I talked to my therapist recently. More accurately: I cried to my therapist recently.
I started the session by saying I’ve been struggling a little bit with a couple of things, but succeeding in keeping my head above it. Then as I started talking, I realized, I’m not really succeeding in those. I’m barely treading water, sinking faster than I can kick my feet, and I want to just be able to swim.
As some or most of you may know, my mother died when I was little. I was seven years old when she left this earth. I was four when she got sick. So, between trips to the hospital and chemo appointments, and me not being able to remember the first 2-ish years of my life because I was a baby, I really only had 2 years worth of memories to build, and those same 2 years to form a relationship with her — as much as one can at that age.
As of April this year, she has been dead for 21 years, and I am 29 years old as of September. I have lived far more of my life without her than I did with her. She taught me how to read, how to tie my shoes, and how to respond to compliments (you’re supposed to say “thank you,” not “I know”), but I’ve learned so many more things without her aid than I ever did with her. I have no personal experience on which I can base any perception of what she was actually like as a person.
Most people find that sad. For me, though, it’s just a fact of life. I don’t grieve my mom’s death because she wasn’t really a part of my life. Sometimes I get sad when I imagine the best case scenario of what could have been if she had never gotten sick and died, but that’s always brief, and it doesn’t really matter, because that’s not the reality. It’s not sad to me; it’s just a thing that happened. I have a wonderful stepmom who has been my mom longer than my own biological mother was. I also had several amazing mother figures who stepped in to help raise me when my dad was struggling, before he met my stepmom. I have never lacked in that area.
The part that affects me is the fact that everybody else’s relationship with a person I never met has been looming over me this whole time
Growing up, my family pushed this idea of what my mom was on me. Up until a few years ago, she was an angel. A saint. A perfect deity who could do no wrong. She was a perfect mother, a perfect wife, a perfect person. Now that I’m an adult and I’ve put together small pieces of secondhand accounts of history, and I’ve decoded stories my family has told me, I find myself strongly doubting that.
From everything I’ve heard about my mom, she was a person influenced heavily by societal roles, gender norms, and the expectations placed upon her by the people around her. She was deeply flawed. She had issues and problems and things that she struggled with. Just like everybody else.
One innocuous thing that I know about her is that she really liked dolls. Last week, my dad and stepmom were cleaning out their storage room and found a bunch of her old dolls. My dad texted me a picture of them and asked if I wanted them.
The only memory I had of those dolls was the fact that I was too scared to play with them as a kid. Not because they were creepy, but because I didn’t want to ruin them. It was drilled into my head that they were special because they belonged to my mother. These were sacred objects; too important to be played with. So I kept them in my closet and never touched them.
I told my dad I didn’t want them.
He replied, “Nana made them for your mom.”
I felt the shadow of my mother fall over me again.
Hoarding is a genetic predisposition in my family. My great grandmother died when I was a teenager, and she left boxes and trunks full of stuff for the rest of my family to sort out. The mindset of the rest of my family is, if this was important enough to this person who is now dead to keep this whole time, then it has to mean something to me, because I am their family. There’s an obsession with heirlooms. Everything is an heirloom.
For a long time, I kept little trinkets and objects that belonged to my mother. I am also named after my great-great-great aunt, so my family assumes I want all of her stuff, too. I had a lot of things. Shelves full of them. Clothes that were my mom’s, ceramic dishes, little stuffed animals. Rocks. Shells. Pins. Jewelry. I only kept them because dead family members were kept on a pedestal as these perfect beings, and if these things belonged to them, I couldn’t just get rid of them. They were special to them, so they therefore had to be special to me.
We recently had a discussion with my grandfather over Zoom about his end-of-life plans. He said, “I don’t care what you do for a memorial, or how you want to dispose of my remains, because I will be dead already at that point, so it won’t matter to me.” The rest of my family seemed confused, but it made perfect sense to me. That moment unlocked something in my brain. Why do “heirlooms” matter to regular people if you never knew the person who owned it first? If it’s of historical significance, give it to a museum. You, the individual, do not have to keep it if it has no significance to you personally.
I used to be flattered when people compared me to my mom. “You look just like her.” “That’s totally something your mom would say.” “You got that from your mom.” I would be flattered because to me, that was like getting compared to Jesus. I wasn’t raised religious in the technical sense, but there was a pantheon of deities that was worshiped in my household. Just not one of the traditional ones.
I had a phase for a while where I craved uniqueness. I wanted nothing more than to stand out as my own person. I wanted to be different from others. At the time, I didn’t know why. I didn’t think it really needed a reason. But now I know. That was when I started to get tired of the constant comparison.
