Tag Archives: Family

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Rest Easy Mom and I Hope You Can Be Soft Now.

When I was 16 and suffering my first broken heart, my mother didn’t gather me into a hug and tell me everything would be alright. Instead she told me life wasn’t fair.

For her, it wasn’t.

An only child, her father died when she was young and her mother retreated into an overwhelming grief that left no room to raise a child. Instead my mother roamed the neighborhood, eating out of garbage pails and fending for herself. She grew up and married a man she thought would give her a life of stability and comfort. Instead he moved her to a dilapidated farmhouse in New Hampshire and eventually abandoned her to support 4 kids and pay off the mountain of debt he’d acquired. A Catholic, even after women on birth control were banned from Communion, she did not ask much from God, only that he keep her children safe. She said she could handle any other trials he sent out her, as long as he didn’t take her children.

When her oldest, my brother Rod, died in a car accident at the age of 25, she firmly turned her back on God for betraying their covenant. The product of two Italian parents, she knew how to hold a grudge and to the best of my knowledge, she never forgave God for taking my brother.

She became a police officer because they only had one pay scale. She could make a man’s wages doing a man’s work, and support her family. She called her police uniform her costume. She hated the yearly qualification she had to pass in marksmanship. Her greatest fear was another officer would shoot her accidentally practicing their quick draws or panicking when they entered a building. She wanted to go in first, not out of bravery, but out of self preservation.

She preferred her billy club when dealing with reluctant arrestees. She was quick and sneaky with it and no matter the damage she wrought, the male officers got blamed. As one of the first woman cops, she benefited from the perception of women as kind hearted angels and used that to her advantage.

We had few boundaries growing up. She was too busy making a living and paying off my father’s debts to focus on much else. The main rules were to be home when she woke up, and to not embarrass her in her line of work. The one time I didn’t make it home early enough, I earned the nickname APB Maynes after she put out an All Points Bulletin on me. The one time I tried to evade a traffic stop, the unfortunate officer who finally pulled me over had my car driven to the police station and took me home with instructions to tell my mother what happened. He had no desire to give my mother the news. When she drove into work the next day and found my car in the police parking lot I imagine they drew straws to see who would tell her my latest misdeeds.

For most of her life, I didn’t know her as a warm person, I knew her as a strong person, a hard person, a person who took what life threw at her and trudged on. If there was an obstacle, she didn’t go around it or over it, she went through it. The cupboards might have been bare, our only heat the kitchen stove, but I never saw her break down, I never saw her give up, and I damned sure never saw her cry.

She might have been born in New York City but inside she was pure Yankee granite

That steely resolve certainly helped her in life as she buried 2 children, one in 1984 and one in 2021 and a granddaughter in 2014. She cut me out of her life in 2015 and though I reached out to try to heal the rift, I knew from experience that once she made up her mind there wasn’t anything anyone could do to change it. I lived on and so did she. I, too, have a bit of steely resolve I inherited from her.

As I reflect on her life and death, I can say she was one of the strongest women I have ever known. It is not easy being raised by a woman who didn’t tolerate weakness. The mistakes she made weren’t because she was malicious or bad. They were because that was the only way she knew how to get through this life.

Life made her hard.

I have a poster in my house that says:

Be soft. Do not let the world make you hard.

Do not let the pain make you hate.

Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness.

Even though the rest of the world may disagree,

You still find the world to be a beautiful place.

I hope wherever my mother’s spirit takes her, this time she finds a place where she can be soft.

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Somebody That I Used to Know

Since Alana Concetta’s death, I’ve felt unable to write. Yet life reminds me in so many ways that she wanted me to write. She encouraged me to write about her battles with mental illness and how I coped. She thought I could be a voice of hope in a world where too many parents ignore their child’s mental illness because they think it’s a reflection on their parenting.

She wrote “The stigma of mental illness is alive and well.”

But I have resisted writing and this resistance has made my grief even worse. Writing about my feelings helps me acknowledge and process them. Keeping them inside has made me feel like the proverbial elephant sitting on my chest.

It’s hard to breathe.

I keep them inside for fear my feelings will be used against me and used against Alana. But as the months pass, I keep going back to the fact that I raised my children in a family of secrets, of things we didn’t say and things we didn’t acknowledge. I took Nora Ephron’s advice late in life to “be the heroine in your story, not the victim.”

I left my marriage and New Hampshire after my ex husband kicked the kitchen island down and pinned me to a wall and told me I should consider myself lucky he took his anger out on the kitchen island rather than my face.

I decided I no longer wanted to be a victim.

But still I find myself eating my feelings and swallowing my words. I fear what my divorce lawyer might say when we end up in court again because my ex intends to drag this out until there is nothing left to fight over. I worry that my words will be used against me when Alana’s boyfriend finally goes to trial for her death. I ache at the thought I will hurt my remaining daughter with my words.

