Living As All of Me

[sanmagic7]

hannah1, such a lot to go thru - and grieving the M you never had could certainly be sapping your strength.  all that emotion takes a toll.  i hope you are eating to keep up with the energy your brain/mind is utilizing in order to do this (and if i'm out of line here, please ignore - it just popped into my head).

feeling cared about, feeling loved, can be very painful.  i still burst out crying when kindness is shown to me.  i'm so sorry for what your M put you thru - dang, that's horrible!  grrr!  the mama bear in me comes out when i think of things like that.

you are also doing a lot of physical work, it sounds like.  so much going on.  please, be as caring for yourself as you wanted your M to be for you, if at all possible.  love and hugs

[HannahOne]

SanMagic7, thank you for caring! And reminding me to eat I went to bed a little hungry last night and barely slept, and I'm not in a great head space this morning, which is probably half due to low blood sugar. SO much of my mood is not eating enough regularly.

Thank you also for the mama bear energy. I go back and forth between feeling sorry for the woman, and being baffled and furious. I guess I can appreciate that even though I do have CPTSD and struggle, whatever is wrong with her must be so much worse for her to function so poorly. Part of the struggle is knowing she did love me, in her way, how she was capable. The disconnect there is so vast.I know many of us here feel that way, parents think they did great or love us and yet we experienced relational trauma and or various kinds of abuse.   

I made a pretty decent life out of it in spite of it, and I have to remember that too and appreciate the present. Most of my problems now are my feelings LOL, which is much better than the problems I started out with of struggling financially, functionally, relationally, in every area my external and internal life were both very difficult to make work. I was also thinking yesterday about the women I met along the way who inspired me, a neighbor who was a nurse, a teacher, a college admin. I saw that there were different choices and I tried to make the better choice whenever there was one.

One thing my mother couldn't seem to do was ever enjoy life, be in the present. Poor thing. I try to focus on allowing myself to feel safe and content. It's rainy so I'm focused on "snug as a bug in a rug" feeling and the quiet in my house in a safe place.

[HannahOne]

I want to balance feeling my grief from the past, and getting what I want in the present. I find it tricky.

I've been crying a lot and thinking about the past. Why couldn't my mother love me. What is the reason. I want there to be a medical reason. She did take too many prescription pills, but that doesn't explain it enough. I want there to be some reason besides "she didn't want to" or "other things were more compelling." Ugh it doesn't make sense. I know having a reason wouldn't really solve my pain about it anyway.

So today I want to connect to people and give and take. But I don't know how/who. I have a kid in the house, currently on the phone, but I don't bring my needs to my kids. I have a dog here at my feet. I have to pickup groceries and can chat with the grocer, who picks greens just for Frank. I could call a friend. It just feels like whatever connection I make in the present is no good compared to what I want. But I can't go back and be a child again. I don't even want that, I want someone to interact with me now, to be interested, curious, delighted, share interests, to teach me.

Aha... I do like learning and having a teacher is a kind of authority. There's a shared interest, and teachers are often interested in the work of the student. It's a mind to mind connection that I like, trying to learn what is in someone else's mind, and them giving me feedback about how much I got it right/wrong. I have been trying to find some classes. I don't want to bring my mother wound transference to a teacher bbuuut.... being a student is a power dynamic that might satisfy part of me. I keep reaching out about the painting class and getting no response. I will call today. First I will pet the dog and get groceries. I Am tired already. I didn't sleep well at all again. My sleep medication isn't working and the other medications I am on make sleep worse. And crying is exhausting.

[HannahOne]

I am amazed to still be finding pieces of me and understanding what happened, how it shapes me today. After an hour of staring at the Ralph Lauren blazer it occurred to me that it was pretty "preppy."

?

Why was I so into preppy? I identify as an artist! But all I want is loafers, men's suit pants, blazers and button downs. What is happening to my closet?! Where went all my bohemian skirts? I haven't worn a skirt in two years.

I am understanding a bit more why I was working so well with the previous therapist. Sounds wild to say it was her clothes but it was partly her clothes, her loafers, her button up shirts, signaling something about wealth, status, safety, knowledge, security. That's why she became what I wanted to be. Why I wished she were my mother. If she were my mother, I wouldn't be me, and then none of it would have happened. She embodied what I had aspired to in her clothes, and her clothes read "safe" to me.

Therapy itself is WASPY, leather couches and the leisure to lie on them, "feelings" scoffed my father, who has time for those, everyone hurts, suck it up. Therapy is leisurely work, unaffordable for so many, pays so little you have to be rich to offer it, or else charge the rich a lot of money in exchange. Security, money, status, class, safety, respectability, these things are all tied together for me even though I know the wealthiest people are as sick as the rest of us. It's a hangup I have. When I was born we were very poor. Not enough to eat poor. Was it because we were white trash that everyone was screaming, drunk, punching out the kitchen windows and walking around half-dressed? It must be.

