• I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead

I'll Sleep When I'm Dead

~ writing my way through motherhood, doctorhood, post-PTSDhood and autism. sleeping very little.

Tag Archives: sock monkey

Fuck Ted Bundy

31 Thursday Mar 2022

Posted by elizabethspaardo in Catholicism, christianity, empathy, Evil, kids, love, marriage, my awesome husband, narcissism, outrage, parenting, PTSD, romance, Sin

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

be my valentine, betrayal, children, divorce, empowerment, Evil, fallen world, family, good, Justice, love, meaning, narc, narcissism, original sin, Parenting, religion, silence, sock monkey, stars, trauma, true love, truth, vampire, viktor frankl

Flesh of my flesh

Bone of my bone

Leave your parents cleave to me 

I am your new home

Home forever

Til death do us part

And if I make you yearn for that end 

Why that’s hardness in your heart

For if you love God

You love marriage, you love me 

And you know when God joins together

You’ll never be free

Free to be who you really are

To follow the fate signed in your stars

No you are mine and I am yours 

Don’t lock your phone 

Don’t lock your doors

We are one in heart and soul 

We are both driven by the hole 

left behind by the barren wombs that birthed us underneath the moon

Mother moon has cried for us while Brigid’s fire inspired us 

To reach for something better than us 

Wait Did I say us? 

I meant me. 

You conjure planks in all our eyes 

But yours are fine 

(It’s a disguise) 

A pleasant reflection outside of you 

Rot and decay is what is true

What god has joined together I will put asunder 

For how can we be one when your trunk is putrid and diseased at its core?

Swoop up the fruit before it hits the floor 

If you can tell a tree by the fruit it bears you’ve done a damn good job of fooling God 

For our children are precious fruit indeed 

Owing little to your bitter seed 

They grow and bloom in spite of you 

Soaring so far past the height of you 

Knowing there is something not right with you

People look at the women that fell in love with Ted Bundy

Stood by Ted Bundy

Accepted a proposal in a courtroom from Ted Bundy

And they think these women are naive or dumb or victims themselves

But has it ever occurred to you that they were there because being in love with Ted Bundy worked for them?

Instead of looking at him as this charming manipulative sociopath fooling these women

Has it occurred to you that she was manipulating him too?

Judas and Ted Bundy and Jeremy Noyes 

Sinners that God so loved he gave his only son 

God and Abraham would sacrifice their sons for the sins of the world

And so do you think yourself holy when you hurt your kids to hurt their mother? To punish her for leaving? For putting asunder what You joined together?

Because it was never about God 

And always about you 

And you, are a jealous and vengeful little demigod 

So easily beat by Brigid and Mother Moon

Everything’s fine (of sock monkeys and crocodile tears)

06 Tuesday Apr 2021

Posted by elizabethspaardo in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

abuse, love, Parenting, PTSD, sock monkey

My therapist and I realized the other day that although I’ve been in therapy with her off and on since 2014, we’ve never discussed my childhood. “Well,” she said, “I’m sure you’ve discussed it with the other therapists you’ve seen in the past.” “No,” I replied, “I haven’t. Never.” She asked. if I thought we should and I paused and took a deep breath and said, yes. My life has been a series of fires to put out for so long, this is the first time we’ve had time to get into it. She is clearly not a Freudian. And I have clearly been avoiding this. (My mother’s voice ringing loud in my head “someday you’ll grow up and go to therapy and talk about what a terrible mother I was,” making a pit in my stomach big enough to swallow me whole. The guilt. The shame. You don’t talk about the family to anyone outside the family.

Soon after this, someone tweeted about writing about your childhood and your parents’ reaction. It was a lighthearted tweet but some jackass replied that if one is going to write something negative about one’s parents, they should discuss it with their parents first as he had had an experience counter to this and was not okay with it. Here’s my response:

He has since deleted his comment as you can see.

I mean what I said and yet, I have held back on discussing certain things here. But I’m reminded of the quote:

So, fuck it.

I was reading my fave Viktor Frankl a couple of weeks ago. There’s a book newly translated to English of some talks he gave in 1946, shortly after leaving the camps. He writes about getting out and choosing to stay in Austria and the experience of having so many people there say, oh we had no idea what was going on in the camps. He calls it a deliberate not knowing and says it’s essential to the success of authoritarian regimes. Ordinary people must deliberately turn away from what is happening so that they don’t have to accept responsibility for it, don’t have the moral imperative to do something about it.

