“Oh my God, he’s crazy.”
25 years of increasingly crazy – she just figured it out? I just offered two succinct nods. “Mmm hmm.”
I was sitting next to my mom and brother on her fluffy peach sectional. We were dazed, the kind of shock, sadness, and exhaustion that can only come after a tornado of mental illness. Of all Dad’s special little rage-a-thon episodes, this one had been epic, and, most importantly, truly about nothing.
Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t nothing in his head. In his head, it was a 5-alarm emotional threat, and he was in full defense and war to protect himself. It didn’t matter whether his version of reality agreed with ours or not.
It was Christmas Day (a classic day for a good family fight), and one of our friends was alone that day. My mom, brother, and I had talked about bringing her some food to cheer her up so she wouldn’t feel alone. Sounds kind, right?
For my dad, this was abandonment and betrayal. He thought our friend didn’t like him, so he thought a choice to spend any time with her, however small, was a choice to reject him. Once the spark of abandonment and betrayal was lit, the fire took hold and went out of control, regardless of how we explained ourselves or apologized. I remember crying, begging him to see that we loved him and that we weren’t trying to abandon him. He couldn’t hear it over the noise of his pain. He took all his trauma and hurled it at us as if we were the most hateful and spiteful family on the planet. I remember finally feeling so frustrated with him for being so irrational and insane that my frustration built slowly into my own fury. In retrospect, I clearly see that it was useless to get activated and pulled into his spin. But, at the age of 25, still healing from my own wounds, I didn’t have the perspective and wisdom to step back, fully accept the complexity of his mental illness, and respond differently.
He finally stormed out in a rage. My stomach lurched when he walked out as if my stomach could fly out of my body, reach out to him, pull him back to us, to reality, and love. The rest of my body took a massive sigh of relief. The assault of accusations was over. For now.
My mom, brother, and I were doing what people do when dealing with mental illness. We were hashing through the events, trying to make sense of what happened and wondering where we went wrong—an important and futile exercise. There is no sense to make, except…
“Oh my God, he’s crazy.”
For my mom, this was a moment of seeing the whole. She was a war veteran in this marriage and had coped for so long that she’d never stepped outside of it to see the totality of Dad’s increasing illness. I’m sure that was too scary… until this moment.
As if I had a moment of being out of my body, I have a picture in my mind of the three of us on the couch; my mom’s eyebrows up to her hairline, my brother’s frown, my hands stuffed in the pockets of my overalls. I felt relieved and even vindicated that my mom was finally seeing the truth. Her coping mechanism had been to normalize Dad’s behavior and expect us to do the same. That’s how she survived her childhood with her mom’s mental illness. With reality finally acknowledged, I felt the fresh possibility of change, like spring just around the corner. And 25 years of grief wanted to rise up in me, vomit on the orange and brown carpet, or throw itself against the sliding glass doors. I wondered if the grief would be endless. I wanted my mom to divorce my dad and finally be free to heal. But what I wanted more was for my dad to come home to his heart, our love, and his wholeness – a desire that would never be fulfilled.
That gruesome Christmas day was the beginning of the end of their marriage. My dad blamed me for their divorce and refused to talk to me for years. I felt sad to lose him, frustrated that he once again made me the scapegoat for unhappiness that he had created, and relieved not to have to deal with him.
It also gave me the space to embark upon the next level of healing, spiritual expansion, and the discovery of new possibilities for love and peace in my own relationships.