Throughout all of this, I also had a sibling with severe mental health and behavioral issues. Not only was I expected to be a carbon copy of my mom (or, more accurately, a carbon copy of the grandiose idealization of my mom), but I was also expected to be The Good Kid. I was supposed to be the stable, healthy, happy one that was quiet and that behaved, that was “an old soul” and responsible and smart and made prudent choices and stayed within the lines. My sibling used all the resources and bandwidth that my father had. The responsibility of everyone’s sanity rested on my shoulders for the majority of my formative years. If I wasn’t the rock, everything would fall apart and it would be my fault.
I was never allowed to just be a kid.
I also had a temperament that needed a lot more direction and outside structure than I had. My dad was relatively laissez-faire about his parenting style. Don’t do anything you don’t want to do, and stay away from things that will break the law or hurt yourself or others. Otherwise, do whatever you want. I didn’t have a lot of specific options laid out for me, so rather than going out and finding things to do, I didn’t really do anything at all. I watched a lot of TV and I played a lot of video games. I joined a youth community service group for girls in middle school because I had a friend who joined and I wanted to spend more time with her. It was what she wanted to do. It wasn’t what I wanted to do. And then, after I joined, all the younger girls looked up to me and leaned on me as a role model, so when the initial friend and I grew apart, I felt like I had to be there for everybody else. I served as president of my chapter for two separate terms because it was what was expected of me.
It was always just a fact that I was going to go to college right after high school. Nobody ever asked me if I wanted to, it was just assumed that that was the way it was supposed to happen. It wasn’t until high school that people started asking me what I wanted to go to college for. I didn’t have a solid, concrete answer for more than a few months at a time.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
When I was really little, my answer was always “everything”. I wanted to be a firefighter, and an astronaut, and a chef, and a farmer, and a mom all at the same time. After I learned that that’s pretty much impossible, I always answered with a shrug. The answer was intangible and not consciously known to me at the time, but it was that I wanted to be a better person than my sibling, I wanted to be someone that my mom would be proud of, and most of all, I wanted to make everyone happy.
In eighth grade, I thought I had it nailed down. I wanted to go to Oxford to study psychology. The problem with that was the fact that I wasn’t motivated to succeed in anything other than psychology specifically. My grades slipped because I never did my homework — not because it was too hard, or because I didn’t understand the material, but because I didn’t want to. My parents told me, “You’re not going to get into Oxford with Cs and Ds.” I shrugged and said, “Okay.” Guess I won’t go to Oxford, then.
I wanted to be a historian until I flunked AP World History. I wanted to be a musician until I discovered I didn’t care for writing poetry. I wanted to be a YouTuber until I realized I don’t like constantly being in the public eye. I wanted to be a photographer until I had clients who didn’t have the same artistic sense and didn’t appreciate my work. I wanted to be an author until I found out I had to constantly force the words out onto the page with no breaks and write at a greater quantity than I was able.
It’s really apparent that something went wrong somewhere when the hyperlexic kid fails English 101 three times.
“But you’re so smart!”
Am I? Because I know a lot of words? Because I know what people want me to say, so I’m good at testing? Because I’m a talented mimic?
I’m “smart” because my mom wanted me to be. I’m “strong” because my dad needed me to be. I’m “resilient” because I had to be under my specific circumstances, otherwise things could have gone horribly wrong and I would have lost everything.
I’m not strong; I feel things deeply and it affects me severely. I’m not resilient; I’d rather lie down and take abuse than inconvenience someone else. And “smart” is a debatable, nebulous term that has a lot of aspects and facets. People just think these things are true of me because I play the part. I seem smart because I use big words. I seem strong and resilient, because I don’t tell people when I’m struggling. I see my struggles as personal failings, because why would someone as strong and resilient as I am, as I am supposed to be, struggle?
So I push away anything that makes me uncomfortable and anything that questions the identity that I have spent my whole life building, all so that I can be a person that somebody I never knew could be proud of. And I’ve gotten so good at avoidance that I have trouble identifying when I’m struggling. I don’t know what it looks like to struggle until I’m curled up in the fetal position having a panic attack because I feel like everything is falling apart and I can’t control anything and I’m failing at the role I’m supposed to play so I don’t know who I am anymore and it’s all my fault. I’m supposed to be a person that can roll with the punches and take anything that’s thrown at me. So why can’t I do that anymore?
Well, if you carry a certain amount of weight for a long time, and the weight keeps building and getting bigger, your legs will give out eventually. You just stop being able to carry all of it.
