no boys allowed in the room!!!!

I've been offered what I think of as the Carl Agatha Special*: an elective hysterectomy! I'm going for a second opinion next week, though.

I'd keep the ovaries, which are fine, so no surgical menopause. I asked about my cervix. "Up to you," said the surgeon. WTF, you are the dude who went to medical school, maybe you should weigh in here? I'm all for patient choice, but you gotta at least give me some pros/cons to work with! He kinda shrugged and said "studies indicate that it really doesn't matter." What does he prefer? "I usually take it out, but again, it's up to you."

Well ffs, let's just flip a coin, then?

*not actually available to CA. Sorry, carl :(

wow that's exciting for you!
i would think removing the cervix might affect sexual response?
and wtf that he didn't think to mention that?

i feel a need for this thread today thank you for bumping
i'm so tired that i think my brain is actually drained of blood

me too. i am feeling kinda sads and tired etc

(a mother who does not care about your feelings at all in any way, the opposite of supportive in a crisis, who teaches you not to trust any achievement of your own because it's probably a trick, who invents complex imaginary scenarios and convinces you they are real, who is hypercritical and convinces you that this is just how everyone else in life is gonna view you, and most of all you are deeply weird and will never understand normal people, so just try to hide as much as possible, human relationships are just elaborate interpersonal performances). the impacts it has had on the way that i am, and the way that my family and relationships are. it is such hard work undoing it, and i can't even seem to approach thinking about being forgiving about it yet.

Ooof. Respect, roxy, for grappling with this in such a clear-sighted way. We have so many kids at this school who are having emotional crises literally every day and we keep trying to get them new levels of mentoring, counseling, outside services, etc to try to build their emotional growth before it becomes a discipline/safety issue that the school has to be punitive about. Just today we were talking about one student and I specifically thought, "She needs a mother. Like an ideal mother. She needs a champion whose love never wanes" and I felt for her SO BAD. We can't give her that, so far, but it set me thinking about that kind of love so your description rang that bell hard.

I hope you can both have some good R&R this weekend!

Dude said cervix removal doesn't affect sexual response. I'll try to quote him exactly: "the cervix, it's only real function is as a door to the uterus. No uterus, no need for door."

I dunno I guess if it comes out I will definitely never have cervical cancer!

oops, sorry for xpost

like he explicitly said it doesn't affect sexual response or he avoided the question with the answer about the door? i remember reading something about it and have feared cervical cancer for that reason specifically (among the obvious others like dying obvs)
i'd be glad to know it's not true but i'm not convinced by that answer!

i hear the work-affecting-the-feelings bell
know that one well

Congratulations!!! I've never considered the cervix issue. I can't decide whether it would freak me out more to have the top of my vag be closed off, like a Ken doll crotch vagina, or have a cervix with nothing behind it but the rest of my insides.

Like this

https://citymovement.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/screen-shot-2013-02-13-at-9-21-08-pm.png?w=470

or this

https://cdn.wittyfeed.com/4647/d1e3a4xokb7p5wf8jk6d.jpeg

He specifically said that studies indicated no impact on sexual function. The door was an add-on comment, albeit an awkward one.

xpost hahahah I'm just gonna try to stop thinking of doors for a while!

Its funny, when he said something about "not having periods anymore," I'm like OH RIGHT!!! My main issue is what he referred to as "bulking" symptoms (puffed out abdomen, feeling of heaviness, aching) and not so much awful bleeding (though that piece could be better), but all of a sudden I was struck by the idea of life with ZERO periods for ever and ever amen!

i know we can count on kate78 to tell us the truth
it is freaking me out to think about the ken doll

i mean not a lot but yknow

I got a very ken doll vibe from Martin O'Malley in this week's dem primary debates. I picture him with a ken doll crotch.

lol
he seems like an actor playing president on teevee

what's the standard recovery time for a hysterectomy?