And as I was reading it, I thought of my mother. I thought of how much energy she and my father have put into not knowing for my entire life. You see, my greatest fear has always been that my children will turn out like me. They most definitely got some crap genes from me (nature) so I have to know that I am raising them differently than I was raised (nurture). And so, I have to remember what it was like and all the glaring red flags and cries for help and all that that they purposely ignored. Because I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t ignore my kids’ cries for help and red flags and all that.

I used to make excuses for them. It was the 1980s, it was rural Appalachia, not a place mental health was talked about. We didn’t have health insurance a lot of the time. But it’s just excuses. I had a lot of friends, of all classes and varieties, whose parents got them help (tried to anyway). The truth of it is, she didn’t want to be embarrassed and she didn’t want to be bothered. It’s messy, ya know? I remember writing a story in college about a girl who kills herself by slitting her wrists but makes sure to put newspapers down so it won’t make a mess for her mother to clean up. I had no idea the story was about me. I truly didn’t.

When you cut yourself everyday with razor blades, arms and ankles and shoulders and thighs, it is bloody. It wasn’t a thing back then. They still called it “self mutilation.” A friend of mine turned me and my boyfriend onto it and I loved it. I loved it for a lot of reasons, conscious and subconscious. I tried to hide it but apparently something happened that made it impossible to ignore. So they told me to stop. And she said, “You don’t need to see someone do you? You’re all right aren’t you?” And there was only one acceptable answer. “I’m fine.” Because we were always fine.

But my cuts were a reminder we weren’t actually fine. An intrusion into the beautiful little house where she kept her china dolls, four daughters, four dolls. And so my sisters would say that I needed to stop upsetting mom. And they would check me for cuts. And I would find new places to cut that they weren’t willing to look. And in time it blew over. She honestly probably completely forgot about it pretty quickly. They do that, ya know? People like her. They just dissociate out the bad memories that don’t fit their picture of the perfect little life. Just put the cut up doll in a new long sleeved dress and back in her place and everything’s fine again.

Fine. We’re fine. Everything’s fine.

We came home drunk, came home high, came home tripping balls. And they didn’t notice. I thought I was really good at faking them out. My other friends’ parents kept catching them but not me and my sister. We were so much better than them! Of course, we weren’t. Of course, if my kids came home like that I would know instantly. And have to deal with it. And admit things are not fine. And I would. But not her. Not them.

And if my four year old came to me asking for protection because her older sister was bullying her, I wouldn’t say “Toughen up. Life is hard,” and go about my day. If they locked her in a room with a static-y TV meant to terrify her at age 5 because she’d seen Poltergeist, if she was so scared she literally ripped the door off the hinges trying to escape, I would do something about that shit. For her sake and for theirs. I prefer not to raise any of my kids to be dickheads. But she loved her flying monkeys because they did the work for her.

I have to think about these things to remind myself I am a different mother than she was and that my kids won’t turn out like me. They’re already turning out differently. They don’t pretend everything is fine (not at my house anyway). They get mad and sad and worried and frustrated and bored. And they notice when I’m unhappy and ask me if I’m okay and what’s wrong and they try to cheer me up. These things happen daily, generally multiple times a day. And it occurs to me how many millions of time I have stuffed down sadness and anger and guilt and confusion and shame and just generally not being fine. And how many times I have stuffed down the urge to say, what’s wrong, Mommy? Because no matter what I said or how I acted, I knew things weren’t fine. I just didn’t know how to say it. For decades.

I look at my daughter and think, wow, she’s so perceptive. She spots manipulation or insincerity a mile away and she calls you on it. And it’s taken me a year and a half to realize I was that perceptive too. I just didn’t allow myself to admit it. Because I had to survive. Because children die without adults to take care of them.

I think about that study where they replaced infant monkey’s mothers with these cloth monkey dolls and the monkeys bonded to them, clung to them. Those infants turned out much better than the monkeys without one, or with the ones made of wire instead of cloth. And I wonder, did those monkeys grow up and go out in the world and eventually realize their mothers were just dolls, and not real mothers at all? Did the monkeys marry monkeys or dolls? If you’re used to a doll, I’d imagine marrying a real actual monkey wouldn’t feel right. Until you eventually realized being married to a doll isn’t normal at all, and really not a good idea.

WILL YOU MARRY ME? I THOUGHT YOU’D NEVER ASK!

