(I wrote about this subject back in August but have a few more thoughts on it.)
I cry over old movies (we just finished watching Wuthering Heights – my eyes are swollen), the site of a child being hurt, the Wounded Warrior commercial and the ad for Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. I cry if I’m tired and I just broke a dish; I cry if I’m frustrated over something I used to be able to do so easily and now can’t begin to do. My poor husband. It took him many years to decide the best thing he could do is leave me alone till I’ve run out of water. Good move. I’m a weeper. It’s in my DNA. My mother used to cry if she got a run in her nylons. No, she didn’t cry. She sobbed as if she’d just found out my dad had cancer. She cried if my dad drove too close to the edge of a cliff. In fact she became hysterical. Her mother, my beloved Finnish grandmother, was a crier too.
I’ve always envied those strong-as-a-bull-kind of women, the ones who never show any emotion at all. Steely, I think is the right word. Why can’t I buck up and stop being a wus (that word’s not in the dictionary so if I misspelled it, all bets are off). When I throw my long list of “please God requests” and my mental imaging out every morning, I always say, please help me, when a mini-crisis arrives, to meet it with equanimity and objectivity instead of with cries and cussing. So far, I’m still a weeper. I guess now that the elections are over God is busy working on the Ebola crisis and ISIS.
But it has caused me to become introspective. I know that’s supposed to mean a reflective looking inward but I use it for problem resolution. Sometimes, when you do that you’ll find out you’re beating yourself up needlessly. That’s something else that runs in my family. My Finnish grandfather told me when I went to spend a week with him in Minnesota after my grandmother died that he had killed her. Talk about beating yourself up. I told him grandma had died of cancer. He insisted he killed her. When I asked for an explanation he said that when he retired he felt that the spacious and lovely apartment they had lived in for years (over his Studebaker and Packard showroom and garage) needed to be sold and they would move into the tiny, very old three bedroom house they had bought for my mom and her kids to live in many decades earlier when my father had joined the Marines at the end of World War II. Grandpa wanted to be sure they had enough money in case they lived to be very old. His siblings were all long-lifers. He had a sister who lived to 104 and grandpa lived to 94. He gave parsimony a new name once having me drive him to a store an hour away (when gas was high) to save ten cents on a hearing aid battery. Grandma didn’t want to move. They had a very LARGE disagreement over it. Grandma cried (remember she was a weeper). She cried and cried but grandpa won that battle. He said she started to die little by little when they moved in to that small and somewhat shabby house. She was so unhappy and missed her spacious apartment with all the big windows that overlooked Bovey, MN. Then she died of cancer. That means he killed her.
How in the world was I going to convince him otherwise? I tried but I’m afraid I wasn’t very persuasive because down deep inside I agreed with him but I know it wasn’t intentional so he was innocent in my eyes. Destructive emotion is one of the primary causes of death. They had been married 56 years and Grandma’s grief over losing her beloved home was close to despair. She gave up and got out. Maybe that’s what happens to us emotionally fragile people.
I’ve often wondered if people who were either traumatized or abused as children didn’t develop emotions that were so deep it was difficult to handle them. Many wind up with anger management issues. I once broke a phone in half after finding out my husband had spent the night with another woman. Being emotionally fragile causes fear and is often fueled by child abuse. Those of us who were sexually abused as a child (or an adolescent) did not develop confidence. Our self-esteem became desperately battered as the years went by and abuse piled on abuse.
My father always said he would tell us what our opinions were going to be. What happens to a child who grows up in that environment? My father liked Fords; my oldest brother liked Chevrolets. Brian got a shellacking over that. If you get knocked down often enough you become afraid to get back up. My mother checked my bed every night to make sure I was not sleeping in the fetal position. I always was. She would yank my legs down straight and give me a lecture on poor circulation. When you are denied a right that even a pet dog has what do you think about the wisdom of any choice you make?
When I turned 18 I asked my parents if I could go to college. The answer was no. They chose which job I would have and told me I had to start helping to support the family. Could I get a driver’s license? The answer was no. Could I wear makeup or choose which books to read or which music to listen to? Could I choose my own friends? No, No No! My mother farmed me out to neighbors on the weekend to wash their walls, scrub their floors and any other chores they needed help with. I received no money for my work. I’d had enough. I told my parents that if they didn’t start treating me better I was going to lose all the love and respect I had for them. My mother shrieked, “No one speaks to your father that way. Get the belt, Bernie!” My brother tried to stop the beating, grabbing the belt away, screaming, “You’re killing her.” My father knocked him out cold and kept beating me until I passed out. When I regained consciousness, covered with welts and blood, I could hear my parents talking in their bedroom with the door closed. I crawled back into my bedroom, lay on the bottom bunk and plotted my escape. A week later, while my parents were grocery shopping, I shoved a few belongings into a pillow sack and ran. Sometimes, even those of us who were abused know how to say, “I can’t take it anymore.”
A child growing up without any abuse, with love and approval and support has no reason to cry. That child learns that it is okay to have an opinion. That child is encouraged to think for themselves and to make wise choices. My mother said once that she wanted me and my siblings to remain children. She got her wish. I was emotionally the age of thirteen (the year my sexual abuse began) until I got into recovery. My oldest brother never grew much past the same emotional age as me. My other brother is so buried in his ultra conservative Catholic religion that it’s difficult to tell how old he is emotionally. My younger surviving sister told me a few years ago that she wished we were back as little children with mom and dad. I looked at her with horror. The emotional growth of most abused children stops at the time of their abuse.
As I moved across that bridge of recovery (I was 45 when I began) I felt myself growing through my teen years, through my twenties and then into my thirties. It was an invigorating experience. One of the exercises I did while in recovery was to make a list of all the things I had done that required courage no matter how small, learned to swim, worked up the courage to dive off a high board when I was very young (and got in line to do it again and again always hoping I wouldn’t be afraid) learned to drive a car, learned to climb a tree etc. When I read my very long list I was amazed. I had never thought of myself as a woman of courage. What courage it had taken me to run away from home.
I’m still a weeper. Bad habits are tough to break. My best friend Peggy told me one time that she wished she could cry when she was upset. She said I got all my anger and disappointment out while she held all of hers in. She died after a long battle with cancer three years ago. I wish she could have cried. The men in our life don’t understand that sometimes the only answer to some problems is a good cry. It gives us courage. It energizes us. I tell myself I’ve come a long ways.
But I still wish I was a steely-eyed, emotionally strong woman.
