Showing posts with label sisters. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sisters. Show all posts

Wednesday, May 16, 2018

Triggered: why do I have this gun to my head?




I have been sitting here for hours, or perhaps months or years, trying to make point form order out of a seething ocean. And I know it's not going to work.


I was pretty surprised, when I finally sat down to make "the list", that I had already done so. The file even had the same name, though it was created last year. I have no memory at all of making it, but it was for a post just like this one, which at the last minute I deleted.

I don't quite know what it is - perhaps the need to vomit up the toxins of years of sexual abuse, triggered by the MeToo movement which has aroused more dragons than it has slain. But I know my dragon. The abuse went on for years, and the stage, the set, the backdrop of it, the theatre in which it was played out, was in the hands of (in the words of Baby Jane Hudson) my very own sister! 

Pat was always just there - much older than me (13 years), flamboyant, brilliantly histrionic - her followers, her ubiquitous coterie of admirers, thought so anyway - and smart, but in a way that could go straight to the jugular. She  felt entitled to say anything she wanted and was shocked if you objected ("whaaaaaat?"), and never apologized. And I was infantilized, except when it came to her pimping me out at her parties, being fully aware that I was drunk and being groped by numerous married men. At age 15, I was the mascot, passed around with impunity. Fair game.




I can only hit the highlights, or lowlights, of the grinding game of her presence in my life. There were some favorite sayings (sort of like the sayings of Jesus - or she may have thought so):

“Margaret, you’re weird.”

“Margaret, you’re wired.”

“Margaret, you’re crazy.” Usually said with a cocked eyebrow and a cool little shrug of contempt.

High points of my life were marked with high sarcasm. When I got married to a man I loved, she had this to say at the reception:

"Well, I guess now you think you've got your whole life figured out."

When I was juggling two toddlers during a visit, she watched me, not helping out at all, then said with the expression of someone imagining someone's terminal disease, "Sometimes I try to imagine what your days are like."

Oh, it goes on, and it WILL become a litany and a list if I don't watch out. When I played Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady for a community theatre group, she honored me by attending. Afterwards, backstage, she stood apart, saying nothing, while everyone else jumped around me like puppies and my husband wept with pride. Finally when I looked at her with an agonized, "Please, can't you say SOMETHING?" expression, she arched her cool little eyebrow and said in a cool little voice, 

"You weren't boring."

So I wasn't boring. I wasn't awful! Good to know. The weird thing is, I was supposed to be OK with the remark, even grateful for her assessment. Over the next several days of her visit, she minutely dissected my voice and all its flaws (she had tossed away a singing career with too much booze and sex. No  kidding). Not boring, but obviously pretty terrible, and I think she was incredulous I had the nerve to get up there at all.




I just deleted a huge chunk of this, because we haven't gotten to the abusive part yet. (Oh, let's put this one in! I made the mistake of saying I was taking clarinet lessons, and she said, "Are you going to tap dance at the same time?")
Other ripe cherries were spat, but you have the idea by now. When I told her I was anxious about moving to Vancouver and wasn't sure what would happen, she bored into my eyes and calmly said, "I guess you'll just self-destruct."

OK, that's enough, now we have to get to the "real" stuff, and the reason she keeps pouring back into my brain like a landslide of hot rocks. When I was 15 or so, I was shy, chubby, not very attractive, but Pat would let me come to her parties. Her parties were piss-ups full of married men and loud falling-down-drunk women. They were up-against-the-wall affairs, and I was expected to think it was a privilege to go to them.

When I first encountered the expression "Walpurgis night", I immediately knew what it meant. Barely getting to the bathroom in time to barf was all part of the proceedings, as was feeling an alien penis grind against my bottom in the dark. I was supposed to like it, and the horrible, horrible thing is that I DID like it, or some of it. Once, her boy friend's best friend (in his 30s and married) started "dating" me, taking me to movies and such. Things were getting out of hand with him. When I finally went to my Big Sister and told her I was frightened of what was happening with him, she said, and I quote, "It doesn't hurt to have a little smooch and a snuggle after a date."




