no boys allowed in the room!!!!

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.

I think in terms of my Mum, a lot of her problems stemmed from not coping

And instead of leaning on my Dad to pick up the slack, which she would never do why because weakness, or talking to someone anyone which she would never do why because weakness, the pressure she put on herself to be "Mum" just completely broke her & she spiralled into making worse and worse choices, reacting physically to stressors that in no way remotely deserved those reaction. to anyone outside it looked like it was ok but inside our house it was Beirut & she was holding us all hostage to her fear of failure

And Dad was scared of her, the way we all were. We were basically helpless & just had to do what we could to "dont make her mad" etc

What made it complicated with Mum was that the only person she was confiding in was me, I'm telling her to leave, to get help and doing all I can do at 16 to protect her from herself & protect the rest of the family from her flameouts

So I saw my parents as flailing adults from the time I was 16... it made me angry for a long time after, even when things got back to normal, even after Mum apologized for putting me in the position I was in

I got the anger & out of my system a few years ago, and I reckoned with the emotional abuse. And I am now (somewhat) at a place where I can think back to those experiences with a form of acceptance - those things happened, but here I am, and allow it to move back into the past where it belongs. That's not our relationship now & a great deal has changed just with the passing of time - the huge geographic distance helped maybe more than anything.

It's there and it won't go away or even diminish, but I'm not fighting the fact of it anymore. I have reached a point where I don't live in that visceral anger anymore.

Not everyone gets there, I don't think there is a right or a wrong way to go about it & I kind of think just being here is a fucking great accomplishment

Each of us ITT has become a unique & independent woman *in spite of* our past. They did what they could, or didn't, but WE filled in the blanks ourselves as best *we* could, and we deserve love & encouragement for that no matter where any of our heads are at, no matter where we are in the process of dealing with so much heartbreak & trauma & bullshit

<3

geographical distance OTM!

I think I just extricated myself (not particularly deftly however) from an unhealthy friendship. Growing up as a weirdo, I have tended to spend time/be friends with anyone who wanted to be my friend, because friends were hard to come by. Now, I'm realizing how the way I felt about myself as a young person (childhood through early 20s) is still structuring my thinking and behavior as a middle-aged person. I will be friends with people and participate in groups because they want me, regardless of whether I really want them. So I will find myself in situations where I am obligated to do things that I don't gain the pleasure that I should from them, and then develop a sense of resentment, rather than just politely say no.

The depression doesn't help, because I question whether I am unhappy because of the depression or from the activities/people that I am spending time with that I'm honestly not that into. Like this woman (the now former friend), who is kinda emotionally still in high school, where she will criticize other women based on their appearances (e.g. "why does she shave the side of her head? it's so unfeminine!" or "She looks fat in that dress!"). And she is also really self-absorbed and obsessive, so she rarely talks about anything other than a handful of topics, mostly boyfriends and pets, that just get really stale, oh and she has some weird rivalry (that isn't mutual) with another good female friend of mine, and will consistently make catty comments about her whenever she comes up in conversation. I eventually learned not to mention this other friend in her presence, which is just ... well, now no longer an issue!

Sounds like a positive change to me <3

Good luck Quincie!

Let us know if you want a special "Since Uterus Been Gone" playlist in your honour.

Awww thank you for remembering and thinking of me!

Yesterday was my last day of work pre-surgery (surgery is tomorrow, but I'm home today for BOWEL PREP, details of which are surely only appropriate for the TMI thread). My boss, a badass nurse whom I adore, called me into her office as I was headed out and said in grave tones: "be sure to poop the first day back!" Love working for a nurse!

I think an excellent point for this thread is how COMPLETELY BULLSHIT is that we still, in 2015, call the removal of a uterus a HYSTERECTOMY. It really chaps my ass. I've tried to take a stand by calling it a "uterus removal" instead of the accepted medical term. So hilarious substitute lyrics are welcome and really do make me LOL, but let's avoid the stupid "H" word!

I'll be thinking of you q. I had this surgery back in 2010 and as someone prone to depression anyway I pretty much spent the next year or so in a state of severe anger or severe depression. Not saying that will happen to you, of course. I'll be sending all my good thoughts and vibes your way.

good luck quincie!