The answer isn’t to give up. The answer is to reassess. How much of this weight is necessary? How much of it is old garbage I don’t need anymore? And, the most difficult question for me, but perhaps the most important: How much of this can I get help carrying from someone else who is willing?
“Nana made them for your mom,” my dad said about the dolls he found in storage.
I said, “Nana can have them if she wants them. I don’t need more stuff.” What I didn’t say was, there’s no room in my house for them, and there’s no room in my life for them.
He said, “Point taken.”
I told a close friend of mine about how I was feeling, and they told me to look up the term parentification.
I’ve always felt like nothing ever belonged to me, really. Not even medical diagnoses. Most of the time, I meet up to maybe 90% of the criteria, at the absolute maximum, for any diagnosis, and I find a lot of community with people who actually have them, but there’s always a part of it I don’t have and can’t relate to. AuDHD. Hypermobile Ehler’s-Danlos. Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. OCD. Even physical traits and identities. I’m definitely not blonde or a redhead, but I’m definitely not brunette. I’m not skinny or fat. Short people say I’m tall, tall people say I’m short. My sexuality is fluid. I'm definitely a woman when I’m around men, but if you put me in a room with people who identify as women, I feel like I don’t belong there either, like something is fundamentally different about me.
But then I looked up parentification. And for the first time, everything made sense.
It’s not my dad’s fault that I took on all the responsibility of raising myself. It’s nobody’s fault, really, it’s just the way the cards fell. I’m one of the luckier parentified people, because I only had myself to raise, and I didn’t have any younger siblings. But I did feel as though I bore the brunt of everyone’s emotions. I was the family therapist. I was a therapist for my friends. And all I got was a school counselor trying to coach me through grieving my mom when that wasn’t the worst of what was happening.
I couldn’t tell anyone I was struggling, because I didn’t think I was. I thought it was just life. I thought it was a normal thing for “good” people to do to listen and give advice and bear the weight of human suffering. I would get random allergic reactions and psoriasis and eczema breakouts and my weight would fluctuate and I would have delusions and crying outbursts and nightmares and hallucinations. When I got x-rays before I had braces, my orthodontist pointed out the fact that somehow, I had both an overbite and an underbite on top of my crossbite; my jaw was shaped to have an underbite, but I clenched my teeth so much from stress as my adult teeth were growing in that the bottom teeth were tilted backwards and my top teeth touched my bottom gums. People would ask me what was wrong, and I couldn’t articulate what was actually wrong, so they would assume I was grieving my mom. I assumed I was also grieving my mom. People would tell me grief is weird and manifests itself in strange ways. Maybe it does. But it doesn’t come from nowhere. It’s disproportionate that I only had that two years of really knowing my mom and now that she’s been gone for 21 years, I’m still feeling the same grief.
I’m not. Not really. That’s not what’s affecting me the most. Yes, I lost my mom at a young age. I didn’t lack the presence of a mother figure, though, so it really didn’t make a difference to me. I was sad about it for a while, but my life went on and the world kept turning and I’m here now and I don’t know any different. My mom’s death isn’t a major factor in my life. It was an event by which I defined myself for a long time, but that's about it.
For the people around me, though, it was a different story.
I’ve been told a lot, by medical professionals even, how I should feel about certain things. For example, I went to the emergency room recently for severe lower abdominal/uterine pain, and the (male) doctor got paid $1,700 by my insurance company to look at my chart and talk to me for five minutes to tell me that I had a “small” ovarian cyst but that I "shouldn’t" be in that much pain.
But I am, I thought. So what are you, the medical professional, going to do about it?
As a child, I was coached through feelings before I could have them or express them. The adults in my life were scared that I could end up like my sibling, and so they tried to nip all that in the bud by telling me how to feel and how to express myself. I was asked to draw how I felt a lot.
I would often end up with crayons or colored pencils in front of me and a blank piece of paper. Because that was it. It was nothing. I felt nothing. I couldn’t explain it using words at the time (or images, for that matter), but it was an accurate portrayal of my feelings.
“It’s okay, draw whatever comes to mind," the counselor would say, thinking that I was afraid or nervous to draw. "It doesn’t have to be perfect.”
I would look at the paper for a minute, and then sit back in my chair, signaling that I was finished.
“That’s okay, sometimes sadness can feel like nothing.”
The only thing I can recall drawing in those situations was when I was around 15 years old in a counseling session. I picked up the pen and drew a torso of a person, then inside of the torso, I drew a big cage with a tiny person crouching inside of it. I still didn’t know how to describe that feeling at the time, but that was also accurate.
