Dear Sweetness,
Your stepdad and I took your little brother to the back to school picnic on Friday. You know the one at the park by the zoo at the giant playground. They call it a picnic but it’s really just parents standing around talking while hoards of kids move around the playground en masse like hundreds of ants on a sugary piece of food dropped mistakenly to the ground. Sometimes a kid will stop to eat a piece of pizza at a rapid rate to run off and rejoin the hoard.
Your little brother is often labeled as the shy one. So this picnic would in our mind not be his jam. We didn’t even bother to go last year without you but this year is the year we are trying to do life despite our grief. We didn’t ask him if we wanted to go, we told him we were going and we could leave whenever he wanted. When we showed up, your brother was barnacled to my leg for about all of five minutes. Then he was off. He became one of the ants only stopping to request pizza that I held on a paper plate for two hours that was slowly being munched away, bite by bite, during his check ins.
Your stepfather and I stood there with the other parents we know because their kids are friends with our kid. It felt completely normal. By normal I mean completely weird because we don’t do normal. In the past at an event like this, there would have always been something that would have made me worry or make my stomach ache the entire time. Either something leading up to it or some interaction during the event itself.
Any school related happening or activity outside of school has always been tainted by the presence or pressure of your other parents. Maybe they would plan to be in town even though it wasn’t their parenting time just so they could show up and make their presence known. Or maybe they would plan their in-town visits around the highlighted events of the school year. They would then take you in our place to concerts, parent nights, this family picnic, so we wouldn’t know whether to stay home or to attend, not wanting to put you and your brother in an awkward position. Not knowing which choice would be the more supportive one to make.
This was the most normal school event we had ever done as parents. After we got home and put your exhausted brother to bed, we sat and talked about how odd it was. That the night was just a normal night. It felt like we had accomplished something as a threesome that we could attend a school related event and it could go off without a hitch.
About an hour later, I couldn’t help but notice this icky feeling coming to the surface. Hello sadness. I realized that in order to attend a “normal” school event, or have a “normal” experience as a parent, or even a “normal” life, we all have to be separate. This picnic proved to me in a very tiny way that signing the agreement had worked. That my hunch was correct that if I handed you both over to your dad and stopped fighting him, all of our lives would improve. Afterall we all deserve some normalcy. And by normalcy here I mean not living every moment in chaotic trauma. Although it’s still very difficult to shake the nagging feeling I have about your brother and how his life is anything but normal there.
Then it pissed me off. My sadness turned quickly to anger. That this is what narcissists require. Complete destruction in order to have all of the power. Your other parents needed total control in order to leave us alone. Wielding that power over me has become their next source of supply. Keeping me in the dark about your school life, your activities, your medical care, locking your brother’s phone up in a cabinet so he can’t have daily access to his family here. They know they have me right where they want me and yet it’s still better than living everyday in traumatic chaos. For you and for me. Our separation being the sacrifice.
When I talked to you on our biweekly video call yesterday and you told me all your teenager things, it reinforced this choice as being a necessary evil. You weren’t stressed about an upcoming transition. There was no sign of you not sleeping through the night or high levels of anxiety coursing through your veins. You were talkative and bubbly. You told me all about the good things happening in your life. Like the first real concert you will attend on Tuesday night with your stepmother. Field hockey practice. The new friends you made in chorus this year. All normal teenager things. Even your disinterest when your little brother tried to tell you all about his wiggly tooth and show you his latest K’nex build. Also normal.
After our call, I began to wonder if there is also a part of you that can’t care about us and our goings on here because what then? What good would come of it? It would only bring you more pain. It’s the same for me when I loop about my rights to you and your brother being trampled upon. It won’t bring you back. And if it did, “back” brings the traumatic chaos with it. For all of us.
It’s hard to always filter the happenings of my surroundings through the “I made the right choice” lens. Confirmation bias comes to mind. It can feel like toxic positivity. There is usually a backswing. Like the sadness that came after the picnic. I am supposed to be glad you have peace even though it causes friction with my relentless instincts to mother you. I know this is by design, the resolution to our traumatic chaos, the agreement, was meant to endlessly torture me. Torture comes in the form of seeing that you are ok there, maybe even better off without me in your life. Or maybe that’s just the gaslighting talking.
