enviable enough that someone would die for lack of having what I had. I was devastated then, that I had somehow pushed this woman to her death. For years I couldn’t make sense of the bad parts of my childhood against this powerful picture. Somehow if I saw the bad, if I started to put the pieces together, I made her death worse, even, than it was. When I could no longer ignore the bad parts. When I matured enough to understand the abuse I had suffered I mourned her loss over again. The guilt I felt grappled for supremacy over the anger I felt toward my mother.

      For whatever reason the mind works the way it does, whether it makes sense or not, this was the hardest thing in my childhood for me to recover from. Though I’ve processed it over and over, trying to make sense of it, even now, the idea that someone died, because they envied my childhood life, makes me want to crawl in bed, pull the covers over my head, and pretend it was a good childhood. To somehow make her sacrifice worthy. Try as I may, I couldn’t possibly work that kind of magic. I hope, at least, that remembering this beautiful delicate soul, putting this in writing at last, will insure that wherever she is, she found the peace she sought.

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4. March 2009 by gennyfer.

     Damn. I have other things to do, other things to think about but it seems Frank shoved us in to food week. Used to be I was the pushy one. Is the following the strength you mean when you say how strong I am to have survived it all?

     It was liver for me too. I can’t think about the stuff without getting sick to my stomach. God forbid I catch a whiff. Sometimes even smelling beef frying in onions evokes a memory of the smell and I am drawn back. A Counseling & Human Services professor I had in college once told me that he saw forcing a child to eat something they despised was on the same level of sexual abuse. Forcing anyone to put something inside their body that they didn’t want is equally wrong he said. I don’t know about that, I don’t think it is quite the same and argued the point back then but reading Frank and Mary’s tales of our dinner table nightmares had me thinking about that debate. Perhaps my teacher was more right than I was.

     Sitting down together as a family is one of the top things parenting experts tout as being essential to raising happy well bonded children. I have been a mother for 16 years now and I’ve really tried to make this part of family life work. But I just can’t do it. I’ve noticed, living with my brother now that he can’t seem to sit and eat “en famille” either. He most often grabs a plate and wonders off to anther part of the house. I manage to stay in the room but rarely at the table.

     The dinner table was the major battle field in my childhood. Dinner was regularly taken away for poor behavior during the day, “off to bed without supper” became the replacement for the wooden spoons. I was a stubborn kid though. I tried, I really did, and there were times when I would choke down my liver (mom was sure we needed liver once a month or so, there were a lot of these nights). I’d slice a small piece and bury it in a forkful of mashed potatoes trying to figure out how to swallow it so I wouldn’t taste any of it. One night, I can’t remember why or when exactly, I just couldn’t bring myself to eat it. Dinner was over for everyone else and I sat, not allowed to leave the table without finishing my dinner, staring at the cold hated slab of liver. I was not going to eat it, somehow my line had drawn itself in the sand and I was going to win this battle, just this once.

     I sat at the table until bedtime. Probably two hours from start to finish. Finally my mother released me and sent me to bed. Hungry again. But I didn’t care, I felt triumphant. Until I came downstairs, ravenous for breakfast the next morning. The liver trauma shoved aside in my ADD haze. No thought to anything but the cereal I’d have for breakfast. I climbed up on the kitchen stool. Is at down to ready my bowl when mom swooped in and grabbed the cereal away from me. Stunned, I watched as she opened the refrigerator door. She pulled out my plate from the night before and set it in front of me.

     Cold liver for breakfast. I did not cry. I sat. It must have been a summer or weekend day because there was not a rush, no imperative to get anywhere. I sat. My mother eventually left the room. I crept over to the trash can, tilted my plate in and watched the liver slide in to a pile of coffee grounds. I pulled some other garbage on top of it to hide it. I guess I moved too fast. I didn’t think about how obvious it would be. After being so stubborn for so long there was no way my mother would buy that in the five minutes she was out of the room I’d gobbled up that piece of liver.

