Possessed By the Spirit

Sometimes, despite my better self, my parents slip out of my mouth.  Fortunately, I recognize it and turn it into sarcasm as soon as possible.  “What the hell were you thinking?” turns into “What the hell, we can’t have anything nice?  Now you’ve ruined the whole trailer park chic I was aiming for, might as well cancel the company dinner.”

                I have heard counselors refer to something labeled “tapes”.  The criticism that we hear in our head, the voice that chastises us constantly. This voice is the critical comments our parents make.   I rank that theory about as high up as I do the “I’m okay-you’re okay” pop psychology of the seventies.  Every human being has a critical voice; it's our control measure; it's our brain trying to save our ass.

                I do believe that generations that are unable to recognize pain will continue to have pain until they look at it.  Perhaps my parents’ voices that come back to me as a parent are from their generations of pain, ignored and passed down.  I have my own theory. When a child is born, the parents become immortal. In some way, a piece of them, their DNA, will live on long after they are gone. In that DNA, the knowledge and experience of the generations are entwined.

                I came along when my parents thought that after years, it was finally safe to have sex again.  Maybe alcohol was involved; I never asked.  But they were old and tired.  Both my parents had worked hard at an early age.  They were still struggling financially.  There were no resources left. Resources being patience, empathy, sympathy, nurturing, and money.

                Other parents had Band-Aids and children’s aspirin.  “Did you get a boo- boo?  Want me to kiss it better?  Here, let me put on a band-aid, you chew on this yummy orange pill.”

                I was flabbergasted.  As much as a small child’s flabber can be gasted.  What in the world was going on here?  A boo-boo got this kind of attention?  You little faker! 

                I skinned a knee, and Mom was guaranteed to say, “Well, looks like we’re just gonna have to cut the leg off.”

                Dad was famous for: “I could have told you that was gonna happen.”  Followed closely behind with: “Bet you won't do that again.” 

                Fate chose to give me a child who spent the first year of her life receiving painful tests and procedures.  As a result, she became a toddler who had no fear of pain.  It was just a normal daily occurrence to her. 

                But life had made me a nurse and a mother.  Not to mention a psychology degree that taught me how fragile the human psyche can be.  I knew I was going to screw this up! I had no clue how not to break this tiny, precious scrap of humanity that the neonatal intensive care nurses handed over to me.  Lilly was so impossibly tiny and fragile that my parents’ style of parenting would crush her body and soul.

                I didn’t need to worry.  When other parents of preemies were excited because their four-year-old had a bite of pudding in the past month, or the one-year-old tried to roll over, I had a different story to tell.

                “Lilly was walking around the yard and picked up a rock to throw, and she dropped it on her toe.  Looks like she is gonna lose the toenail.”

                Lilly was about fourteen months old at the time and discovered she could gross out her biological father by peeling back the dying toenail.  To stop her torture of the Bowling Ball, I had to put lidocaine on the toe and pull the nail the rest of the way off.  Lilly watched with interest and demanded that I give her the toenail trophy. In retrospect, she wouldn’t have flinched if I told her we would have to cut the toe off.

                But the sad fact is that we are taught parenting by our parents.   My parental supervision was, at best, lackadaisical.  “If you kids don’t sit your asses down right now, one of you is gonna be bawling.”

                The one cousin who would be crying was never identified.  That left the prediction open to interpretation.  Would it be Kristy?  She appeared tough but broke under pressure.  Maybe Jodi, she was cute and petite and could turn on the waterworks if she thought it would get her out of trouble.  It wouldn’t be any of the boys, Butch and Danny, Rocky, or Brian, those little shits were tough as nails. I accepted that it would be me.  Not because I was naturally clumsy, but because Mom was deadly accurate with a flip-flop, flyswatter, or any available utensil.  After all, I had been warned, “Don’t you act up all crazy either or you’re never going anywhere again.”

                Children are deliberate in their reasoning.  I truly believed that if I “acted up,” I would spend the remainder of my life housebound.  A sad and lonely old woman, I would stand at the window as my family left to visit Grandma Brown.  Me, maybe a cat or two, alone because I “acted up” when I was five years old.

