I'm not afraid of my father anymore

This post was a long time coming. And if you've watched the news in the last 24 hours, you'll understand why I finally picked today to write it. Back to your regularly scheduled un-hoarding tomorrow.

This post is about violence and the importance of mental health care. There is not much about hoarding here and nothing about decluttering. I would say that if this upsets you, don't continue reading. But in fact, if you feel that way, I want you to continue reading. Actor Patrick Stewart has seen violence first-hand and made the point better than I ever could:

"People will not talk about it. Victims will not talk about it. Those who are perpetrators of the violence will not seek help...but the only reason that I am striking my match is that hopefully by illustrating what it has been like to be in an environment of such violence, that it can pass, and that one can survive it...and lead a life with out violence...Darkness is the friend of repression and cruelty...Only by talking about these experiences can one help to expose them."

~

For a while I've mulled over the question of "What happens when my mother finds my blog?" because I'd be a fool to think that she'll never find it. It won't destroy her, but she'll be extremely upset by it. And I don't think that's a bad thing.

When I struggled most with my eating disorder, I wish someone had exposed me, instead of 10 years passing before I finally was too miserable to keep going. I wish someone had upset me, I wish someone had taken me by the shoulders and screamed "you don't have to live like this!!" I wish someone had told me that there was help, and that I could get it. The worst moments of my eating disorder made me feel like there was a demon in my head, controlling me. It is scary to live in your own head when you have mental health problems. And that makes it scary for the people around you. Mental health interventions can save life and limb. I've seen it first hand.

Growing up, my parents fought a lot. My father was prone to rages, particularly road rage. When I was six someone cut him off in traffic. He lost it. Tailgated the guy until we passed the police station and he tore into the building in an absolute rage with me in tow, screaming and flailing at the police officers to do something. One of the police officers took him away into another room while a lady police officer picked me up and carried me around to try to calm me down. Because by that point I was bawling from fear of my father. My father didn't give damn about me. A police officer I'd never met cared more about me in that moment than he did. When we finally got home, my mother told me to brush it off.

Fast forward ten years and my father's rages had worsened. I woke up many Saturdays and Sundays of my teenage years because my parents were screaming at each other in the kitchen downstairs. But by 16 I'd gotten pretty sick of it. One Sunday I walked into the kitchen, went about my business, and in the process of avoiding my father I knocked a coffee cup off the counter. He lost it. I tried to keep going about my business, turning to get something from the freezer. But as I reached in, my father slammed the door on my hand. Now, remember that my parents are hoarders and that the freezer was overly full. Something sharp cut my hand open. I stood in the kitchen watching blood drip onto the floor. My father at this point had now grabbed the keys to the car and was running out of the house, blaming everything on my mother and swearing he was going to divorce her, as was his MO. My mother chased after him, determined to get him back. I needed stitches but I never got them because she was too busy chasing after him and was too afraid to admit what happened. I had to go to school the next morning with my hand bandaged up in an ace bandage, and the truth bandaged up in a lie about slipping with a knife while cooking. When my mother finally came back (my father re-appeared later), her only response was, "he didn't mean it." I still have the scar on the palm of my right hand.

Not the one my father wielded though it looked the same.
Ironic how it was supposed to prevent crime instead
of being the instrument of it.

But left unchecked my father's rages became dangerous to people outside of our family. Two weeks after I graduated from college my family was going to the movies. My father was driving because my mother was too afraid to drive with him in the car. Someone cut my father off in traffic and as expected he broke into a rage. At the next stoplight he stopped the car, grabbed the "club" that he kept in it because he was paranoid that someone was going to steal the car, and ran over to the door of the guy who cut him off. He brandished this piece of 1/2" thick steel  as though he were going to break this other guy's window and then attack him. In the middle of four lanes of traffic I bolted out of the car. And I ran. Because I was now absolutely certain that my father was capable of murder. He had put a potentially lethal weapon in his hands and had lost control to the point that he was willing to use it against another human being. And in that moment I realized that one day, if I wasn't careful, the one who would end up dead would be me. So I ran.

I ran two miles to the house of a friend whose mom was a lawyer. I wanted a restraining order against my father.  She did an excellent job of concealing any shock she felt, saying only, "I knew your dad had problems. But I never knew it was this bad." It was a very telling statement.

She told me that unfortunately the particulars of the law meant that I couldn't get one, since I wasn't the one he tried to get at. However, I could try to get him prosecuted on assault charges. Even though he didn't make contact with anyone, "assault" is apparently considered just the intent to injure.

By this point my mother had found me. I told her that my intention was to prosecute. She burst into tears and begged me not to. I gave her another choice: divorce him, or get him evaluated and treated by a psychiatrist. Or I was never coming back to that house again. She couldn't decide. She went home and brought me a duffle bag of clothes.

I lived out of that bag for the entire rest of the summer, sleeping on friends' floors until I finally was able to get a job and housing at the college I'd just graduated from. My boss later described me as "begging" for a job, my desperation obvious.

By the end of the summer my mother was begging me to return home. My father now had a diagnosis and was being treated with psychiatric medication. Unfortunately it was prescribed by our general practitioner, because he refused to see a psychiatrist. He also wasn't doing any type of talk therapy, which concerned me because there's strong research evidence people with serious mental health issues do better when they have medication and talk therapy together than with either treatment alone. But my housing at the college was ending and I had spent away all of my college earnings on crap. I had no money and I had to return to my parents' home.

It was strange the next time I saw him nearly fly into a rage. Something trivial happened that was a typical trigger for him. I started to see him stiffen up as usual. But then I saw something very strange in his eyes. It was like he knew something was supposed to happen next, like he was supposed to do something next. But he didn't know what it was. There was no rage at the end of this.  I was safe.

