Distaff

I am the little boy who had a little blue blanket.  Really.  Like Linus.  A security blanket -- I remember it well.  It was important to me.  I remember throwing up in bed, and I covered the spot with my blanket, not hiding it, just being able to sleep, curled around the spot, without having to call, well, mom to help with the matter.  I pulled the corners so it lay flat and neat, centered over the wet place. 

It was gone one day when I came home from school.  I would have been maybe six, maybe even seven.  Yes, too old for a blue baby blanket left over from when I was an actual baby.  But how do such attachments form?  Obviously, the parents imbue it with some significance -- Oh here Jackie, don't cry -- you just be quiet and hold onto your little blue blanket and there there.  Children draw comfort from symbols.  After all, there was once a womb, a close warm wall of encompassing security.  Transition is continuity.  

I don't remember looking for it.  I don't know if I always went for it, home from school.  Sometimes it was in the washing, and I did like the clean and sometimes warm way it felt afterwards.  But I remember the surprise of not finding it and then worry and other emotions, searching.  I remember asking my mom where it was, perhaps by then with some anxiety.  Not hysterical.

"Oh, I threw it away.  I thought you were too old for it."  And I remember the, well, hysteria.  Why did you do that why did you do that...  I have the words for it, now.  I do remember she said it was trash day.  So too late to recover it.  Let's go look.  But too late, too late.  I think I recall saying we should find the truck, go after it.  I have a related memory of imagining the journey of trash trucks to the dump. But maybe it was just a lie, about trash day -- an easy lie to shut him up.  How after all would a very little child know when trash day was?  Could I even count to seven?  I was not a good student.  Did I know the names of the days of the week?  I don't think I did.  I was neglected.  

The words are betrayal and betrayal.  That was not the way to handle it, this too-enduring babyish attachment.  There should have been some preparation.  There should have been some thought about the meaning it had for me, and how to aid in a next step toward emotional maturity and healthy attachment.  You do not simply take away without providing an alternative.  Like nature, emotions abhor a vacuum.  And something about security, which is one of the many opposites of betrayal.

Once in a while, rarely, the family would sit around the fireplace and have popcorn and throw some special product into the flames so that they would burn in different colors.  Little bits of metal, elementals I'm thinking, in a long narrow cardboard tube.  So there we were, dad absent, and I was thirsty so I went to get water and when I came back I ate some more popcorn from my bowl and the two siblings and my mom started to laugh.  Well, that first handful was a bit different.  It had some wetness in it, in my mouth.  And they said the dog had been eating from my bowl, and they'd put some of their popcorn into it so I wouldn't know.  So, dog slobber.  This is the sort of thing I should have expected from the brothers.  But my mom was laughing too.  

I still didn't have the word, betrayal.  And even without the word, I didn't expect it, the thing itself, under the circumstances, of present parent supervision.  Caught off guard. 

And one day, when I was still upstairs, the then-worst brother told me that this was his room, not mine, and I had to do whatever he said or he'd kick me out.  But it was a shared bedroom.  Right?  Turns out, no, not anymore.  That one had gone to his mother and told her to give him the room.  Give me that room, I want it for myself.  And she had said, literally, with the actual words -- but I don't know the actual words.  Yes, or Okay.  Or, Anything you want, honey.

They well deserve to have, that know the surest way to get.

Because they were all liars, I went to her, no doubt distraught, and told on that lying brother -- the lie, one of his lies, that I did not have a room anymore.  But maybe it wasn't telling on him.  Maybe I was looking for truth and comfort and stability and rationality.  Security.  Well Jackie, he asked me for it, he wanted it. So I gave it to him.  And I was hysterical.  But now I don't have a room.  Now I'm in his room.  Now I don't have anyplace.  And so on.  Why did you do that why did you do that...  And mom was bothered by this, this puling fretful helpless need from this now frantic little boy.  She must have realized, upon reflection, that I had been placed in an uncomfortable position.  Parents often are attuned to this sort of thing.  It's an instinct, maternal and paternal.

These are early but not earliest details of a single ongoing story.  My first memory, pre-toilet training, is of standing in a crib holding the vertical rails screaming to be picked up -- I can still feel the wood.  I remember pretending to be asleep in the car, wanting to be carried up the stairs -- but I was big enough to walk.  Long long ago.  When I was still honest about wanting to be held.

I am reluctant to think I have a codependency with my mother.  I have just wanted her to be happy.  And I have given her a considerable amount of money over the past more-than-a-decade -- she's on a fixed income with debt and no credit and no savings.  She had drained all of her assets to the voracious demand of that middle brother. Repeatedly refinancing her house to make down payments for yet another house for the leech, having lost as he did his former home.  Three or four times.  

So in reality it was I who was supporting this worthless sibling -- making, somehow, their car payments, buying cigars, supporting hobbies and fantasies and failed financial adventures into being an importer of Chinese merchandise or a buyer of gold or an expert in currency exchange.  

But I wanted her to be happy.  I'm still reluctant to call it codependency.  It has seemed like duty -- protect and support your elderly parents.  No matter how sick they might be, or destructive to self or third sons.

I have been wrong, though.  The prudent thing would have been to save literally all the money I had given her, and require a strict and confirmed budget, so that when real need came up -- other than feeding the parasite, the late middle-aged nipple-baby mama's boy -- other than enabling her sick relationship with that one -- rather than flush that money save it, so she could have actual comfort in her old age, instead of futility and anxiety and dependency on me.  It's that iron in the soul, saying no to the sucking vampire need, hers from me, the parasite from her.  So I was wrong.

In my 20s I asked her, in all seriousness, if she had dropped him on his head as a baby, that she felt so responsible, that he was the way he was.  I asked her, literally, if she had tried to abort him, to act so guilty.  She said, indignant, that she would never do anything like that.  I was trying to understand this incomprehensible enmeshment.  But I never did, until my recent insight that paired codependency with a freshly discovered, salient and adult-sized betrayal.

I will not tell the end of this long, lifelong story.  There are innumerable other truly bizarre details and incidents, threads in the warp of this tapestry.  They fall very much -- perfectly -- into the pattern I've traced out.  And of course, of course, it's not actually over.  There is a monster, more than one at the heart of the maze, and the unwinding of a single clue leads there, if not away again.  

I have been deceived and betrayed in as grotesque a way as could fit expectation, if I had ever actually learned to expect betrayal from its persistent yet unsuspected source.  You would laugh outloud at the perfection of it, like a very clever whodunit that is also a farce and a tragedy, every detail dovetailing into an elegant denouement.  Pluck out the heart of the mystery, unravelled yet tightly wound.  

Penelope. Theseus. Linus. Baldir. Oedipus. Hamlet. Norns.

There aren't really any villains.  Just types, archetypes, like Greed and Need, swallowed Guilt, shamed Nemesis.  Like comedia dell'arte ... I'm the buffoon, dunce cap, Pierrot I'd suppose, heart broken, sad clown.  

J