Just finished reading “Sickened” by Julie Gregory, her story of living with a mother who needed her sick, Munchausen By Proxy.
It is amazing that her mother could convince her she was sick, and to ‘act’ sick, and how her mother’s state depended upon her behavior. And how she never knew this wasn’t her real self, that this was a self that her mother needed.
She writes, “Truth is whatever your mind believes. And beliefs are erected by those who raise us. If someone shapes your mind into a distortion, you have to find something that can give you a straight answer.”
She tried to tell her dad about the abuse, but he didn’t fully grasp the immense totality of it all…she goes on to say.
“After that day with Dad, I knew that nobody could give me straight answers but me. I used mirrors to step back and forth between trips out into the real world, trips back into the swirling black hole of my family, trips to new adventures outside the bubble, seeing how long I could walk away from the mirror before the old thoughts submerged the fresh ones. Sometimes I’d only get to the kitchen or down a few steps of the porch. Sometimes, I could make it a half-day before I’d have to rush back to see myself…
With my freshly wired instincts, I inch farther and farther out of my incubator. I stay longer in the real world and run back with less frenzy when waves begin crashing. When I do slip under, I whip out a pen and write myself back to the surface, using whatever material I can snatch to capture the barrage; bar napkins, toilet paper, airline barf bags, my bare leg. I scribble my thoughts; tweak them with words from my new vocabulary. It talk myself out of paranoia and coax myself from ledges. I fill volumes of journal books with these moments; packed with crowed text, both sides scribbled and stuffed with snippets of paper smeary inked paper towels, feverishly written.
My life now in triplicate: One life in the mirror, one in the world, and one balancing the two as oceans which must wax and wane in tandem until one replaces the other.” Julie Gregory
She is right that your life is lived in triplicate until you can finally live fully in your truth.
How you find yourself in a very awkward stance, knowing your past is incorrect, but not fully knowing what is, and then being the one to resurrect a you that you have never known. How you have to go against all who stood with you in the secret.
She writes about her younger brother. “His memory, as mine once did, as opted for the starrier picture. It was just last year, when Danny was twenty-four, that the only thing he wanted for Christmas was a tape of Mom’s singing, one of the few good things strained from our life with her.
He still needs a mom and dad. His psyche has draped sharp edges of detail in a thick drop cloth as he keeps his past at bay with workaholism and asthma attacks that coincide with Mom’s random phone calls to him…”
It is like a curtain that shields the truth, a blind area where the parents are concerned, something that stops the truth from penetrating their worlds and upending their apple cart of loving parents, or at least ones that ‘tried their best’.
To me it is facing the inconvenient truth.
