"You're Hurting My Arms! I Want My Mommy!"

PAST

September 30, 2017

Last night after work, I went to Panera to enjoy a sandwich and salad while waiting for traffic to clear so I could start the 90 minute drive home. (I commute out of town for a job and stay in a motel for two nights out of each week.)

As I sat there munching lettuce and musing over horoscopes (yet again), a father dragged a sobbing little girl, about five, out of the restaurant and onto the patio close to where I was sitting, but behind a pillar where I couldn’t see them. He berated the child for touching something she shouldn’t have.

I expected the kind of bratty, willful screaming that usually accompanies that universal child’s, “But I WANT it!” but it soon became clear that I was hearing something completely different.

“When I tell you not to touch something, you leave it alone! Do you hear me? Do you hear me?” the father was screaming. The child sobbed and sobbed.

“Do you hear me? You tell me you hear what I’m saying to you! Why won’t you talk to me!”

The child cried incoherently, then, after more demands by the father, I heard: “You’re hurting my arms!”

“Why don’t you listen to me?”

“You’re hurting my arms! I want my mommy! I want my mommy!” The child was crying so hard she could barely get the words out.

“And I’m going to keep on hurting your arms until you tell me you hear what I’m saying! Shut up! Quit crying! Shut it down! Shut it down right now!”

Of course the child couldn’t “shut anything down.” Imagine being five years old, caught in the grip of this huge, terrifying creature who’s supposed to be the one taking care of you, and you’re being hurt and screamed at, when you didn’t even mean to be bad, and there’s nothing you can do to make it stop. Of course you’re going to scream, and there’s nothing you can do to stop crying.

I can recall quite a few times in my life I had been right there.

“Shut up! Shut it down right now! All right, if you can’t shut up, we’re going to the car!” Pulling the child by one arm, the father started off toward the parking lot. After a couple of yards, he wheeled about and dragged the child back around, pulling her back to the restaurant again. “You shut up! You be quiet!”

They disappeared inside the restaurant, the child sobbing all the way.

The fear and despair on the face of that little girl as they passed felt very familiar to me.

I had sat there thinking of what I might be able to do. One option: Shout at the man that he’s being abusive to that child, and he’s going to screw her all up if he acts like that all the time. Another one: Offer to take the child for a moment.

But I was afraid to. You never know what a person in such a rage is going to do, especially if you embarrass them in public. One time, I was eating at a Wendy’s when an old man became enraged and started screaming at the cashier. He went on and on and soon everyone in the restaurant was glancing over at them and muttering under their breath about how horribly the man was acting. Finally, I shouted, “Shut up!”

The man finished with the poor cashier and stalked into the dining area. “And who put their oar in back here!” he shouted.

I was stupid enough to speak up. “I did.” And then the asshole went off on me.

And that was just over a few dimes in change. God knows what an enraged parent like that one, especially a man, would do if someone questioned their relationship with their child, plus embarrassed them in public. If I said something, would he go home and do worse?

I felt so sorry for that poor little girl, and I bet I can guess how that little child is going to grow up.

We'll come back to this.                                                    ***

As you’ve seen, the time is drawing near for certain predictions of mine to either come true, or not. And, as you’ve seen, I am becoming very anxious. It’s almost as if there are two timelines here, titled like Friends episodes: The One Where Chi and Rory Make a Wonderful Breakthrough; and, The One Where I Was Right.

It’s a quality of time reminiscent of Schrodinger’s Cat: Until you open the box, the cat is both dead and alive. To the outside observer.

The question is not so much: Which timeline am I in?

It’s: Why does it matter so much?

Because it’s obvious to any reader of this blog that it does.

The good marriage timeline doesn’t make me as happy as it should. If I care about Chi, and he and Rory find one another again, and become very happy and fulfilled in their marriage, then I should be ecstatic.

He’s happy. He didn’t want to break up his family. It’s good news!

For him.

