Chapter 21

For a long time after Older Brother left Diana, I ceased all contact with everyone in my immediate family.  The only interest I had in seeing Older Brother was to hand him the divorce papers.  Younger Brother and I were still mutually avoiding contact over juvenile drama around his wedding.  And my parents?  Well, they were the most toxic of all, and I was sick of them violating my boundaries when they thought I was not looking, and then lying about it to my face.  It was the final straw when they insisted they were neutral in regards to Older Brother and Diana breaking up, when everyone damned well knew they were not.

But I did not lose their number, and they did not lose mine.

I wanted a family connection desperately.  I wanted to have at least one family member that I could unconditionally love, and who would love me unconditionally in return.  I wanted my family to be capable of the positive changes promised by their rhetoric about mental health, and I wanted them to be capable of accepting my positive changes in the same regard.  That meant that I, like an abused dog, took them back, each in turn, after walking away the first time.  I wanted to believe that they were sincere about making changes, and that they would not squander it if I gave them second chances.  In my twenties and thirties, I was not ready to acknowledge that healthy relationships with Mother, Father, Older Brother, and Younger Brother, were all impossible.  They did not want healthy relationships, so healthy relationships were never going to happen, regardless of my personal desires.

Older Brother did not want that.  Younger Brother did not want that.  Father definitely did not want that.  Mother could not deal with that.  In fact, I am certain that Mother’s primary goal was specifically to have the appearance of a healthy relationship.  She very much hinged her public persona on being an open-minded, caring, honest person, and the appearance of healthy relationships was critical to that perception.  Having a child who refused to talk to her was very damaging to that perception.

I did have a couple years of peace, but I let Mother worm her way back into my life like a parasite.  I let myself be coaxed by her pitiful insistence that all she wanted was a loving, healthy relationship.  She seemed so sincere that I did not have the heart to dismiss it.  She had spent so many years in therapy that the illusion of personal growth was a cornerstone of her public image, and maybe even her perception of herself, but honesty was never really an option.  Instead, lies and deceit were always the default answer to any problem.  For her it was natural, easy, and comfortable.  The hard internal work she would have had to do in order to have the kind of relationship I wanted was absolutely out of the question.  The person she was willing to be is vastly incompatible with the kind of person I am, and worlds away from the kind of person I am willing to spend time around.

Mostly out of guilt and an aching desire for familial connection, I let Mother draw me back in.  I figured it was just a matter of time before she and Father could not stop themselves from doing something I found unconscionable, and I would have an excuse to cut them off for good.  I had not yet come to terms with the fact that their history of bad behavior and my expectation that it would continue was the “excuse” I needed to remove them from my life forever.  You cannot have a healthy relationship without honesty and respect, and it had been confirmed repeatedly that those two qualities were impossible for my parents.

Mother started slow and easy, calling me on the phone to talk every couple months.  Since Father and I had a much more volatile relationship, he mostly avoided talking to me except to sing me happy birthday once a year.  We all knew that if he talked to me frequently or for very long, he would say something asinine and the whole delicate situation would disintegrate.

It is painfully difficult and stressful to maintain boundaries with people who have no real desire to respect you or your boundaries, especially when they are cultivating the illusion of healthy mutual respect.  Such illusions support gaslighting and create doubt as to whether or not slights and manipulations are intentional.  Mother and Father did not want to respect my boundaries, and by extension they did not respect me, but that never stopped them from wanting a relationship.  Their fear that I might end the relationship motivated them to act in ways they believed I wanted them to act, but it was performative and illusory, not sincere.  They did not want to respect me.  They wanted to avoid the consequences of not respecting me.

If boundaries are genuinely respected, people seek to understand and abide by the boundaries that are set, with full acceptance and no resentment over the existence of those boundaries.  They seek to fully integrate those boundaries into their understanding of the relationship, so adhering to them is natural and automatic instead of something they must constantly bear in mind.  Are they going to make mistakes?  Of course they will, especially if the boundary is contrary to habit and ingrained behaviors.  But they will always seek to understand, listen, accept, and learn when they mess up, and do their best to catch themselves and alter their attitudes so they can stop crossing boundaries altogether.  When respect is sincere, over time mistakes become less frequent and eventually stop altogether, because respecting boundaries becomes a habit and demonstration of caring.

