What we give our attention to - stays with us. What we let go of - will let go of us.
Cat Forsley
The pink snowsuit my father's parents got me for my second Christmas
My mother's youngest sister died Friday. In January, her oldest sister died. Both deaths rocked my world. My aunts were potent symbols of a childhood world where I felt safe and loved. I was the third grandchild in my mother's large family and the first grandchild in my father's smaller family. In my father's family I was spoiled, no doubt about that. At Christmas, I was showered with presents. My mother's parents couldn't afford to be so generous with things, but they more than made up for it with people. Their house overflowed with people and there were no strangers in that small rural community where my mother grew up. Most people knew my name and, if they didn't, all they had to do was ask my mother's name, and then they knew who I was. I loved that sense of belonging.
Me in Kentucky with one of my uncle's dogs, circa 1955 (personal collection)
I felt safe and loved at my grandparents' houses. My own home was sometimes full of fighting. My parents were young and when I was born my father was patrolling the DMZ in Korea. When he got home, adjusting to each other and a new baby created tension and fighting. The fighting frightened me. And that's why I felt safe with my grandparents.
I loved visiting my father's parents where I was the center of attention. I remember Grandma asking me what I'd like for lunch; I always asked for the same thing: Campbell's Cream of Chicken Soup and a peanut butter sandwich made with Skippy's peanut butter. Afterwards, if I'd been good I could go to the cookie drawer and get a cookie. Sometimes, I spent the night and Grandma would tuck me in and tell me, "Nightie, night." Grandma taught me how to play cards and we played game after game of War. When I turned eight, my grandparents got me a record that played, "Happy Birthday to you/Happy Birthday to you/Happy Birthday, dear Angela/Happy Birthday to you." I still have that record. It's bent after all these years and I have no way to play it, but I keep it in a box with other treasures and sometimes I take it out and think about what it was like to be a beloved grandchild. (photo above, me and my father's mother, circa 1955)
My mother's house was a busier place. I rarely had my grandparents full attention and that was just fine because the house was full of uncles: my mother's four youngest brothers. We sometimes played Chinese checkers together and hung out together and sometimes, because they were teens after all, they loved to tease me. Once my Uncle Sam scared me with a devil's darning needle, a kind of walking stick that was actually harmless. Best of all, was when my uncle Clifton, the tallest of my mother's brothers, would lift me up on his shoulders and I felt like I could touch the sky. (photo: Clifton and me, circa 1962)
When we went to Kentucky, we were "going home," or "down home." My mother took me there for the first time when I was only six weeks old because she wanted her family to see me "real bad." The house was full of people, including my ailing great-grandfather.
We went to Kentucky every summer. My grandparents would be waiting in the front yard when we drove up and my grandmother would always say the same thing, "I looked for y'all to come today," and fold us into her arms. My grandfather was quieter, but, in his own way he welcomed us too. My grandfather died when I was 12 and, after that, us girls slept in grandma's room. I loved her room. It had a screen door that opened onto the front porch and lots of windows and even in the Kentucky heat, it was cool and comfortable. Grandma would tell us stories as we were falling asleep and after her voice stopped, I could hear the whip-poor-will calling from the woods across the road.
On the day we left, Grandma would give my mother a jar of her homemade strawberry jam and they would hug and then we would get in the car and my father would back down their red clay driveway to the road and head north.
What's the take-away from all of this? For me, these good memories gave me something powerful to hold onto. The love I found with my grandparents and my mother's family, helped me weather the terrible times after I lost my daughter. Was my childhood happier than other people experiencing similar trauma? Maybe not. What matters, according to an article in Psychology Today, was what I felt about my childhood. Those happy memories gave me resilience. That reminds me of my Kentucky grandmother and her hollyhocks. Every year, my grandmother would plant flowers and every year her chickens would scratch them out. The only flowers that survived were the hollyhocks. Hollyhocks grew at the back of the house and I can picture them now: resilient flowers that were strong, beautiful, and chicken-proof.
In other ways, however, my childhood was no bed of roses. (More on the vulnerabilities and losses of childhood and how they relate to trauma in my next post.) Meanwhile, here is a song that expresses the bittersweet feeling I have about losing my aunts. Bitter because so many of the people I love are now dead. Sweet because when I hear this bluegrass tune, for a few precious moments I'm back at my grandparents in Kentucky with the television tuned to the Nashville station. Maybe the Grand Ole Opry is on and old-timey music is playing and I'm happy. Those memories are talismans I can hold onto as I keep going, living with PTSD.
Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
I Can't Hear Your Pain
"I need to minimize my exposure to your pain," a friend told me recently, while we were discussing some of the traumatic events we've both experienced in our lives. Sadly, this isn't the first time I've heard those words. Another friend told me that "it makes her stomach hurt," to hear about my past experiences. The friend who I met for coffee last week, happens to be the father of the daughter I relinquished for adoption: aka my ex. The original intention of our reunion was to discuss and heal from the experiences of the past. Now, he's decided that he doesn't have room in his life for me anymore and he doesn't want to hear anymore about my grief. What he had to say hurt, but I had seen it coming for a long time and I wasn't surprised.
The Loneliness of Trauma
Processing trauma can get very lonely at times. Therapist Dr. Kathleen Young refers to this as trauma stigma and her take on what silencing can mean to trauma survivors is worth reading. I am a trauma survivor with complex PTSD and complicated grief recovering from and processing multiple traumas that took place over 20 years of my life - ages 17 to 37. That doesn't mean that I talk about trauma all the time. Far from it. I would get exhausted. However, there are times when I want to share how I'm feeling with friends, family and - in the case of my ex and my husband - those who have gone through traumatic experiences with me. I have several wonderful friends who are not afraid of my pain. They can let me feel what I feel and be who I am. This is not a small gift. Others - even people I love - behave as if trauma is contagious and the less said about it the better. I like to give them the benefit of the doubt and think that they can't really understand what it means to be silenced. Sometimes, however, this is no longer possible. It is not healthy to be silenced. The problem isn't that I MUST always speak about my pain. The problem is that the traumas I experienced are a part of me and, even though I am working on healing, the pain may never be entirely gone. And so, I have to limit my exposure to people who want to silence me.
Speaking Up
My ex followed up our talk with a hurtful email that said, amongst other things, that being reunited with our daughter should make up for any trauma that I experienced in the past and that he wasn't interested in holding my hand while I continued to grieve. If it were only that simple. My relationship with my daughter is a tenuous thing and she hasn't spoken to me in over a year, while my ex sees her and talks to her regularly. Both my ex and my daughter imply that "if only you would change and let go of the past everything would be great." That might be true. But it is hard for me to believe. Telling people that "if only you change, I'll love you," rarely seems to work, at least in my experience. My therapist has often told me not to disown that part of myself that experienced the trauma. I also know that if I tried to silence that part of me, not only wouldn't it work, but I would have to erase a large part of myself and I can't do that. It reminds me of the hikers we met along the West Coast Trail on Vancouver Island. There was a large dead seal near where they had pitched their tent They had simply thrown some dirt over the seal and moved their tent 20 feet. Both black bears and mountain lions frequent that stretch of the trail and neither animal would be the least bit fooled by dirt. Trying to cover up trauma and grief can be that way: only the person burying it thinks it's hidden. To get back to my ex, I responded to his email with one of my own. Amongst other things, I said that "I am tired of your anger and your inability to accept me for who I am." And that's what it comes down to: acceptance or silencing. I have silenced myself for many years and now that I am learning to speak out, I can't stop. I have a voice and I need to use it. That doesn't mean I have to speak out at inappropriate times and places. All I know is that I don't want to be silenced again. And after I sent the email, I felt a burden lift from my heart. Below, Dr. Maya Angelou reads her poem "And Still I Rise," Her poem evokes the beautiful resiliency of the human spirit under difficult circumstances. It is a poem that resonates with me.
Has anyone ever silenced you when you were sharing your feelings about past traumas or your grief? What did you do?
This is the first in a series of posts on trauma within communities and why trauma survivors need to speak out in order to heal.
Problems are not the problem; coping is the problem.
Virginia Safir
My husband is sick, my mother has a hairline fracture in her hip, and I'm making lists about everything I need to do before I fly to Michigan next Monday to be with my mom and dad. Thankfully, my sister will be there too, as much as she can. For those of you who may think that I do nothing but process grief and trauma, read poetry, listen to peaceful music, and go for walks in the woods (which I did yesterday, by the way), it's not always like that. Yes, I have the luxury of doing that sometimes. And I need that space and time to heal. But right now, I have to put my own concerns on the back burner and deal with more urgent matters.
