Once something's been broken, it's never the same
Originally published at my blog Dear Daughter
I’ve been putting off trying to write this. I can’t write it without making myself look bad, and I can’t write it without making Mother and Daddy look bad. It was a sunken-place time in my life, I was in terrible pain, I didn’t get the help that I needed from my parents. Instead they used it as an opportunity to take you away from me. Then they kept me away from you and destroyed our bond. I tried my hardest. But it was beyond my control.
There’s no use pretending that I am not flawed; I’m deeply flawed. But I am a good person and I have a good heart. I’m not selfish or vindictive. I was obviously born with the neurologically diverse condition I call Asperger’s; it’s technically now High Functioning Autism, or you might use the more graceful term “on the spectrum.” The main reason I know that I was born this way is that I was a spontaneous reader; I taught myself to read before I was three. This is not uncommon but it is unusual. I think I was also born with a tendency to mild mental illness; depression seems to run in our family. This was exacerbated by lack of support around my mental health as a child, which I experienced as traumatic. I had other strengths upon which to draw, and I think if I’d had sufficient support and encouragement, there’s no reason I could not have led a normal, healthy life: married, raised my kids, had a career. And it’s not too late for happiness, I do know that.
I can’t be entirely happy without you, though. Things are pretty stable for me now but there is always a daughter-shaped hole in my life: this wound. I have to think there is a Mommy-shaped hole in your life also, even if you don’t want to deal with it right now; I think you have this wound as well as other wounds I don’t even know about. Shitty things happen in life, it’s guaranteed. More shitty things will unfortunately happen to you in the future. I want to know about these things and be there to help you along. Because you’re going to need all the help you can get, trust me
I always had trouble forming and maintaining relationships. It’s not because I’m a bad person. It’s because of my autism. I very much want to have close, warm relationships with people, and I am capable of doing that. I had it with Grandmother all my life, I’ve had it with friends, and I had it with you until you were five.
I didn’t understand or accept my condition until pretty recently. When my doctor first suggested it, I was not at all receptive. But I knew there was something different about me, even as a kid: I was really smart. I had a lot of potential, Mother said. This was revealed when I started first grade, because I could read. I think I was reading at about a high-school level. Years later, my elementary school principal told me he’d expected me to become a rocket scientist or something. “I’d never seen anything like it,” he told me when I was about 20. “I couldn’t find anything in my office that you couldn’t read. Finally I gave you a [scholarly] journal and you had trouble with that. But you could read the newspaper, you could read the encyclopedia, no problem. We didn’t know what to do with you.”
Maybe nobody suggested that I was anything more than intelligent. But based on my experience as a counselor and educator, I’m pretty sure someone must have suggested to my parents that I was “special.” I know the school was providing me with services designed to help me manage my autism, because I remember them. It was in grad school that I first began to suspect I might be on the spectrum, because I was learning techniques that made me think, “Wait a minute. I did that in elementary school! Did they think I was…? Must have.” The more I learned about psychology, the more I learned about myself, the more I realized that there was something messed up about the way I was raised. Well, it was a long time ago, and people were much less informed and accepting about mental illness.
But Mother’s insistence on my “potential,” along with their reluctance to accept my developing mental illness issues, or psychology as a valid field at all, makes me think that she listened when they talked about my intelligence and shut down when they talked about my deficits. I never got any counseling because she didn’t believe in counseling. She believed that I was smart enough to overcome anything I wanted to overcome. And being smart has been a huge plus. But I needed help and support as a child that I didn’t get at home. The school snuck in some social-skills training while I was in elementary school, then put me in gifted classes and hoped for the best. I became an anxious, depressed child who grew into an anxious, validation-seeking teenager and then became an anxious, depressed, validation-seeking, self-deluding young adult. I was boy-crazy and had terribly low self-esteem. I was in pain and I didn’t even know it.
So as I became a grown-up, I had a shitty relationship with my parents, very few friends, trouble with romantic relationships. When you were born I was so happy with you, I just fell in love with you. We moved to South Carolina and I tried to build a life. I loved my job as a counselor at the Governor’s School; you loved the “big kids” too. But as the years went on I became lower and lower. I knew I needed to move to a bigger town, but my parents were not receptive to this idea. There weren’t any counselors, for example. I tried various things to help myself, and asked several times for my parents’ help, but they refused me. I fell in with a crazy Pentecostal church, which really messed with my head. After a bad break-up, I became so depressed. I’d developed an opiate addiction as a result of my doctor overprescribing for my migraines. (I don’t have migraines now, I think it was stress.) I was trying to treat it myself, stepping down off the pills, but it wasn’t working. I realized I would have to go to a hospital. You went to your grandparents’ house. I thought it would be three months, then they’d give you back, but while I was in the hospital, Mother tricked me into signing away custody. There’s just no nicer way to put it. She told me that you were sick, and in order for you to receive medical care, I needed to sign this form she was faxing me and fax it back right away. Of course I did as she asked. It broke me when I realized they intended to keep you.
I wonder how you experienced this time. You couldn’t have understood what was happening; I certainly didn’t. I have faced the fact that you must have cried for me, and I wasn’t there. I know you wanted to talk to me because every time I called you, you would ask me to give Grandmother my phone number; apparently you were asking to call me and they were telling you, “Oh no, we don’t have her number.” I sent a thick stack of cards that were returned unopened. But I couldn’t tell you the truth. You were so little and I felt like I had been such a bad mother. You had surgery on your Achilles tendons during that first year and thinking about you being in the hospital and in pain and asking for me just tortured me. It still does. But the worst was, at some point you gave up asking for me. The pain of that is overwhelming.
Meanwhile, the Great Recession was keeping me from finding another good job. At first I had a counseling job and I thought I could get you back. I tried for five years, turning my whole soul and being into the project of getting you back. Finally I even had your room ready, painted and decorated. But I failed. I had to accept that you belonged to my parents now, that was your home. I fell apart. I was barely staying housed. The job situation got worse and worse; my health deteriorated. An abusive man took advantage of me and stole my car. It became nearly impossible for me to see you. I bounced around South Carolina. And then finally I moved to Oregon, and things started to get better.
Except for this wound, of course.
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