But I can’t keep it inside any longer.

Depression is a medical disease with a high mortality rate. Being hospitalized for depression is like being in an Intensive care unit as the person’s life hangs in the balance. These are the words Alana Concetta‘s psychiatrist at the Brattleboro Retreat told me and listening to these words gave me two more years with her.

I wish I could have had another fifty.

Instead she is dead and I don’t know how and I have accepted I never will. Two medical examiners have weighed in, both admit she was beaten, strangled, and had a lethal dose of heroin in her system. One states she died of strangulation, the other a heroin overdose.

Where the heroin came from is anyone’s guess.

The day she died, I went to her boyfriend’s house, at his request,  to pick her up. She was face down on the floor, her dog, Baxter, next to her. She was the last person I performed CPR on.

The part I struggle with is that we were working so hard on her mental illness. Taking classes with NAMI (National Alliance for the Mentally Ill). Understanding that her unreliability was a symptom of her illness rather than a lack of consideration. Figuring out that her reluctance to make plans wasn’t flakiness but rather an acknowledgement on her part that sometimes she didn’t know from day to day whether she could get out of bed and participate.

I understand all of that now.

Since my daughter’s death, depression is my constant companion. Anxiety and stress visit on a regular basis. I never know when something will trigger me to tears or despair.

My mental health is dependent on medications, exercise, yoga, and keeping busy.

See, if you keep busy it is harder to dwell on the pain.

Since Alana’s death I feel her pain. I feel the strength it takes to get out of bed each day and go on with my life. I understand how hard life was for her.

She was so much stronger than any of us gave her credit for her.

And so I will try to write to honor her and her struggles. Try to feel my feelings and speak my words. Let people know that having a child with mental illness isn’t something to be covered up and ignored.

It’s the least I can do.

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Family Rules

When we left New Hampshire, we left an environment where Alana’s mental illness was considered attention seeking and my support of her getting healthy was considered being a sucker.

As we settled into our new routine in South Carolina, Alana came home one day with a sign listing our new family rules. They were so unlike the ones we lived under before. We were used to criticism rather than compassion, angry explosions in place of laughter, bitter rants instead of gratitude. It wasn’t until we were out of that place that we could understand how unnatural it was.

With the upcoming arrival of a grand daughter who will never physically know her Aunt Alana, these are the things I learned from Alana and hope to pass on to the newest member of our family:

We use our words

We feel our feelings

We lick faces

We make mistakes

We practice being kind over being right

We celebrate little victories

We pop the bubble wrap

We’re never too old to play the floor is lava

We will hug you fiercely and we will love you forever

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A Farewell to Dad

He wasn’t the best father, but he was my father.  When my sister called and asked me to accompany her and my brother to his deathbed, I went, even though I hadn’t spoken to my dad in 22 years. I did it, I thought, for my siblings. Turns out I really did it for me.

Our family picture after the death of my oldest brother, Rod.

Our family picture after the death of my oldest brother, Rod.

When we entered the room where my dad lay dying, he looked exactly like his father had 22 years before. His head, covered with silvery gray hair, was thrown back on the pillow, his mouth gaped open, and harsh, irregular breathing filled the room.  Though the nurses said he could hear us, he was unresponsive.

Unlike my grandfather, who died at home in his living room, my father began his death in an intensive medical care unit. Outside the unit a sign warned us to wear masks due to a flu outbreak.  He was on contact precautions so before we entered his room we added gowns and gloves to the masks that covered our faces. The constant beep of monitors and the intrusion of nurses to empty his catheter, titrate his medications, and turn and position him widened the space between us and him.

It was hard to break that space.

The death of a parent, even a parent that never embraced the traditional role and remained more of a Peter Pan man-child than a King Triton type of dad, is hard. When it’s a father you’ve only seen from a distance for the past 22 years, one you’ve ducked down grocery store aisles to avoid and maintained at least a one room separation from at family gatherings,  it’s a little harder.

In Al-Anon they say one can detach with love or detach with dynamite. I’d always seen my choice, dynamite, as irrevocable.  As I smoothed his hair, wrapped his hand around mine, and reminisced about our shared past, I realized I was wrong.

Even though it was too late to repair the damage done to our relationship, it wasn’t too late to remember the good times we once shared.

In the time we spent alone, I played him the songs we knew together and the ones I’d grown to love since then. Kenny Chesney sang “Boys of Summer” in the background and I talked about fall in New Hampshire, football games my older brother played in, and towns we had rivalries with. Willie Nelson crooned “Always on my Mind” while I told him about the toast  my youngest gave at her sister’s wedding and how it reminded me of him. Craig Morgan sang “Almost Home” as I retold stories of the friends and family that had predeceased him. Over and over, I told him it was okay to let go.