My husband has a cold or the flu - I can never remember the difference between the two - and he isn't happy! Last night he had a fever and had hallucinations during the night: little creatures shaped like balloons with weird arms and legs running around our bedroom. (Thankfully, I didn't see them too.) He has a more-or-less non-stop cough and a constantly running nose. So, today, I set aside most of the things I had planned to do and went grocery shopping, washed clothes, cooked dinner, and generally pampered him. My son thinks he's getting sick too, but with any luck he won't because he eats enough oranges that I'm surprised that he doesn't turn orange.
My husband's cold (or flu) will come and go. My son may or may not get sick. My mother's hip is a more complex and much more worrisome problem. Her hip fracture is "only" a hairline fracture, but it is in a location where it is impossible to operate on. I haven't been able to the x-ray and I have no medical experience, so I can't quite picture the situation. It's not necessarily life-threatening except for the fact that my mother is 78, has serious osteoarthritis, and is prone to pneumonia. I did an Internet search for "hip fractures elderly women" and wished that I hadn't because the first hit turned up an article on how hip fractures have a higher mortality rate than breast cancer in older women. Not exactly reassuring. It also wasn't reassuring that my sister, who as an occupational therapist and does have medical experience said, "I don't have a good feeling about this."
Put those two things together and I really began to worry. And then Ruthie Foster's fabulous version of the spiritual "Travellin' Shoes" came into my mind. The first line goes something like this: "Death came a knockin' at my mother's door/Saying come on mother are you ready to go?" And then I couldn't get her voice out of my head and I had to listen to the song and downloaded it here so you can listen to it too. It's not that I expect my mom to die from her fractured hip - but she could. It may seem morbid, but listening to this joyful, sad song eases my heart.
One of the characteristics of PTSD, is that people with PTSD tend to overreact to real life worries more than other people do. Emotional reactions explains this process. Needless to say, if I am in the throes of emotional overreaction or having panic attacks, I won't be much help to my sick husband or my mom and dad. This post suggests that it is important to watch your self-talk at these times and be more aware of your mind: in other words practice mindfulness. I already do that and, I have learned the hard way, that during stressful times I have to take extra care of myself. So, with that in mind, I bought some hojicha tea today that a Japanese friend introduced me to last month - Japanese Sleepy Time, she calls it. I find it restful to drink a cup in the afternoon and I plan to take it with me to Michigan. I booked a double session with my therapist on Wednesday and I am creating an ipod playlist for unwinding at the end of the day. I'll think of more life-savers to take along before it's time to go.
Today, I did manage to find time to have coffee with one of my African students and was delighted to receive a beautiful orchid for the New Year. Adit's beautiful smile and the orchid cheered me up and then I cooked a nice supper which cheered up my husband and now, as I write this, I am sipping a glass of wine. One glass of wine, not 2 or 3 or 4. Relaxation is the key, not oblivion. Because that can be another aspect of PTSD - the desire to avoid unpleasant emotions of any sort or to be so afraid of them you have an anxiety attack or try and bury your emotions in a fog of drugs or alcohol.
Here are some words from Thich Nhat Hanh that speak to me right now. "Smile, breathe, and go slowly." I like these words so much that I'm going to write them down, keep them in my pocket, and try and remember to read them as often as I need to and follow what they say. It can't hurt.
Here's another take on the situation: an anonymous verse from the Christian tradition.
To perceive Christmas through its wrapping becomes more difficult every year.
E.B. White
Yukon winter (flickr)
Good or bad, we've all survived another Christmas. To be honest, this Christmas was pretty good for me. Parts of it were even wonderful. Other parts, like the hectic last minute preparations and the sadness about not hearing from my daughter, weren't so good. However, as lovely as Christmas in Vancouver can be, it can't compare to Christmas in the Yukon. In the Yukon, you don't have to fight to keep your Christmas simpler and less commercial because, unless you live in Whitehorse, it just is simpler. Outside of Whitehorse, there are few places to go shopping, no traffic jams, no noisy shopping malls. Well, you get the picture. For those of us who delight in the simpler side of Christmas, the Yukon is Christmas paradise and, for me, bring to mind the words of one of my favourite Christmas carols, In the Bleak Midwinter. "In the bleak midwinter . . . Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone/Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow/In the bleak midwinter, long ago."
