Playing Catch Up

Monday

I was up for a few hours in the night but otherwise slept okay. I think the pilates class tired me out.

I got up with Dave a little before 6:00 a.m., took my medication, and put Dave's lunch in his lunch sack. He had portioned up everything the night before, so there was nothing for me to do besides that. After Dave left for work, I had a couple of fried eggs and a piece of toast for breakfast then I went back to bed! I was still tired and the feeling was compounded by having to take a bit of benadryl because I started sneezing as soon as we opened the front door to let the cats in and out for their morning rituals.  So I went back to bed and tried to get a little more sleep but of course I failed miserably.

Instead of sleeping, I read awhile.

I'm still reading After the Tears, the book about adult children of alcoholics. It's wrenching in some ways--many ways, actually--but it's interesting. It explains so many things about how children learn to adapt to an alcoholic/addict parent and how those adaptations stretch into adulthood. There's nothing normal about growing up with an alcoholic parent, but when we are in the situation we learn to crank up the denial until it becomes the new normal. That constant level of denial along with all the awful things that accompany acoholism can end up causing problems later in life.

In my experience, having an alcoholic father was humiliating, embarrassing, frightening, and worse. Of course there's no way to express any of those feelings as it’s happening--it's not safe or smart to anyway--so things get internalized and that causes lots of things--thought processes and beliefs and so on--to become warped. It's interesting to see the machinations, the process, explained. It’s interesting and wrenching, too. And maddening. And sorrowing. Reading this book is bringing up memories from my childhood and suggesting that I look at them as they truly are, the way they are before I stripped them of their emotions so that I didn't have to face the inherent awfulness of the situation. (I couldn't at the time.)

[Here I had put a couple of memories that came as I was writing, but I decided to move them below just in case anyone wants to skip them. They're at the end under The Memories Below heading.]

In the afternoon, I took a break from the book and watched part of a movie, The Card (1952) with Alec Guinness and Glynis Johns. Of course, I love Alec Guinness (he was such a calculating, amusing, and enormously talented actor) and I like Glynis Johns ever since I saw her play a mermaid in Miranda (1948), a charmingly strange film, and very British, too. However, The Card turned out not to be quite as charming, so I stopped it halfway through.

After I turned off the movie, I did some dishes and took a shower. We were going out to dinner with my brother and I wanted to get ready and put some makeup on. However, my skin has been so dry that it's starting to get flaky. The makeup I tried to put on stuck to the flaky bits and left me looking like I'm shedding my skin. Ugh. And this is even with a heavier moisturizer slathered on! I just go full-on reptile during allergy season I think.

When Dave got home, we sat and chatted for awhile. Saba came in and got brushed. She and Gray Kitty are like giant bumblebees in the spring, carrying pollen in from outside to deposit it on the furniture where it lays in wait for the chance to get sucked up into my sinuses and make me miserable. What we really need is a little kitty door with a built-in brush-vacuum combination that would strip the pollen and such off of them as they came through it and before they could bring it in the house.  (There's a million dollar idea. Inventors, get on that!)

For dinner, my brother had suggested BBQ and I'm always up for BBQ so we had dinner at Rudy's. Dave, who is a vegetarian, always has trouble getting enough to eat when he go there. He orders sides usually--potato salad, coleslaw, that kind of thing--but the emphasis at Rudy's is on the meat and so the sides are only so-so. This time before we left the house, I told him I was going to sneak in some vegetarian fake meat for him to douse in Rudy's BBQ sauce (which is surprisingly vegetarian). He though the idea was hilarious, so that's what we did. I cooked up the three Quorn nuggets and a vegetarian "chick'n" patty and wrapped them in foil and stuck them in my purse. When my brother and I were unwrapping smoked turkey (my brother) and brisket (me) and dousing it in BBQ sauce, Dave was unwrapping his fake meat and dousing it in BBQ sauce. Yum!

We sat and ate and chatted for a little over an hour and then parted ways, with a plan to meet up again on Wednesday night at Costco to do some shopping. (Tomorrow night we have a pilates class.)

When we came home, I felt pretty tired and so did Dave. He went to bed really early and I soon followed. I read for a bit and then put something on Netflix to fall asleep to. 

 The Memories Below

Just writing that made me remember once, when I was perhaps five years old, being beaten by my father with a broom. I was playing outside near the back door--I can't even remember if I was playing alone or if there was someone else there--and he came out of the house and started beating me with the broom. I had no idea why he did it. He kept hitting me across my shoulders and back until the broom broke. When I think about it now, I think: That was awful. What could a five year old do to deserve such an awful punishment? I have no idea. But I have to prompt myself to feel some emotion about it because in the past I have recalled that memory with complete detachment, emotionless. It was just a thing that happened. Ho hum. But--huh--it turns out that things like that, getting beaten with brooms and belts and so on, actually leave a lasting impression beyond the bruises and welts. And when you multiply those experiences...

Oh! That, too made think about talking to someone at the old studio: He told me that his family was so boring; there weren't any real scandals or criminals in their history. He guessed it was probably that way in most families; they were all boring too. So I began to list various things about my family: My teenaged cousin who was murdered in a crime that made the news. (His was the first funeral I remember attending; I was six.) My drug-dealing uncle who died on Christmas morning of a heroin overdose next to the bed where his 8-year-old son was sleeping. (I was so long inured to horror that the next night I slept in the same bed.) My grandfather who shot his girlfriend and then himself in an attempted murder-suicide. (I held a bit of his skull in the palm of my hand and felt nothing more than an interest in the object itself.) My little brother, who also died of a drug overdose. (I touched his cold, dead face as he lay in his coffin. I was so thoroughly numbed that I joked ("What the hell? You only die once.") as I bought the more expensive flower arrangement to send to the funeral home for his funeral.) The awful list went on and on. I laughed as I told that guy all these things. And I laughed again at the expression on his face when I laughed the first time.

Later, a few hours after writing those memories down, I fell asleep and woke up at 2:15 or 2:30 or so. I always seem to wake up at that hour. I lay in bed, in the dark, and I remembered why this, of all times, has long been the witching hour.

My father was a baker, so he got up long before anyone else. I will give you one guess as to what time his alarm typically went off.  When I was ten, eleven, twelve, I would stay up late, sometimes all night. I would read or sit in the living room and watch television all night. One local channel broadcast old black-and-white films all night and I would sit a few inches from the television, the volume turned way down and watch hour after hour of those films. But when I heard my father's alarm going off, I would turn off the TV and quietly sneak to my room. I had time to do this because the first thing he did when he got up was go to the bathroom and take a shower. I would turn off my bedroom light so he wouldn't see it shining under my door and I would lie there in the dark, listening. I knew the sounds of his morning routine by heart and I would wait in the dark until I heard the sound of his truck going down the street and then I would wait some more. More than once I had been caught out of my room when he forgot something and had come home to retrieve it.

The roots of my fear of encountering him in the night stretch back into the darkness of childhood, back before memory had a firm foothold, when my mother worked nights and we were left alone with him. 

Memories are seasonal, conditional. They cycle through us again and again, triggered by sounds, lights, timing. Something about spring triggers these memories in me, but I have no idea why.