Uterus B Gone!

Thanks VG! Sunny, I'm so sorry you had a shitty post-op time. Did you get to keep your ovaries? The plan is that I keep both, which hopefully will help ward off surgically-induced menopausal misery (I've read that the ovaries can be somewhat "sleepy" after the trauma, and some temporary menopausal symptoms may occur). My depression has been well managed on the same med for ages and ages, so my fingers are definitely crossed that uterus yank does not rock the boat on my mental health. I'm fortunate that I never wanted to have kids, so I'm not having to struggle with any loss of fertility issues. I know that is incredibly hard for some women, even those who have had kids and think they were done anyway.

I don't know if it's complete bullshit that we call the removal (-ectomy) or a uterus (hustera) a hysterectomy. We also call a kidney removal a nephrectomy, stomach removal a gastrectomy, etc. There's lotsa Greek used in medicine instead of the vernacular, which often aids in worldwide standardization of medical terminology.

BUT ANYWAY! Good luck tomorrow! Hope you've saved up The Wire or some other show to watch the shit out of in the coming days.

I thought q was referring to "hysteria", in the old sense of the word

no, "hysteria" is referring to the womb.

Good luck, Q!

I got just under two weeks of dry time before my period started again, so at this rate, I may be eventually cleared to join you (and Sunny) in a state of blissful womblessness.

Although, that doesn't sound too blissful, sunny. I'm sorry. <3

Awww, thanks, Carl. Now that I have a 6 year old who knocks his teeth out and throws himself through windows the tide of my feelings is definitely turning :D

Thanks VG! Sunny, I'm so sorry you had a shitty post-op time. Did you get to keep your ovaries? The plan is that I keep both, which hopefully will help ward off surgically-induced menopausal misery (I've read that the ovaries can be somewhat "sleepy" after the trauma, and some temporary menopausal symptoms may occur). My depression has been well managed on the same med for ages and ages, so my fingers are definitely crossed that uterus yank does not rock the boat on my mental health. I'm fortunate that I never wanted to have kids, so I'm not having to struggle with any loss of fertility issues. I know that is incredibly hard for some women, even those who have had kids and think they were done anyway.

― mom tossed in kimchee (quincie), Wednesday, November 11, 2015 11:21 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yes! I did keep my ovaries (side note: one of them is heart shaped lol) and believe me when it comes to period time you feel everything but without the blood or baby making. I don't remember any menopausal symptoms but I was so furious I wasn't really watching for them.

My hysterectomy came about because I developed Adenomyosis (this is where the uterine tissue grows into the muscle of the uterine wall and results in really sharp stabbing pains that never stop) after having a c-section after age 35. All of my anger was directed toward my obgyn because when I was in the hospital to have Henry the original plan was a natural birth but he kept pushing for a c-section because otherwise it would be a 30+ hour labor. After saying no a couple of times we finally said yes and he never warned me this could happen. The c-section at my age is what did it. So I was mad and him and myself for agreeing and sad because no more babbies. I remember being in pre-op before the hysterectomy and it was me and pp. I whispered to him in all serious - "now is our chance run!!" but we didn't. Turns out that of all my obgyn's patients since he started practicing in the early 80s i was only the second case he had ever encountered.

Anyway....thinking of you right now Q. The recovery is easy peasy, physically at least. Just don't exert yourself for a few weeks and you'll be golden.

ps: sorry for not avoiding the H word :)

Got 99 problems but a uterus ain't one!

uter-less!

hope you are feeling ok x

I'm feeling good! Only rough spot was PACU, where I proceed to get sick all over everything, multiple times. They ended up admitting me overnight so I could stay on the IV for pain and nausea meds. Came home in the evening, had a very decent night of sleep, and now I'm comfortable and bored. Haven't needed so much as a Tylenol. Can get up and down myself, even picked stuff up off the ground without too much discomfort.

Surgeon told spouse that "we got a LOT of stuff out" hahaha

glad to hear of your successfully evicted uterus & minimal discomfort!

must feel super great to have "a lot of stuff" out of your body

everybody out of the pool

<3 glad yr doing ok quincie!