Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. OK. I have it. I got it. Several times over. From the abusive brother, the alcoholic mother, all the bad characters that followed fulfilling their roles as symptoms of my younger version of PTSD. Then came my husband. The walking chaos generator. Enough that he had undiagnosed, unacknowledged ADHD which is hell to live with. Then came the topper, the icing on the cake. A lovely Mild Traumatic Brain Injury which all the literature assures me is nothing like Mild.
I survived fine, Ok, I was doing all right even after the abuse, beatings, character assassinasions and rape and threats of my spectacularly normal dysfunctional American Working Class Upbringing. I made it all the way through that. And More: 6 Pregnancies, two miscarrages, two abortions, two births. Made it through the surgeries, through two graduate schools and moves to 7 cities.
The came the clincher. The clincher from hell. My now ex-husband's brain injury and its repercussions.
Seven Years, one month after the brain injury. Not my brain injury, but I am not the same.
Happiness hurts now. Or perhaps it isn't happiness. I sit down to read. I look around, all is peaceful for the first time in seven years. I can see there are no emergencies, there are no devils, no more bad guys waiting around the corner to take apart all I have manage to reconstruct today. It isn't like that anymore. But after seven years of it, I cannot let go. The choices seem few now. Life with this resident anxiety or what? I don't know.
I sit down to read papers for my eleven year old daugther's upcoming trip to D.C. with a Leadership program. I've had 6 months to prepare, but this is the first day I could devote to it. Last minute like everything I do because I still haven't caught up after 7 years.
I lie down. All is peaceful. Dogs napping. Older teenager depressed. Younger daughter so wanting to be happy, but since Mom and Sister are depressed it challenges her otherwise bouyant personality. I haven't slept more than 4 or 5 hours on average per night in 7 years.
I don't want to sleep. I don't want to go to bed. Not alone.
So I'm quiet. I should be happy, but I sit to read, immediately feeling a sense of relief at this normalcy. A quiet happy peaceful home at last. Immediately tears come to my eyes. This peace is only suggestive of all the loss, all the damage, all the exhaustion, the fear, the lacerating pain that truly felt as if it would never end. Month after month, year after year.
And somehow people find themselves repeating to me that it all will pass. It will all be ok. They say marriage isn't a war. I'm sorry. Mine was a war. It lasted for 22 years and the last year stripped me.
I spent my entire life fighting the system that wanted to metaphorically lobotomize me and now it is what I pray for. Come. Make me stupid, make me unaware, extract my sentience, numb me, make me blind, deaf and dumb.
Oh, I remind myself, as if it were a daily prayer. I cannot give up. I canoot sleep, I cannot relax. I have two children to shepard into their respective futures.
To cure this thing I am told I should try something new called EMDR. A light or other physical therapy that uses an odd mechanical means to help the brain transfer the memory of the trauma from the primitive part of the brain to a more lately evolved managerial, executive part of the brain where I should be able to manage the emotional memories of the event, the war, the extended trauma.
I will have to relate each and every incident. I told the woman we could be at this for some time. She casually rattled off every kind of incident that is likely to cause PTSD. I stopped her. I had experience nearly all that she mentioned.
Too much. Too much. I will have to travel back through time to scrub the system.
Back to the insults, the frustrations, the time-killing inanities of a courst system, divorce system entirely corrupted by its own failures. The bad lawyers, the crook lawyers, the incompetent social workers, the tired justice system representatives that speak nice cultural values but fail to implement them.
Back to the land of the living dead and back to the world of realizing there is no justice. Do not seek justice from the Damned. Try to eradicate their significance is the best I can hope for.
Saturday, September 22, 2007
Thursday, September 20, 2007
Brain Injury & the Birth of a Personal Metaphor
I look at photos my sixteen year old daughter has left behind on the table. Children in the mountains, balloons, my daughters, other children, trees, house, a lake. In the photos she is nine. In fact, it's her 9th birthday party at the country house. In the mountains, in the woods, on the lake is what I used to say.