In the case of my parents, they never asked me a single thing about my boundaries.  They never tried to genuinely understand why my boundaries existed, or why I felt the way I did, even when I went out of my way to try to explain it to them.  They instead made assumptions based on what might have upset them in those situations, and proceeded to walk on eggshells, constantly curating their behaviors for fear of rebuke instead of forming new habits and attitudes.  Rather than seeking to understand why conflict happened and genuinely resolve it, they practiced avoidance and placation.

Instead of my boundaries creating greater understanding and fostering a stronger relationship built on mutual respect and trust, it created an elephant in the room.  Any time we interacted, it was there, taking up most of the space while all three of us did our best to ignore it.

My parents ignored the elephant in the room because they did not know what to do with it and they were unwilling to change anything about their views, behavior, motivations, or habits in relation to me.  I ignored the elephant in the room because I knew that if I challenged them to be sincere, it would all break down, and I would end up the bad guy, at fault for our reconciliation not working out.  Over time, I fell back into old “ignore it” patterns of behavior because I still felt a heartbreaking desire for familial connection.  I did the mental gymnastics to avoid acknowledging they were incapable of sincerity with me.

Despite that, I stared at that elephant a lot.  I thought about that elephant a lot.  I waited, almost with bated breath, for that elephant to make a move, so I could shout in triumph that I was right, and they were not worth having around.

Because I already knew they were not worth having around.

Except that elephant did not move.  Mother was very, very careful about what she said to me.  I had inadvertently given her a lot of time to think about the grievances I voiced, and she had a good idea of what lines she should not cross, even if she had no genuine respect for why those lines should not be crossed.  For those areas where she was unsure of my boundaries, she avoided the topic entirely.  If we never entered those territories, she could not egregiously violate boundaries which baffled and confused her.  If she curated her words and actions, I never needed to witness that she still desired to violate my boundaries and intended to break them down.

We settled into a civil, and at times even pleasant relationship.  Mother and Father moved to Oregon, so the distance helped a lot.  Small doses were doable, and even a little satisfying.  I became invested in the relationship again, and Mother’s confidence grew.  As it grew, she pushed more and more, mostly plying against my compassion with guilt and pity, bemoaning her sorrow that none of her children got along.  Father may have been masterful at subtle emotional manipulation, but she was not too shabby herself.

Mother knew that I was still too angry about Older Brother to be receptive to manipulation on that front, but she slowly guilted me into resuming contact with Younger Brother, who was again extending an olive branch.  I allowed her to manipulate me into talking to him, because she was incapable of having a relationship with me which was free of manipulation.  She had her agendas and personal selfish desires, as always, and with the proficiency of a lifetime, used guilt and pity to slowly and skillfully coerce me into doing things she knew damned well I did not want to do.  She counted on my compassion and adherence to the give and take inherent in any relationship to wear me down.  It was important to her, so eventually I had to give in, or I was the one being insensitive and cruel.

I am a little angry at her about that, but I am more disappointed in myself.  I knew the kind of person she was, and I knew she was incapable of genuine respect for me or my boundaries, and yet I allowed myself to be drawn in.  I allowed myself to become emotionally invested in the existence of that relationship, and through that emotional investment, I allowed her to manipulate me.

Manipulative and abusive people love social conventions and niceties.  They will twist and manipulate social conventions that allow society to keep moving, like second chances, forgiveness, and apologies, to keep their victims close at hand and available to victimize.  How many times have you heard of an abusive person swearing, “I’m sorry, Honey.  I didn’t mean it.”  The victim takes them back, and the next day the abuser is hitting their victim again, because the apology existed only to placate, and was thoroughly insincere.

When my parents got caught lying, they usually claimed “misunderstanding”.  On the extremely rare occasions when they admitted they had behaved badly, they were always “sorry”, and they “didn’t mean it”.  Anything was better than admitting deliberate misdeed or manipulation, but manipulation was too frequent and habitual to be accidental or unintended.

