So, my parents and my nephews are in town. At one point yesterday, the dog was barking non-stop to be let out of the house (which she could not be until the trailer was put up) and my parents were yelling at each other and the nephews were squabbling and hitting each other with sticks and I sat down in the open end of the van and stared at the lilies after a few seconds, it dawned on me that I could not hear them any more.
So, I looked over and sure enough, when I looked over, I could see them all storming around and I could hear them.
But apparently, when your brain is overwhelmed by negative stimulus, it can just shut that shit right down–almost hysterical deafness, if there is such a thing.
That’s a nifty trick to know that your brain can do, but maybe there might be stressful situations in which I might actually need to hear what’s going on so I hope my brain doesn’t make a habit of it.
At dinner, I got to hear about various family members and all that entails and after a while, my oldest nephew asked me if I was depressed. Dear lord, kid, where you not listening to these tales of woe and stupidity? How can a girl not be depressed?
And my sister-in-law called hysterical for some reason and later I heard my dad tell my mom, “Don’t tell Betsy, it’ll just upset her.” Listen, the fact that she has custody of my nephew most of the time puts my upset-o-meter so far in the red that her calling and causing further nonsense doesn’t even shake the needle. But it’s stupid anyway–this whole keeping secrets bullshit. I mean, I don’t want to know. I don’t want to know all this terrible crap nobody’s actually going to do anything about. But I resent deeply this idea that it MUST be kept from me, for my own good.
Who the hell gets to decide that for another adult?
Anyway, I don’t believe it’s about my well-being anyway. It’s about a bunch of people who act weirdly like children keeping something from the person they have thrust into the role of adult in order to feel powerful.
And I also resent that–that my acting like an adult means that I become the authority figure who must be rebelled against.
Though, you know, the good thing about hearing all the family gossip is that it gives a girl a chance to see that all branches of the family tree behave this way, not just mine.
I don’t know, folks. I used to think that I wanted kids. But I watch my nephews and I’m not sure it’s fair to do this shit to another group of people, who didn’t do anything but be born into this family.
On a side note, my mom and I were talking about how competative my nephews are and she said she didn’t remember my brothers being like that and I said they were competative, but not as much as my nephews, but probably because we had these family friends whose sons warred with each other when they were little, literally tried to kill each other.
Neither my mom or dad remembers that. And they looked at me like I was making it up.
But I do remember it. I know it’s true–that those two boys fought so much and so terribly that it was hard to be around them.
But when both of your parents sit there and tell you they don’t remember it…
I don’t know.
It starts to make me feel a little crazy.
Which, you know, fine. Maybe it would be nice to find out that all the bad things you remember didn’t really happen that way.
But I have a lot of really good memories with a lot of the folks who read here.
And I would be devistated to learn that I was just making them up.
Filed under: Family, Stories About Me, Things I Hate
1) Girl, you cannot fix the world. Accaepting that may make your heart hurt, but it may help you avoid momentary hysterical deafness.
2) Momentary hysterical deafness in the face of family carryings-on is a feature, not a bug. Learn to control it and it will be your friend — it will help you not stress out when there’s no real reason.
3) The number of things that people in my family remember differently sometimes astonishes me. Up to and including things about which there are signed documents, canceled checks, and stuff like that. But mostly about the constant-but-unverifiable stuff. So I was really reassured, last month when I was with my sisters, to get a moment of instant unanimity about this one dreadful, horrible, awful dinner my mother used to cook. Generally, I think anyone with a family has this “but weren’t you there?” reaction all the time.
We call my grandmother “Rashomon Grandma” because she insists that there is One Truth to the way any particular thing happened, and will, say, copy edit your personal story you put in the family book if she thinks you’ve strayed from the truth. Which is amusing, since everyone else in that family is a terrific embroiderer in fine Scotch-Irish tradition. The rule for everyone but Grandma seems to be that a commonly held fiction = truth.
It’s amazing, because it makes things like child neglect and methamphetamine addiction go *poof*!
Honestly, I think the bar is, if it makes you mad, you’re probably sane.
Honestly, I think the bar is, if it makes you mad, you’re probably sane. Amen!