This is NOT to say that medication fixes everything. I did see rages again from my father, including one bad enough during a visit to my place in DC that I kicked him out and sent him and my mother packing back to Philadelphia on the next train. I issued another ultimatum at that point: they both needed to start seeing a psychologist in addition to the medication. I wasn't putting up with this anymore now that I was on my own.

Three years later, my father is a completely different person. He's obviously committed himself to therapy at this point and even admitted that it probably saved his life. And I believe that. And I thoroughly believe that it may have saved mine. I'm not afraid of him anymore. I'm also not stupid enough to believe that that part of him isn't still deep inside somewhere, and that for my own safety I still need to be mindful of my father's behavior.

My father never laid a hand on my mother. And perhaps that's why my mother still sticks her head into the sand. "It's not abuse because he didn't mean it."

No, mom, it is.

Many times we are afraid to speak out when we know someone is violent or has violent tendencies. We cannot afford to do this. Because when these people are left to continue their behavior their behavior only gets worse. If someone had forced my father into treatment, I probably wouldn't be showing you this.

Amazing how a cut so small could bleed so much.

So much of the violence in our society could be stopped or prevented with adequate mental health care. And with a culture that encouraged people to get help for their mental health problems. Because it is a nightmare living in a mind with a mental health problem. My father must have been miserable for those 60 years of his life. My mother I'm sure is still miserable. 

So speak out. Get help for those you know suffer with mental illnesses. For the people who have intensely erratic and dangerous behavior. Because more people than you know depend on it. 

Thank you, Dad, for getting help. I'm so very proud of you. 

Mom, I know you hoard because of what we endured together.  I know how miserable this feels. Please get help. Please. 

~

As for me, I'm a lot better than I was. I've even come to realize that being forced out of the house right after college opened an opportunity for me. You see, the job that I begged for was at my college library. I had never wanted to be a librarian but my boss very quickly saw that I enjoyed the work I was doing and that I was good at it. For the entire second half of the summer, every day she would say, "are you sure you don't want to be a librarian?" And what do you know, by the end of the summer I had applied to library school. Which led to an internship at a medical library, which then led to a fellowship at a bigger medical library, which led me to my permanent job in DC and the wonderful life I have here. You may not be faithful, and that's fine. But for me this was definitely a time when God may have closed a door, but he opened up a window for me. 

Mental HELLth problems

This post is a vent. It's pent-up stress released in words. 

If you don't like reading about other people's emotions, you may want to skip this post. 

I'll return to my regularly scheduled un-hoarding tomorrow!

I learned the hard way that there is no shame in having a mental health problem. There is no shame in getting help for it. There is shame in avoiding treatment, and making your friends and relatives' lives miserable. There's a reason that Alcoholics Anonymous's 8th step is make a list of all persons we have harmed and make amends. Mental health problems hurt. Hoarding hurts. Eating disorders hurt.

But does it work the other way? What about the people who hurt us? The people who hoard? The people who got violent and slammed our hands in freezer doors when we spilled coffee? The people who told us we were fat and made oinking noises when we would eat at dinner?

This weekend, the husband and I found out that we each have family members with cancer who likely only have a very few months to live. In my case, it's my paternal grandmother.

I've always had a tenuous relationship with her. She blatantly ignored my father's mental health issues and never did anything more for him than suggest that he "control his temper." At holiday dinners growing up she would make oinking noises in my direction while I ate but in the same breath would tell my sister to eat more. She constantly openly insulted my mother for having a messy house, for not being a better wife (to a guy who constantly threatened to leave her after he'd throw objects around the house?!), for marrying my father in the first place. She was the one who taught my father that overweight women were disgusting, worthless creatures. Given that my mom was overweight and I was getting there by the end of high school, my therapists and I acknowledge that she played a role in my eating disorder.

Yes, my mom has problems. But she needs help, not insults. And I didn't need to hear those insults either. I didn't need oinking noises to tell me how fat I was, I needed someone to show me how to eat normally. I've always desperately wanted a good relationship with my grandmother, but every time I tried, I got hurt.

But right before the husband and I got married,we had some serious problems because of how involved his mother was in our wedding. I'll skip the details, but what she did bordered on sabotage on more than one occasion. She wanted her son to marry an nice Jewish girl, and this little German Lutheran girl just wasn't going to work for her boy.

Grandmom was the one who convinced me to stay.

Grandmom had gone through the same thing when she married my grandfather. They ended up eloping and it worked out well in the end, but for many years she was deeply despised by her in-laws and shunned by her own parents. In a way I owe my wonderful marriage to her.  She taught me to cook; she taught me about style and interior design...about having a household budget and working hard to move out of the socio-economic class you grew up in. I love that. Those things are important to me.

*That* relationship is the one I wanted to have with her all the time. But I last spoke to her over a year ago, and I had to hang up the phone crying because I couldn't take the hurtful words she kept dishing out about my mother. I'd begun therapy at that point and I realized that she was a "toxic" person in my life, someone who was not helping in my recovery. I haven't talked to her since.

Grandmom's not going to change. She's 91. She's mellowed substantially to my mother because my mom is her primary caregiver. I realize that time is running out and I just have to swallow my pain on this one. She's not going to change and I'm strong enough and sensible enough to ask her to change topics when she gets insulting, and to realize that her opinions are not the truth.

Maybe that's part of recovery. Maybe that's what I have to be thankful for this Thanksgiving. She can spout her insults, and those are her truths. But they don't have to be mine. I've learned more about letting people's insults go because I've been forced to deal with her insults along with her ... dare I say it?... love. I am so afraid of getting hurt emotionally when I see her this week. But it's time for me to move on from the hurt in the past, and take advantage of what time is left.