It’s not good news for me. The bad marriage timeline, it’s quite clear, made me very happy. So happy it kills me if it looks like it’s not going to happen.

Why is that? Anybody else could just go find someone else. Why does it have to be him?

A number of reasons are obvious. It’s the ones not so obvious that are important, and more deeply true.

Obvious:

--I don’t want to be wrong. Everybody knows that being wrong is bad, therefore we are bad when we are wrong, and therefore I am bad. (This is the message we get living in this world, all the time. From parents, from all judgment from all people everywhere.)

--I don’t want to be self-important and egotistical, and that isn’t as bad when you are also right.

--I am afraid of looking stupid and feeling humiliated. I will have to admit that I was nothing more than a misguided homewrecker, lost and alone in bereavement and trying to steal someone else’s husband, and that makes me a bad person. And I don’t want to admit I am a bad person. I wanted to be a good person, not a bad person. I will have disappointed myself, and then I will be angry at myself and hate myself for what I did.

--I will have to admit that I didn’t handle what happened to me very well and just went completely mad and stayed that way. I don’t want to be a person who goes crazy under emotional stress and wrecks her own life and everybody else’s. I want to be someone who can handle life’s tough times well.

--I will have to admit that the relationship is gone forever, and so is that dream I had for my future. I may have changed it quite a bit, but I did still have it. And the alternative future doesn’t look nearly so happy to me.

--And the fact that Chi is Chi. No one else is him. I have never met anyone else like him, just as I never met anyone else like Simon. Even if anyone else showed up, it would never be Chi, just as Chi wasn’t Simon and no one else ever will be. One thing I treasured about each of them is that unique spark, that unique quality of mind each of them had. When each man was simply being himself, it was just pure joy to be with him. And the fact that those guys picked me? Wow. Just, wow. What an experience! How lovely they each were! And the fact that I could offer them something that really mattered to them? That really mattered to me.

--And it made me feel like I really mattered. No more of that. That’s gone, too. In fact, if a person loves you and then takes it back, it’s like saying, Oops, my bad. I was wrong about you. You didn’t really matter. You were crap, and this other person is better, after all. Nobody likes hearing that. It feels way better to be special than to be unspecial.

--I have to give up my old idea of what my life is, what it’s about, and what I’m about, for a new one.

These things are all obvious, and you were probably thinking them while reading the past few blogs, if you even got that far. What an idiot this person is. What is she smoking? This person is motherfucking nuts.

So what??

Because, here is what is not obvious:

If I DO have to give up my old idea of what my life is, what it’s about, and what I’m about, for a new one, then it’s clear that I prefer my old idea much, much more. I can design a new life paradigm, but I can’t get excited about it. I look at it and go, Meh. What do I want to do that for? What’s exciting, what’s happy, what’s fun, what’s attractive about that one? For me, not much.

Why is that? Why does one life paradigm feel like my rice bowl, and the other one doesn’t? So much so, that I don’t want to change to the new paradigm at all, even when it looks like circumstances demand that I do this, because it is reality?

Why is that old life picture my rice bowl? Why does that rice bowl feel so good and so right to me, that I’m doing ALL kinds of mental gymnastics to be able to keep it, and no other way to live looks attractive in the least? I know about codependency, a lot more than I knew about it two years ago. I have a pretty darn good idea what life with Chi might actually be like, no matter how absolutely adorable the functional adult parts of him are. I love the man very, very much, but geez. Why do I keep telling myself I can handle that? THAT is likely to be Tough. Note the capital T.

Well, that would be,

(ONCE AGAIN),

ISSUES OF POWER AND CONTROL.

Since littlest childhood, what have I been doing? Looking for that parent to love me and listen to me, not hurt my arms and scream at me. My BPD mother, inappropriately revealing her own childhood to me as she struggled to come to terms with being sexually abused by my grandfather, exposed me to all these recovery materials. She didn’t do much with them, but I sure did. 