I swear, reading those paragraphs… I could have written a lot of that myself. It’s always been weird to me, the family secret thing. It’s kind of like “oh, if we don’t talk about unpleasant things, they really didn’t happen”
Like, Scarlett O’hara not wanting to hear about the War b/c it was spoiling all the parties of the social season.
I’d rather talk about it – learn from it – and ensure that history doesn’t repeat itself. But I am in the minority.
I’m sorry. I zoned out while you were talking about something. What was it again?
Hoo boy. I just spent the week with my mom, who is increasingly inflexible and strident about her version of family truth. I can’t count the times that I just mentally checked out rather than to tell her off, because for the most part, the stuff we could have argued about isn’t nearly as important as spending what time we have together enjoying what can be enjoyed in our relationship.
B, now that you have spent a number of years in the South, I hereby authorize you (in my capacity as a native Tennessean), to respond to such “Are you depressed?” questions with: “I’m fixin’ to be if all y’all don’t (insert colorful phrase for what you want here).”
Well *I’m* depressed having missed your True Blood play-by-play. Dang it, woman.
I haven’t seen it yet, birthday girl! So there’s still hope of a play-by-play happening.
Heh. For my family, I don’t get told the “family secrets” anymore because they know I’d be the one to point out how insanely stupid the goings-on actually are. And as long as no one points out the stupidity, their actions are “OK.”
In fact, just this week my mom called to moan about having to drive my aunt (her little sister) 14 hours away so she (my aunt) could spend a weekend with her affair boyfriend (my aunt is married). And when I said something like, “You know, you don’t have to agree to drive her there if it bothers you so much” my mom got irritated that I wasn’t commiserating and just told me I “didn’t understand.”
And yeah, my southern family has the same “if we don’t talk about it, it’s not happening/didn’t happen.” Sigh.
As for the specific memories in question, don’t forget that you had a much clearer view than your parents did of what those other children were doing.
It’s kind of astounding how many adults can glance at serious, threatening, bullying behaviors among children and only see “play.” And you weren’t simultaneously engaged in adult conversation and work either, you were totally immersed in the kid world happening out in the yard, in the children’s rooms, etc. You were in a much better position than your mother to see that those other kids weren’t teasing each other, they were seriously doing harm.
I grew up drowning things out. I’ve always made lovely stories in my head. It always amuses me how the family legacy isn’t “Dad was always depressed and shouting and there were always fights about money” but instead about how weird Kathy was for going off by herself to talk to herself in a corner of the yard.
My mom’s favourite line for a long time was “I think you dreamed that”. Whenever a recollection didn’t jibe with her version of history, she’d dust off her “dreamed that” line to both reinforce her mythology and demean the recollection of her children, assuring that the parent-as-setter-of-agendas and child-as-subservient-to-parent roles stayed in place. About three years ago I cracked and said something along the lines of telling her she has a crap memory and it isn’t fair to dismiss our recollections as dreams because it kills our own narrative histories. I was also able to show her a movie that I found on the internet and ordered from Czechoslovakia. I’ve talked about the film for years and she’s always told me I dreamed it. Imagine her surprise to see the thing. A real thing….not a dream.
So she’s backed off the “dreamed it” thing around me but it still hasn’t quite sunk in that everyone sees things differently.
I do feel lucky, though, in that they don’t seem to be keeping the bad things from me.
So it’s not only my family that has selective memory! Like my dad not ‘remembering’ that before the days of the weed whacker us kids got to cut the grass edges with scissors. And it really sucks to be a lefty using right-handed scissors for an hour.
And now, any stuff I miss is my fault because I’ve let my mother default into the gatekeeper of goings on. But I’ve gotten pretty good at taking what she says and figuring out the truth of it…..
Loonytick, yeah, I think that might be part of it–that we were witnesses to it in ways that the adults weren’t. But damn.
Coble, as usual, you are also able to get at something I hadn’t been able to articulate. There’s a way in which the way my parents interact with me sometimes feels like an insistence on being able to set the agenda and reinforce their version of things.
There’s also the case that there is no objectively true memory. Our memories are colored by our own perceptions of what happened to begin with and time only makes the gap between any two people’s memories (not to mention the truth) that much wider.
The likelihood is, neither you nor mom have an objective play-by-play of the past, but you know how the past made you feel and the specific narrative has likely evolved over time to mesh with those feelings and perceptions.