To Dance Without Touching: The Roots of C-PTSD

Preface

 

I wrote the following essay for a memoir group to which I belong.  It describes my relationship with my mother and also gives a bit of insight into the background of this relationship--why, perhaps, my mother was the way she was toward me.  Since Complex PTSD often begins with the mother-child relationship, I am publishing this essay on my blog so that you, my readers, may catch glimpses of the beginnings of Complex PTSD. 

 

Infants, according to what I have read, are wired to be cherished, lovingly touched, and soothed by their mothers.  Babies are wired to see themselves reflected in the loving mirrors of their mothers' faces.  If this does not happen, the brain of a baby must compensate somehow and adapt to an unnatural situation.  In this adaptation lie the beginnings of Complex PTSD, and the baby is set upon a lifetime path of unnatural adaptations, adaptations that can make the baby/child/adult vulnerable to further abuse as he or she journeys through life.  If the person awakens or recognizes this situation and then gets effective help, he or she can do the necessary work to change the maladaptive "wiring" and find a degree of happiness, peace, and understanding. 

 

At my age, I do not imagine that I will "cure" my C-PTSD.  In fact, I doubt that an adult ever "cures" their C-PTSD completely.  I do, however, expect to heal myself to a degree where my life is more enjoyable.  That is happening, in fact.  Namaste . . .

 

 

My Mother, Jean

Me, Jeanie, Age 4

My Father, Robert
 

 

 



On Presidents’ Day, 1995, my mother died.  The circumstances of her death were ordinary, unlike the relationship we had shared.  She died in a nursing home, specifically Oddfellows Home in Walla Walla, Washington, after having suffered her final massive stroke a week earlier.  Even in her coma, she fought her death, and she let go of her struggle only after I whispered over and over, “The boys will never get their hands on your house.  It’s been quit-claimed to Robert, your grandson.”  The “boys” were the sons of her second husband, and during her last years, her biggest fear was that they would inherit the house she took into her marriage to their father. It seemed that after she was convinced that her house was inaccessible to them, she felt free to leave her life, and she died.   

Tuesday, the day after her death was a workday for me.  Her body had been taken to the local funeral home for cremation, and there was nothing more I could do, so I went to work as usual, never mentioning my mother’s death to my colleagues. I saw no reason to tell anyone.  A few days later, I took possession of her ashes, planned a future memorial service, and went about my life as usual.  My mother’s death had been a struggle for her but not for me.  Why not?  I had never really known my mother.  We had danced through our eighteen-year mother-daughter relationship without touching, and after I left home for college, prospects for contact were even more remote.  As my  mother had admitted to me one day, she had not wanted me, and even if she had wanted  me, I would not have been the daughter she wanted.  She admitted this to me when I was an adult; I had sensed it from the day I was born.  But who was this woman, this person who had not wanted me?  I will share with you what little I know. 

My mother was born Jean Peterson in Omaha, Nebraska, on June 14^th, 1913.  Her mother was Margaret Fairgrieve, daughter of Alexander Fairgrieve, a Scotsman, coal miner, and politician from Red Lodge, Montana.  Her father was a used car salesman, surname Peterson, from Omaha.  According to my mother’s cousin, my mother was born “outside the blankets,” a fact that may have profoundly clouded the relationship between her and her mother, although I can only speculate on that possibility.  However, since her mother had been “mothered” by cloistered nuns in the convent school in Helena, Montana, where she had been sent after her birth mother died, I can only assume that her mother knew as little about being a mother as my mother did.  From what very little my mother had told me about her childhood, this assumption may well be accurate. 