I kept thinking, Why don't you change? Why don't you wake up and DO better? Fuck if I'm going to live like this, no matter how scared I am or what I have to do so this doesn't happen to me!

My whole life was geared toward learning all I can about human motivations and relationships and exerting power to change. Because of that time and that experience, that’s what’s exciting to me, that’s what matters to me, that’s what feels important.

If nobody hurt little children by the arms anymore, think how much of a better world we’d have. If we all could heal from being hurt by the arms, think how much lighter and more joyful our lives could be!

Who wants to sit by oneself writing manuscripts that won’t much matter, and have a few casual friendships in which nothing deep and transforming is happening? I have Saturn in Scorpio, goddamn it! Life has to be deep and passionate or there’s nothing lively about it! I have to have deep transforming encounters with deeply transforming people, or life feels like nothing much at all!

Which is why I was so at home helping Simon when he got sick. A lot about it was very, very bad, and a lot about it was very, very sad, but I definitely met the best in Simon and I definitely met the best in me. And I was at home there. That kind of stuff fits my personality the way shoes need to fit my feet. It defines what I feel is important about life. And when Chi opened up about how things really were at home, and how he wanted to change his life, I thought I was gonna get to do it again.

It made me feel like I am important and worthwhile, that what I know matters, that what I can do has value. That I went through what I went through all those difficult years I was young for a reason, and Chi was it. Now it made sense. Now it paid off.

Which is why my “real” work, although it certainly has value to others, doesn’t do this for me. It’s not the kind of thing I do best; I have to struggle to do that. Writing is a little more like it and not so much of a struggle, but nobody cares about that. And even if they did, it would be somebody in Timbuktu reading my book. Nobody I know, nobody I care about, nobody who matters to me in real life. So these things don't "work" as well. 

I want what I really am and what I really know to connect with other people I care about and mean something. You know…actually matter. I want to have worth as myself, not as what I have to masquerade as so other people can get what they want.

(Just like Chi does, come to think of it.)

When I was five or six or seven or eight, this got burned into my brain as What Feels Important To Do In Life. And nothing else does. So when I don’t get to do this, I am unhappy and feel disused, disconnected, unimportant. (And then I dump on myself for wanting to be important. “It’s Egotistical.” –Mom.)

Now. Let’s look at something.

HOW many times have I gone over and over and over WHY it isn’t okay to stage manage someone else’s life? In how many ways do I understand how vital it is that others do this for themselves? And in how many ways have I revamped my ideal of the Chi and I relationship to reflect this understanding? IF that relationship happened, I DO know a whole lot more about how to be in it in a way that’s healthy (including dumping it if it were untenably unhealthy). And I thought I was doing a good job revising my ideals of what I thought a relationship should be.

I’ve revised my thoughts about how to operate in that paradigm, but I haven’t revised the basic paradigm at all.

As a child, why do you come up with that paradigm in the first place?

Because you’re tiny and helpless, and stuck in the house forever with this mean, frightening, unpredictable giant who’s supposed to be your parent, whom you’re supposed to love, and who calls themselves raising you. And you can’t escape.

And the only way to get Mom (or Dad) to stop hurting your arm and screaming at you is to manipulate your parent’s feelings so he or she doesn’t want to anymore. You can’t hit back. You can’t run away from home. (Although, I sure can remember wanting to, when I was the age of that little girl, or maybe a year or so younger.)

That little girl was me, growing up with a BPD mom and a dad who whipped the SHIT out of me instead of helping me when I got a C on a pre-algebra test. This is why I fell in love with the bus driver when I was five. And the PE teacher when I was seven. And the Talented and Gifted teacher when I was eleven. And the pre-algebra teacher when I was twelve. And wondered what the fuck was wrong with me that I was so unlike other children.

And it’s still me today. Wasn’t that what I was supposed to do? How can I win at this? How can I recreate this situation in my life? A relationship that isn’t like this doesn’t feel like anything.

