On asking for help and repair

A story I haven't gotten to tell yet :: ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED On AUGUST 23rd 2022

Can You Turn The Lights Off? ends mostly in 2019, with some bits of my autism realization that is from fall + winter 2020/2021 (the diagnosis process is quite long.) But apart from that, no other storylines past December 2019 are included in the book.

The best way to survive a world wide pandemic in 2020 and 2021 was to spend most of my time processing the 90s, 2000s and 2010s, lemme tell ya.

I need to admit something to you - I used to roll my eyes when people would say, “ask for help!” I inhaled that commentary as mostly classist and something I like to call reeking of low ace score privilege. Low ace score privilege (LASP if you will), is when someone has a mostly functional and non toxic family system.

If you’re unfamiliar with the ACE, check this out.

Asking for help was actually not the root issue I had, not having people around me in my circle (whether that was family or friends) that could help me was the problem. The people surrounding me were largely not resourced enough to help me, so it didn’t matter how many times I would ask for help, it would never come.

My mother, well-meaning as she always has been and always will be, wasn’t really an adult on time. Essentially, she had kids when she was more or less helpless herself - not grown up and capable and wanting a man to save her from the pain her parents caused her, not resolved in her own childhood trauma.

My mom also really went through it being married to my dad and then divorcing a person like him. She definitely had PTSD, if not complex PTSD from the experience and that meant… surviving was the only goal.

My mom helped me when she could for physical things, but it was never a sure thing. I couldn’t rely on her financially at all. And I had very little to no emotional support to navigate hard situations like being queer and trying to come out to her at age 16 and just being told to take it easy, and not to worry too much. She didn’t notice so much about me.

And my dad? Well, I understood very early on that he had no capacity to meet anyone’s needs but his own (and I wasn’t even sure how good he was at that), so I never really expected him to meet mine. If he ever did, I’d appreciate it, but I knew it was not the rule, it was the exception.

My brother? He was so traumatized himself by our family system and the horrific abuse he endured (arguably much worse than mine,) that there was no way he could be in relational reciprocity with me and I seldom had that desire arise because it was inconsiderate and ignorant.

My extended families are spotty at best. I don’t really like most of them because they never really made me feel safe as a highly sensitive neurodivergent person. I knew if my mom needed money that my grandpa (her dad) would take care of it, for example. Which was nice to know that it didn’t always land on my back. But that was the only support I knew I could count on, and it wasn’t directly given to me or used to help me. It simply made sure she was okay, which meant I didn’t have to do that job.

I grew up and honestly lived my life until very recently, being the strong one, not because I wanted to be, but because not needing help was the only way I was going to survive.

If I didn’t make it work, it wasn’t going to. That was the reality of my life at a very, and probably too young, age. If I needed help, I was simply not going to make it. There were no resources available to me if I did need help. So yeah, for me, I didn’t have a problem around asking or wanting help, it’s that I would get a No I Am Not Able To Help You title in return.

I’m not sure we speak about that enough in self-help spaces. It’s one thing to be scared to ask for help, but actually having the possibility of having your needs met if you ask, and it’s another thing entirely to be scared to ask for help because no one around you can help you.

It’s my high school reunion soon, and I was thinking about where I saw myself in 10 years when I was 18 years old, and if I made it accordingly. I giggled when I remembered that my 17/18 year old self believed she was not going to be married and would be writing books. I guess I have the exact life I thought I would have. The exact life I wanted as a teenager. I told my mom about this, I said, I for sure thought I’d be in Los Angeles though. And I did spend quite a few years in SoCal in total when I add it all up. So I lived it all - all the dreams I had for myself - often better than I dreamed them. And she said, “Did you think we’d be together?” And I said, “Hell no. You were so unreliable back then. I had to just X you out of all my plans. I thought I’d just make the ocean my mama.”

She smiled at me. I smiled back.

What a miracle we have created between us.

I remember when I was 21 or 22, and I had a therapist named Dee. She was real no nonsense Dee. I liked her a lot. And she told me I had to grieve my mother. The mother you wanted and the mother you needed, she is not coming, or she’s not coming back, Emily.

“Yeah, I see your point.” I remember telling her and then driving back home to my townhouse.

I probably mostly believed and trusted Dee on that. My mom wasn’t coming back or maybe she had never really been there the way I needed or wanted. But there was this tiny little part of me that knew she would - come back I mean. My mom was an excellent mother outside of the ways trauma impacted her - I was there, I remembered it. I didn’t know when she would come back, and I didn’t know how, but I knew she would. I know and knew my mom’s heart. I truly saw her.