But, he hung on.

The palliative care nurse practitioner said he wouldn’t survive once they stopped the medications, but the medications stopped and he didn’t. Then they said the ambulance ride to the hospice might kill him. One last road trip, I murmured as the stretcher rolled into the Florida sun and bumped up into the ambulance, yet still he hung on.  We can keep him pain-free, they said at the hospice, but it might hasten his death. It doesn’t matter, we told them, yet in spite of the pain and anti anxiety medicine, he breathed on. We sat by his bedside and laughed, prayed, told stories, cried. We watched him take one agonizing breath after another and we held our breath each time they stopped. But he kept breathing.

It wasn’t until late the second night, with all of his children around his bed, that he opened his eyes, took one last breath, and died.

My clearest memory of childhood is my father’s lectures at the dinner table. He’d tell us look around this table, these are the only people you can trust. These are the only people who love you unconditionally and will love you even if you grow up to be a murderer, a rapist, or a thief. For years I joked about his low expectations for us instead of focusing on the other part, how much he loved us and how much he wanted us to love and look out for each other.

Perhaps he hung on to make sure we’d learned the lessons he’d taught us. Even me, the daughter who had ignored him for 22 years.

If we get to make our own heaven, I have no doubt he’s in a place where the Jameson flows freely and the stories and laughter never stop and he is surrounded by people who love him.

He wasn’t the best father, but he was my father, and, in the end, I loved him still.

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Alcoholism: A Family Affair

It takes an enormous amount of energy to live in an alcoholic family in denial. “Loose lips sink ships,” my father said and our family currency became half-truths and lies. My dad wasn’t a drunk. He liked to drink. He wasn’t an alcoholic because he didn’t go to AA. Even thirty days in rehab didn’t stop the denial. We unknowingly snuck him out one night when he begged us to visit and then told us we could take him into town for an outing. I knew it wasn’t because he missed us, but because he missed the liquor store.

العربية: مجموعة مشروبات كحولية. Català: Divers...

العربية: مجموعة مشروبات كحولية. Català: Diverses begudes alcohòliques. Cymraeg: Rhai diodydd alcoholig traddodiadol. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

See, no matter how many drunken speeches an alcoholic makes about how he loves his family, he loves the alcohol more. Deep down, his family knows this. We did. We heard it in the next-day apologies for his drunken behavior. We saw it in the glaze of his eyes. It reverberated in the clink of empty bottles.

As I grew older, it became harder and harder to convince myself that I was content in a relationship where I came in second to a bottle of booze. Eventually, he succeeded in pushing me away and I let him. For that, I am grateful.

Growing up with an alcoholic taught me to be careful and cautious and scared. It made me evaluate every drink I take. It forces me to analyze every slurred word or stumble I make when I’m drinking. All of my interactions with alcohol are judged on a strict scale because, due to my family history, I’m only a few drinks away from being an alcoholic. I carry that burden with every drink I take.

Maybe that’s where I break the cycle. I love my kids more than I’ll ever love booze.

Yes, alcoholism is a disease. Yes, some of us are genetically predisposed. And it might be unfair, and un-politically correct, but on some level I still believe that if my father had loved us enough, he would have given up alcohol and I guess I’ll never forgive him for that decision.

All I can do is not make the same mistake he did.

 

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I Miss My Things

I miss my things.

Missing: My Things

Missing: My Things

It’s been 2 weeks and 2 days since the moving company arrived at my house and ushered all of my most prized personal possessions into their big truck. When they were done, I received a copy of the packing list and they drove off, promising to reunite me and my things within a week.

It didn’t happen.

I’ve called my relocation specialist several times and received vague promises of a delivery soon. “I’ll call you back in a few days to firm it up,” he assures me. But no call comes.

It’s amazing how empty a house is with only two beds, a dining room set, and two folding tables. It echoes.

In Fight Club, Tyler Durden claims “The things you own end up owning you,” and I wish I could be more zen-like and unattached about not having my things, but that would be a lie. I miss my things. My desk, mostly, and my comfortable desk chair. The asthma medication I ran out of several days ago that I can’t refill because there’s a three-month supply on the truck. A cookie sheet. My spice collection. Extra vacuum cleaner bags. The whiteboard for my refrigerator. Even though it seems like a random collection of stuff, it’s the stuff that makes a house a home and grounds me. I need it.

Okay. I don’t need it. I want it.

The things I need are already here. The love of my family. My dogs. Good health. A creative mind. A sense of peace and rightness in my world. The truck didn’t take any of that, I did.

Having a desk to put it on doesn’t seem that big a deal after all.