                I knew that Lilly would take my words seriously.  As a young child, she was already too serious and intense.  I couldn’t afford to toss one of my parent’s common lines at her.  The psychiatric bills alone would break me.  Not to mention having to watch her on Oprah’s couch when she was an adult. 

                “Tell me how it came to be this bad?” Oprah would ask.

                “It was my mother, Oprah, it was her.  That one, the old lady in the front row.”

                The audience would gasp in horror, hissing ‘shame, shame’ at me, booing me as I cowered in my chair, ducking random purse attacks from angry housewives. 

                “Tell me what it was like. Was it always bad?”

                “No, Oprah, not always.  She seemed normal to most people.  But then, for no reason at all, her face would change, her voice would change, and she would say things that no child should have to hear!”

                “What did she say to you as a young child that was traumatic? What are some of the things you outlined in your book, ‘It’s Mom’s Fault’?”

                “The first memory I have is my mother standing in the middle of the living room.  She was looking for the nail clippers.  I was playing on the carpet at her feet.  Her eyes squinted and turned all red, her body shifted, and she grew smaller and harder and meaner.  Then this awful voice, oh, it still gives me chills to talk about it, Oprah, that voice.”

                “What did ‘the voice’ say?”  By now, Oprah is leaning forward, clasping Lilly’s hands in both her hands, and staring at her with a face of abject sorrow.

                In a soft, trembling voice, Lilly continues.  “She said,” (long pause for dramatic effect) “She said, ‘I guess if I want something nice around here, I have to pack it up my ass!”

                Thank goodness that timeline never materialized.  That day in question, as soon as I heard my mother speak without either my knowledge or permission, I slapped my hand over my mouth.  What I had feared since the day I became pregnant had happened.  I had turned into my mother.  Surely, my father was not far behind.  My parents tended to travel in pairs, the better to squash my self-esteem.

                Don’t get me wrong.  My parents loved babies and children.  I had seen my mother coo and make a fool of herself over her grandchildren.  The same with my father, he couldn’t resist a baby’s giggle or a tag-along partner in crime.  It was just that my parents were tired and poor when I was born.  That and the fact that they had to live with me, day in and day out, the familiarity breeds contempt.  Mom and Dad adored my cousins and thought they were the cutest, smartest, funniest kids ever.  The grandkids, oh Lord, those kids got away with things I would have been skinned alive for just thinking of doing.  But me, they were stuck with me.  And with me came the responsibility of parenting, so I wouldn’t grow up to be an embarrassing adult. 

                As a result, I was held to a higher standard and subjected to even more oddball parental threats and comments.  After all, my parents learned from their parents, and those parents learned from their parents, and so on.  Generations of poverty, unspoken trauma, and archaic parenting styles were heaped upon my siblings and me.

                I don’t know the kind of parents that Donna and Tubby had before I was born or became aware of my world.  I do know that Donna and Tubby burned all the wooden spoons in the house so that Mom couldn’t use them as spanking sticks.  Mom could laugh about that sometimes when I was in my mid-twenties, and Donna and Tubby were in their thirties. It must have been one of those pranks that had to age to become funny.

                The threat to poke a pair of nail clippers up my own ass to keep them safe was my awakening.  Like an alcoholic who loses everything they love, family, friends, and job, I knew I had hit rock bottom.  The spirits of my mother and father were within me. If I were not careful, in moments of frustration or anger, I could be moved by “the spirit”.  The people that I loved the most never really left me; I carried them in my heart, my soul, and in my voice.  I had to be very careful not to let them take over.

                On a summer day, Lilly cried and whined because it was hot and she was tired, and I told her to pull the weeds from the flowers.  As she droned on in a whiny voice, listing all the reasons I was being “mean Mama,” I let myself drift back to my childhood.