     The first place she looked was the trash. She dug that liver out of the garbage. Brushed a few of the grounds off and put it back on the plate back in front of me. I did not eat it. I sat for hours that morning, hungry, uncomfortable, miserable but unbroken. I don’t know how the story ended. I can’t remember the details. I don’t know if she verbally relented or just let it go. I know by this time she was getting a lot of flack from her parents about me possibly being anorexic. She may have felt compelled to ease off. All I know for certain is, on that day, I won. I have never, and will never eat liver again.

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25. February 2009 by gennyfer.

     I was following my husband out of the room after a fun filled family money discussion with Frank. We all live together with 6 children most of them mine. My back was to Frank when he said “Oh, I had a question for you?” Innocently I turned around. “Who was worse? Mom or our step-father?”

      My instant response, “You’re such an asshole.” I stood in the doorway looking at him, Forrest had stopped our exodus too and was standing behind me. “What kind of obnoxious question is that?” Really it’s like one of those Zobmondo questions where you have to chose between two equally noxious things. I hate that game.

      “Seriously, which one do you think was worse?”

      I hate to answer this question. Don’t think it hasn’t occurred to me before. I tend to fall back to over-analyzing things when I’m in a tough spot emotionally. “Well, mom was mentally ill and I guess you have to let some things go. There are some things she probably couldn’t be considered responsible for. But R. was a child molester, there is no excuse for fucking little girls. Accept doesn’t it kind of follow that someone who would even do that must have some kind of mental illness too?”

      My husband interrupted… “You aren’t seriously trying to stand there and make an argument that it was somehow OK because he was mentally ill?”

      “No,” I said, “Of course not. I don’t mean that. I’m just trying to figure out a way to explain it to you. After I told her, I was in 7^th grade when I told her he molested me.” I looked at my husband. “You know, I only ever told her because I wanted to protect Mary. I figured it I told her Mary wouldn’t have to go spend weekends with him anymore and I could be sure she was safe.”

      Frank cut in here, “You know statistically that doesn’t happen as much, the biological dad doesn’t go after his own kid.”

      “Of course I know that, now, I didn’t back then. She didn’t know. Shit. No one knew that. No one knew much about the subject then. Anyway, I told her, just to protect Mary, and you know how badly that went.”

      “Yeah” said Frank, “That was fucked up. You’ll have to write that one up for the website.”

      “So telling her was a big Fail. She blamed me and Mary kept having her weekend visits . Sometimes mom would even have me ‘entertain’ him when she couldn’t be back with Mary on time when he came to pick her up.”

      “What!” said my husband, “Entertain him? What the fuck?”

      “Well, yeah, I know I’ve told you this one before but you always block it out. Cause it sucks pretty bad. But she’d know she was going to be late so she would tell me I had to make coffee for him and keep him company until she got there.” I moved in to the room Frank was in.

      “I was terrified. I didn’t want to be breathing on the same planet with him let alone be all alone in a room, an empty house with him. So it went like this, I was alone in the kitchen with him, making coffee. He was across the room sitting at the table.” I moved to the desk in my brother’s living room and gestured to where Frank sat. “So I was here at the stove and he was about there where Frank is. I was making coffee. I was scared, really freaked out but knew I’d be in trouble if I was rude. So I was making coffee, like a good girl.”

      “But I wanted to be as far away from him as I could get while still obeying mom and I really didn’t want my back to him. So I did this”. I turned my back to my brothers desk and leaned back. “That was what I was doing when mom walked in. She did her long chat with him and then he took Mary away for the weekend. When they were gone mom railed at me, screaming about what a slut I was, for leaning back on the stove like that, deliberately showing off my body.”

      I walked back to the center to of the room. “So yeah, yes! I think she was worse than him. Fuck you for asking.”

      My husband decided we should decamp and head back to our side of the house as he was “Going to be sick now.”

      I said to Frank, “See! Now you made me make him sick. See you tomorrow. Dork.”

[Frank and I have communicated in this way for a long time. It’s such a harsh topic it is hard for me to convey in words that I wasn’t actually angry at him during this exchange, the name calling is just a reflection on our warped sense of humor. Without each other we would not have survived the childhood we got stuck with and I wouldn’t go back and change any of it if it meant not having him as a brother.]

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11. February 2009 by gennyfer.

What if everything your parents ever told you was a lie? Or at least so much was not true that nothing could be trusted?