Yeah, I don't see why the cervix would have anything to do with sexual response tbh. That woudldn't have occurred to me to worry about.

additionally, and what i most want to talk about here, beating myself up for being 35 and just now understanding and working on all this stuff. i've always felt 10 years behind on being "normal"; no change

i identify with this so hard. I'm just a little older than you are dealing with similar things. I'm finally, just now, realizing the damage that my mother did to me. I've been in pretty intense therapy for almost two years now and I'm just starting to get it. My therapist and I are pretty sure that my mom has Narcissistic Personality Disorder but it's sort of the opposite to what Justine described - she was a pretty good parent when I was a kid but that all changed when I was about 17 and since then she's been either drunk and/or depressed but most often both. The biggest effect this has had on me is similar to what you describe in that her parenting has made me think that I'm not a capable adult and I feel way behind my peers in a lot of ways. Anyway, it's a process and I'm really just starting to heal. The fact that I'm only doing this now does make me feel really bad sometimes but when I do feel bad I try to remember that at least I'm dealing with it and trying to grow and that's something that some people never even get around to? Idk - it's really hard and I get angry about it a lot tbh.

(Sometimes it feels like I've paid and continue to pay a pretty hefty price - all the numerous fucking issues and complexes I've walked around with my entire life - for all this and she's just oblivious or chooses to be oblivious. Tbh she never should have parented imo.

Anyway I went off there but just wanted to say that I get it R and try not to be too hard on yourself. I think it's pretty awesome that you're confronting this stuff and dealing with it at all no matter what age.

i know we can count on kate78 to tell us the truth
it is freaking me out to think about the ken doll

gosh, I haven't logged on in weeks, but it was almost as if I could sense my name being invoked.

I don't know a ton about suprecervical hysterectomies, but I know a lot of it depends on the procedure used to get it out (abdominal or laparoscopic or vaginal). Vaginal, I believe, is the preferred method, but you can't spare the cervix with that method.

Anyway, I'd probably take it out as long as they're in there.

Yeah fuck it. Take it all. What else can they get out while they're at it? Gallbladder? Appendix? Fuck it.

I lost ten pounds having superfluous and vestigial organs removed. Ask me how!

thank you! i appreciate your candor, expertise, and sharp personal radar, kate78 :)

Hugs and kudos to roxy!!

Re: procedure/recovery. Surgeon #1 would do lap and possibly da Vinci robot (LOL, robot hysterectomy!), OUTPATIENT which damn that is huge to me to be back home same day; back to work in 2 weeks (but maybe just a couple of days until up to doing some work from home). Up and about early and often is the rule. Definately no your mother's (or, in my case, grandmother's) hysterectomy with its 6-8 week down time!

Lechera and Carl: off topic but I'll be in your city and will have a few hours free on Sunday afternoon if yous wanna grab a drink? Gotta be back on the Blue Line around 6.

maybe? this week has been hellish and i need a sensory deprivation chamber before even thinking about grading midterms but send me an email and we can exchange contact info!!

email sent!

Aw, Roxy. I feel you. Had a lot of same realizations working with kiddos. Had to get back on all kinds of mental health meds I'd convinced myself I didn't need. Had to get a lot of therapy. Three years later kinds doing better. Took over 20 years of constantly beefing with my parents, talking with siblings now that we're full-grown, to realize they were just doing their best even though their best was not always very good for me. Godspeed and if you even need to chat, hit me up.

the past is like a big whack-a-mole that keeps popping up in the present no matter how much you think you'be beaten it down, and you can never predict when or where
that's what I've learned in life

troothboms

sometimes as you get older you learn that you dont have to whack the moles whenever they pop up, you can just go "oh hey that thing that happened" and keep on truckin

Lechera and Carl: off topic but I'll be in your city and will have a few hours free on Sunday afternoon if yous wanna grab a drink? Gotta be back on the Blue Line around 6.

I'm scheduled to attend a local park kid Halloween party adorablenessfest from 2-4 but also email me (or copy me when you email LL) because it would be lovely to see you if I can.

thank you all for all this wonderful support around my mom issues, yall. i seriously appreciate it.

<3

i think that, sadly, too many women didn't make it out of their childhoods (or sometimes even adulthoods) unscathed by the way their mothers treated them.

The first part of growing up (actually growing up, becoming a functional human adult; rather than just ageing out of your child body) is recognising the fucked up patterns caused by faulty rearing, and trying to alter them, to make yourself a better and more decent human being.