I realize that this is about one month before her father's accident. Right there. Same house, same lake. I glance through them all and it is very nearly like looking at someone else's family photographs. My own family isn't quite recognizable in these photos. So much has changed. I have nearly erased the 5 years preceeding his accident from my everyday consciousness. And it strikes me now that those 5 years were in fact the happiest of my life.
Now it is as if they don't belong to me anymore. They are vaguely familiar. The pictures are like looking at scenes from a novel you read a very long time ago. But that was my life. And the ensuing years have been so difficult, so lascerating that I have had to eradicate the happiest years from my life because the ongoing grief and pain of what was lost is simply too much to live with. So without realizing it, I have foregone the comfort of keeping those years in my every day heart.
He doesn't remember that I ever referred to him as 'my husband.'
He looks at photos and home movies with ditance and a disassociation I didn't think possible.
I am living in the horror movie once called invasion of the body snatchers although my working title is invasion of the husband snatcher.
All I can say is that it is like the time someone opened the back of the camera before rewinding the film. All those images lost, the sunlight, the broken hairs, tilted glasses, rumpled shirts and the unfelt wind. They are gone as if over-exposed to some force and the life that I had with my husband is gone like the pictures on that roll of film.
I realize that this is about one month before her father's accident. Right there. Same house, same lake. I glance through them all and it is very nearly like looking at someone else's family photographs. My own family isn't quite recognizable in these photos. So much has changed. I have nearly erased the 5 years preceeding his accident from my everyday consciousness. And it strikes me now that those 5 years were in fact the happiest of my life.
Now it is as if they don't belong to me anymore. They are vaguely familiar. The pictures are like looking at scenes from a novel you read a very long time ago. But that was my life. And the ensuing years have been so difficult, so lascerating that I have had to eradicate the happiest years from my life because the ongoing grief and pain of what was lost is simply too much to live with. So without realizing it, I have foregone the comfort of keeping those years in my every day heart.
He doesn't remember that I ever referred to him as 'my husband.'
He looks at photos and home movies with ditance and a disassociation I didn't think possible.
I am living in the horror movie once called invasion of the body snatchers although my working title is invasion of the husband snatcher.
All I can say is that it is like the time someone opened the back of the camera before rewinding the film. All those images lost, the sunlight, the broken hairs, tilted glasses, rumpled shirts and the unfelt wind. They are gone as if over-exposed to some force and the life that I had with my husband is gone like the pictures on that roll of film.
Another Day Post Mortem on the Brain Injury Effects
It has been a lousy day after several other lousey days. I have come to fully acknowledge what I've known for years but did not have time to address until now. I have not just Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, PTSD, but it is COMPLEX Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
This because the most recent of stresses easily designated as cause was actually more like a war. I had to war with the systems of our culture to protect my children in every way. And this war lasted five and a half years. I warred with the justice system where I was told quite clearly that I should expect to find justice in the justice system. I warred with the psychanalytic system, the social system, the family system, the school system, the health system.
All this effort put into a system in extreme contradiction with itself. At all junctures we as women are nearly harrangued with the importance of motherhood and family, yet at nearly every possible turn we are met with blind, willful, punishing resistance to our attempts to simply be the best mothers we can be. It is a hoax, it is a dirty trick, it is a Trickster's game. Do it our way or we will impede your progress at all costs, even if it means endangering or damaging to the children.
Shunned, never paid or compensated for the labor in any sense. Conditioned to think that the work and labor of rearing a family should be reward enough. That is tantamount to saying the check is in the mail or I won't come in your mouth.
This because the most recent of stresses easily designated as cause was actually more like a war. I had to war with the systems of our culture to protect my children in every way. And this war lasted five and a half years. I warred with the justice system where I was told quite clearly that I should expect to find justice in the justice system. I warred with the psychanalytic system, the social system, the family system, the school system, the health system.
All this effort put into a system in extreme contradiction with itself. At all junctures we as women are nearly harrangued with the importance of motherhood and family, yet at nearly every possible turn we are met with blind, willful, punishing resistance to our attempts to simply be the best mothers we can be. It is a hoax, it is a dirty trick, it is a Trickster's game. Do it our way or we will impede your progress at all costs, even if it means endangering or damaging to the children.