At the beginning of 2019, my mom got very sick. She was going through menopause and losing a lot of blood due to fibroids and she was becoming severely anemic. There came a point in which standing up making food wasn’t working. She would faint, and the danger became that if she was alone, she might hit her head or hurt herself. I let her come live with me in Encinitas. I paid the rent and the herbs to stop her bleeding. I made her lentils every day. My girlfriend and I looked out for her and brought her to the beach and watched the sunset.

It was a really big time in my life; I had come out in the fall of 2018 privately to all my friends and family, and I was about to come out publicly after being in my first same-sex out of the closet relationship. I was struggling with so much internalized homophobia. I really had a lot going on personally. And yet, there was this simultaneous thing happening in which I was caring for my mother that had literally abandoned me 2 years prior when I was on my death bed in withdrawal from a drug her and my dad had consented to putting me on at age 12. She did not deal with the consequences of her actions and decisions at all. She did not clean up the messes she made much.

My mom didn’t particularly “deserve” me showing up for her per say. She didn’t deserve my money or my time or my girlfriend playing monopoly with her on the rug over food I cooked with love, maybe. Some people in my life had thought and said out loud that I should never ever forgive her. But she had nowhere else to go that was actually safe, she needed physical help, so I let her come in with me.

I barely talk about or even remember that. I probably have done loads of stuff like that in my life and just don’t think twice about it. Once my mom, at some point last year (2021) told my therapist (new one) these series of events, and my therapist was like WHAT? Because she had no idea that I “saved my mom’s life” as she put it. To me, this was very simply, doing the right thing for someone who needed it because I could - I technically had the resource for it. I love to help people when I can, and I often make sure I can, because I know how painful it is for someone to not be able to show up for you because they didn’t watch how resourced they are. That’s how responsible I am. I make sure I am resourced for other people so that I can actually be a safe place.

My mom after that, actually began to be a mother to me. She did the right thing more. She put me first. She healed. She resolved her pain. She stopped serial dating. She asked me if she could repair with me. I said yes. She told me I gave her the biggest blessing by giving her a second chance. By not giving up on her, even when many people told me to.

“Why didn’t you?”

And the real answer to that question is because I see you correctly. I knew there was still a chance for you to come around. I know when there isn’t a chance for someone to come around too - I see reality and patterns quite well.

AND…

Sometimes I wondered if she just began the repair process because I took care of her when she was sick in 2019, and this was all a twisted way to make sure she would have someone to take care of her if she needed it again. I wondered if she was using me. (What can I say? Manipulation and exploitation via your parents really does leave a mark on ya.)

I tested her. I really tested the fuck out of her. Oh yea? Will you still love me if I do this? Will you still show up if I do that? Do you really mean it, how about now, and now? And what if this and that, are you still taking care of me or are you leaving me? Am I actually safe with you?

We did something my therapist suggested to us, which was have a morning meeting every morning at 9:30 am in which I told her everything I was mad about for nearly an entire year until I didn’t need it anymore. It was for one hour every day, and not more than that, at a time where my mom had the most energy so she could meet my needs.

Every single morning, I would process my intense rage, my crippling grief, my immense annoyance and irritation and my powerlessness and my helplessness. I would process my trauma, and there was a lot of it, a little bit more each day from 9:30 am to 10:30 am. I would cry, and yell and become very small and also very big. It was a very emotionally demanding year.

I know the privilege of a parent actually repairing with you. Of someone who has physically abused you and emotionally neglected you to say that was wrong and I feel remorseful because of how much you’re hurting, not because of how guilty I feel. I also know the pain of a parent who won’t and can’t do that.

“How much do you trust me from 0 % to 100 %?” my mom would ask me two years ago…

“About 2 %” I would smugly respond, with a tight lip fuck you kind of smile my mouth and eye lids would make.

Now if she asks me, I say, probably somewhere around 80 %, maybe 90 % on good days.

Two years of intense repair.

It has been a profoundly spiritual experience. Not for the faint of heart.

And the other day, Shannon was over and her and I had gone paddle boarding, and my mom had gone out to dinner, and she was on a patio, and we drove by on our way back, and I yelled out her name with my window down, and she looked at me, recognized me immediately, with the most joyous look, like, “That’s my girl!”

She was so happy to see me, as though we had been separated for months, and I thought, that’s fucking love. To be received with such joy.

The gory repair and the relational work of healing trauma is brave work not everyone wants to take on, and I am someone who thought I was never going to be able to ever ask for help and have it be available to me.

And now I can ask…

And it arrives.