When I visited Mother and Father in Oregon, it was surprisingly a very enjoyable vacation.  We went to a number of local museums, their house was astoundingly clean, and they were cooking food that was decent tasting and not potentially tainted with food poisoning.  I was pleasantly surprised and found myself embracing a spark of hope that maybe they had grown and learned.  Father was on completely different psychological medication, no longer working because he was on full disability for his mental problems, and seemed emotionally balanced in a way I had never seen before.  I hoped that maybe they had changed, and they could be decent people to be around.

The piece de resistance was when Mother admitted to me that they had made a lot of mistakes while I was growing up, and they were very sorry for that.

I should have asked for details, and the need for those details screamed in the back of my head, but I did not ask it.  I let her apology remain uselessly vague, and accepted it, pretending it was the apology I needed to hear.  I was invested in the relationship, and I knew deep down in the pit of my soul that she knew I needed an apology, so she crafted the apology she thought I wanted to hear, and made it vague enough to infer anything.  She knew I believed they had made mistakes, so she would “apologize” for that to smooth things over and make it go away.

Social niceties to the rescue!  Let the abuse resume!

Mother’s confidence grew.  She began deliberately testing my boundaries, very slightly pushing against them to see what she could get away with.  I was back in contact with Younger Brother and had accepted her “apology”.  She was winning in a situation where there never should have been a winner or a loser.  If she stayed careful and patient, she could manipulate me into doing more things that she wanted while maintaining the illusion of respecting my boundaries.

While I was still in contact with her, I had no idea if she was deliberately calculating about her actions, or if it she just could not help herself.  I consoled myself that which scenario was the case made no difference, because her actions were the same regardless.  I knew if I asked which was the case, she would cry foul and insist that the entire premise was a lie.  Father probably would have insisted that my entire premise was so delusional I might need anti-psychotics.  Mother always insisted she was a reasonable, loving, honest person, and always acted from a place of caring and sincerity.  She would most likely have declared that any inference of manipulation was either a deliberately cruel and hurtful accusation, or at best a horrible misunderstanding.  Father would have insisted it was a deliberate and unparalleled cruelty on my part to accuse her of being anything other than that reasonable, loving, honest person she pretended to be.

I had observed decades of “misunderstandings” that resulted from contradictions between their actions and their words.  “Misunderstanding” swept lies and manipulation under the rug, excusing it as an accident so Mother and Father could publicly absolve themselves of guilt and avoid changing their behaviors.  There comes a point when repeated “misunderstandings” are in truth deliberate actions, or the behavior would change.  That point is usually far sooner than most people are willing or able to draw a line.

During all of that, I developed a chronic illness.  I had no idea what was wrong with me, but without health insurance I found myself living in a body that was starting to fall apart for reasons I could not begin to guess.  I adjusted my activities, and tried to continue on as best I could, until I finally reached a point where I became fully disabled.  Those friends who were closest to me knew about my difficulties, but I did not announce it widely until I had to shut down my business as an independent artist and seamstress.

In 2007 I was bit by a tick when hiking at Lake Berryessa in California.  I did not think anything of it at the time, because I had been bit by ticks when hiking many times before.  But this tick bite was not like any of the others.  It swelled into a lump about five inches in diameter, with a bright pink center, bright pink ring, and pale pink in between.  I thought about Lyme disease at the time, but I had never seen photos of a bullseye rash that was swollen, or one that was pink instead of red.

It took seven years to find a Lyme literate doctor, who diagnosed me with anaplasmosis (anaplasma phagocytophylum), mycoplasma pneumoniae, and reactivation of herpes 6.

Anaplasmosis was the primary infection I received from the tick bite.  It is a proto-bacteria, which means it has no cell wall and is extremely antibiotic resistant.  Treating it is further complicated by the fact that it lives in white blood cells and can only be reached by antibiotics when it has reproduced and is floating in the blood stream looking for an uninfected white blood cell.  This particular disease is unknown to almost all human doctors, but most vets have heard of it, since it is sometimes contracted by dogs that go hiking frequently.