Shunned, never paid or compensated for the labor in any sense. Conditioned to think that the work and labor of rearing a family should be reward enough. That is tantamount to saying the check is in the mail or I won't come in your mouth.
Thursday, September 13, 2007
Even This
OK. It takes me a long time to decide which black backround to choose for this blog. Even this is affected by the ambient emotional fallout from that accident. I look at the one with dots. I think, well, it would keep the subject in perspective. The muted colors and circle designs dcrease the gravity of it all. They are emblematic of the depths and complexity of i. There's still hope, even if it is a dampened hope. It becomes a heaviness behind the eyes.
Then back to the one I chose eventually. The all black, severe, formal, funeral, war announcement quality of the design called 'Minima.'
How you may ask is this related to Brain Injury? Whose brain injury is it anyway? I have asked this questions at many times over the years? Why is it he, the injured, the instigator, the perpetrator goes on freely enjoying his history-less life, while the children and I suffer and suffer.
That's a question I often ask. Perhaps the most glaring absurdity, the mean irony seven years later is that although I did not have the accident, in fact was not even a witness, I seem to be living it along with my children, more than the brain-injured husband and father who emerged from the lake that day a very different man than the one who entered it. My black Irish humor refers to the entire affair an an extended scene from Invaion of the Body Snatchers. Who took my husband?
Today it dawns on me that weeks have gone by, three at least, since my ex-husband told my 16 year old that he would probably come sometime in December. She quietly reported it to me as she sometimes does after a phone call from him.
He is not coming. But it is different this time. Him not coming at all or him being late is so frequent as to be expected. Something else has happened now. We always knew that this day would come. He would drift away. Because he has to. He was never firmly attached even before his brain injury. Now though, post-injury, his attentions are intermittent. His emotions are simply strange. Unusual at times, nearly always seeming feigned or unfelt. He is now ineffectual in emotional situations. I know he's mechanical now.
If one were looking on as a third party he may appear as any other, very cliched, ex-husband. He has had 3 girlfriends. The first two left him. They are much younger than him. As an acquaintance once said of a close friend of hers who'd had a brain injury, "If you hadn't known him before, you would think he were a normal guy. You can't see the differences unless you've seen the changes."
My ex is highly functional.
Then back to the one I chose eventually. The all black, severe, formal, funeral, war announcement quality of the design called 'Minima.'
How you may ask is this related to Brain Injury? Whose brain injury is it anyway? I have asked this questions at many times over the years? Why is it he, the injured, the instigator, the perpetrator goes on freely enjoying his history-less life, while the children and I suffer and suffer.
That's a question I often ask. Perhaps the most glaring absurdity, the mean irony seven years later is that although I did not have the accident, in fact was not even a witness, I seem to be living it along with my children, more than the brain-injured husband and father who emerged from the lake that day a very different man than the one who entered it. My black Irish humor refers to the entire affair an an extended scene from Invaion of the Body Snatchers. Who took my husband?
Today it dawns on me that weeks have gone by, three at least, since my ex-husband told my 16 year old that he would probably come sometime in December. She quietly reported it to me as she sometimes does after a phone call from him.
He is not coming. But it is different this time. Him not coming at all or him being late is so frequent as to be expected. Something else has happened now. We always knew that this day would come. He would drift away. Because he has to. He was never firmly attached even before his brain injury. Now though, post-injury, his attentions are intermittent. His emotions are simply strange. Unusual at times, nearly always seeming feigned or unfelt. He is now ineffectual in emotional situations. I know he's mechanical now.
If one were looking on as a third party he may appear as any other, very cliched, ex-husband. He has had 3 girlfriends. The first two left him. They are much younger than him. As an acquaintance once said of a close friend of hers who'd had a brain injury, "If you hadn't known him before, you would think he were a normal guy. You can't see the differences unless you've seen the changes."
My ex is highly functional.
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