Pimped me out, she did. I never had a term for it before, but now I know. Her own drinking habits were legendary at that time, so she felt I should mirror them. I learned the lesson too well, had to join AA in my mid-30s, and horrified the entire family (especially Pat, who said "I'm just so thankful it never happened to me").

I would say she was not a happy woman, and she wasn't, but neither was she unhappy, for there was just something missing in her. She did not have a fully-formed conscience, and was completely incapable of real intimacy with another human being. She could slash and burn, oh yes, and she did, many times. She collected exotic and intriguing men like pelts, including an indigenous Mohawk man named Clare Brant who went on to become a much-revered psychiatrist on a reserve. That engagement didn't last too long, for on one of her many trips to Germany she got pregnant (by which boy friend is unknown). I have seldom heard of such a jaw-dropping act of betrayal. But on she went, a human wood-chipper, on to the next engagement, another man to "process" and spit out.

There were other betrayals, horrible ones, such as the time I trusted her with some very sensitive information about my father and what he had done to me as a child. She immediately called my parents, blurted out the whole thing, and started a World War III which only ended when my parents were put under the ground.

But it is all so odd. SHE is so odd, but so arrogant that she somehow twists it around and accuses everyone else of being odd, or sick, or crazy. When I began to read and hear about narcissism, her astonishing behaviour began to make sense, the coterie of quasi-friends, the continual gaslighting. But so many pieces still don't fit.




What I have always wondered:

Why Germany? Why was she so obsessed with it? Who would be attracted to that place, less than twenty years after the war? Why Munich (given its dark political significance)? Why did she come back pregnant when she was about to get married to a man she supposedly loved? Did she know who the father was? Why Germany at all? No one in the family had the slightest connection to it. What was all that political radicalism all about, why did she seem to think the wrong side had won? Why did she cultivate certain key people and collect them like trophies? What was that supposed to do for her self-worth?

I had hoped to fashion this into something other than a rant, but it's broken pieces, and you can't put a broken heart or a broken brain back together. It's too late for that. I want to let this whole thing go, and I don't know how to do it. Incredibly, in her late 70s, she still hasn't run out of admirers that she can whip around her little finger. I've found pictures of her with her Thomas Merton Society, and she still looks like the favored child. Merton is just about the creepiest figure who ever lived, a monk who broke his vows and had a selfish affair with a woman engaged to be married to someone fighting in Vietnam. Is there an echo in here? Do engagements mean nothing at all? What about morals? Isn't it also true Merton fathered a child out of wedlock and pretended it didn't exist? Infants who carry your DNA are bad PR, apparently, and disposable (as she must have known).





Such a hero. But I can see why she loves him.

Whenever I write something like this, I delete it and go back to the quirky stuff I usually post. I do enjoy that stuff, but what about the poison in my guts, do I just carry it? What is being a writer all about? Not about this, evidently. The one time I really poured it all out like lava, three long-term followers bailed in quick succession. Let's go back to the funny, weird gifs of silicone babies, shall we? So I don't know. 

My mother once said about Pat (and seldom did she divulge anything so personal, as she was mostly indifferent to me), "She's just talking about herself." Mum also had an older sister, unmarried, flamboyant, often cruel, who had gone through men like water. In her later life her drinking went out of control, and eventually she committed suicide. She wasn't found until weeks or months later because nobody missed her, and my parents had to go to New York to bury her because there was nobody else to do it.




I don't say it will happen, but if she does die alone, I think I will give about as much of a rip as she always has about me: no more, no less.  It may be the only possible way that I can bury her.

THE KICKER. There had to be a chaser! I had been so shut out of my family that I didn't even receive notice of my parents' deaths. For some reason, one day I began to look for my mother's obituary online and found it. Read the thing through. Read it again. It was interesting reading, because there was a hole in it. My name wasn't on it! According to my mother, or likely Pat who was entrusted to write such things, not  only was I shut out of the  family and ostracized: I had never been born. It was the strangest thing. 

