I've always wanted to run away from any connection to my mother. Not just because of her craziness but because she died unexpectedly. With no prior history of any heart or health issues she had a massive heart attack in her sleep. Coronary edema is what the autopsy said and while I don't totally understand what it is I know I never want to have that happen to me. So I run. I run away from her, my childhood and the relationship problems I'm having now. Running helps me feel in control of my health. That said it is ironic that as healthy as I am, that I would be diagnosed with breast cancer and then heart problems. Still I run; maybe not as fast as I would like or as far but it's given me a sense of control and escape at the same time. It was surprising then to hear the therapist suggest today that my husband was maybe trying to run away from me.

I know that a cancer diagnosis is a big stressor for any relationship but could a fear of my mortality drive him away? When I was first diagnosed he assured me that he would help me get through the upcoming surgery and he joined me to the many doctor appointments, sitting in depressing waiting rooms and he helped with the tough decisions one makes when contemplating and choosing chemo. But once I started chemo things changed. He had offered to get live in help while I was going through treatment but I didn't like the idea of having a stranger living in the house all the time. I think because of that he decided that I could take care of things myself. I also didn't want him to think I was afraid of cancer so I saved my worrying and tears for the shower at the end of the day. Some nights I would silently cry myself to sleep while he slept besides me. Would I have been better off saying I was scared, tired and sick? I was jealous of women whose husbands took care of every need for their wives while they were going through chemo. It was tough to make everything seem like normal so when I had a day where I was exhausted I got no help and no sympathy. I remember distinctly one night. The kids were in a club and had to be picked up at 8:30. I was like the walking dead but my husband was tired from work so he wouldn't pick them up. But did I say anything or complain? No, I got in the car and feigned off sleep long enough to pick the kids up and get them home. What was wrong with me for not standing up for myself and what was wrong with him for not stepping up for me?

Then when it took longer to recover than it was supposed to he made me feel like I was weak, a hypochondriac. Doctors love to tell you that after two months your health is going to be back to normal but there is no "normal" after cancer, just a new world and a new normal. My new normal didn't fit in with doctor's stats. When the crushing fatigue lasted two months and then became six then eight months I was diagnosed with a heart problem. Sort of a perfect storm of genetic changes and chemo. If I wasn't trying to run so much I might not have known for a long time. I was forced to undergo numerous invasive tests because the doctors didn't want to believe my heart issue was from chemo. I felt bad for my husband always having to leave work to get the kids and then stay and wait for me and I never asked him how he felt. But, he never asked me how I felt. I felt like I was becoming a burden to him.

It has been a long road back to having a feeling of being healthy and in that time I have had more procedures and have lost two friends with very similar diagnoses as mine. I remember telling my husband about the first friend recurring and then later dying and I didn't get much of a reaction and certainly no attempt to reassure me that everything would be okay. Then the second friend recurred and died a year later. Again, no comment from him. I don't even think he acknowledged I was talking.

So could it be that he was blocking out everything I was saying because he was afraid of his own mortality? He's lost a good bit of weight over the last six months and has been running and hitting the gym almost every day. In fact he won't even let me run with him anymore because I'm too slow for him. Do I remind him of his own mortality? Would he rather be with someone who hasn't had any health problems? Would it be too painful for him to lose me? Believe me when I say, "I'm not going anywhere."

As I begin to run slower away from my mother's failings, letting her past hurt catch up to me, he is starting to run faster from mine.

So what do you say when someone looks at you and says, "Wow, you've been through a lot." and you know that they only know half the story?

I saw a therapist yesterday for the first time. Well, not really. I tried a few times to see one but the topic of my past either was to difficult to articulate or wound up consuming most of the session the first time we went through counseling twenty years ago. At least I had written out what I needed to say so I could just hand her the paper and she could get an idea of what had happened. The sad thing is I had originally written this out a few months back for my husband and when the therapist asked me what my husband's reaction was after he read it and I had to say that he didn't say anything to me. So what does that mean? Does he think I'm some kind of a freak or psycho because of what I experienced during my childhood? It probably wasn't fair to him that I never told him any of these things prior, but in my mind I didn't want my past to have any influence on my relationship. It was a mistake on my part to think this and if I could hit the pause and rewind button I would but it's too late.