When my mother was dying I stayed in her home with my one year old son.. The progression laid out to us was grim, pain, cancer spreading, it would end in her brain stealing her ability to communicate. There were reams of journals she had kept for fifty years. Alone at night while my son lay sleeping I started to read. My desperation ratcheted up and I careened from one journal to another desperate to find anything that would raise questions I’d want answered, questions only she could answer.

I started to piece together a portrait of a very lonely person. First. It seemed she had written versions of the same journal over and over. As if every decade she revisited the same spiritual crises without realizing she was repeating herself. Then I began to talk to my family about what I read, questioning what was going on with her.

I heard the story of my mother having polio at the age of three so many times I can add so many details. I guess these details would even make it easy for it to become my story but I understand it is not. That is the difference between the way my mother’s mind was and mine is.

She had polio and was paralyzed for a year before she recovered. During this time her sister would steal her bottles and when she recovered she had rickets and malnutrition. Or alternately her parents wanted her to die because she was inconvenient and were starving her.

None of this was true.

I presented the idea to my aunt that perhaps the polio virus had caused the mental instability, perhaps there was some connection between it and schizophrenia or whatever she had (she was never diagnosed so all this is parlor diagnosis). My aunt said “Gennyfer, she was never paralyzed. She had such a mild case of polio we thought it was the flu. We didn’t even know it was polio until she was recovered.” Imagine your mother telling you he same story about her childhood over and over until you could tell it word for word yourself. Imagine that this story became somehow archetypal, part of the structure of who you are and how the world works. And then suddenly it is not true.

But it wasn’t just this story. It was every story. Slowly I became more investigative than curious. I read to find the patterns in her stories. I wanted to understand some truth about my childhood to have some bedrock under me again. This is what I figured.

Someone would come in to her life. Some were impressive some mundane, I could not figure out why she chose the people she did to steal their particular stories. She met my godfather. He walked with a limp because of polio he had as a child. Suddenly, her brush with polio morphed in to a much bigger more interesting story. I wonder how long she told the story before she got enough practice to sound so sure and believable. Honestly, I don’t know what was wrong with her but I believe she didn’t realize the extent of her own lies. There were so many incidents that I began to piece together a time line in my head. The notes on a student who had been locked in a closet and traumatized by her parents were written around the same time she was “able to retrieve a repressed memory” about when her sister starved her and locked her in a closet.

There were these co-opted tale lies I’ve touched on, but we also uncovered so many other lies. The time from when she told me she was dying until a week after her death was short really. It didn’t seem that way at the time. I guess it was seventeen days. From that time two years ago the prevailing question that entered my life is this… “Who am I if everything I grew up knowing was a lie?”

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11. February 2009 by gennyfer.

Our mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer in September of 2006. Ten days later she passed away. During much of that short period of time I stayed at her house alone with my almost one year old son. In the evenings, I sorted through her papers and journals. At first, I read these things, while she was still alive, in a frantic desperation, a fear that I would find something I needed an answer to and only she would know the answer. I did reach that point eventually and it was too late. It may have been too late all my life.  My mother had been very mentally ill. My siblings and I had figured that some form of mental illness was plaguing her, but the extent, the depths, to which her disconnect from reality reached was staggering for us all.
In the week following her death, before her memorial service, in a stress filled fatigued processing of the initial shock of grief and the vertigo of learning so much of everything we had believed about our mother, ourselves, and the way the world worked was in some way fictional and wrong, we conceived of this sight. What, we asked ourselves, would we do with a lifetimes worth of journals? Would others appreciate or benefit from the insight we gathered during this bizarre time?

As a unit and individually, my siblings and I have survived a bewildering, painful, and abusive childhood. I suspect what carried us through, the branch over the quicksand, was and is our sense of humor. We had need of a place to explore what it means to grow up as a child with mentally ill parenting. With a great deal of compassion for others facing these same issues , with a better understanding of why it was hard to find our own places in the world, and with our indelible, irreverent sense of humor, Crazymom.com was born.

We intend this site to become a place where people can explore their own childhood experiences of parenting, comparing reality vs. crazy. Please check back soon for more features of the site. If you would like to receive an email to let you know about updates or if you have any suggestions for our site please let us know.

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