The tide was rising and I determined to ride it out. I was born in a city apartment with an empty fridge and a cardboard box for a kitchen table. When I started school we had enough to eat but not enough to heat the house we had just moved in to in the suburbs from the city apartment. In middle school we had a bigger house and almost enough money to fix the hot water heater. I got straight As and aimed for "prep school." I got in. And I knew I was going to get out.

What's more "preppy" than a navy Ralph Lauren blazer with leather patches on the elbows?! Can't get much further from "no hot water" than Ralph Lauren.

I could never keep up with the rising tide as we moved up the social ladder, precariously, only to fall back again and again as my father got, but couldn't hold, job after job. I was on a scholarship to the prep school and I was totally bewildered, having never seen a "Sebago," didn't know that LL Bean was not a kind of vegetable. I didn't understand that most of the kids were NOT on scholarship and that being "smart" or even "street smart" had no currency. Straight hair was the currency here. Uh oh. I was still worried about having enough food, and we STILL weren't heating the house in winter, half the time the hot water heater wasn't working. And I needed Sebago's. Or at least penny loafers. And straight hair.

All of it was in order to get out. Where was I going? Apparently, to the heart of "preppy," the Northeast, to the Hamptons, New York, Harvard and Princeton. It was very loaded, every tiny choice mattered, how to fold the socks, how to change my midwest accent, how to roll my pleated plaid skirt, how to eat seafood, which books to have read and what NOT to know anything about, like, oh, Coors light, Amazing Grace, and how to set up a mousetrap with a bucket of water. So many things to learn/unlearn, code switching as fast as I could to become someone to whom those things were not happening, would never happen again. Who, me? Me who?

It worked. Kind of.

Meanwhile it was happening all the time. Someone has to pay for the prep school. Everything is a tradeoff. Nothing is free. "Who do you think you are? Think you're better than us?"

Uh, yeah. Yeah I did think that.

Still don't know who I think I am. I've been obsessed with straightening my hair lately. And wearing loafers. With sweatpants.

And now I'm going to "the city" to the "city therapist." Sounds a little different now, "going to the city." "getting out of the suburbs." Why I must wear loafers on the train with the commuters, why I must straighten my hair and then carry a portable straightener in my bag in case it curls up again on the way.

It's like I have a language of my own coded such that I don't understand it myself.

Reconsidering the navy blazer. Am I "preppy"? I passed, I think. Apparently. I got to the Ivies, I worked the jobs. But it wasn't me, or enough of All of Me, by age forty it all crashed out and I was in long bohemian skirts painting and making sweet potato pie with a toddler on my hip, humming "Amazing Grace." I traded the entire 30 years' work for art and babies. What's up with all of that?

What is it that I want when I want to be preppy? It has to do with work, the kind of work one does at leisure in a room with an expensive leather couch, with nothing expected except words. Work that doesn't cost so much. A life that has some elbow room, and leather patches for what breaks through.

It can never be one thing, it's always both at the same time. I am mixing the preppy blazer and loafers with the white trash and the feminine. The mashup is either athletic wear, because I'm newly into working out (whatever THAT is all about), or Victorian romance, so many lace and sheer blouses, so much femininity against the lines of the plaids and the structure of the blazers. I'm also very interested in romance, in relationships, how to love and be loved, the experience of "falling" in love and how to let that happen. Work and love, love and work, Freud's formula for happiness, or what we can get of it.

The grief is the first people I fell in love with were my parents. And it wasnt' safe to love them.

I'm safe in the navy blazer, I pass, no one would know...except for my curly hair, lol. I read "preppy" in the upscale grocery store in by blazer, respectable, preppy food in the cart, no Hamburger Helper or white trash here...except for my sweatpants, lol. I read serious, focused....except for the lace blouse peeking out.

It worked, kind of. I'm hungry all the time, but I don't eat enough. It's hard to get into the hot shower. It's hard to feel "feelings." It's hard to understand the currency I have, what to trade for what. Trade thoughts for cash? 30 cents a word? What's the tradeoff, what's the cost? Am I middle class yet? Am I falling, or rising? Is grace really so amazing, or is it just our birthright? Am I lost, or found? And what's love got to do with it?

It's complicated. Complex. All the trauma, and All of Me.