I've always had this sense that my father didn't know what to do with me after my mother died. He had very little to do with my childhood except for the occasional trip to the amusement park or racetrack but apart from that I remember little. As much as he and my mother didn't get along he kept their bedroom exactly the same as if she were alive. Weird I know, but I never asked him about it because you just didn't talk about anything back then. My sister came home to live with us for awhile and then we had a housekeeper that came when I got home from school. Some things I just don't remember and maybe it's my mind just trying to forget them. I just remember the feeling that I was different from my classmates and that they all knew that my mother had died. Divorce wasn't a popular thing back in the seventies so to be living in a single parent household was not common. I felt like I was just going through the motions and tried to avoid any situation where I would have to say that my mother died. I couldn't even mention it without completely falling apart. The problem with that was you didn't show any emotion in my house now that my father was in charge, especially crying, and that's all I wanted to do. As much as my mother subjected me to her verbal abuse I was completely stunned when she died, like the rug was pulled out from under me.

So I went through the motions, I hated school and all I could think about was going to the barn so I could ride and escape life. Thank God I found horses because otherwise my life would have been a disaster. I wanted attention and if getting in trouble got me attention then so be it. The only thing that kept me from following that path was if I screwed up I wasn't getting to go to the barn and that was the worst punishment I could imagine.

Funny how the one thing that really got me through my childhood and adolescence was the one thing my husband couldn't stand. He knew I rode and was serious about riding when I met him but maybe he thought I shouldn't need the horses since I had him.

I never realized how much our past affects our present and how those past behaviors manifest themselves in our relationships with our own children.

Today

It's raining. Great... I'm seeing a therapist today for the first time. Actually I've seen a few over the years but never made it past the second or third appointment because it was too hard for me to go through the re-telling of my childhood. The last two therapists were for my son who has Aspergers. The therapist would ask the inevitable question of how was my childhood and I would say, "Great!" Why bother spending time that should be spent helping my son discussing my childhood. I'm supposed to see a second therapist that my husband has chosen for us to see together but there is no appointment yet. I don't understand how someone can be a therapist, helping people, and not return a new patient's phone call asking for an appointment? I'd be finding a different therapist but I told my husband he would be the one to find the marriage counselor since he was the one leaving the marriage.

It was raining the morning my mother died. After saying over and over how she wanted to die in her sleep she got what she wished for, a massive heart attack at the age of fifty. The memory is crystal clear. My mother gasping for air and my father reaching over trying to wake her. A call to 911 with instructions given on how to perform CPR. My father trying his best to do something he'd never done before on a wife who pretty much hated him. I wonder how that felt? I guess those feelings melt away when it's a life or death situation. My father tried to do the right thing. EMS came and they put her on the floor, continuing to do CPR and shock her back to life. For a long time I wouldn't step on the spot where my mother lied on the floor that morning. It was a quick drive to the hospital in the pre-dawn hours but it seemed to take a lifetime. My father asked the desk nurse when we arrived to the ER how my mother was doing. She looked at my father, then at me and said "She's not breathing." It wasn't long after that that we got the news. We walked out of the hospital, my father's arm around my shoulder. It was a long silent car ride home.

I was twelve and just at the cusp of the teen years when all you want is to be just like everyone else.

Hello and an Intro

My name is Josie and I'm a forty something wife and mother of two teenage boys. Well I really am not sure about the wife part as my husband announced two weeks ago that he was unhappy and wanted some time apart to sort things out for himself. So was I surprised? Not completely as things hadn't been great for awhile but his mind had already been made up about moving out so rather than try to fight with him over his decision I let him go. That sounds alot like being a doormat but it's symbolic of how things have been for the last few years - tap dancing around our feelings towards each other and not wanting to make a decision that would cause conflict. "Well at least we don't fight", I said to him trying to rationalize that things really weren't as bad as they could be.

So what do you do when after being married for twenty two years, your husband walks out with no promises as to when and if he's going to return? If you're me you spend alot of time on the internet trying to figure out what the hell happened to get you to this point. And then it hit and I felt like the whole house of cards was collapsing.

