It's like reality is tilted one way and you're tilted the other. You constantly reach for something, an idea, an emotion, a reaction and your hand misses and the target moves.
I literally spent my 20s enraged. My sleep mantra was rocking back and forth, repeating "I don't want to die."
Every problem---light bill, school, jobs, relationships was met with I don't want to die.
That stemmed from my parents playing loose and fast with reality as addicts. So what I thought and felt were minimized, finished, disrupted. Gas lighting indirectly. In my late teens I finally realized I had a good memory, in fact an eidetic one but I had been discouraged from it to the point where I thought I was just making things up.
Addiction also breeds forms of narcissism and even after they got sober they were self absorbed and vindictive. I've written before about sexual abuse from my cousins based on envy at my being an only child and therefore more resources. People always think you're spoiled, you're not, there's generally just more. Four kids at Christmas with a budget of $1000 vs 1 with $500 spent on me. Because they were going out for madness, I was often dragged along or left alone or left with abusive babysitters, my two cousins.
There was a mix of envy, confusion and guilt from my parents because of their addictions and the fact that I have remained addiction free, I only occasionally drink and have never done drugs. At a certain point I'd made my 4th year of AA and NA meetings with my mother because she had to drop all of her friends for sobriety. I was 17. I have heard it all, the meetings became like living movies for me but they also re-balanced reality for me so that I could see it was them who were bonkers not me.
We also did family counseling after my parents divorced, their divorce involved SWAT, a manhunt, fleeing the state, prostitutes masquerading as my mother , AT&T, robbing a gas station with my mother, a car accident and my father hitting my mother with a car. Luckily it was a rental. She sued the rental agency and got $600,000 ..
That's just a recap of the Divorce "season".
We're not even going to bring in stepfathers. 4. My mother I think was trying to recreate her parents abusive 40 year marriage. Or right it. She succeeded in tempering it but never quite doing better. She literally bought the last husband.
I watched their addictions, all 6 parents, fathers and mother, transfer to money, then lack of money then to food. My mother died obese, being slowly amputated/cut apart, diabetic, stroking regularly, Jonesing for Chinese food, meat, soda. Craven. Enabled by my stepfather.
When my mother lay dying she asked if she'd been a good mother, to rate her. I gave her a B plus . One because we'd gotten to a place of radical honesty and because I was telling the truth. I owed her insanity the truth. I also objectively thought she'd been a victim of sexual assault, misogyny, bias, parental abuse, addiction and the gaping emotional hole yet rapacious hunger of narcissism.
She was not near an A.
But she'd never abandoned me, even when I asked at 10 to be put into foster care because of the insanity.
My father?
Ehhhh. He was radicalized like Malcolm X and yeah, we went Islam for awhile. Unfortunately it was the 1980s so the dissonance drove him to drugs and his sojourn in prison that seemingly centered and honed him into an intelligence weapon for not behemoth of Civil Rights to attack again after his bid. A warrior who's war had morphed from interpersonal to systemic racism given a high end corporate job as a prisoners rights advocate. Forced to sit by street addicts for long enough to want a taste of the dragon....and it was a wrap from there.
We'll give him a B-.
He tried to parent me as a tsunami built behind him, within him and eventually washed all that had been him away.
From my adult perspective, having done several years of therapy over three decades----I wholeheartedly believe every Black person, every person in general, but brown folk in particular needs to do one good intensive year every decade of their lives. I have. Its why I'm still alive. The cure for Black self destruction would be that year.
I sat in a book club in Harlem and a man came into the bookstore in hospital gown and pants, proceeded to sit down and rant for about 15 minutes. Then got up and left. The group then went along on its blind dash seeking cures in books fifty, sixty , seventy years old. I suggested we study counseling, deprogramming, psychological enhancement techniques because they froze when he walked in, I evaluated but most importantly I watched them not know how to handle it and we all have family folk with his decompensating issues. it was a no go, like my father they wanted to to be Super Black instead of Healed (Healing) Human. Alas, Petruchio.
So I am not an addict though I love good food and don’t exercise like I used to. I haven't abused anyone....though I will admit to being a stultifying mental and emotional maze in relationships who has learned how to knock down maze walls and build rooms with doors, signs and appropriate warnings. I have written about almost a whole 60% of the shit that has happened.
A coworker platitudes me with what doesn't kill you makes you stronger bullshit. Instead of constructive mental healthcare the Black community generally administers platitudes, Bibble verses, or silence....or drugs and alcohol.
In truth I sat with my mother as she lay dying and was able to talk to her honestly about not liking her. Separating that from loving her. I after all had halted a lucrative career to move a thousand miles to hold her hand....for two years as she dragged out dying, eventually over four states, the local news, several courts, hotel rooms, a grand escape from Charlotte that a friend compared to the migration after slavery....ironically he's working on being a counselor. It though was one last grand madcap, completely unnecessary if she'd been adult responsible adventure. My father more of simply disintegrated.