When my mother was a year or so old, Margaret Fairgrieve married Robert Murray, a Scottish coal-miner from Wyoming, and the family moved from Red Lodge to Tono, Washington, a tiny coal-mining settlement near Centralia, Washington.  Robert Murray never did adopt my mother, but he loved her dearly.  How do I know that?  I remember him dimly, and what I remember is that he loved my mother as a father loves a cherished daughter.  I remember his bit of a brogue, his joking and teasing, his good-natured hugs, and his teary good-byes.  And I remember that he loved me.  When I look back on my early years, I know that he loved me.  When he and I danced, we touched.  When I was three, he took my little hand in his rough coal-miner hand, and we walked to the tobacco shop to visit his cronies and to show them how cute I was.  He stood me on a table, and we sang songs from the old country.  The other men clapped, and my grandfather was proud of me.  Face beaming, he fed me candy, warning me not to tell my mother and sealing the deal with a wink and a smile.  I never told.  I just knew that if he loved me that much, he loved my mother, too.  But my mother never understood why he didn’t adopt her and make her truly his daughter.  She never understood.  Nor did I. 

My mother left Tono when she was sixteen and entered the teachers’ college in Bellingham, Washington.  She graduated with her teaching credentials.  At some point between graduating and moving to Longview to take her first teaching position, she met my father, Robert Cox, and married him.  He was what we would call now “a handsome stud” with his black curly hair, sensual facial features, and athletic body.  What neither of them knew, of course, was that beneath his black curls lurked a mental illness yet to unleash itself.  At the time of their marriage, the problem manifested itself as moodiness and detachment, two characteristics that might even have served to make him more attractive to women.  Tall, dark, handsome, and a bit distant.  Throw in “brilliant,” and you have a real hunk.  Combine that with my mother’s beauty, flirtatious behavior, and narcissism and you have the makings of a psychological train wreck to come at some point in the future.  

In the early years of their marriage, then, I believe that my mother became aware at some level of consciousness that if she was going to have the life of her dreams with my father, she was going to need to do a whole lot of adapting—either she would have to adapt to him and his behavior or she would have to abandon the relationship, something that was not acceptable in the late 1930s.  Above all, my mother was concerned with how she looked to others, and divorce, however legitimate the grounds, would not make her look good!  

Considering the above, then, my mother had her hands full without the additional burden of a child.  Thus, when she found herself pregnant and being pressed by my father to abort the fetus—that being me—she agonized over the matter of getting the abortion and possibly dying as a result or giving birth and raising a child she did not want.  She told me that she chose what she considered the less perilous of the two paths, the path less apt to physically damage her.  She could not have known that the path she chose would lead to collateral damages which she could not have imagined and would never have comprehended if she had been able to imagine them. 

I mentioned my mother’s “life of her dreams.”  My mother’s dream was to leave the coal-miner culture behind her and embrace a more elegant, certainly a cleaner, life of the sort enjoyed by the middle-class American women she saw in the films and the Life magazine articles.  More than anything, she wanted to fit into this dream culture, and she wanted to be admired and accepted by the people encompassed by it.  Despite my father, she managed to accomplish her goal.  By applying principles of her inborn Scottish thriftiness and common sense, she managed to take us from an attic studio apartment to a decent one-bedroom apartment to the four-bedroom house in the better section of Longview, the house from which I launched myself at age eighteen.  There were apartments and houses in between, and each was a bit better than the previous.  By the time I left home, she had arrived at the “life of her dreams.” 

By the time I was about ready to launch, however, I could see that her constant adaptation to my father’s moods, violent tantrums, and other outward manifestations of his inward mental torment had taken a toll on her behavior and stability.  She and he had turned to alcohol as a pacifier and comforter.   

And then one warm day in the summer of 1956 there came the great train wreck.  My father came home in the middle of the week from his summer job as a forest ranger at Spirit Lake and announced to my mother that he had caught himself standing behind a co-worker with his axe raised, about to bring the axe down on the man’s head.  Instead, he got into his car and headed for Portland where he found a psychiatrist and set himself up for long-needed psychiatric treatment.  As the months passed, he changed and she didn’t.  His changes, in fact, threw my mother’s concept of their relationship all off kilter, and she no longer knew how to adapt to him.  The relationship she thought they had was not the relationship they did have—all those adaptations and sacrifices she had made no longer applied to this new reality, and she didn’t know what to do.   