Let's back up, way back up to when I was growing up. I am the youngest by far of three daughters with my sisters being ten and fifteen years older than me. Yup I'm the baby and while I fit much of the typical description of the baby, with the age gap I grew up more as an only child. My parents had a horrible relationship. It wasn't always that way but in my era it was endless fighting. Fighting over stupid things, fighting just to fight. Often times my Mother would be screaming at the top of her lungs at my father and would often wind up throwing some glass object at the wall. One morning while my father was out she called my sister to tell her that she had drunk a bottle of vodka and was going to kill herself. Why no one checked her into a facility I'll never know but I think it was just swept under the rug. My not understanding what was happening would cause me to shriek and cry which just made things worse. My father hated any kind of emotional demonstration especially crying and of course crying is what I did because I internalized everything.

My sisters were either in college or out of college so I was home alone with my parents. When we did all get together my mother and my older sister would fight constantly. They were like oil and vinegar yet they liked many of the same things. She was the successful one. First to graduate college, first to marry, first to divorce and first to have a good career. My other sister shared many activities with my Dad and she tried to stay clear of my Mother. Then there was me.

My memories of my mother are not good. She was controlling and vindictive. She would smile to your face and turn around and rip you to shreds. It's funny because at my Father's memorial mass my cousin spoke about my parents, fondly remembering my Mom as a beautiful woman with Grace Kelly looks and a gracious, outgoing personality. "If you only knew", I thought to myself how far from the truth his observations were. My father was a "Male Chauvinist Pig" (this was the seventies), and came from a shanty Irish family according to her. My father spent his day working in the city as President of the company he worked for back in the day of martini fueled lunches. He would come home at 7:30 after my Mom and I had eaten dinner and would make a sandwich and head upstairs. Unless I went up and spent time with him at night I didn't really see him.

My days were spent in school which were a refuge from my mother's increasing number of rants against my father and sisters. When I was not in school I was tightly controlled by her. I was limited in the friends I had because according to her the families weren't good enough and the kids were messed up so I spent alot of my childhood playing alone or else being stuck in the car listening to her endless stream of complaints. If I tried to stop it I was quickly admonished with the words "Children should be seen and not heard." I was powerless with no voice.

On her good days she would tell me how I was her only hope, her ray of sunshine but as I got older and more upset by her tirades her comments quickly turned to predicting that I would soon be just like my father and sisters. I was ten or eleven years old at this point and realized that no matter what I was going to disappoint her.

Was my mother suffering from some sort of mental illness? Probably but this was the 1970's and marital problems were not discussed outside of the family nor was mental illness so I'll never know for sure. I remember one day where I was swimming in our pool when a thunder storm began to roll in. I wanted to get out because I was afraid but my mother told me I wasn't allowed to. She had to go inside for some reason and I wasn't allowed to leave the pool. Did I risk disobeying my mother by getting out of the pool or stay in and risk getting caught in the storm and lightning. Who does that to their child?

Things continued to slide downward between my mother and father and my oldest sister's divorce didn't help matters. She went so far as to pack my sister's wedding dress in a Mr. Coffee box and send it with my father when he visited my sister. The ranting steadily increased and my mother's mantra became "When you turn fourteen I'm taking you and divorcing your father." I was either eleven or twelve and was fearful of this ever happening. Then my oldest sister came home for one last visit and after a big blowout with my mother vowed that the next time she came home it would be to get me away from my mother. I just remember laying on the couch crying my eyes out. I had no understanding of what was going on. All I knew is that it hurt.

Where was my father during all of this? Well the weekends he spent playing tennis in the morning until noon and the afternoons were spent mowing the lawn. I don't remember much about him ever trying to stop the fighting or trying to come to a solution or get my mother help. He would just retreat upstairs. He would take me to an amusement park sometimes on Sunday afternoons and I would ride the Merry Go Round dreaming of Black Beauty and of riding and horses; my escape. We would occasionally go to the track which furthered my growing love of horses. My mother was intensely jealous of the time I spent with my Dad and hated horses. She put up with my growing interest in riding but made no effort to hide her disdain for horse people. I didn't care what she thought. That one hour a week spent in a riding lesson was like heaven to me.

Riding in the car with my mother became like torture. Her new favorite rant was to talk about how she wanted to die in her sleep. I can't say how many times I heard her say this but I remember distinctly where I was on a few occasions when she said it. I was silenced if I tried to say anything so I sat alone in the back seat of the car.

Well my mother got what she wished for.......

To be continued tomorrow. I think we all need a breather.