[sanmagic7]

my dear hannah1, for the record, i don't know that i've ever seen a 'sebago'.  is that a brand of shoe?  bag?  that probably tells you enough about me.  but i'm one of those who chooses clothes for comfort, or because someone gave them to me and i'm ok with wearing it.  i find it amazing how people define themselves and by what.  when i lived in mexico, it was all about what car you drove.  my mother's generation, and many women my age define themselves by how clean their house is.  so many different standards.  for me, i'm simply ill-defined. 

i had a friend who always wanted to get me on one of those makeover shows.  she was always dissatisfied w/ my makeup, clothes, shoes - she was very much about fashion and style, (also an artist) and i didn't have either.  she finally gave up, which suited me just fine. another friend has nothing but big brand name shoes, clothes - he was delighted when my D got a pair of Vans slip-ons!  she'd just picked them up at goodwill and they fit, but she didn't know the brand at all.  then, not so delighted when she got a couple pairs of skechers.  it was funny to me.  not that i'm judging, o no!  it just fascinates me what's important for different people.

it sounds like you have so much going thru your head at any one time.  that must be exhausting.  i understand you weren't nourished in so many ways as a child, and that is so sad, so maddening to me.  to think you can't even nourish yourself physically now because of that . . . how horrible.  love and a hug filled with 'do the best you can'

[HannahOne]

SanMagic7, you're right. Part of me agrees with you. Fashion labels are a cultural construct, part of capitalism, a marketing strategy. I used to write the marketing strategies, not in fashion but another field. It's vain, meaningless in the big picture, and doesn't matter, either. Other than the blip of high school when I entered a world all new to me, for fifty years I had very little interest in clothes, no interest in brands, and I generally wore whatever was on sale at Walmart at home, an all black suit to work, the same shoes every day. Was socking away money for the kids, not spending it on secondhand brand name blazers.

On the other hand part of me is fascinated with clothes right now. On the very fact that they ARE a cultural construct, have different meanings to different people, how they signal gender, class, and can be used to express something about the person if the person has the luxury to choose intentionally. Elton John's clothes say something different than the King of England's clothes, and both differ from what my dentist wears. Why? who cares? What does it matter?

I don't know, but it does. I'm interested in the language of clothes, what are the nouns and verbs? What are the clothes saying without words? What signals are other people picking up that I didn't pay attention to?

I'm trying to understand myself, and the part of me that is interested in fashion. But this isn't my personal blog and maybe my musings are too adjacent to recovery and I should move these posts over there. I would have to heavily edit and really edit out what matters though, which is the trauma. So I put it here. But musing in public is always risky no matter what. I will ponder how to handle going forward.

 I guess another issue is I don't want to write straight up about my trauma here either. One it would trigger the * out of everyone. And two, it's not interesting to me. What's interesting is the intersection of my trauma and my life. How trauma shaped me into what I am now and how I might still shape the trauma back, twist it into a pretzel and eat it, gain some mastery. And, contradictorily, how I might drop the trauma and find underneath a whole new set of clothes I've never worn before, something more comfortable, more native to All of Me. Right now I'm in the messy middle of mixing and mashup.

To me fashion is like painting, or any other art. Like writing. Eight years ago I took up a 2,000 year old method of painting that is incredibly arcane. No one cares, and it doesn't matter. It's a waste of energy and time, literally. Mixing an egg yolk with vinegar and ground up rocks, why bother when I could buy a tube of acrylic paint at Walmart and be done with it? Why am I even bothering with this, I could be making soup. Something practical. It's a good question I asked myself as I cried over my canvas. One mom friend came into my house and saw my paintings. Are you going to sell those? she asked. Nope. She couldn't conceive of why I would do something that didn't turn into cash. Or at least something you could eat.

Fashion is like that, it's pointless, frivolity, you can't eat fashion. Brands have found a way to turn fashion into cash, to make it a need, to make a business out of it, but fashion is still unnecessary. In a war zone, no one cares what you're wearing, although camouflage is a better idea than a lace negligee. I grew up in a psychological war zone. Now that I'm out, I wanna see what the rest of the world was doing while I was hiding in a closet eating cold soup from a can. And some of what the rest of the world was doing was trending. the 70s, the 80s, the 90s and Y2k all have their fashion trends. The wheel of culture moves and things come in and out of fashion, from the Rubenesque figure to twiggy to Kim kardashian and now with GLP1 back to Twiggy. From bell bottoms to straight cropped to skinny jeans back to flares, and now the baggy wide leg low rise, the endless hunt with my teen this week for JUST the right amount of baggy, the perfect rise, just enough "wide." 12 inches from crotch to waist, too high, 9 inches from crotch to waist too low, measure from your crotch again kid... what shoes will you be wearing, because these are 31 inches long and with your thick sneakers they'd work but not with your flats... ok that wash is too much of a "mom jean" how about this dark wash? No? Breathe in, breathe out, try not to scream... What a waste of time and energy, I'm thinking, as I'm scrolling, "this? how about this one? no? This one? This doesn't matter, you know, it's what's inside that counts." And, it matters because she is interested in it, she knows it signals something about her that she's aware of the current trend, that she's aligning with the herd, that she took the time and energy to find the jean that expresses the zeitgeist right now which seems to be "Who cares? My pants are falling off." And she put her own spin on it with her belt and a fitted floral top. That top is pretty fitted, I didn't say. I closed my eyes a little and sent her off. You go girl. You're in the clothes that speak to you. Go on, get out. Take on the world.