I found I was healthy enough to point out to myself most of all how financially irresponsible my mother and stepfather were, all the way to dragging him into court. And then I got him to drag me into court and I got to cross examine him in front of a packed courtroom for an hour. The fucking highlight of the whole "season" of the Family Show.
In many ways I got to castigate their insanity openly but of course by the time you get clear, sure of your sanity, invulnerable to passive aggressive attacks, they're old, decrepit, dying.
So you can only punch them a few times.
I gave them both hell and fire, once together in a hospital room and I saw how not pathetic or apathetic they were but sort of broken. I saw people who had mangled relationships with their children and lacked skill, ability, insight, self reflectivity to deal with that. For years my mother offered for me to sort of have at her, finally before she got seriously ill I wrote the mammy jammy of all letters....she said she couldn't read it.. I found it In the house, I think she did, I think she couldn't process it. I think it was like my stepfather in court in cheap shoes and a cheaper suit with a lawyer whose claim was a shingle and being White and me alone at the opposing table....and trouncing them, questioning him, objecting ( I got to object in court! Law school woody!) , confronting my mother about her big and small shit, all made possible by healing myself, with help over the years, learning to put them into a box and on a shelf without guilt and extending mercy for those dying years.
Honestly, why?
So I wouldn't be like some of the fucked up clients and students I've had who bemoan dead mommies and daddies and wreck their lives----between trans fat, law enforcement and impulse control, mommy/daddy issues is the top killer of Black folk.
I didn't want to carry them. When asked about grandchildren I calmly answered "You have intentionally through arrogant gluttony destroyed your body, cutting your lifetime by 20 years. Not only is that unreasonable to my plans but what would you be capable of teaching grandchildren? You both are a cautionary tale, not a repository of wisdom grandparents are suppose to be."
I told them that I was fulfilling my love and obligation to end this chapter, these characters. I was there for her in her weakest hours in the end of life as she'd been steadfast in my beginnings but that I was clear, guilt free had deactivated a lot of the buttons they were trying push and was the Observer....of what not to become. They were my anti-mentors.
Shut them the fuck up.
So that's how you get through insane parents.
You do therapy, work out your rage, you re-calibrate reality away from them.. Instead of living at home, God got me 500 miles away for undergraduate and I visited but the dying time was the longest I'd been with them.
You must become independent. I saw very little of the millions they squandered, maybe $15,000. My trust was taken away and I paid for school myself but when the end came I fully owned myself, which is why none of their blows landed.
You heal and re-balance reality.
And if possible you confront them and like diamond don’t waver in your cutting clarity and non tolerance of their madness in word or form.
Before we left, I'd visit my mother, she'd start something and I'd leave jumbled, her dying my last but surest fear. Then donating plasma regularly they noted my increasing blood pressure. I'd been visiting five to six days a week. I cut it to twice a week and did fifteen minutes with her then would go to type on my laptop for forty five in the lounge. Fifteen minutes, back to the lounge. In controlled bursts, she was far more amenable. I made it a priority to rest, exercise and have quite a bit of some Southern fried sex.
You must learn to manage insane parents like errant children or a dog. Tough love but firm and resolute to not take any shit.
Sometimes I miss her, she was a great intellect. Most times though I don't. My father either. And I'd give you money for the pride of her cutting him off and hopefully staring at my stepfather at his grave but not having spoken to him in years. He is a testament to not just a differing perspective. But a dry drunk/addict still seeing a fractured reality.
Their absence is liberation, I felt unmoored when she died but not crumbling as I expected. I realized what ironically their pastor told me when I was forced to leave them in their mess after undergrad , you become your own parents. You parent yourself. Bad parents must be replaced. The broken people never learned this. They keep trying to get unconditional love or tainted love from the world, hence why my mother bought a husband and he allowed himself to be bought and enslaved and emasculated by her for years. I have every confidence that he's crumbling inside, seeking another mommy wife, his mother died when he was 13 and my mother, a psychology major said she specifically chose him because he would transfer that unfinished business and love to her as blind loyalty. And he did, losing 20 years of his lifetime.
Yeah, my mother was that level of a manipulative narcissist. Real deal not how people casually throw the word around.
You learn to set boundaries and hold them.
You forgive them in God's light but know them as fucked up people in reality. I loved my parents, all six mainly for the Jedi like training they gave me to navigate life, even if sometimes it was unwanted, harsh or from other sources as a counterpoint to what they suggested, they were still the impetus.
I'm glad that they're all gone before i had children. Clean slate. I'll find some nice old folk at a nursing home for my kids.
Lastly you accept that you are not them. You bare similarities and trace elements but like a renovated house, you can completely rebuild yourself and still have them in a box on a shelf, a closet with out sacrificing the whole house, your life to their insanity.
#KylePhoenix
Yes, I have, thank you. It requires work and introspection and awareness to not replace them with their archetype in friendships or relationships.
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