                “If you move any slower, that milk will be sour by the time you get it to the bulk tank.”  That line was one of Dad’s favorites.  It never failed to give him a chuckle at his own humor, as I carried the shotgun cans to the milk house.  While Dad was enjoying his laugh at my expense, if I had dared to whine, the consequences would be lethal.  The best I could hope for was that Mom, Tubby, and Cathy hadn’t heard him, or they would yuck it up as well.  This would have encouraged Dad to elaborate, and my mood was already dour after working in the hayfield all day.

                Mom liked to add little lessons to her parental comments.  “You know, if you pulled the weeds out by the root, it would kill them, and you wouldn’t be out here pulling the same damn weed every week.”

                The weather comments of being “too hot” would not have gone unnoticed either. 

                “You’ll be glad for this heat when we’re freezing our asses off this winter.”

                “Maybe if you actually moved a little bit, you could stir up a breeze.”

                “You bitch about the cold, then you bitch about the heat.  I think you just like to bitch.”

                “Whining about it ain’t going to get the work done any faster.”

Instead, I pulled the sprinkler closer and told Lilly, “See, each time the sprinkler turns, you will get rained on, and it will cool you off.  It's like playing in mud, just with weeds.”

                My idea was not met with enthusiasm; she snuck into the house to call Uncle Greg and inform him that her mother was a monster.  I was not the nice person that Uncle Greg thought he knew; instead, I was an evil and cruel woman who was only happy if her child was suffering.  It was hard to get the entire conversation out of Uncle Greg; he was laughing too hard to repeat most of it.

                Each morning, as I dropped Lilly off at preschool, I looked at the other little girls with envy.  Like Lilly, they had long hair.  Unlike Lilly, the other little girl’s hair didn’t stick up every which way in knots and tangles with an occasional hunk blindly brushed.  The other little girls had mommies who brushed their hair each morning and put in bows and clips.  Some little girls had smooth ponytails or artistic French braids.  Lilly looked like she had held her head in a wind tunnel. 

                Those lucky mommies must have had little girls who sat still and didn’t shriek with each brush stroke.

                “It’s fine.  It’s okay.  It’s good enough!”  Lilly would shout as she swatted at the brush and grabbed my arm to hold me at bay.

                French braid?  I would have settled for five seconds of American brushing.

                “I’m not taking you anywhere looking like this!”  Mom would announce.

                “Oh, stop it,” Mom would say, while smacking me on the top of my skull with the hairbrush.

                “The way you are carrying on, you act like you’re being skinned alive fer chrissakes.” Dad would tell me with a note of finality in his voice.  I had no doubt; this was a thinly veiled threat; succumb to the brushing or I would be skinned alive for real.

                “If you don’t let me brush it, the knots will get so thick they will have to be cut out,” I warned Lilly.

                “Noooo!  No cut my hair Mama, no cut my hair.”  My drama queen screamed and threw herself face down on the floor. 

                I took that opportunity to brush the back of her hair, hoping that the front and sides would work out eventually.  This became a daily ritual of threats, dramatic responses, and a few furtive brushes.

                I justified the warning as it wasn’t really a threat.  If her hair became so knotted that no amount of brushing could fix it, then the knots would have to be cut out.  It wasn’t a threat of empty warnings of physical harm.  Just a statement of fact.  The spirits of my parents were satisfied, and I had reached a compromise with my conscience.

                Many years later, Lilly was an adult with smooth, brushed hair.  I received a call from LensCrafters where she had gone for her annual eye examination.  The doctor introduced herself and informed me that Lilly needed to be taken to the emergency room immediately.

                “She needs to be seen now; there are indications that she has a brain tumor.  She’s refusing to go and told me to call you.”  The doctor spoke frantically, frustrated with Lilly’s refusal.

                I asked to speak to Lilly, and when the doctor handed her the phone, I asked her a few simple questions.

                “Have you been throwing up lately?”

                “No.”

                “Have you had excruciating headaches out of nowhere that won’t go away for a long time?”

                “No.”

                “Dizzy?  Blurred vision?  Seizures?  Loss of balance?  Suddenly unable to move arms or legs, or have odd twitches in your arms and legs?               

“No.”