That counselor asked me, “Is there a lock on this cage?”
I said, “Yes.”
She then asked, “Where’s the key?”
And I answered, “I don’t know.”
~*~
I’ve been writing this same post for several weeks now. As of today (the day this is posted), my grandfather who discussed his end-of-life plans over Zoom with the family has passed away, and two weeks ago, on Saturday, my husband’s grandfather also passed away.
Earlier in the day, on my lunch break, I was texting back and forth simultaneously with my father and my husband. My father was telling me that the whole family was visiting my grandfather today in the hospital, and that things looked grim. He was most likely not going to last the rest of the day, let alone until Saturday, which was when I was planning to pay him a visit. My husband was (is) very broken up over the fact that he did not get much of a final goodbye with his grandfather, and so he was encouraging me to take off work and go see mine.
I had a thought:
I work in childcare with infants as my day job. I love my job. Things about the corporate structure and my coworkers and the children’s parents annoy me every single day, but the passion is definitely there. I considered going to a hospital an hour and a half drive away from where I was right then just to watch someone I know and love wither away and die while my whole family grieves and cries around me. Then I considered going back inside, hanging out with a bunch of babies that I also know and love, surrounded by happiness and laughter and nurturing young lives while they grow at their most vulnerable stage.
I knew instantly which one I would rather do.
I told my husband, quote: “I realize it makes you sad, the idea of not getting a final goodbye with a loved one. But like. My family is so much more blase about death. I’m ok with it. If it doesn’t work out [that I get to go see my grandfather in the hospital], it doesn’t work out.” I followed it up later, after a couple more back-and-forth messages, with, “Imma be real frank with you my love, I’ve been told my whole life how to grieve. I don’t need you to continue to tell me how to grieve.”
Several hours later, I read the text message from my father announcing the death as I was walking across the parking lot to my car after work. He knows that I have to keep my phone in my locker, so news is usually broken over text.
I was fine.
I called my husband. We were both driving; he was going way up north to stay at his mother’s house for the night so that he could see his dentist in the morning for an appointment (I’ve asked him why he doesn’t get a new dentist closer to home. He says, “I like my dentist.”) and I was driving home from work. We talked a lot on the drive home, about many different things. For perspective, I live almost an hour away from my place of work.
My dad called me while I was still on the phone with my husband, when I was about about five minutes away from home.
I have not witnessed my dad cry very often. But he was audibly sniffly. He started laying out in detail the events leading up to the death, and that’s when it started to crash down for me.
I got off the phone with him right as I pulled into my driveway. I brought in all my things, put them down where they go, and went to the bathroom to change out of my work uniform and into my comfy clothes.
I snapped out of a dissociative state lightheaded and dizzy, half-undressed with my work shirt in the bathroom sink and my pants halfway down my legs. This was not how my after-work routine usually went. I was confused as hell. I didn’t know what was going on or what I was feeling or how I had even gotten here from the living room. Then, it occurred to me.
This is what grief feels like.
Real, actual grief.
Something they don’t tell you in counseling about "the five stages of grief" is that it’s not really five clear-cut stages with neat labels and set durations. Grief can’t be boiled down to that. It’s its own phenomenon, more than a simple, describable emotion. It makes you feel like someone else. It makes you feel like a vulnerable, squishy, fallible human, an animal, a monster even, and it is the best feeling in the world to feel it for the first time in your adulthood, when you’ve only watched everyone around you feel it for themselves up until that moment.
It makes you feel so deeply, primally, viscerally, alive.
I sat down on the floor where I was previously standing and I sobbed and I cried and I lost my mind, and it felt so amazing. I was finally feeling something by myself, for myself, without anybody else’s influence.
On the outside, I’m sure I did not appear to be okay. Anybody witnessing my breakdown would have attempted to stop it. But I didn’t want it to be stopped. I wanted to finally feel this mythological thing that I’ve been attempting to hunt down and pathologize for practically my whole life.
And that, friends, is an appropriate bookend to this saga. If you take anything from this, let it be that it feels so much better to let yourself feel how you actually feel than to let someone else tell you what you’re feeling. Letting other people put a label on it, diagnose it, medicate it, can be detrimental.
Of course, if the medication helps you, take it, and get whatever diagnosis you need to convince the stuffy men in suits behind the desk of your health insurance company that you need it. That’s fine.
But you’re so much more than what other people say you are. In fact, you’re probably much more than what you describe yourself as. There may even be more to you than you realize at all. There doesn’t have to be a word for it. You are you. Unfathomable. Indescribable. Just you. That’s enough, and that’s okay.
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