Then there is my new friend anxiety. Anxiety has replaced the bulk of the mothering I used to do for you. Without you both around there is a lot less mothering to do. Anxiety showed up when your brother had his first hospital stay. There are cycles I go through where I can’t sleep for days on end. I believe this mothering part of me is creating the anxiety to remind me not to get too comfortable in the new normal but to stay vigilant for the chaotic trauma it believes is coming.
The anxiety looks for chaos in everything. Like walking a tightrope. When I went to my doctor, I gave her my last year in a nutshell. Surprise surprise, she suggested anti-anxiety medication. Not just Xanax for the peaks of when I can’t go one more night without sleep, but everyday anti-anxiety medication for “generalized anxiety disorder”.
I can’t help but question both the suggestion and the diagnosis. If it’s the ongoing trauma of my kids having moved away, my son still in crisis, and this new normal feeling anything but, then it’s not generalized anxiety disorder. This is a normal reaction to ongoing trauma. Drugging myself won’t make the problem go away. Don't get me wrong, I am tempted to numb myself out. I want to avoid feeling both the plummet I fear is coming every time things are too easy and also the anxiety which is so intense that I fear I might go crazy and not come back.
If I am honest, I numb myself in so many ways to cope with the loss of you moving away, why would I put this suggestion in a different category? Coping for me has many forms. I workout too much. I use my anger as a shield to not get too close to anyone. I eat foods I know aren't good for me. I watch way too many youtube videos while I overclean the house trying to regain some control over my life. I have adopted way too many houseplants. Then there is the macrame to hang the houseplants. It’s all numbing. But somehow this medication is a step too far for me?
Maybe what I actually fear is that the medication will numb out my caring. Smother the mother. A lot of times I wish I could stop caring. I wish I could stop thinking about you and what you do all day, who your friends are, and what you ate for dinner. I feel pathetic and ashamed that I can’t move on or have a life without you. How have I turned into a helicopter parent?
I am constantly looking for the turn off valve for being your mother. I at least want to not feel the constant pain of you moving on in your new teenager life and your brother struggling in his. Both are too hard to bear most days. I want to forget any of this ever happened. I want to quit my job but mothering is a job you can’t resign from, seeing that there is no boss to hand my letter of resignation.
Then there’s the layer underneath. That I have spent my entire life mixed up in the chaos of narcissists as an ingredient in their soup. The picnic might have struck a nerve. That all of the parts inside of me have no idea how to do “normal”. Not just the mothering part. None of my patterns work existing outside of the pot.
Maybe there will come a time when the three of us here will forget what it ever felt like to have you and your brother at those picnics. Probably not. But maybe we can forget the chaotic trauma that went along with it. Maybe I can turn off steeling myself for the next round of blows from your other parents and learn to just live in the meantime. Completely forgetting that the traumatic chaos is coming until I get a message that your brother has been given yet another medication or he is being taken to the hospital again. Maybe someday that will feel like the weird thing.
Your little brother got his first pair of glasses this week. This was yet another normal experience for me. No stepmother telling me I picked the wrong shape for your face. No weirdness that she then bought a second pair for you to wear at her house. That the ones she picked are the “right” pair because the ones I let you pick were all wrong. Which of course makes me wrong. And bad. Because I am a bad parent. None of this happened. It was just me and your little brother picking out his glasses together.
I didn’t even text you a picture of him. Partly because I didn’t want to taint it with my disappointment that if you were here you would care but since you are there you can’t. Partly because I just wanted your little brother’s experience to be his. Not because I don’t care about including you, but because why force it? Why drive the nail in for any of us? I worry that I am letting the narcissists win by changing my behavior and dancing around the decisions I would usually make. But then I remember there is no winning when attached to a narcissist. But can there instead be peace? Maybe me not texting you was a step towards peace for you not having to care and peace for us creating a new family unit of three (mostly).
So for now I am over here trying to be at peace that you are happy over there my love. Even if it’s an act, even if you are just happy in the experiences and later will have to unpack trunks full of messy feelings about all of it. For now soak in the normal. Soak in the peace. I am, one little experience at a time, trying to tolerate the normal over here. While the mother / anxiety in me is still walking the tightrope if ever the traumatic chaos should return and she is needed.