But I knew in my heart that NOTHING my children could do would cause me to do such a jackassed, lame-assed, plain stupid thing. My kids could be axe-murderers, they could kill ME with an axe, and of course they would be in my obituary. It's called having a sense of reality.

So you see, those forces of darkness did not win, after all. But how I wish, how devoutly I wish I could just kill her off.





Thursday, September 15, 2016

Cynthia on the throne




Get up and dance to the music!
Get on up and dance to the fonky music!



Dum-dumm du-du-du-du-du-dum-dumm
Du-du-du-du-du-dum-dumm - du-du-du-du-du-dum-dumm
[All:] Dance to the Music, Dance to the Music


[Freddie:] Hey Greg!
[Greg:] What?
[Freddie:] All we need is a drummer,
For people who only need a beat, yeah!


[Drummer]
I'm gonna add a little guitar
And make it easy to move your feet
[Guitar]


[Larry:] I'm gonna add some bottom,
So that the dancers just won't hide
[Bass]



[Sly:] You might like to hear my organ
I said 'Ride Sally Ride'
[Organ] 


Cynthia, Jerry!!
You might like to hear the horns blowin',
Cynthia on the throne, yeah!
[Trumpets]


Listen to me
Cynthia & Jerry got a message they're sayin':



[Cynthia:] All the squares, go home!
Aaaaah, yeah!!!
[Trumpets]


Listen to the basses:

Dum-dumm du-du-du-du-du-dum-dumm
Du-du-du-du-du-dum-dumm - du-du-du-du-du-dum-dumm



[All:] Dance to the Music, Dance to the Music



Written by Sylvester Stewart • Copyright © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, Warner/Chappell Music, Inc


It took me a while to deal with this song, and it's not because I don't like it. Quite the opposite. I wanted to find the original so I could do a "mondegreen"/lyric clarification on it: none of us ever knew what all the words were, especially not through tinny AM radios in the mid-'60s. And it was intriguing to decipher them at last. The song is an example of soul music at its finest, flamboyant, infectious, full of spangles and stars. Later versions of Dance to the Music, some of them 14 minutes long, really let the band rip, and boy are they good, better than I ever remembered. This version seems tame by comparison.






Listening to a really clear stereo version of this is a revelation. We never had such an option back then. The little "guitar riff" I hear right after "dance to the music" isn't guitar! It's saxophone. Cynthia screams her head off like a banshee, which is great: whereas then, I wasn't sure there WAS a Cynthia. That shows how much I knew. This band not only has women in it (unheard-of in a major rock band), it has women brass players! And everyone knows a woman can't blow a trumpet. Don't tell that to Cynthia.

There was something glitzy about Sly and the Family Stone which would later be transmogrified into the much-slicker Fifth Dimension, but since they had the incredible Marilyn McCoo, all was forgiven in my eyes. I've never heard a voice with greater honesty and clarity, but at the same time, it was plaintive. "Bill!" she keened. "I love you so, I always will. . .Oh won't you marry me Bill, I've got the wedding bell blues." And this was right around the time I met MY Bill. Hey, the pop music of that era is so potent in my mind, so fused with those dizzy times, that I still do a little mental back-flip when I hear Crocodile Rock.





I'm working up to it, I'm working up to it, what I am going to write about. I can feel it coming on like a bad cold. It was the summer this song came out, my sister was home from university or Europe or wherever-the-hell-she-always-disappeared-to, before reappearing with something like an illegitimate pregnancy, a new fiance or a few quarts of very expensive booze. She considered herself to be a Liberal with a capital L, consciously cultivated friendships or at least associations with non-whites and radicals at whatever-the-hell-school-she-went-to, but when she came home one weekend from wherever, I made some reference to Motown music. 

She said, her face puckering in a disdainfully puzzled way: "What's MOW-town?"

