A few years have passed since I’ve posted or even seen these wordpress blogs. I’d forgotten the associated email account and figured all that could reasonably be accomplished by them, had been. They were a cathartic mess, and yet everything described therein was true. Indeed, they greatly understated Brigid’s malevolent behavior, left out many staggering events I’ve since recalled and gave far too much credit to dear-ole’-dad, among other issues It was like the first few bricks in a dam giving way. Coming to understand your parents as crazy, underhanded and/or just bad people humans isn’t fun or easy.
I’m the oldest of 4 siblings, and all but the youngest have seen our lives fade into very limited and dark corners. I’m trying to climb my way out of things and am have hope, even at the age of 47, that a real go of things is possible. We 3 old look and behave as differently as can be reasonably expected of full siblings, but share a few traits in common
- Learned helplessness – Buried deep in our nervous systems is a powerful sense that any goal or expectation is always the first step on a path to failure, shame and humiliation. We all tried to break free of this and had a few years of success after leaving home, before our inability to make real connections with others or otherwise cope with a world we weren’t prepared for led to giving up.
- Anger and Defiance – “Screw you! Leave me, fire me, take you can from me! See if I care! NO! Look how I can suffer and you still won’t get to me!”
Anyway…….this blog will describe an event from my younger years that illustrates the “next-level” narcissism of my Brigid, my mother, and the atmosphere of our home which gave life to these coping mechanisms.
When I was 7 years old, I ran away from home. It wasn’t much of a run; just fleeing my friend’s home, about 1/3rd of a mile away. I packed the brown suitcase under my bed and left. It was nighttime and dark outside.
I remember the relevant events of this episode vividly. One evening, Brigid stood in my doorway and scolded me for not keeping a clean room. She told me to move this and move that…….fold my clothes and put them here, and then there. No matter what I did, there was more scolding and hollering………………and laughter. That’s right…laughter.
These cathartic outbursts of Brigid often involved giggling when she’d provoked the defiance, lies, or fits that she was after. That allowed her to launch into whatever Meryl Streepesque drama speech she’d been practicing in her head for days or weeks.
I finally stopped trying to clean my room, laid on the bed, yelled back and told her to go ahead and punish me. There was a deck of UNO cards on my desk and I “threw” them on the carpet. 7 year old me didn’t have the guts to really throw them, or go into the kind of tantrum that Brigid fell into on a near daily basis, and so I neatly scattered the cards. She saw this and laughed harder. Then I threatened to run away.
If you’ve never known what it’s like to be put into an emotional killbox by a parent at a young age – where they unleash their fury and let you know there’s not a damn thing you can do about it – there’s no way to really describe it. Brigid let us all know, time and time again, that she was bound by no rules. She was could whatever the hell she wanted. (more on this in future blogs)
She never helped or showed us to things. Instead, expectations were given, followed by more insanity when they weren’t met. Brigid never made any attempt to make regular house chores (or anything else) a positive experience or happy routine in a happy home. It certainly wasn’t a happy home.
Got a problem with my behavior kid? Don’t think it’s fair, huh? Go ahead and complain, then I’ll crack the whip even harder. There’s nothing you can do. I do what I want and right now, I want to lay into you and feel like a boss.
My threat to run away provoked a long and intense laugh. It wasn’t a chuckle. She backed up against the door frame and held her stomach while she cracked up. Brigid had gotten all that she wanted out of me that evening and more.
Over the next two days, she contacted the parents of my friend and, I suppose, told them what was about to happe. I didn’t see or hear that part, but my friend’s mother (an eccentric, bohemian artist type……..a rare species in Newtown) was expecting me when I arrived.
The evening when I ran away, she provoked me into a fit again. It was obviously planned. All that was missing was my threat to run, and she went about getting it out of me with more yelling and threats of punishment until I did run away. She chuckled again, told me to take out the brown crappy suitcase from under my bed and pack it, and so off I went.
Two cars stopped along the way and I think they were the only two. The first was a man, who asked if I was alright and where I was going. I said yes and he hesitantly kept driving. The second was a couple. They stopped, asked who I was, where I lived and where I was headed. I tried not to cry but couldn’t help it, and said that I was running away to my friend’s house because I was angry at my mother. They mumbled something to one another, then asked how far away I was. It was about 200 yards to my friend’s home at that point. They turned their car around so that it’s headlights brought the road into view, then slowly followed until I arrived.
Brigid did this to create a story she could tell; one of her countless “Ya know what I told em’ doncha!?” tales where she gave whomever what for with one of her root-toot-tootin’ conversation finishers. She’d recite these to whoever was willing to listen, and seemed to think they were crafting an image in the minds of others:
Brigid the wonderful, yet strict and fun good-ole’-Iowa girl mom!