My father died young, at age fifty-two, leaving my mother a widow in her late forties.  For a while, she was disoriented.  For ten years she remained single, and then one year, after taking a cruise aboard a freighter, she married the ship’s captain.  They had a good life for about twenty years.  She was beautiful and smart, and he adored her.  He had two sons by his previous marriage, one son being a preacher and the other being a dope peddler.  Luckily, the two sons lived far away in California and were not often present to spoil my mother’s new life.  When their father died, the sons made noises of wanting to inherit her house when she died.  They wanted their half, despite the fact that my mother owned the house going into the marriage with their dad.  My mother did her legal best to make sure they would never get their hands on her house, but the fear of this kept her in a state of constant anxiety.  As I said, my assurance that the boys were out of the picture enabled her to let go, finally.   

For various reasons, then, the mother-daughter dance in my life was a dance in which my mother and I never touched.  We never connected.  When I looked into her eyes, I never saw that special look of love.  When she read to me and I tried to lean my head on her chest, she stiffened.  I learned early that touching was not permitted.  Listening and obeying, yes, but not touching.  My school years passed, and the dance did not change.  I became a wife, and her “My friends all believe you have to get married” reminded me of the no-touching rule.  When I told her, at the end of my twenty-year marriage, why I had to report my husband to the police, her “Well, she must have seduced him” was the axe that severed any hope I had for connection with her.  There had never been a connection and there never would be a connection.  Finally, her words sank in. 

Toward the end of my mother’s life, she had numerous strokes.  Family friends contacted me in Walla Walla where I was working.  They were alarmed that the women coming in to do my mother’s housework were stealing her checks and helping themselves to her money.  I knew something had to be done about this, so my son and I transported my mother to Walla Walla.  For a few months she lived in my basement apartment while I attempted to find a good nursing home accommodation for her.  I knew she needed more help than the women who came when I was at work could give her, and I was struggling to hold down a fulltime teaching job and take care of her on the weekends, an arrangement which was putting too much stress on me.  When a room opened up at the Oddfellows facility, then, I was happy.  

My mother enjoyed her corner room there where she could look out on the flowers and take walks in the garden when she chose.  I also arranged for one of her former caregivers to take her for drives in the country when the weather was nice.  On Saturdays I reserved one of the small senior buses and took her to the mall where she could eat pizza, smoke, and watch people, an occupation which she loved.  During her final few months, my  mother had a good life.   

She had her final stroke when she and I were enjoying a Valentine’s Day lunch at the complex where I lived.  The ambulance took her to the hospital where she lapsed into a coma.  After a day of this, she went back to the nursing home to die.  And our dance was over.  The music stopped, the lights dimmed, the people filed out the door, and that was it, silence.  

*    *     * 

Epilogue 

In the days following that Presidents’ Day, I tried to sort my feelings.  How did I really feel about my mother’s death?  “Relief” was the word that rose to my awareness.  I felt a surge of relief.  No more put-downs, no more criticism, no more anxiety in anticipation of a visit to her.  But “relief”?  Should I feel relief at my mother’s death?  Did other women feel relief when their mothers died?  Am I a monster, a heartless monster that I should feel relief?   

My mother died in 1995.  When I think back on the day she died and when I reflect on my feelings, I still feel relief, but I also feel a sense of peace because I know I did everything I could to make her last months as good as possible for her.  She loved walking in the garden outside her nursing home room, she enjoyed the trips into the countryside, and she looked forward to our Saturday trips to the mall so she could smoke, eat pizza, and watch people.  I was able to give her those pleasures, and I have no regrets, for as I said, I did the best I could for her.  As far as I’m concerned, the score is even.  And I’m still relieved.  I can say that now without guilt.