I had the radio on CKLW (Windsor/Detroit), like I always did. Hey, this was Chatham, Ontario, with one of the largest black populations of any city in Canada, and a terminating point for the historic underground railroad (which I wouldn't find out about until many years later). Motown music was the pulsebeat of our lives. We were saturated in it. It blasted open the stodginess of this Victorian small town and brought it alive.

So. . . what is MOW-town. I will show you what is MOW-town.

I turned up the radio just as this song was starting. Well, someone on YouTube just pointed out to me that technically it's "soul music" (some might say "funk"), because it was never on the Motown record label. But never mind, it's the spirit of the thing.

To her credit, she did listen to it, all three minutes of it. I don't remember what she said, if she said anything, but her reaction was a sort of puzzled disdain.





The unspoken message was: if it wasn't by Brecht and Weill, if it wasn't by Alban Berg or Rautaavara, it was primitive and declasse and not worth listening to.

You can see why I have trouble with this. Oh, it's not this, not specifically. She was thirteen years older than me, and lived in another universe. I'd go stay with her in Toronto - it was a real treat for me, or at least it was seen that way - and she'd take me (I was fifteen) to adult parties and encourage me to drink heavily, and sometimes smoke pot. Older married men (I mean, in their 30s) hit on me constantly, since I was tender meat and would never say anything. The one time I DID go to my sister, terrified I would get pregnant, she looked at me with an arched eyebrow and said, "Nothing wrong with a little smooch and a snuggle after a date."

I understand all this somewhat better from my vantage-point of being about a million years older. I see now she was likely jealous of the fact that I attracted so many men - and I did, though the sloshing drunken atmosphere at these things was a factor, for sure. She once slashed at me for wanting to go sit in the living room: "Oh, so you want to go in there and sit with Derek and snuggle up to him and romance him?"


The really weird thing is, I didn't even know it was emotional abuse for years and years. The reason is, I was supposed to be grateful for this opportunity to have a social life. They were being nice to me by allowing me to drink and dope among them. And the weird thing is: I was grateful. It was a chance, and I was lucky. A chance at what? I probably had nine or ten full-strength hard-liquor drinks at these things, and went home and barfed my guts out.





What about my parents? Did they not have a clue, or what? My parents turned over in bed and went to sleep, telling themselves my sister and older brother were "taking care of me" and protecting me. But they attended some of these parties themselves, and they knew exactly what was going on. They even watched it happen.

So this song is like one of those jack-in-the-boxes, or those things that jump out of a can - you know, like the magicians have. This is but the tip of the iceberg, of course, and the abuse went on for years and years and years, but the very suggestion that ANY of it was abusive would be met with a "whaaaaat?" or a "Well, Margaret. . . you're crazy", said with a dismissive, who-gives-a-fuck shrug. In fact, "I don't give a shit" was one of her favorite expressions.

The thing is, though, my sister not only didn't find lasting happiness, she didn't seem to find any at all. She gave away her baby daughter, went through men (most of them married) like water, then slammed the door and decided she didn't need anyone. Maybe she doesn't. I am not sure.

I'm not big on this forgiveness stuff that is so fashionable right now, nor do I think I'll be consumed with anger and never find any peace unless I forgive her. A lot of people only pretend to forgive because they feel like they're supposed to. It's the thing, nowadays - you see it on television, on Dateline maybe - someone murders someone's daughter and they forgive the killer. Makes them look pretty damn saintly, so there is payoff. 





You know, this is pretty incredible, but I actually found a Facebook page for my sister, though it was established in 2012 and has two posts. I see this a lot, and I am not sure what it means. Why establish something you're not going to use? I also found a Facebook page for one of her old boy friends. I really liked him, and though he was very nice to me and flattered me, he never once made a pass. That was rare. I found a photo of him, and he's just an older version of himself, and you see the goodness shining out of his face.

But she dumped him. He had problems (her being one of them). He wasn't good enough. So fuck him, he was out.