Her brother was the same way. They both thought they could craft their own reputations by telling stories. They both seemed to think that nothing could inspire awe, respect, and joy in others like telling stories where they were hero’s in the end. In one of the blogs from years ago, I speculated that they were both “trapped” in the the emotional development stage of 2 or 3 year olds. They thought and acted like toddlers, who anticipated their mothers bright smile and clapping hands when told of they day’s coloring project, and how great the teacher thought they did.
If Brigid thought she had an entertaining tale, she’d then go down her list of favored persons willing to listen to her endless gossip and advice……….one after the next, usually on the telephone after we went to bed. The same dumb stories……….over and over and over and over.
“Oh hey. How are ya tonight? Great. So lemme’ tell ya about this one……..”
What an obnoxious person.
“So you know what I told em’ doncha?!” This was always said with a southern accent twang, as though she thought it would add additional comic relief to her already hilarious story. The punchline was invariably followed by her weird cackle.
On a side note: Throughout my life, I’ve noticed that people who laugh at their own jokes when no one else is laughing are almost always gossipy, resentful a**holes. They seem to think that laughing at their own stuff raises the levity of a conversation and hides what’s usually a nasty barb they’re tying to jab at someone who isn’t there.
Since writing those blogs a few years ago I’ve spoken to a few people who knew Brigid from those years, and one was particularly helpful. Almost everyone in our neighborhood thought she was crazy, obnoxious trailer trash. 7 year old kids running away from home at night, carrying suitcases, wasn’t something that happened in Newtown……..except for, well, Brigid. It’s a middle-class to upper middle-class suburb. Folks in Newtown life there for the peace and quite. It’s for people willing to forgo the culture and buzz of city life, or the quaint, familiar “everybody knows your name……and your parents and grandparents name” atmosphere of small towns. They live in Newtown in order to avoid people like Brigid. She was so wildly out of place and her depth. She didn’t belong there.
The HBO show Sopranos touched on the issue of borderline personality disorder. Brigid is so much like the character of Tony’s mother, only trashier, mouthier, more malevolent and even less self-aware. Tony’s therapist, played by Lorraine Bracco, said something that flipped a switch in my head. (paraphrased) “To people with borderline personality disorder, life is little more than an endless series of conflicts. People aren’t much more than abstractions in their drama.”
I suppose The Soprano’s is off topic, but this is relevant. It was the first show that craft story lines around normal seeming people with quirks, talents, and flaws of everyday people. The character of Tony’s mother was obviously created by someone familiar with people of that sort. They were several flashbacks to Tony’s youth, where her nutty behavior was illustrated. In one scene, she kinda-not-too-serious exclaimed that smothering her children to death was preferable to moving to Vegas. In another, when Tony was asked to recall fun moments with her from his childhood, he remembered a time when a relative fell down the stairs and was injured, which made his mother laugh. And so the kids laughed as well.
Eureka! That. I felt that scene in my bones. Brigid rarely expressed joy, save for self-praise or when something bad happened to someone else. We laughed along with her, because it was so great to her happy at anything. If she’d laughed at seeing people skinned alive, I might now be asking a captive in the cellar to put the lotion in the basket.
Despite these crazy behaviors, Tony’s mother, on several occasions, would say things like….
“I can’t thing of a single really bad thing that I did. It was tough raising those kids, and I think I did a pretty damn good job”
In Brigid speak: “I had so much to deal with, but managed to be a wonderful mother”
Brigid doesn’t register any of the horrors her kids experienced while in her care, because they didn’t feel bad to her. Indeed, these are often happy memories to her. “Are you a glad mommy or a mad mommy?” I would ask her when I was 1 and 2 years old. While potty training, when I had a whoopsie, I’d run into a corner and hide. I was terrified, not just of Brigid, but of her tumultuous moods. I don’t remember life at 1, but know this because Brigid has told this story dozens of times to me since……..with a happy grin on her face. That’s who she is. Behavior that would horrify a sane, well socialized person is fun stuff to her.
Brigid could certainly be diagnosed with more sever and sinister personality disorders than borderline, but that absolutely describes her relationships to people.
She tormented her kids because it made her feel good. It gave her a sense of control and power that she found nowhere else. Her ridiculous hee-haw puns, bizarre monologues, self-pity (for “Allllll that (she) had to deal with“), and gossip didn’t inspire the awe and appreciation in adults that she was looking for. They mostly caused people to conclude she nuts. But those psycho outbursts –which constituted almost all of the conversations (monologues) she had with us with any real emotional energy – squeezed a ton of guilt, shame, defiance and anger out of us kids. It was like nectar to her squalid soul.
What a disgusting human being.
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