But I think part of that adult growing up process involves understanding that your parents (and put the finger for faulty upbringing on all parents, not just mothers) were human beings. Maybe deeply flawed human beings. But human beings dealing the best they could with the hands that were dealt them. And not just that they were flawed human beings, but they were raising girls within deeply fucked up power structures. I'm guessing from ILX demographics that most of us were born in the 70s or 80s, which means our mothers grew up in the 60s and 70s. Dealing with sexism, external or internalised during that particular historical era, how fucked up things were. And especially those mothers who were dealing with mental health issues, diagnosed or undiagnosed or utterly misdiagnosed - including mine I might add! - stigma is bad today, even with all the information and psychiatric treatment, but y'know, trying to cope with that with absolutely zero support structure in place.

I'm not giving a "get out of a jail free card" for bad parenting. But understanding that deeply flawed people, doing an incredibly difficult job under structures we now understand to be totally fucked... that does not produce the best results. I think it's a marvel sometimes that anyone gets to adulthood unscathed. IDGAF about forgiveness; I think it's overrated. But I think Understanding, and that sense of "they did the best they could with what was available to them" goes a long way towards letting go of anger and moving forward into better behaviour.

otm

It's official: my uterus (and its buddy cervix, because why not) are being evicted from the premises on November 12.

Gory details can follow if anyone is interested.

should we throw a "bye uterus etc" party y/n

I sure as hell plan to!

Only one more period (if that) EVAH for me, holy shit.

and then throw all your tampons into a kiddie pool

God I can't even imagine, bon voyage uterus!!

I'm totally going to ask for pictures of the uterus and fibroids laid out on a tray!

Hey! (hey!) Uterus! (uterus!) get off of my cloud...

I'm so sorry. Good luck with the operation.

I'm totally down with uterus lyrics! Thanks for the good wishes.

This time last year I was being worked up as a potential kidney donor, which turns out to have been good mental preparation. I seem destined to lose an organ some way or another.

Q, all the best with this! Is the Da Vinci robot a go?

quincie <3 thinking of you!

roxy & ENBB, i have been going through exactly this myself in the past couple of years, the reprocessing, also post-age-35 and after my friends started having kids. gradually came to understand that my mother is abusive and my father is an alcoholic (functioning, but nevertheless). i grew up in a terrible home environment with a lot of yelling, a lot of stress and chaos, where i wasn't really allowed to have a normal range of emotions, i mostly learned that I had to keep to myself and not draw too much attention and pretend that things were ok, to get by. i didn't grasp until recently how damaging it was. it's not for lack of trying but i wasn't diagnosed properly until i went to someone who specializes in ptsd/trauma, so for many years i thought i was the problem

once my friends started having kids i started to think, wait, i could never, ever imagine any of them *ever* yelling hateful things at their children or hitting them. i could never imagine any of them making it their priority to hang out in a bar just about every night and being emotionally absent in all the ways that go along with that. i also feel pretty bad at times about being behind my friends/peers on this or that major life milestone, but on the other hand.. if i hadn't been stubborn enough to go away to college and get out of that town, i'd probably have wound up married to an abusive drunk and stuck in a dead end job and thinking i didn't deserve anything else. i really went through a lot & things are slowly getting better but it certainly has taken me a lot of time and money and a good therapist.

i do not think my parents did the best they could. i can't change it now, but.. imo the bar should be set higher than that, and their behavior is the problem. it seems that in order to really move on, i have to keep reminding myself of that and not diminish/hide the past or go along with family pressure to pretend everything's fine.

daria-g, so good to see you back 'round these parts! Let's do it in person soon--I'll e-mail you :)

I found gobs of fault in my parent while I an adolescent, but I can now look back and see how lucky I was to have very good and decent people--people who placed family and being good spouses/parents above all else--as my folks. It wasn't perfect, but it was very supportive and real and man, I sure did get lucky. I think about what Roxy, ENBB, daria, VG, and others here had to contend with IN ADDITION to growing up as girls/women in this world. . . ugh. That's all I can think of to say. Ugh.

I'm not talking about diminishing the past, or handwaving away the past, I'm talking about looking the horrors of the past full in the face in order to understand them, and understand one's own place in them.