And that—as well as the person Chi is—is why Chi looks way more attractive to me than hanging him up and forgetting about him, or joining Match.com.

This is STILL what life means to me, and it’s STILL stuck in my head. Even when I know I’m doing it, know it’s bad, and am devising ways not to do it anymore,

I’M STILL DOING IT AND IT’S STILL HAPPENING!

Look how tenacious this is. Even, even, even though I’ve studied and studied and studied this, I know what it is, I know why it is, and I’m even trying to revise HOW I’m doing it, nothing else feels satisfying, so I won’t STOP doing it and just change to another image for living my life.

I can come up with ‘em. I just look at ‘em and say, Yuck.

I see the horoscopes saying, Stay out of power and control, and I go, I get that. I will stay out of power and control in these and those ways, instead of doing relationships these other ways I was originally dreaming of doing.

But stay out of a LIFE of power and control?

I, apparently, would need to get a brain transplant.

There’s nothing wrong with helping another person heal, or being with another person as they heal, but I’m incapable of being happy any other way. My marriage with Simon wasn't like this. 

But now Chi’s so sweet, and I love him so much, and I know how sad he is, he never leaves my mind, and I’m incapable of being happy any other way.  (Now, at least. Simon and I didn’t start out that way. Well…wait a minute. There was that issue of being way better for him than his diagnosed-BPD first wife. Oh, shit. Well…but that wasn’t power and control. Trust me, nobody was controlling Simon.)

Things are different now. This is a problem.

As I’ve posted on this blog, I am a fan of Family Tree Counseling. (I think it’s Family Tree Life Coaches now.) I attended one of their live feeds one Tuesday night, and they were talking about this. You’re attracted to what you’re attracted to. You can’t really change what you’re attracted to. All you can do is try to pick something that’s workable, instead of something that’s not workable.

Seems like me. I can imagine other paradigms for living life, but they just aren’t attractive. And that’s why I hang on so hard, hoping the horoscopes are right and the picture is wrong. I can change how I behave within my sick paradigm, but give it up for a completely different kind of life? My friend Judy is perfectly happy with her completely different kind of life, retired, writing novels that aren’t at all well-known, and going to a different book signing every month, trying to get her name and work out there. They don't even have anything to do with deeply transformative topics. Well, okay. They sort of do. They're werewolf stories. (Good werewolf stories, but none of us will ever be James Joyce.)

Meh. Okay. She’s happy, but if that’s all I had in life, I don’t think I would be happy. And the weird thing is, Simon really did NOT offer this when we got together. (Who knew he was going to die of a brain tumor?)

What he offered was the chance to be part of a HEALTHY, FUNCTIONAL family, something I thought I’d never have, and that was part of the reason I was so happy with him. And so proud to be with him. (And he was special, fun, and adorable. Like Chi, but different.)

And then Chi and I got together, and BLAM! Here was this other paradigm for living, brought up from the depths. And now I have trouble living when it looks like it isn’t going to happen.

Am I just sick? Not necessarily. In the right relationship with the right person, it could be functional and work out well.

Not being able to adjust to any other kind of life, especially when it’s clear that that is the life you WILL have, is sick.                               

                                                                           ***

Having seen this, I had another flash of insight:

THIS IS WHY THE HOROSCOPES ARE BETTING THAT THE LOVE TRIANGLE HAPPENS.

Because ingrained, resistant, deeply entrenched life paradigms are NOT unique to just me.

Look how hard I’ve worked, nonstop, almost two and a half years, and I still haven’t gotten rid of mine. Look how bald-faced honest I’ve been, even when I have to admit the most horrible things about myself. Look how much I read. Look how many rocks I’ve turned over (astrology, for fuck’s sake?). Look how doggedly I go after my own motivations as well as everyone else’s.

I WORK, and I WORK HARD. And I still can’t get rid of mine.

