Whispered Words of Whitman

My mother used to say that in narration to accompany whatever fresh clusterfuck we were dealing with that week. “You couldn’t! Writers in Hollywood never conceived of such a scandalous story.” Now in my Thirty-sixth year and a mother in my own right, as I reflect upon vignettes from my childhood, I have a new found appreciation for what she meant.

Mother

My mother – who is going to just love being editorialized as such – is a good-intentioned, hardworking product of the Greatest Generation, born into the latewave Boomer Gen Jones era. With a mind for puzzles and data organization, she was a favorite of her father who went on to outgrow the codependent relationship shared by her mother and older sister. Her parents married young – in their early twenties – and stayed together for more than sixty years, until my grandfather’s death, with my grandmother following only three years later. They bought a home in the Wissinoming section of Northeast Philadelphia, raised their two daughters, and hosted family holidays as the generations multiplied.

Father

That girl from Wissinoming fell for an ostentatious twenty-something year old guy she had begun dating around 1987. My father was the real headline generator for the first part of my life. The eldest of three, he was the first born son of a Philadelphia firefighter and his wife. They lived in the Frankford neighborhood, which bordered Wissinoming to the south. After enduring years of physical abuse at the hands of my grandfather, my grandmother left him while her youngest child and only daughter was set to begin her senior year of high school; making my aunt the prior occupant of my nursery until her graduation, since I wasn’t due until the fall anyway.

My father was an incredible story-teller. He’d weave fantastic tales so masterfully, he began to conflate those stories he conjured with actual memories from his life, painting over some of the uglier truths with a Norman Rockwell-esque fabrication. To this day, I find myself bringing up a story of my father’s and I am stopped in my tracks wondering if this truth from my childhood, which I can remember my father telling in vivid detail, was another for the ever growing pile of falsehoods I’ve discovered. 

Sister

The June before I turned five, my mother gave birth to her second and final baby girl, my little sister. I went back and forth on how I felt, from curiosity, to envy, to smitten with her little coos, through to naming myself ambassador of communications because I was much closer to her age and thusly, could translate what she was saying from the baby talk language long forgotten by the adults who surrounded us. As we continued to grow, we went through the typical – or so I thought – sibling rivalry. But we also endured the atypical influences on our relationship, which ultimately – at least as of this writing – succeeded in tearing us asunder. Of course there were times I didn’t want to have a little sister, most of them between the ages of 10 and 19, but now it feels like I’ve lost the only companion in this life who will ever understand all we’ve gone through and remember who I used to be, for the times when I need reminding.

A Turbulent Uncoupling

It’s hard to say whether my relationship with my sister was a victim of a harsh puberty or those external pressures which came in the form of our father’s love manipulation. When our parents divorced in October 1999, it set in motion the series of events which have added up to the basis of my emotional regulation and executive decision making. This was the first event in what would become 22 years saturated with varying traumatic experiences, post-traumatic growth, catharsis and eventual enlightenment. Prior to the explosive, pivotal events which resulted in my mother being granted a restraining order against my father and subsequently having him evicted from the family home while my sister and I were witness to the whole affair, neither my sister nor I were aware of the dynamic between our parents. We were too young to see our mother faltering in response to our father decompensating into what I’ve come to assess as Bipolar I with psychotic features compounded by the pervasive narcissistic personality disorder he developed as a coping mechanism in response to his childhood environment. Plus, it was my mother’s upbringing to never let the children in on any conflicts between parents, which only contributed to the mounting pressure of the load on her shoulders. 

So when two uniformed police officers showed up at our door one evening, after both parents had returned from work and picked both my sister and I up from our after school program, I was caught off guard, to say the least. By this point, I’d grown close to my father as two headstrong, first-born children looking to make a lasting impact with this time we’re given. On the other hand, my mother shared her younger-sister experience to bond with her second born daughter and could only offer austerity to her “spunky” eldest child to balance the chaos brought by my father. This outright declaration of war by my mother was not just an act of aggression against my father, but it was a divisive blow to her first-born, a consequence I can only imagine she either couldn’t foresee or was outweighed by the benefit of the necessary divorce. 

Anatomy of Generational Trauma

Now this is when things really started to kick off. The nuclear family unit divided evenly down the center, with me and my father on one side, my mother and sister on the other, and a canyon worthy of being counted among the wonders of the world in between. Despite my mother’s best efforts, my father considered me to be a peer and confidant – please read: wildly inappropriate parentification – which gave me access to one side of a complex situation which I was too immature and emotionally dependent upon to view with any clarity whatsoever. What was really a maladaptive perversion of the parent/child relationship, I interpreted to be a testament to my intellect. And what child doesn’t crave that intimacy with a parent? To feel like you are truly connected in a way which no one else on this planet could be capable of.

On the other side of this equation, we have a mother who expected a marriage like that of her parents and a hierarchy fashioned after her family of origin. Simultaneously, she rebelled against that same family of origin for rejecting her. His understanding of the family system mixed with the audacity to openly mock and criticize that system is what ultimately attracted her to my father in the first place – in my opinion, anyway. She was now left with the responsibility of raising these two children, which if we’re being honest, was probably much easier than raising two children and a full grown man (speaking from experience on that one). But this was still not the life she envisioned for herself or her children. And to make matters worse, the predisposition for my mother’s bond to be stronger with my sister through the shared experience of birth order left me odd-man-out in our home. My father including me in the conflict between him and my mother, no matter how inappropriate, made it that much more difficult for my mother to try and shield me from the volatility of their divorce because my father would make wild accusations and my mother would refuse to defend herself, stating it was not business to be discussed with a child. Which I definitely was at the age of 12. But when she treated me as such, it only strengthened my support of my father, who regarded me as an equal, in my eyes. Over time, my sister began to seek our father’s attention only to be rejected for either his latest lover or used as a means of re-establishing contact with his eldest daughter, me. 

I tried to nurture a close relationship with my sister, especially when I was in college and we were no longer living under the same roof, fighting for the affections of parents who were doing their best to navigate this precarious family dynamic. But for whatever reason, it never took hold. We kept falling back into sour disagreements fueled by years of insecure attachment styles ruling our development. She was only 6-years-old when our father was served with a protection from abuse (PFA) order with eviction from the shared residence, so she had a significantly different childhood than I did. She held it against me that our father only really wanted to maintain his relationship with her because he saw it as a foothold to remain in my life. I didn’t know how to apologize for that, mostly because I was unaware of it, but it saturated her daily reality. And now I find myself envying her relationship with our mother from time to time, because they share something I can’t. I’m not even sure what exactly that is, but I can feel it lacking in me when the three of us get together.

Herstory Repeats Itself

It wasn’t until I found myself filing for my own PFA, twenty-some odd years later, that I reached a full-circle moment in both understanding my mother and loathing myself in new ways. Maybe my initial assessment of my mother was ill-informed and immature. (It 100% was.) But more than that, how did I grow up understanding relationship dynamics like these enough to critique the women in my bloodline who precede me and still manage to find myself in my mother’s shoes despite my best efforts to achieve literally anything else? Sure, some of the details were only slightly different, but for all intents and purposes, by the age of 31, I managed to find myself in almost the exact position that marked the beginning of my mother’s 40s.

I began this next chapter of my life with a whole host of emotions. But the loudest by a country mile was the thought – Son of a bitch. My mother was right. You really could not make this shit up.