I don't need - or want - to rehearse or list the terrors of my childhood here. You've got the lot: long-term emotional abuse; physical abuse and beatings inside and outside the family; sexual abuse and rape outside. All of which was denied. The first rape denied in a way that was particularly destructive to my sense of bodily autonomy, for a long time, which lead to further assaults.

I was lucky, in that when I first started sprouting behavioural problems at school, aged 12 or 13, the therapist I was sent to sent me back to school and took my Mum in for counselling. There followed 10, 15 years of my Mother in therapy. Things didn't become great overnight. Things got a lot worse before they got better.

But in the course of that therapy, I eventually discovered things about my Mother's childhood. Abuse doesn't come out of nowhere. She was abandoned by her parents, who left her in the care of a relative who raped her repeatedly as she was growing up. For her to acknowledge the fact that I was raped would mean acknowledging her own rape, which she wasn't ready to do yet. She spent her entire life dealing with massive undiagnosed PTSD. She was hospitalised at least twice (that I know of) for "major mood disorders". I did not know that while she was raising us, she was wrestling with major mental illness - she later told me she would get up, feed us, take us to school, then go home and collapse straight back into bed with depression. I have dealt with depression, and been hospitalised myself, for mood disorders. I got into substance abuse to cope, which she never did. I have since learned about PTSD, because I've had to, because of my own abuse and assaults. She didn't have those resources when raising me. I have struggled with this shit my whole life. I cannot imagine dealing with this, and trying to raise children at the same time. *I* would not have coped. I am not surprised that she failed to.

All of this stuff is now puzzle pieces for me, trying to put together a picture of "why were things like that". The missing puzzle piece was my absent father. Absent emotionally through all of this stuff, absent physically as much as he could through overwork, just plain absent when he finally ran away. I've assembled pieces of his bizarre childhood from family history I inherited after that set of grandparents died. Another puzzle piece arrived after I was diagnosed with Asperger's; my Dad was all "oh hey a lot of my programmer friends have that, I'll go and take one of their tests... oh. That's an awfully high score, isn't it. And I was a lot worse before I found this community of people a lot like me." Another puzzle piece of so many things in my childhood that weren't him refusing to do things; just him being *unable* to. My Mum was raising children single-handedly because my father was just not there emotionally.

Things were fucked up. I'm not sweeping this stuff under the rug or denying it. But things like looking at my own freakouts (PTSD triggering + autistic meltdown = wow that is a person totally out of control to the point where I didn't even actually understand what was happening) and then looking at memories of my parents' behaviours, and seeing the same patterns has enabled me to say "wow, PTSD is a hell of a trip" with regards to out-of-control behaviour (even violent, abusive out-of-control behaviour) and trying-to-regain-control behaviour, rather than "what a vicious, controlling, abusive narcissist." Which it would be very easy, as an outsider, to think or dismiss.

I have a ton of friends with alcoholism and substance abuse disorders; I've done my own research on addiction because of my own struggles. When you read about the neurochemistry of those things, it does help to frame it as a disease, with both psychological and physiological aspects. Addiction is not a failure of will or a moral fault, it's something much closer to a mental illness. Mental illness is not a failure of will or a moral fault. It's a combination of misfiring brain function and environmental stress triggers.

Despite everything that happened in my childhood, I do not like "blame the mother" explanations. *Because* of everything in my childhood, perhaps. "A bipolar incest survivor with PTSD and a high-functioning Aspie get together to raise some children" sounds like the punchline of a joke. It's the hand my parents got dealt. They did with it what they could. I'm lucky that one of them got treatment, albeit after the damage was done. I am able to have a relationship with that parent now, because they walked out from behind the wall of denial. I understand why they did what they did, because they understand why they did what they did. When I say "deeply flawed human beings" I mean "deeply flawed" and I mean "human beings". Accepting both sides. In both of us, parent and child.