The mycoplasma was a secondary infection, which would be more than treated by treating the anaplasma.

Herpes 6 is not the sexually transmitted version of herpes we learn about in sex ed.  It is a form of herpes that is endemic to the human population worldwide.  Most of us catch it as toddlers or small children, have flu-like symptoms for a week or two, and then it goes dormant.  It reactivates in people who are immune compromised, like AIDS victims.  I had been infected with anaplasmosis for so long that I was in an autoimmune state which allowed the Herpes 6 to reactivate.  The combination of the autoimmune state from the anaplasma and the Herpes 6 reactivation has caused the majority of my symptoms.

During those seven years of slow, mysterious decline, I had built quite a following online as an artist and a seamstress.  A huge part of that following was specifically interested in corsetry.  I was making bespoke corsets on commission, and wrote a great many tutorials illustrating how to make corsets.  Those tutorials were all posted for free to my website, because I loved sharing what I did and how I did it.  At the time I had the largest and most comprehensive resource available anywhere, and it was all free to anyone.

I was honest and detailed when I announced my illness online.  I let people know that I had no health insurance, and I had fallen behind on work and would no longer be taking commissions because of disability.  I was going to apply for Social Security Disability, but because I had a rare and invisible disease, it was likely the process would take at least a couple years, if it worked out at all.  Treatment was prohibitively expensive ($20,000-$50,000 depending upon how treatment went), so I had little hope of recovery.

When I announced my illness and told the world that I would no longer be taking commissions, a fellow corset enthusiast reached out to me and offered to run a crowd fund to help pay my medical expenses.  I did not have the ability to run it myself, so I gratefully accepted.  The online corset making community came together for me, and the two-month long campaign reached full funding, giving me the money I needed to proceed with treatment and clear the infection.  Most of the rewards were donated by fellow corsetiers, at no cost to me.

Most of the donations were about $5.  A few were in the $100’s.  A couple different individuals donated $1000 or more.

Mother shared the campaign online and was openly overjoyed that so many people around the world cared about my wellbeing.  She personally sent a few hundred dollars through the campaign, making sure to tell me that she wished she could do more, but, as per usual, she and Father “were broke”.  It was genuinely amazing and heartwarming that so many strangers were willing to reach into their pocketbooks and help me when I needed it most, and I will forever be grateful to them.

It went very much like when I was finally able to get a driver’s license.  Because strangers made up the difference, Mother absolved herself of any guilt she might have felt over not being there for me yet again.  Since I was OK, it would not be publicly obvious that her lack of effort or expenditure was yet another failure to be the Good Mother she claimed to be.

That wonderful community may have pitched in to get me treatment, but there were still living expenses to cover, and I was completely incapable of holding down a job.  The entirety of that burden fell on Diana, and by extension, her parents.  Diana’s parents did not understand my illness and were not convinced it was as severe or debilitating as I said (I looked fine!), but since Diana was sticking with me, they helped out and tried to be compassionate about it.

Think about that for a moment.

Yet again, when I genuinely needed their help, my own “we will always be there for you” parents colossally failed me.  Not only my future wellbeing, but also my food and shelter, were provided by other people.  My medical treatment to cure the infection was paid almost entirely by strangers.  Diana was in graduate school, so she was not capable of supporting both of us on her own.  Instead, every month her parents helped to make up for my inability to contribute to the household.  Those two people, retired and on fixed income, chose to help me keep a roof over my head and food in my mouth on a monthly basis.

My own parents did not make that choice.

Instead of offering monthly help, Mother once again offered that I could come live with them.  When I refused, a paltry $100-$200 each Christmas was their token contribution, so she could say she “helped” and to prove how much she Truly Cared.

Think about that for a moment.

My parents and I were all aware of the fact that there was an elephant in the room, and if it was disturbed, it would shake down the building and our currently civil relationship would fall to pieces.  The greatest factor in keeping the elephant quiet was distance and infrequent interactions.  If we were living under the same roof, there would be no way to keep the peace.  Mother and Father would not be able to maintain the lies and careful curation of their words and actions.  They were not that good at keeping track of what lies they told and to whom.  Even if they could, I resent lies far too much to ignore such behavior if I am surrounded by it constantly.

