The Quiet Crisis Next Door

I had just fled my parents’ bedroom when I heard the click, and then my mother scream– “He’s got a gun, run!”

My mother’s fourth (and current) husband, had flown into a rage, flinging and destroying items (a boombox became the first casualty) because I wouldn’t say I loved him when he asked if I did. I had hesitated a matter of milliseconds when he asked, but the tightening of his face told me my hesitation had already betrayed my answer, and so I felt that I might as well just verbally commit. I wasn’t feeling that particular emotion for a man who had physically restrained me and held knives under my legs, forcing me to exercise because he thought I was just too damn fat, telling me that if I didn’t hold the position as long as he thought I should I was going to get cut. The cruel irony of the actions of a man who would go on to tell me things like “someday, you’ll be fat, 40, unable to change a light bulb, and nobody is ever going to want you,” cannot be understood unless you could visualize him as he was then. Since you cannot, you will simply have to take my word for it when I tell you that he himself was quite overweight at the time.

I was barefoot, and only months past a surgery on my birth defect, but I hit that asphalt outside of our house running as fast as I could. I didn’t turn to look around me, but I could hear both my mother and my sister running after me as I headed across the street to a friend’s house. Pounding on the door, frantically calling the police as her mom stood looking anxiously from us to the door, realizing in a detached sort of way that I had actually run, and the doctor who performed my surgery had said I probably wouldn’t be able to after the surgery.

By the time the police came, my stepfather had driven off, knowing (because this wasn’t the first time he’d flipped out with a gun at Christmas time) that one of us had probably called the cops. And because it sadly wasn’t the first time, I had only the faintest flicker of a hope that maybe my mother would actually choose to leave. I had already seen her walk back to my siblings and I a few years earlier as we stood in the melting snow with our police escort, sent with us from the domestic violence shelter in Sierra Vista to collect our stuff, as she told us we’d be going in without the police and she’d be dropping all charges. He’d gotten on his knees and apologized she told us, and she was sure he meant it…

The responding police officers on this second occasion left quickly since he was no longer there, telling us to grab a few items as fast as we could and leave. But my mom decided that wasn’t how she wanted to proceed. After first driving us on a futile visit to my dad asking for money and support, she drove us back and directed us to pack. My sister and I rapidly threw stuff in trash bags, I probably took less than five minutes to clear the most important things out of my room. And then we waited. And waited. And waited…because my mom just was moving so painfully slow. I suspected she wanted us to be there when he got home. I can’t even say how long it was, but it was definitely too long. I rushed into my sister’s room when I heard my stepfather’s truck driving up to the house, and my mother followed me into the room, told us to stay in that room, handed me a 22, and told me if he walked through the door at any point in the night, things hadn’t gone well and to shoot him. And then, after a prolonged bout of arguing, she got into bed with him.

My sister sat next to me in her room shaking most of the night, as I stared at the door holding the gun and waiting. In the morning, I was finally able to get ahold of my brother, so as the raised voices of my mother and stepfather crashed through the house, my sister and I grabbed our trash bags, climbed out a window in the back of the house, and walked to the Walgreens across the street. I used the only bit of money I had to buy us a loaf of bread and a can of Vienna sausages, which we ate as we hid out in an alley all day waiting for my brother.

I have had allergy problems my entire life. But that year…it was definitely wow, I had never seen a flair up of reactions with anything approaching that intensity. My pediatrician seemed regularly worried, and given how sick I often was, I imagine nearly 30 years later that she probably still remembers me. One low light, my tear ducts spending the better part of a year swelling shut, was undoubtedly memorable…I know it certainly was for me!

In retrospect, I realize that the stress was just pouring rocket fuel on a system which already had many environmental and food sensitivities. And there was nothing I could do to make the stress stop. That was what my life was like, and I couldn’t avoid it.

My parents don’t have space in my life right now to represent their side of things, so in the interest of fairness I will tell you that they feel they were just parents doing the best they could (and certainly there are people who go through worse in their childhoods), that I get upset about things I shouldn’t, and that I am mentally unstable. My sister currently believes that since they are family, even if the actions were messed up, that relationship makes everything that happened OK.

I will leave each of you to decide how you want to land on those issues. I personally see myself as mentally resilient and strong, and I don’t want to make space personally to give credence to that kind of gaslighting in my life…because I’m a grown woman who values herself and quite frankly I don’t have to- and I shouldn’t have to. And I would want anybody who is in similar circumstances to know that some things should never have to be OK, I don’t care who’s doing them. I (and you) are worth so much more than that.

Everything about my life is different now. I live in a home where I am safe, loved, and treated gently. Sometimes the holidays can be hard for me, but I do everything I can to fill them with happy traditions. Going with Hannah to the Nutcracker. Building gingerbread houses (although this year we’re doing a chocolate chip cookie house). Zoolights. Putting up our Christmas tree Thanksgiving weekend. Driving around and looking at Christmas lights.

And yet, sometimes, as caregivers, the happenings may be different, but still we can’t stop the stress, because what is happening just can’t be stopped. And it makes every health matter worse. I feel confident the high levels of stress I was experiencing over the last few years helped hand me every health challenge I have been working my way through with the flair ups in my allergies and the POTS this past year. And, in some ways, I still can’t make so much of it stop.

When that is the case, I do what I can to put everything on pause I can. If I feel like it would help my stress level to make paper stars instead of folding laundry, the laundry sits unfolded. And sits. And keeps on sitting if need be. I don’t have anybody helping me make these comparatively more trivial chores happen, and I don’t care enough to add to my stress to make sure that they do when I have to pull some sort of pressure off of my system. I wear makeup that brings me joy every day, and I don’t limit the glitter when the mood strikes because it’s like sprinkling joy on my soul. And I try to take time to heal myself through my art. Poetry has always been a favorite playground for my emotions, and molding them, words can become Play-Doh, porcelain, or Picasso. I love free verse, but not every poem I write is structured the same. I like sculpting different things in my playground, so to speak. My poem “So Selfish”, for example, has rhyming couplets, with each line having the same number of syllables, because I wanted the rhythm to slam my point home. “So selfish they say/ she chose her own way…”

I am sewing a quilt from my old leggings by hand because I find the process almost meditative (Tony likes how soft my leggings are, so it’s going to be a present for him). If I feel like I need to dance instead of clocking in and doing hab hours, you know what, I’m doing that, because right now Tony needs his mom to be OK more than he needs all 30 of those hours officially accounted for on a ledger. I’m already doing the community safety off of the clock so I can block if he tries to do something dangerous, so he’s still getting the most important programs done every day.

And, as always, I pay attention to where my emotions are at. I feel things deeply, and I get emotionally invested in music, books, movies…I can take on the feelings in art so easily. So when things are harder for me with my stress level, I have learned to pick content that emotes a little more sunshine while that is needed.

And when I need to, I am learning to say “no” when it comes to taking something on.

And I think maybe other caregivers out there might need to hear someone say it’s OK to do all of that, so that is what I am saying here. Perhaps you might not be needed to make some of your loved one’s therapy programs work, but you’re still needed just as much. And sometimes, when the stress won’t stop and you can’t make any of it seem better than it is because reality will not be denied no matter how much you meditate, all you can do is take control of what you can, practice accepting the rest of it, and do what you can to improve the things that you can. And maybe the stress won’t stop, but it can slow things down just enough.