There's a lot on the internet now about narcissism. Back then, I called it "Pat". It was this inchoate mass, this churning in my stomach, this feeling I would never be good enough and I wanted to die and it was my own fault. Now I know my sister was the queen of gaslighting, and she did it due to the sucking void, the great nothing, the three zeroes at the centre of her own life.

"So now you think you've got your whole life solved. Is that what you think?" This is what she said to me, verbatim, at my wedding. After watching me play Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady, her reaction when she came backstage was, "You weren't boring." When I looked hurt, she gave me the "whaaaaat?" reaction. It's just incredible. But that's how it was, and maybe still is, or maybe not. Though I think she is still alive now, and living alone. She'd be 75 years old.





This always brings me around to "where we are now", and it does seem like a bloody miracle that my current family brings me such joy, such pride, so many good times, such laughs. But in spite of what she thinks, it didn't land on my head out of the sky. I co-created this situation with my husband, over 40-plus years of commitment and devotion. Some of it was very, very hard. Can you believe there was fallout from all that sexual and emotional abuse? I once told a psychiatrist about it, and halfway through the story I noticed his mouth was hanging open. "Why didn't you tell me about all this before?" "I didn't think it was important."

I was on the track of forgiveness, and got sidelined. What I can manage, at least part of the time, is pity. I just feel sorry for anyone who would feel that OK about slashing and burning and leaving the scene. I don't think she feels this nearly as much as the people in her path, however. Narcissists are good at dealing out cards, poison-dart tarots of death, but lousy at playing the cards they are dealt.

I'm not sure how Dance to the Music got me here, and I was sure if I followed this path it would take me into some rough waters. I still feel baffled, and I feel pity - I suppose condescending pity, but that's all right. Hey, feeling anything at all, being above GROUND after going through all that, is quite admirable, I think. 






My sister has always called herself a writer, and when she decided to be a novelist, she took home a hoard of my grandmother's old diaries and believed that if she read them, a novel would appear. She kept talking about wanting to get in touch with Margaret Atwood. They were obvious colleagues and just hadn't met yet. The novel never materialized, nor did anything else. In what world would a person like that ever risk shattering her most cherished illusions?

I've pursued my writing doggedly, written three published novels and keep on blogging, I suppose mainly for myself. But I do the work, that's the thing, I don't just talk about it. For some reason, trying to wind this up, I keep thinking of the setting for a gemstone. It has to be held by something, surrounded by something. In my case it was a sort of molten meteorite hurtling down from a death-planet, but somehow or other, the gemstone, the amber or hematite or whatever-it-is, stayed intact. It didn't really crack up after all.





Post-whatever. It occurs to me that my representation of the lyrics to Dance to the Music sucks raw eggs, because you can't even tell what it SAYS. I was too busy being fancy with the text, playing around with colour, etc. So here are the "real" words. I did change one word, sensing a mondegreen. Instead of "listen to the basses", I substituted "the voices", because I can hear an "oi" sound in there.


Get up and dance to the music!
Get on up and dance to the fonky music!

Dum-dumm du-du-du-du-du-dum-dumm
Du-du-du-du-du-dum-dumm - du-du-du-du-du-dum-dumm

[All:] Dance to the Music, Dance to the Music

[Freddie:] Hey Greg!

[Greg:] What?

[Freddie:] All we need is a drummer,
For people who only need a beat, yeah!

[Drummer]

I'm gonna add a little guitar
And make it easy to move your feet

[Guitar]

[Larry:] I'm gonna add some bottom,
So that the dancers just won't hide

[Bass]

[Sly:] You might like to hear my organ
I said 'Ride Sally Ride'

[Organ] 

Cynthia, Jerry!!
You might like to hear the horns blowin',
Cynthia on the throne, yeah!

[Trumpets]

Listen to me
Cynthia & Jerry got a message they're sayin'

[Cynthia:] All the squares, go home!
Aaaaah, yeah!!!