I am 42 years old. And up until a few weeks ago, I would have told you I’m not an emotional person. A lot of statements like this “That movie had me crying and I’m not an emotional person.” “I’m not a crier but when she said that, I ended up bawling.” And so on and so forth. I didn’t think I was an emotional person because that’s what they told me. I remember being at the Pittsburgh International Airport and my mom was either leaving for her prolonged trip abroad or returning from it. I was 16 or 17. And my mom was crying and my sister was crying and so on and so forth. And I wasn’t. And it was, oh what’s wrong with her? Why isn’t she crying? And so when I was diagnosed with Asperger’s at the age of 22, it all made sense as to why she never seemed to express the appropriate emotions. And what it took me all these decades to realize, is that I knew it was all fake. The tears, the words they spoke, the situationally appropriate feelings they acted out. All a performance. A play we put on everyday for ourselves, for the world. I just couldn’t play along. Actual sadness, actual crying, I knew to keep hidden. Like a rabbit crouching down in the field, pressing its soft underbelly to the cool grass, hoping the wolf won’t rip its intestines out. Hoping it will pass by. Never, I mean never, expose your soft underbelly to them. Keep it locked away. Even from yourself.

It turns out, I’m actually really fucking emotional. I cried in front of patients in residency. That is not done. I cry on my way home from a hard shift with my addiction patients. I cry every time my son Max plays piano. I cry at movies, on almost every major holiday, thinking about the future, the past. I’m a crier. It’s taken me my entire life to 1) realize this and 2) let go of the shame around it. You’re not allowed to apologize for crying at my office. Humans are supposed to cry. And if someone feels safe enough to cry with me, I’m honored. Crying, real crying, not performance tears, it’s truly amazing. Every cry is a good cry.

Lena knows the difference between real tears and fake ones. She knows there’s a certain look he gives her that’s meant to make her feel bad for him and manipulate her into acting like she’ll miss him when he goes even though she won’t. And she knows how she’s supposed to act to make people happy. I think she knows she doesn’t need to do that with me. I hope. I’m actively working on it. Working on accepting emotions of all kinds from them and from me. On being honest with them when I’m sad or angry. On letting them know I’m there if they’re sad and that they won’t feel sad forever. Listening. Watching. Noticing. Remembering.

I will never understand how you can see your child’s body bloody and gashed and not want to do everything you can to help her. How you turn away from a four year old asking you for protection. How you tell your daughter she’s a crazy slut and a horrible mother and you’re giving her ex-husband money to get a lawyer and take her kids away. How you mention to her that her uncle googled “Elizabeth Fleming slut” and all kinds of things came up. Show her the tiny little AP wire article in the hometown paper about her turning in the pedophile and mentioning, accurate or not, details about her sex life, and talk about how humiliating it is and remind her how embarrassed her sisters are. And will never understand a man jealous of a ten year old. A man who belittles and degrades his children and his wife, plays them against one another, gaslights and lies. And do you know why?

Because they aren’t real people. They’re just cloth dolls pretending at being human. They’re badly behaved little sock monkeys and I merely, dear reader, relate the facts. Because everything was not fine. And every feeling and word and question and desire and lament and exaltation that I’ve swallowed down, that my children have swallowed down, that so many of us have swallowed down, deserves to come out whatever way we see fit. Y’all sock monkeys can go on deliberately not knowing, just work a little harder at it. The rest of us, we’re gonna be just fine.

Subscribe

  • Entries (RSS)
  • Comments (RSS)

Archives

  • May 2022
  • April 2022
  • March 2022
  • November 2021
  • September 2021
  • August 2021
  • July 2021
  • June 2021
  • May 2021
  • April 2021
  • March 2021
  • February 2021
  • January 2021
  • July 2020
  • May 2020
  • April 2020
  • March 2020
  • January 2020
  • August 2019
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • May 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • February 2016
  • April 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014

Categories

  • addiction
  • autism
  • Catholicism
  • christianity
  • COVID 19
  • doctors
  • empathy
  • Evil
  • kids
  • love
  • marriage
  • medicine
  • movies
  • my awesome husband
  • narcissism
  • New York City
  • outrage
  • parenting
  • Politics
  • PTSD
  • Rape
  • residency
  • romance
  • Sin
  • special needs
  • Uncategorized

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in

Blog at WordPress.com.

  • Follow Following
    • I'll Sleep When I'm Dead
    • Join 787 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • I'll Sleep When I'm Dead
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...