As bad as that is, all of it is inconsequential compared to the fact that Mother wanted me to move thousands of miles away from my entire support network.  She wanted me to leave behind everyone who had ever genuinely loved and supported me in ways that they were not only never willing to do, but incapable of doing.  I think most of all, Mother still wanted to get me away from Diana, and wanted to take advantage of my illness to accomplish that goal.  If she got me away from Diana, maybe things could go back to the way they were before Diana walked into my life, when they could control and manipulate and abuse me to their hearts’ contents.  If I actually was disabled, I would be trapped with them, and would be forced to acquiesce to their desires and abuses.  I would not have Diana standing beside me telling me I did not have to live that way.

Did Mother think all that through?  Was she really that calculating about it?  I now believe so, but regardless of any self-awareness, it is the inescapable consequence of her offer.  That would have been the result if I moved in with them.

Not only that, but if I had taken her up on the offer, Mother would have been out money every month paying my living expenses.  They swore they could make that work.  At the same time, they could not bring themselves to send money to help with expenses where I was living, where I had a support network, where I was truly and undeniably loved and cared for.  It was not unlike when Mother and Father found money for private school because it guaranteed they had unquestioned dominion over their neglected young children.  Once again, having me under their thumbs was worth the money, but my wellbeing was not.

That should have been the final straw, the “excuse” I had been looking for when I decided to give them a second chance, but instead I let it slide.  I had become emotionally invested in the existence of our relationship, in having a familial connection, even if it was a terrible one.  I let myself be coaxed by the fact that they helped at all, because the bar was set so low that even an inadequately tiny amount of aid was unexpected and heartwarming.  I took their tokens of caring as proof that maybe, just maybe, I was being too harsh in expecting them to pull through and demonstrably be the Good Parents they swore they were.  No one is perfect, and they were prime examples of that, even if they could not bring themselves to admit it.  I did not expect anyone else to be perfect, so maybe I needed to lighten up.

Also, it was far easier to let things slide at a time when it was a daily struggle just to meet my basic needs, and it took monumental effort just to walk between the bathroom and the couch.  Quite frankly, I was too sick and too disabled to maintain boundaries or appropriately recognize and deal with violations.  Maintaining boundaries with those who incessantly seek to violate them is exhausting in the best of times, but I was too sick to be completely clear about my boundaries, even with myself.  I fell back into old coping mechanisms because they required less effort and less thought.  I tried to ignore the consequences of my parent’s offer.  I tried to accept that they were broke, even though I had no way of verifying the truth of it and knew full well that they would say they were broke even if they were not.

I tried to let it go, to ignore their selfishly inadequate aid, even when they happily informed me that they were buying themselves a new home, so they would no longer have to rent.  But my resentment started growing again.  Once again, their words of support were directly contradicted by their visibly selfish actions.

With the clarity of hindsight, I can see that I never should have given them a second chance.  As is the way of abusers, they wanted the relationship to happen on their terms, and their terms alone.  They were willing to lie, cheat, manipulate, take advantage, and be calculatingly patient.  They pretended to respect my boundaries, pretended to respect who I was and the things that were important to me, but they never did.  The pretenses were a means to an end, and that end was their ability to abuse me, and hopefully to have me thank them for it.  It was insidious and cruel, but also predictable.  In the tried-and-true fashion of abusers everywhere, when I found myself in a terrible situation, they used it to their personal advantage, no matter the additional harm it could cause me.  Mother manipulated my illness to reinforce the idea that she cared while putting in minimal effort, and used my weakness to break down as many boundaries as she could from so far away.

I wish I could say this caused me to wake up to how bad it was, how toxic any contact with them was, but I cannot.  Emotional abuse is insidious.  It is hard to identify, especially when you are in the middle of it.  It makes you question yourself and your understanding of events.  No.  It was another three years of increasingly egregious violations of my boundaries before I put a stop to it once and for all.