In 1990, I spent a wonderful Christmas in Ross River - a tiny community in the Central Yukon. It was just me and my husband and our two cats and our wood stove. We cut a Christmas tree ourselves, as we always did and put up it in the dining room so that it wasn't too close to the wood stove in the living room and decorated it with the small selection of ornaments we owned in those days. We went to the school's Christmas concert, which everyone in Ross attends, and on Christmas Eve we went to Midnight Mass at the log church nestled amongst trees not far from the river. The priest had a small organ that he played for the hymns and a voice that would have made the sled dogs he kept staked out near his house howl, if they could have heard it. As I remember it, there was something about the out-of-tune enthusiasm of his singing that was truly endearing.
Wood stove, Gord McKenna, flickr
Mostly, though, we cocooned at home by our huge old cast iron wood stove. When this stove was stoked, it cranked out heat that penetrated clear to your bones. We cuddled up to the stove and played game after game of Scrabble. We also took "bedroom" breaks and afterwards lay in bed listening to the the sounds of ravens calling, if it was daytime, or a truck passing far away on one of the village's few roads, if it was night. In my memories, it is just us, the wood stove, Scrabble, and love. It was perfect.
Quebec City, Helene Villeneuve, flickr
Meanwhile, about a decade before my perfect Yukon Christmas, a friend was spending her perfect Christmas in Quebec City where she lived in an adorable little apartment with narrow windows that overlooked the garden of a convent. Sometime before Christmas, she had discovered money in a bank account that she had forgotten about and bought a splendid red wool coat that was both stylish and warm. On Christmas Eve, she and several friends gathered at her apartment where they enjoyed homemade eggnog. Then they put on their coats and walked through the convent's garden in softly falling snow to go to a concert of Christmas music. "Every part of that evening was pure and simple," she told me recently. "It was filled with humble, shared pleasures and the joy of high-spirited youth." She also told me that, try as she might, she's never been able to duplicate the simple beauty of that Quebec City Christmas. We both agreed that part of the secret was that both Christmases took place when we were younger. Also, because both Christmases were spent far away from our families of origin, there were few expectations. We were free to do what we wanted to do: no one cared what clothes we wore, what we said to our "sibling, mother, father, aunt" (feel free to fill in the blank here) or judged the presents we gave.
I'm not suggesting that Christmases without family are the best. In fact, one of my other favourite Christmas memories is of the first Christmas my son spent at my parents. There was a small "herd" of similarly-aged cousins to run around with and everyone was there: my parents, my three siblings, their significant others and children and my aunt. My childless sister gave noisy presents to the children and my mother wailed in dismay, "And what I want to know is who gave these children kazoos." Our son - then 18 months old - almost choked on grapes when he snuck back into the dining room and began cramming grapes into his mouth one after the other without chewing them. Thankfully, my husband discovered him in time and made him spit the grapes out. Even though that was a joyful Christmas, it can be healing and wonderful to also have those quiet, low expectation Christmases that many people remember so fondly.
What is your favourite Christmas? Why? What was special about it?
Nobody can do everything, but everybody can do something.
Unknown
Yesterday was not a good day for me. My husband and son went to get the Christmas tree and I stayed home and got the space ready where it was going to go. When they got home, I felt disagreeable and tense, which ended with my husband and I having an argument. Today, thinking back over why I felt so stressed, I decided that, along with missing my daughter, it was about unreasonable expectations. This is my son's last Christmas as a "child." Well, he's hardly a child; he's a 6' 1" tall, athletic young man who will be graduating from high school next June. He probably isn't going away to university, still, the clock is ticking. After more thought, I realized that my expectations for this Christmas are not realistic. I want this to be the "perfect" Christmas, because it feels like "the last" for our little family.
I shouldn't really worry about it anyway, because the first Christmas with our son may have already been the "perfect" one because everything was new. Our foster daughters always went home for Christmas to be with their first families and I didn't have the opportunity to raise my daughter, so having a baby to share Christmas with was magical. We lived in the Yukon then. Our son (B.) was 10 months old and he was fascinated by the set of Swedish angel chimes we had. He would stand near the table they were sitting on and watch, rapt, as the candles heated up and the chimes spun. We had to watch so that he wouldn't try to grab the candles and burn his hands. Of course, he also had other fascinations, including his discovery of mandarine oranges, which he still devourers at a prodigious rate and his love of the Christmas tree lights and toys, and, well, you get the picture.