                “Then I don’t think you have a brain tumor.  We can take you to the emergency room if you want, but it's Friday, and you're unlikely to see a specialist until Monday.  They can’t give you an MRI because of the clip in your heart.”

                “I don’t want to go to the E.R., I am fine.  It's nothing.  I told her that I have scarring and stuff from being a preemie, but she keeps saying I gotta go.  Do I have to go?”  Lilly asked.

                “Honey, you are twenty-one. If you don’t want to go to the emergency room, then don’t go.  No one can make you.”

                Lilly went to see another optometrist on Monday.  This one also recommended the emergency room, or at the very least, a specialist.  Lilly chose to see the specialist later that week.

                As her Mama/nurse, Lilly had me stay with her at the specialist’s office.  I reassured her that, other than dilation, nothing painful would be done. Regardless, Lilly had me go into the exam room after the tests.   We waited until the white-coated male “eye specialist” came into the room.            

                Lilly sat in the exam chair in the center of the room.  The specialist sat on his rolling stool and brought up various pictures and graphs on the computer.  I sat in the corner, thumbing through a magazine.

                “You see here, this is the issue.  This narrowing, especially in one eye, indicates pressure.  This pressure could be from a brain tumor.  You need to go to the emergency room and have a full work-up immediately.”

                Lilly, being fluent in Dr. Google, responded with her own theories.

                “Couldn’t it be this medication?  Or the scarring from retinopathy of prematurity? The medications and steroids I was given in the NICU?”

                The doctor smiled and, in a very paternal voice, said, “That would be very unusual indeed to cause this.  This is pressure inside this area.  Anything other than a tumor would be rare.”

He waved his hand in the general direction of the screen full of Lilly’s scans.

                Sitting in the far corner of the room, I looked up at his words.  What I saw next chilled me to the bone.  What I witnessed may haunt my dreams forever.  Lilly sat up straight in the chair.  Deliberately, she crossed her arms.  Her eyes squinted and turned dark. 

                I stared, the magazine in my hands forgotten. I felt a sudden chill in the room.  My heart paused in sympathy for the doctor.  All those years of medical school, internship, and residency were about to become meaningless.  Lilly Pearl was about to show him her grandmother's spirit.

                With arms crossed across her chest, Lilly crossed her legs and took a deep breath.

                “Rare?  Well, you want rare?  I’m not supposed to be alive.  They told my mother to dig my grave.  I’m not supposed to be able to walk, talk, or feed myself.  Do you know how rare it is to be a twenty-four-week preemie in college?  If anything is rare, it’s me!”

                The echo of my mother’s voice hung in the room.  The doctor turned back to his computer screen.

                “I guess it could be something else.  I can refer you to a doctor who specializes in rare eye conditions.  He might be able to do more tests.”

                Satisfied, Lilly stood up and took the note with the name of the specialist and marched out of the examination room.  It was a quiet ride home, with Lilly breaking the silence occasionally to complain about the stupid eye doctor.

                The next morning, as I dropped her off at the university, I cleared my throat to give Lilly a bit of advice.

                “You need to turn off your Grandma Pearl switch now.  It’s scary, and you have friends here that you don’t want to scare.”

                A couple of weeks later, I sat in the waiting room as Lilly was examined by the specialist’s specialist eye doctor.  I read every magazine available until at last, Lilly came out of the examination area.

                “He told me to come and get you,” Lilly told me.

                The specialist’s specialist eye doctor introduced himself and shook my hand.  Then he told me about having triplet premature young daughters and how he had to fight the medical system on their behalf.  He turned on the computer and pulled up scans, graphs, and lines.

                “See this here? Its’ narrower than the other eye.  It's just like that.  She just has one eye in which the blood vessel is microscopically smaller than in the other.  It is perfectly normal; there is no pressure in her eyes or her brain.  She was born this way, and it's not a problem.  It won’t get worse, and it won’t get better.  It is just the way she is, and those idiots didn’t bother to look at it.  They just panicked.”

                Lilly taught me that sometimes being possessed by my parents' spirit is not the worst thing in the world.  In fact, sometimes a little Grandma Pearl is what you need to get the job done.