[Trumpets]

Listen to the voices:

Dum-dumm du-du-du-du-du-dum-dumm
Du-du-du-du-du-dum-dumm - du-du-du-du-du-dum-dumm

[All:] Dance to the Music, Dance to the Music

Written by Sylvester Stewart • Copyright © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, Warner/Chappell Music, Inc


Saturday, June 9, 2012

Golden girls







Sisters, sisters. . . one seven, one not quite five. . .


. . . and being with them is golden time, proving Tom Robbins was so right when he wrote:


It's never too late to have a happy childhood.



http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

Wednesday, December 21, 2011

The emotional curve-ball


I don’t know if this qualifies as Grinchitude or not. Probably not, because it’s all about a phenomenon – a social quirk, or something – that I’ve hated for a very long time.



Hard to know what to call it. The curve ball? The sucker punch? The corkscrew?




How about “turning it around”?


I know a few people who are masters of this subtle torture. Their usual method is to needle you, and needle, and needle, and needle, finding the raw unprotected areas of your psyche and drilling into them with incredible accuracy and skill.


This needling goes on and on and on until you finally just have to protest. Finally, you say something. The needler then gets all trembly and woeful and wounded, and accuses YOU of being abusive. "How can you do this to me? I was only trying to help you!", and all that crap.



One person, who for some unknown reason shall remain nameless, was the undisputed master of this technique (for that is what it is, a “method” or even a way of life perfected over many decades).


Over a period of many years, she found those tender spots and jabbed them ruthlessly. Having chosen a sad parade of losers to be intimate with, she was unmarried, and the fact that I married so young caused her to make remarks like, “So I guess you think you’ve got your whole life figured out now.” This was a nice substitute for the usual response to a wedding: “Congratulations!”.


There were others, and they went on for years and years and years. Preparing a turkey for Thanksgiving, my mother said, “Look what it says on the label.”



My sister looked. “A young hen. (Nudging my husband) Well! Bill, you sure know about young hens, don’t you? Why don’t you tell us all about it?”



Since she was thirteen years older than me and clearly superior to me in every way, I said nothing.



More volleys were to come. When she visited us in Alberta while my kids were small, she kept shooting me exasperated, incredulous looks whenever they acted up in the slightest. Then she said in a voice laden with judgemental pity, “I’m just trying to imagine what your days are like.”



I was supposed to be OK with that one, really I was, and I guess take it as advice to throw out my current life and get a new one, preferably exactly like hers.











Anyway, it went on and on and on.  Her pet names for me were “weird” and “crazy”, said in a lilting, shrugging, I’m-writing-you-off sort of way. When I said I was nervous about moving to Vancouver and wondered what would happen if I couldn’t adjust, she did her finest cool, I-don’t-give-a-shit-about-you shrug and said (I’m not making this up):



“Oh well, then I guess you’ll just self-destruct.”


The fact that my brother was seriously mentally ill and died tragically young on the streets of Toronto was all part of the equation. It was meant. Believe me.



I made the mistake of writing her a letter once, an enthusiastic letter about how my life really seemed to be coming together. Bad mistake. Her reply seemed to weigh 5000 pounds in my hand. It was eight pages of advice. Advice telling me how I SHOULD be living. How I SHOULD be going to university and getting past my basic illiteracy and freeing myself from the “backwater” of the small town I was living in (and loved).  How I SHOULD be joining the staff of the local newspaper, “even if you’re just covering the junk items like weddings” (weddings!). Was I supposed to just walk in and join?



That was that, and I had had it with the completely gratuitous advice, the “correction” of my happiness to suit her rigid agenda, not to mention her totally fucked-up life. I was going to tell her what my days were like. I still don’t think it was a nasty letter, but I pointed out that I never told her what to do (true, I was afraid to), so why did she feel so free to plan the entire rest of my life, which I was obviously wasting on a happy marriage, good friends, raising children, doing volunteer work and community theatre, teaching part-time at the pre-school, etc. etc. etc.?



I don’t know what happened, but something about trying to finally make myself heard brought forth the most poisonous, twisted reply I’d ever received.