On Christmas Eve, we had friends over and enjoyed a casual meal of lasagna and salad and other goodies. Then we went to an ecumenical service. B. loved the music, but got restless during the quiet times. Christmas Day we opened presents, phoned family and took a nap. The only present that I remember was the large plush hand-made dinosaur that I got at a local craft fair that was as big as B. We still have that dinosaur upstairs in a basket of stuffed animals that B. is still unwilling to part with. It was a gray day that first Christmas and minus 26 Celsius, not suitable weather for a walk with a 10 month-old-baby and so we enjoyed ourselves inside. On Boxing Day (a holiday here in Canada), we went to an open house where there were other children. B. received a wooden teddy bear ornament to hang on the tree, which we still have. (photo above, B.'s first Christmas)
Flash forward to Christmas, 2011. Yesterday, my husband and son got the tree, which they always do. Happily, I can delegate that task to them because I have unpleasant memories of my parents fighting about what made the perfect tree. I always declare whatever tree my two guys come home with: maybe the best ever. And, from my point of view, it is. I'm easy about that part of the Christmas routine. What I'm not happy about is the unrealistic to-do list that is running through my head and interferes with my ability to relax and enjoy myself. I'm pretty sure this is a woman thing. Some men may take on a larger role in preparing for the holidays, but that's the exception. Most men are like my friend M.'s husband, who she said, "Didn't even seem to notice that it was Christmas-time." My husband helps with the Christmas tree and, thankfully, likes to cook. Gifts, organization, cleaning, etc., etc. is up to me. Fair? Not really, but, left to their own devices my husband and son wouldn't care enough to clean the house. It matters to me and so I do it.
Why not simplify? Simplifying isn't as easy as it sounds. I took a look around the web to find a good article on simplifying and, to be honest, many of them seemed like more work than not simplifying! Just reading these "How to Simplify" to-do lists made me tired. Whew! I did find one post that seemed to get to the heart of what simplifying should be about, so I'm sharing it.
I have a cat who sometimes seems more like a human than a cat. She isn't very big and she has short little legs, medium-length fur and an adorable face. Sometimes she's adorable and sometimes she isn't. But when she wants something, she definitely lets me know. First she meows, then she meows louder, then she comes and stands beside me and reaches up with one of her paws and nudges me on the arm, just like a person would. And then, if all else fails, she reaches up even further and takes a little nip. (Well, maybe not exactly little.)
What does any of this have to do with sorrow? Well, lately the sorrows I've been carrying around for a long time are getting like Goldie. First they started meowing, now they've graduated to nipping - maybe even biting. It's time to listen. I've been meaning to take time for grieving for a long time. I have experienced several major traumas in my life and a number of smaller traumas. I have been sad at times, even terribly sad; however, as my doctor and therapist like to say being sad is important, but if you don't know why you're being sad, it won't help you recover from trauma. Most of the authors I've read, along with my therapist and doctor, all agree that you have to understand something of why you're grieving before the grief can help you to live with trauma. I don't use the word "heal" from trauma because these same people agree that once you hve experienced major trauma, you will never "get over it" in the way we may think of getting over a cold. Rather, you can learn to be aware of how trauma has changed your life and how becoming aware of both your trauma and the sorrow related to it, can help you get on with life. In other words, sorrow grows hope and learning to be mindful of both the trauma living inside and the sorrow connected with it, is no small thing.
Sitting with sorrow is a journey that takes courage and time. Focusing on the sorrow in my life, befriending it, cannot be done in between working long hours, caring for children, or whatever demands fill up my days. As my doctor said, "healing is a process not a race." Or as poet Mary Oliver put it, in her beautiful poem "The Journey," "One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice- though the whole house began to tremble. . . " I don't know if my whole house is going to tremble, but my inner voice is telling me that now is the time to sit with my sorrow. This time I'm going to listen.
This blog will be the story of my healing journey. There won't be any gimmicks, other than getting through each day, one day at a time. Hopefully, some of what I learn and think about and do along the way will resonate with those of you that have also experienced trauma, have gone through - or are going through - grief or are just dealing with the many stresses of midlife.
