Friday, March 21, 2025

 Friday, March 21, 2025

     I met with Rob at 8 am.  I told him I wanted to work on the fears and agitation that flooded me.  I have always been sensitive.  Things improved after I met Mike.  He was a place of safety.  While he didn’t like everything about me, he liked me enough to feel safe and believe his needs counted with me.  He liked that I would care for and be concerned for his needs.  I have lost that sense of safety.  Being retired doesn’t help, either. When I was younger, I was busy. Who had time for this order of self-awareness?  Nowadays, I lie in bed and feel the blood pulsating through my upper back and arms.  I wake up and feel a surge in my solar plexus, which triggers negative thinking.  I am not in a bonded relationship. Everyone around me is.  I float free. I don’t like it.  Rob didn’t have any great suggestions about how to deal with this problem.  I told him my PCP recommended him because he was trained in approaches that dealt with trauma.  While  I feel he probably will have an impact, I don’t know how it will pan out. Today, I filled him in on my mom’s trauma in her first six months of life. 

    I’m sure I’ve told this story before; it's pretty bad.  They discovered a benign tumor in her upper back.  They figured if it grew at the rate of a normal infant's growth, it would crush her organs. To suppress its growth, they injected alcohol into and around the tumor every other day. I knew the basics of the story as a child.  I learned at the end of her life that the site got infected. That meant her mom couldn’t cradle her in her arms.  I have no idea how she was held when she suckled.      

      Then, at six months, they operated.  She came out of the anesthesia twice. They told her that happened because of her strong will to live.  Bull shit! It was May 1904; they limited their anesthesia for fear of killing her.  My mom didn’t even stay in the hospital overnight. Whether that was because they didn’t have a pediatric ward or because my grandparents did have or didn’t want to spend the money to leave her there, I have no idea.  They may also have felt she would be better off at home.

   My grandfather worked as a chauffeur for a bank manager, driving his horse-drawn carriage. He drove my mom and grandmother home in that carriage over cobblestone streets. My mother screamed, and her mother was embarrassed.

     In other words, my mom had plenty of trauma to pass on to her children. And that early event was only one of another eleven events that would count as trauma-inducing on their own merit.

     I met with the Twins at 9:15. Twin E came on first. Her mom was sitting behind her, unbraiding her hair.  She used braiding to give the girls hair waves. I worked on her piece about going to Coconut Beach with her dad. E had said it took an hour to get there.  Her mom laughed and said that the beach was right down the street, the one closest to the house.  While I understood why Mama K would find the distorted sense of time and space funny, I was upset that she laughed at her daughter.  I know parents say, “She knows I love her.” While that’s true, a child feels if my mom laughs at me, what must everyone else think of me.