*Ahem.*

What’s Rory’s childhood paradigm? (And admittedly, hers I know the least factual information about.) It appears to be: Find someone to construct a soft nest for her, in which she doesn’t have to worry about most of the hard stuff in life, like the housework, earning a living, taking care of the yard…that kind of thing. Find someone who will always be there to arrange her circumstances to her comfort. Find someone close enough to count on, but who will accept enough distance for her to feel comfortable (and that's a L-O-T of distance), since Rory isn’t comfortable with too much intimacy. Find someone who can be bullied into how she wants to live, exactly the way she needs him.

What’s Chi’s childhood paradigm? Feel shitty about himself. Really, really shitty about himself, not good enough, repulsive, unlovable. Because he’s so unlovable, pinch and poke and shape and squeeze and fix and mold himself into whatever someone else needs, because no one will ever love him any other way, and do that SO much it HURTS. Stuff the awareness that it hurts, stuff it in, push it in, cram it in, far, far away so no one else can see it. Look, appear, act, seem good on the outside, then wonder why everyone else is happy and he isn’t. Then, when absolutely none of his needs are met, he’s being treated abusively, but others will wonder why he’s objecting, wall off inside his own head and self-denigrate. And when that hurts so badly he can’t stand it anymore—EXPLODE and have an affair! Then feel horrible about it, lather, rinse, repeat.

We’re all running on these childhood programs as old as we are. If I, working as hard as I can work (and that is considerable!), can’t expunge my own childhood paradigm, what are the chances they’ve expunged theirs?

Especially when they began theirs right after childhood ended--in their late teens and early twenties--and have maintained these paradigms for almost forty years, and grown a system up around them of people who think it looks good and who think it's always been okay, because that's what Chi has portrayed to them trying to please them?? Who cannot possibly ever understand that it's NEVER been okay, and who are going to exert TREMENDOUS social pressure so that this system stays the way it is?? 

And society itself agrees. It's almost a forty year marriage! What, you're going to run away and leave your wife? After she put you through school and then stayed home and raised the kids for you and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah? 

Nobody has seen the way it really was, and now it's like Trickle Down Economics. Society has been hearing that story now for over thirty years, and look how hard it is to convince people that that's not true, even when their direct experience is informing them that it isn't. Just like with Trickle Down Economics, people fall in love with the externally happy marriage, even the unhappy participants themselves.

And when you can't stand up for yourself with other people anyway, well...

Of course their old childhood paradigms are still there and still running.

And THAT’S why the horoscopes are betting I see Chi again. Things are very likely to slip back to the way they were, and he won't be able to stand the pain again. That’s why the cards are telling me this, and that's why I’ve gotten blipped on LinkedIn. Twice.

For the record, how many things have the horoscopes been right about, now? Let’s look at the stuff Alice picked out: Pythagorean triangle: Often seen in the charts of comedians, denotes a sense of humor and an unusual way of seeing things. Yod One: A lot of difficulty in childhood resulting in trouble achieving objectives in adulthood, a lot of adversity creating a feeling of “What’s the use?” Gets better later in life after I’ve learned a few things. My novile yod: denotes an unusual way of seeing things. My undecile yod: I’m testing myself to find out how much I’ve learned about something. (Got any guesses what?) 

Transits: 2015, Affair Year Number One: You should see Chi’s. Oh, and you should see Rory’s. I was rereading it last night when the father started screaming at his little girl. In short, they sure called their shots. 

Transits this year: I’m doing a lot of self-mythologizing. (I’m nodding.) Deep, dark childhood issues dredged up from the murk. (Um, look familiar?) Very strong feelings. (Yup.) Researching astrology so much I’m losing sleep? (Yup.) Trying to guess which way my life is going? (Um, look familiar?) Even when I was telling myself these things weren’t happening or actively trying NOT to do some of them, I still was and just didn’t even know or see it!!

2018 is coming. Chi’s Affair Year.

Those. Transits. Are. Not. Pretty.

Placing any bets—?