One More Perspective

I had a tough weekend and it simply continues.  I thought I was ready for some LGBTQ community socializing in a no-pressure environment and as it turns out, I was absolutely not.  …and that threw me into the deep end.  Instead of taking advantage of some organic opportunities to make new friends, I did not even go to try to do so.  It was the most iconic start to the summer season, a long weekend of effortless events, and I was in my bed by 8 pm. 

Back at work on Tuesday, I felt very exhausted and disappointed in my missed opportunities.  I feel I should make new friends in my new home state, but I’m just not up for it.  When in this head space, it’s easy to believe I will never feel social again, because I’m just not that party-type in the first place.  As I was sinking deeper into this unhelpful, disappointed mindset at the end of my day, I knew I needed to just start heading home.  I was figuratively slumped over in my office chair and wasting time, something that makes me feel just another notch worse.  As I was finally walking away from my office building, my body felt like I was treading water.  I was in slow motion and not really making any progress.  My body was resisting my efforts to move forward, though I thought I was putting one step ahead of the other.  As I was taking inventory of this peculiar phenomenon, I had a muscle-memory or an emotional fingerprint flashback to my childhood.  It was vivid and unmistakable.  I had felt this kind of transcending molasses before and I immediately knew when.  It was in 1983.  I was eight or nine years old.  I was living alone with my Father; actually I had been living just with him since my Mother and I returned from New York City in September 1982.  I didn’t fully understand what it meant, but my Mother and I had failed my Father by returning to Communist Hungary from Queens, New York, where my Parents and Grandmother had paid a lot of money to send us.  We were supposed to pave the way to political and academic freedom for our Family, with my Father planning to follow us with my Brother (from his first marriage).  By early 1982, my Brother was already across the Iron Curtain; he was in Vienna, Austria.  In August 1982 then, with my Mother and I in Queens, my Father considered us 75% escaped.  …but then my Mother and I unexpectedly returned to Hungary and nothing would ever be the same. 

At age eight, all I knew was that my Mother choosing to return with me to Hungary ultimately resulted in my Parents’ demise, and I lost my Mother to all things unimportant to me.  First, she immediately went to Austria to help my Brother get refugee status.  He was not quite eighteen and she was thirty-one.  A young person; a beautiful one.  As time went by for me in Hungary, I had no idea I would be fourteen years old before my Mother and I would live under the same roof again. 

I was told my Mother enjoyed her stay in Austria and was living young and free.  I don’t know.  As an adult woman now, I hope so.  I certainly was too young to understand those implications, I just knew I didn’t have my Mother.  People were frequently unkind, freely condemning my Mother for abandoning me.  I resisted that.  Even at age eight and nine and thereafter, I sensed this was a much more complex picture than what other people saw. 

When my Mother returned to Hungary from Austria in 1983, I barely even knew.  Apparently, my Father was divorcing her by then and my Mother’s Brother helped her out by giving her a job as a dorm teacher at the residential high-school where my Uncle was a Principal.  Best part for her financially was that she got to live there as part of the job.  Just not with me.  Whether dorm rules or my Father’s, I don’t have a way to know.  I do recall intermittently visiting her, always by going to her.  I would walk about ten minutes from my home to the city bus stop, take several stops, then walk another ten minutes to her dorm high-rise where she had her Teacher’s quarters.  She was responsible for the students and I was responsible for the grocery shopping for her and me for my visit.  I didn’t mind.  I was quite used to that daily chore from home.  I began grocery shopping for my Family before I could read.  With a largely preservative-free food supply chain, all families had to work milk and bread into their daily errands. 

My Father was always highly motivated by appearances and whether my Mother embarrassed him by returning from the US or by her alleged carefree conduct in Austria (as the rumors went), he was out to make life difficult for her.  I was also making things difficult because I was missing her and I never felt like I got to see her enough after New York City.  I also wasn’t quiet about it.  Of course, now I know why.  I was an eight-year old Imago Octopus signaling with eight flailing tentacles I was not OK.  Still, there was no room for this.  Absolutely not at home with my Father, but though I tried harder with my Mother, she also had no ability to absorb my panic signals.  I could see she was experiencing my distress not as a call to soothe me, but as a criticism of her, which she reflected back to me as my shortcomings.  A happy face was essential. 

I was getting to see my Mother so little, it was agonizing.  On the day I recalled today, I was at her Teacher’s quarters for the morning, expected to go to school in the afternoon.  Hungary at that time dealt with overcrowding in elementary schools by creating classes that together attended either in the morning or the afternoon, switching weekly.  It was getting near the time I was needing to head to the city bus stop and I was losing it.  I was crying.  I didn’t want to leave Mother’s side.  Looking back, I’m sure this was hard on her.  I’m sure my attorney Father made things very difficult for her and she was worried about not complying with the divorce proceedings.  How it worked for me though was I understood none of this, and because my Mother is an Imago Turtle, there came a point where she just reached overload with my demonstrated grief.  I found myself on the sidewalk outside her building alone, with the edict I had to make it to afternoon school.  I can recall my immense, overpowering panic, my loud sobbing, and the knowledge I had to get myself to that bus stop.  It was up to me.  I was to have to carry on from here.  …and high-schoolers were watching.  Fourteen, fifteen, and I was a snot-nosed kid.  Pathetic.  Abandoned or unbrave?  I was sure I couldn’t live with either.  I kept dragging myself toward the bus stop while at times breaking loose and sprinting backward toward my Mother’s building.  I couldn’t see her and I wasn’t sure if she would be there in her flat.  I knew no other part of the dorm high-rise nor the rest of the campus.  I did know she would be unwelcoming if I returned.  She was certainly clear on that. 

So I kept inching toward the city bus stop, stopping, restarting, over and over.  …and then something shorted within me like an overheated circuit that shuts off.  I was able to stop the agonizing back-and-forth.  I had a reprieve from my lost psyche ricocheting…looking for oxygen.  I could just be numb and move, get on the bus, arrive in class. 

Then this just became the norm.  Snap to it.  …I had earned myself a tool for life.  My Mother and I never spoke of this again.  I did my best to not think of this often, as it was my most intense physical and emotional memory of navigating the years of separation between my Mother and me.  I spent years exploring her difficult circumstances and she spent years condemning me for my stress-responses.  …but today my body revisited the sensation. 

Tonight, as my Therapist has guided me before, I, as the grownup, desperately tried to come alongside my eight-year-old self and to step in to be present for her.  Unlike my memories from three to six years of age, I found no entry point to comfort myself on this sidewalk by the high-school dorm building.  The eight year old me was impenetrable and unreachable in her distress and grief.  All I could do for her was simply to stand nearby and bear witness.  It’s as if I arrived too far down the stream.  There is something pivotal ahead of this; I am looking at a result pacing back and forth on the sidewalk to the city bus stop, not the root cause.  

Forty-three years ago, the circuit shorted to protect a child from the agony of being cast out into self-sufficiency.  This weekend, faced with social pressure to perform connection at the LGBTQ events I thought I wanted to attend, my psyche simply deployed the exact same ancient architecture.  It is the same script I ran for decades, learning to mask my distress to protect my marriages, turning my unmet needs for soothing and affection into my performance of compliance.  The molasses then isn’t a failure to socialize; it’s the shadow of the wall that once kept me safe.  Compliance used to mean forcing a happy face for others; now, it represents sovereignty and honoring my need to stop forcing compliance (or a happy face).  I’m simply not ready for new connections.  Not even for friendly socializing, and that’s not a failure.  It’s honoring what I couldn’t before:  the rest and safety I need and only I can provide to myself.