There's another option, though. My brother lives behind the wall of denial. My brother is a pretty awful fucking person in ways I've detailed on ILX before; he's swung over to the super-conformist, uber-conservative dark side. My brother is dedicated to being As Normal As Possible (tm). A ton of his behaviour is the kind of rudeness and brusqueness and not-giving-a-fuck-about-others and "Tell Me What I Did That Was Rude. I DEMAND that you tell me what, exactly, I did that was rude, or else you are a fucking liar and what I did was perfectly acceptable, you peasant" which could be read, if he ever actually sat down and admitted that something was wrong, as a lot of the same issues I face. Or it could just be HE. IS. AN. ASSHOLE. (I dunno. I lived a lot of my life with the terror that I was, actually, An Asshole because I could never figure out what I'd done wrong, until a very wise therapist figured out it was a "can't" not a "won't". A lot like my Dad.)

My brother's default explanation for everything is "My Childhood Was Terrible." This is not something he works on, this is his "get out of other people's emotions free" card. Our Mother was not a deeply ill person who needed a lot more help than she ever got, who did the best she could until she did, finally, get help. Our Mother is a SCREAMING EVIL VICIOUS DEMON-HARPIE HELL BITCH WHO RUINED HIS LIFE. He has cut off all contact with her - which, y'know, I support that decision if a family member is still causing abuse and chaos in your life. I no longer have any contact with my brother for pretty similar reasons. Except, well, he didn't just cut her off. Every now and then he'd go and yank at the chain, because the positions have been reversed and he figured out how to use psychology, not to heal himself, but to carry out abuse and psychological warfare against the mother that Ruined His Life. If I get hit as collateral damage in that war, well, that's Not His Fault.

Seeing my adult long-term-relationship smashed up meant that I discovered a new understanding of my parents' and what they went through. My brother's divorce just made him double down on hating our Mother and blaming her for his problems with women. Experiencing crippling mental health issues made me more understanding of my parents' problems. My brother? He doesn't have Mental Health Issues (never mind his own hospitalisations) he even has a note from a doctor that he likes to wave about saying he is Totally Normal Now. He just had a Bad Childhood, which excuses him from ever taking responsibility for his own behaviour, ever.

I just look at my Mother and I look at my brother, and I see a lesson in How To Be; and How Not To Be. One involves looking at your own flaws, and using those to try to understand the flaws of others. The other is just denial and abnegation of responsibility. Accepting this stuff is hard. Changing it is even harder. Accepting that these things are not moral flaws or failures of will: Mental health. PTSD. Addiction. Autistic spectrum stuff. These things come in patterns, though I will leave it to scientists to determine whether that's genetic or environmental (or probably both). But that kind of tick of realising and accepting: if you are dealing with this crap; it's very likely your parents also dealt with this crap, but with less understanding and less help.

Sorry this is so long. Sorry if this is not-helpful. I'm trying, specifically, to talk about my own situation. Your situations will naturally differ. But I just wanted to shade in the detail of what, exactly, I meant, by things like "Understanding" and "did the best they could," For my parents to have "done better", they would have had to have been different people, with different brains and different upbringings. They weren't. They were who they were. And this is who I am, now, trying to puzzle it out.

Christ that took me 2 hours to write. I am sorry it's so long. I can't TL;DR it, but don't really blame anyone who can't face that wall-o-text.

I guess the TL;DR version is: we are usually raised a lot like the way our parents were raised. If our childhoods involved hideous things like abuse and mental illness and denial, chances are our parents' childhoods also involved those things. We, now, have access to resources to understand how wrong and how damaging those things are. Our parents' generations generally didn't.

What you choose to do with that knowledge, for better or worse, is up to you.

I think is great if someone can see a parent's shitty parenting decisions from a socio-historical context and come to the conclusion that they did the best they could under a certain set of circumstances but that's really not going to be the case for everybody. Sometimes parents really don't do the best they could and from a personal growth and emotional development perspective there's just as much value on being able to say "This person did not value my safety and well being as much as they should have" as there is in being able to say "This person really did the best they could."

I've got one parent in each camp. Mom did what she could in some tough circumstances. She still dropped the ball in some major ways but she knows and acknowledges this and that means a lot. My father knew better and prioritized any number of less important considerations over my general health and safety. He was raised by an abusive monster that everyone treated (still treats, posthumously) like the Best Dad Ever but he also was a clinical family therapist so he can gtfo with any did the best he could" shit.