Shame: Companions in the Swamp

Part 2

Photo by Casey Allen on Unsplash

Shame is dark and ugly. It thrives in a lightless environment and is the layer of thick black sludge at the bottom of my swampland. Throwing light on shame is a herculean task. I’m not alone in this swamp. I’m with the women who came before me; the women who were already in that swampland when I arrived on earth.

I wanted an intellectual resolution to the issues with my mother. (See Shame: The Swampland of the Soul) Why did my mother get on that bus and leave me there when there were so many other options available? It is a question for which, until the day she died, I never received a satisfactory answer.

However, if I am to be honest here, she did give me her answer. I just didn’t want to accept the answer that she gave. Accepting her answer left me feeling me way too exposed, too vulnerable. It left me feeling that I just wasn’t lovable. If I had been nicer, smarter, prettier she would have chosen me over her trip to Washington, D.C.

I know that she was doing the best that she could with the hand she was dealt. This is a story that needs to be told within the context of the women who came before me. The women who were already residing in the swampland of the soul.

My parents invited my grandmother to move in with them when she was no longer able to live on her own. My mother gave up her job to stay home and take care of her. My grandmother took great pride in the fact that she was never sick as an adult. She could not tolerate anyone that was sick, especially sick children. My mom was viewed by her mother as a sickly child. When she had the chicken pox her father was the only one of her parents to hold her and comfort her.

When my mother was sick, she was confined, alone, to her room for the duration of her illness. My mother’s sister would come home from school at lunchtime and bring my mother food and water. She often spoke of the gratitude she had for her sister’s kind care when she was sick. This is the sister who my mother left me with when she went to Washington, D.C. To my mom, it must have seemed reasonable that this person who took care of her when she was growing up, would protect me from her husband.

I was with my mom the night before her mother, my grandmother, died. I had been staying the week at my parent’s house taking care of my grandmother so that my mother could get away for a much-needed break. She came home looking as exhausted as when she left. When she walked into my grandmother’s room that night my grandmother’s eyes lit up and she said, “My angel, you are home. Oh how I’ve missed you.” That was the closest my grandmother ever came to telling my mom that she loved her. The next afternoon when my mom brought her lunch tray into her room, she was dead.

My grandmother was not a warm and fuzzy person. I don’t recall ever receiving a heart-felt hug from her. I can’t recall a single time when she engaged me in a meaningful conversation. However, I did have a lot of respect for her. She was valedictorian of her high school class and graduating college class of 1916. The family story says that she was the first woman to get her driver’s license in the state of New Hampshire and frequently drove to Boston.

She was an amazing seamstress and quilter. I still have my mother’s wedding dress that she sewed for her in my mother’s cedar chest. The cross stitch quilt she made for my parent’s 25th wedding anniversary is a work of art and lies on the loft bed in my cabin. Sewing dresses and making quilts was the way that my grandmother expressed her love. It would be wonderful if educational achievements and beautiful quilts were enough to pull my grandmother out of the swamp. Unfortunately, they served to create a mask to hide the shame behind.

My grandmother must have worked hard to create this life for herself. Her mother, my great-grandmother, was institutionalized in an insane asylum/hospital four times during her life. Three of them occurred during my grandmother’s life when she was six, seven and fourteen years old.

The precipitating event of her committal when my grandmother was six occurred after being overworked from taking care of her sick children. My grandmother being one of them. This piece of family history sheds some light on my grandmother’s inability to take care of my mother when she was sick and the theme of children feeling abandoned that runs through my family’s lineage.

My heart goes out to my six-year-old grandmother who was lying in bed sick, depending on her mother to take care of her. She witnessed her mother becoming so overwhelmed, so manic, that she had to be taken away and committed to the state mental hospital.

My great grandmother spent the next five months of her life in the mental hospital. When she recovered enough to come home she would only last seven months before being re-committed. On her third admission to the hospital, she believed that she was there because she had been very wicked and was sent there because of her wickedness.

I have no way of knowing why she felt that she was a wicked person. The family story passed down to me says that her mother (my great-great- grandmother) and her maternal uncle were both “insane.” Her maternal uncle committed suicide. My my great grandmother felt continually haunted by his death. The shame of it all passed down through the generations.

And so I’ve come to realize that I’m not alone in this swamp. The badge of shame has been passed down from mother to daughter through the generations in my family.

The one who says nothing good came of this,

Is not yet listening. C.P. ESTÉS

To be Continued…

With Love & Healing Energy by the Pond,

Laurel

Postscript: As it turns out, I’ve been in the building where my great grandmother was institutionalized. I was involved in a Shared Straight digital storytelling project with the women at the state prison. The women told their story of how they ended up in prison. (Not surprisingly, the underlying theme of their stories was emotional, physical and sexual abuse.)

Before the stories could go out into the public arena they had to be okayed by the commissioner of the Department of Corrections. I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but It turned out that his office was on the top floor of the old state hospital building. Walking up the stairs to his office, I passed big, now empty rooms that had housed my great-grandmother. The energy of all those poor souls fills the air of that building.