“Don’t pay any attention to me, I’m just an old person and obviously I don’t know what I'm talking about. I can tell you don’t care about my feelings at all and you don’t care if you absolutely devastate me with a letter like that, but I don’t mind because it’s obvious I don’t know what I’m doing and will never tell you anything again.”



It was a torpedo.



It went straight to its mark in my solar plexus, and lodged there, leaking poison.



What happened? I wrote back and apologized!



Apologized for finally telling her how I felt, for telling her how the layers of raw irritation from being slighted over and over and over again had finally become intolerable.



I had hurt her, obviously. Devastated her! I felt awful, like a terrible person. She was just trying to help me! Wasn’t I living in a useless backwater? Wasn’t my marriage really a sham? Wasn’t I weird and crazy, and why couldn’t I just take those nasty names in good humor? (By the way, in a typical example of refusing to take responsibility for wounding me, she later claimed those labels were “compliments”).




OK, then, finally we come to it: the curveball. The way cruel people jab and jab and jab, and then when you finally hit back, their faces crumple and they lower their heads and begin to whimper with well-timed tears spilling down their quivering faces:  how could you do this to me? How could YOU be so cruel as to wound a person like me, who only has your best interests at heart?



She turned it around on me, made ME the cruel, unforgiveable abuser and herself the baffled, wounded victim whimpering and slinking away.





Why the hell do human beings do this? It’s called “not taking responsibility”. It’s called being twisted around like a corkscrew, and maybe not even knowing it, or wanting to know it (just a little thing called denial, a thing that destroys lives).



I could go on and on, but someone is reading this, maybe, and thinking, “poor soul, she’s full of bile, what’s the matter with her?”, or, worse yet, “Why isn’t she being more positive?” Especially at Christmas.



Oh, yes. Christmas. The detonator of emotional landmines.



There’s one more example of a really weird emotional twisting that I still can’t figure out. Maybe 25 years ago I was in the washroom of the local high school (probably while working on a community theatre project), when a woman with an English accent came tiptoeing up to me, and in a soft, almost apologetic voice she said:


“Sometimes, from many, many years ago. . . “



“Excuse me?” I was barely aware of who this woman was, let alone what she was talking about.



“From many, many years ago, someone says something that can be. . . “



“Who? Saying what? What do you mean?"



“I just don’t want you to be hurt by it.”





“Hurt by what? What are you talking about?”



“You mean you didn’t hear it? Oh, all right then, forget about it.”



“Forget about what? Why don’t you just tell me?"


“Oh no, if you didn’t hear it then I won’t tell you.  Believe me, it’s better that you don’t know.”




I felt like screaming by then. “Someone” had said “something” about me, “something” very very hurtful apparently, based on "something" from many many years ago, and this woman, whoever she was, was convinced that I had heard it. Or maybe she wasn't, I don’t know. I had no idea what she was talking about or who might have said something about me, but by now, of course, I was dying to hear it. Who wouldn't be?



“Look, I wish you’d just tell me what the person said. I really want to know.”



“Oh no, no, no, if you didn’t hear it – "


“But I think I have a right to hear it!”



(A wounded silence; tears slowly filling the wide, Bambi-like eyes.)


“I was only trying to protect you from the truth. People always say you’re an unkind person. And now I know why.”



Exit, stage left (via washroom door).



And that was the end of the exchange.



Some sort of double-whammy: dangling this unknown bafflingly nasty thing in front of me, pretending to be sympathetic, snatching it back, then acting all wounded when I insisted she TELL ME what this remark was, neatly turning the hurt around and jamming it forcefully up my nose.






Does anyone know how to stop this shit before it becomes totally toxic? Does anyone know how to neatly intercept such crap and hurl it back at them where it belongs? Is there even a name for this? The only one I’ve found is “turning it around”. But that sounds too mild for something so twisted.



Honestly, I’ve had enough. I don’t care if it’s Christmas or Columbus Day, I need to get this out of my system. There, I’ve done it, and I hope you see yourself. You know who you are.

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm