60-Every New Beginning is Just Some Other Beginning’s End
INTRANSITIVE VERB
If someone snaps, or if something snaps inside them, they suddenly stop being calm and become very angry because the situation has become too tense or too difficult for them.
He finally snapped when she prevented their children from visiting him one weekend.
Synonyms: lose your temper, crack, lose it [informal], freak [informal][1]
Yup, that was it. All that anger, built up over all those months, years, decades—non-addressed in anger-management classes and books, non-mollified over myriad empathetic-friend brunches and dinners–suddenly released in an instant. I blurted, “How dare you?!” wrested my parents’ house key off my chain, threw it on the table, and marched out of the house, D&D in tow.
Brother’s negotiated one-week cool-off trial ended the very next morning when my mother came out for breakfast and casually said to T, “Why do you let your wife parade around looking like a slut?”
With N’s help, I found cheap movers who would go to the house, pack everything up, throw it in their truck, and dump it all back at our place. Like I said, cheap. But before night fell, Daughter and T were making their bed in the room D&D and BFP had swiftly evacuated, and our garage was piled high with garbage bags of belongings. Didn’t matter.
Didn’t matter that Brother would later accuse my kids of sneaking out in the middle of the night.
Didn’t matter that I never went back to retrieve my father’s tools, which I’d been promised, or to take one of the standalone freezers I’d planned to take after both my parents has passed. The only thing I retrieved from that place was my kids, because T wouldn’t stay after that slap in the face.
One! One face slap! How many had I tolerated, ignored, dismissed, accepted over my lifetime?!
And, o, that realization was just the beginning. Every repressed emotion now flooded non-repressingly into my psyche, my bloodstream, my throbbing head, my pounding chest. I remember walking around saying, “Shit, shit, shit,” all the live-long day after Tom died, but I deeply non-recall whatever spewed out of my mouth for the next who-knows how many weeks/months/madness-soaked eternities after that three-day calamity.
In fact, I mercifully non-recollect just about everything until I saw a Dennis Prager article somewhere on the web, chastising children for disrespecting their parents. A total stranger’s face-slap. I’d non-answered my father’s one “enough is enough” call to the house, ignored my mother’s calls and letters of sweet reconciliation—sans any inkling of apology, of course. Mom ascribed to the “never apologize, never explain” creed and, fortunately, was one of the select few homo sapiens who never had reason to do either. But for some reason, the out-of-context dictates of a misogynistically white supremist Orthodox Jew with a conservative radio talk show I’d never listened to threw me into a tizzy, and I started looking for someone else who would confirm I should let go of my egomaniacal, insolent, trivial put-upon-ness and make amends with my mother.
The first therapist I dumped on slapped both his hands over his eyes when I recited, not the mess I’d created and then absconded from, but a few pieces of my childhood. “Do not go back!” he moaned. “Stay as far away from her as you possibly can! You had M.S., and she didn’t tell you?! That’s the sign of a malignant narcissist! Do Not Go Back.”
Well, damn. Not the advice I was looking for. He wanted me to come back for more therapy—in fact, he walked me out to my car because he was so concerned for my mental health—but ‘twas not to be. I’d been assigned to him through my Social Security Widows Benefits Medicare, and when I called for a follow-up appointment, he was gone. Out of their system. They sent me to someone else. She agreed with the first guy, if less dramatically.
So did the next therapist. And the one after that. Seemed no one would assure me I was wrong, wrong, wrong and needed to return and atone.
Earlier in my career, I’d helped a local writer with a nationally read column organize/edit some of her best pieces into a book, ala Dave Barry but significantly less humorous. I then spent too many non-billable hours helping her conceive and launch a women’s group with some of the bestest intentions around, at a time when only women actually addressed women’s issues. Kinda like now. They ended up throwing a great two-day conference, which fed me a lot of ideas about what would eventually be Ghostwriters Unite!, a concept I had no concept of at the time. But one of the programs they offered was a roundtable support group, where women could gather and give each other, ya know, support about… whatever they needed support for.
If that sounds rather vague, please remember I was a certified basket case at the time, frantically searching for confirmation of my defectiveness, and newly oblivious to how poorly I resonated with persons of the female persuasion. I went to two meetings, the most memorable points being that one was in a room with a table, one without. Turned out the crux of the program was listening to the moderator read aloud from a book of psalms… or was it poetry? Inspirational quotes? Pop-psych advice from an Amazon-niche bestselling something generically penned by an MFCC?
Whatever it was, when it came my turn to “share,” my issues were deemed unacceptable, and beyond the scope of the group, and I hadn’t paid my two dollars toward the room rental for last time or bought the book to read along in. As for whether I should return to my mother’s fold?
“You really need to see a psychiatrist. You need to be on medication.”
I left that meeting feeling warm, cozy, loved, and supported, as well anyone would. And yet, somehow, not entirely satisfied. Who’d athunk?
During the murkier days of my marriage, I had three recurring nightmares. The darkness of each scene stays with me, as does the helpless, hopeless, what-the-fuck-did-I-do-now sense of culpability. They’d always been an element of my and Tom’s on-again-off-again-yet-never-separated mutual nonbinarity. Now they were back, sans my husband, but with the same weighty distress. They kept me up; they woke me up; they filtered past my eyes every now and then, diverting my train of thought as I struggled with a client project or student concern. The calendar had long-since turned, my diary was choked with personal appearances and panel discussions. I was working, teaching, eating, grading, eating, working, eating, teaching, grading. My eptitude takes its cue from my cortisol production so I was, in a word, fucked—physically, mentally, psychologically, emotionally. Thank Dionysus I could still work!
But actually, no, I couldn’t thank the Greek god of wine, because I was non-indulging in a masochistic ritual of self-deprivation.
Understand, I was never an alcoholic. I wasn’t even a lush. I just… drank a lot. Not every day. Just when I was cold. Or stressed. Or lonely. The total sum of which amounted to a lotta the time.
It had started when Tom and I were on the road. Part of my job was to accept drinks sent from customers, the better to get me woozy, the better to get them into my panties. It made the cash register ring, which made management happy, which kept us on the gig-rotation lists. But my system doesn’t work like most people’s—
How many times have doctors and nurses have told me, “Huh. That’s not normal. Most people have xyz reaction, not qfw, like you”? Or “this should have made you relaxed, not hyped up.” Or—my favorite—“Why didn’t that med work? It works on everyone else I give it to!”
… so I never got sufficiently soused to accommodate said drink-sender’s ice-clinking desires. I was stone-cold sober when the Yellowstone bartender shook her head at me. “You’ve downed nine Long Island Teas in three hours and you’re not even swaying. But I don’t care how you’re doing it—I’m cutting you off.”
My magic formula was simple: if’n the weather was cold, the alcohol kept me warm. If’n it was hot or warm, it palliatively pushed corpuscles through my bunged up circulatory system. Gotta play the hand you’re dealt, right? Make virtue out of necessity? But neither of those sleights-of-hand worked at Tom’s memorial and when I drank myself into a spectacle, I vowed to go on the wagon for good.
So fine, I non-kept that vow. But I did limit myself to reasonable social-drinking, although never at family events. For some reason—I could never quite put my finger on why—I never felt safe drinking in front of my parents, sibling, or cousins. Always on guard. I might’ve instinctively known better and, for once, listened to myself.
Now that I was insidiously trying to destroy myself, I decided to make sure I had no surcease at all. I’d taught Daughter that depravation never works, and I knew that an occasional evening drink would help, but nay, nay! I didn’t deserve to feel better, scum-of-the-earth that I was.
Retrospectively, I truly do not understand how I managed to rebuild my career, reinstate my reputation, and even nurture a new business while simultaneously propelling toward self-destruction. Then again, my lying-hiding-denying skills were par none. The only one non-convinced I was somehow majestically holding it all together was me. And some part of me actually was determined to heal myself, even though most of my other parts sneered at the thought. Good thing I was too confused to do anything but work!
Okay, sure, there were those calls to the suicide hotline—“No, I have no plan; no, I have no weapon”—but after Baby got so distraught over my distress, I kept the next urge to myself. Besides, what was the point in calling? If’n I wasn’t on the ninth-floor ledge looking down, all they could do was advise me to find a therapist.
Seriously? Like I hadn’t been trying to do that all this time?
“Hey, Dad’s in the hospital. He’s dying. You need get down here now.”
Did that seem out-of-the-blue? Huh—felt that way to me, too. And did ya notice anything missing? Like, say, oh, I don’t know… the name of the hospital?
Which is why I went to the wrong one, had to get directions from a cop to the right one, and got there sufficiently after last breath that Mom had already gone home to the facility they’d been living in for six months, and rigor mortis had already set in. I couldn’t close Dad’s mouth.
Now, I had, in earlier days, sworn there was no fucking way I’d let either of my parents blow $2,500 on a box that was going to end up inside a concrete box in the ground. Since we’d all agreed on that decision, Mom blew $10,000 on said box-destined-to-be-boxed because she couldn’t bring herself to skimp on such an important thing as the container-for-the-thing-contained, i.e., my father’s unalive matter. The casket stood uncovered for all the couple dozen folk to see at his funeral. My kids and I were a bit Jewishly late, which is to say we were businessly on time, and I disregarded the congregation’s mutterings as I hobbled with cane across the uneven ground to sit on Mom’s right, Brother to her left. No one expected me to speak, but Dad had visited me in the middle of the night, so I wanted to share who he was, who he wanted to be remembered as.
Amazing how much information can pass between two energies in the wave.
Yeah, I choked up as I read my piece. It felt awfully personal to be exposing such truth to this mini-multitude. Fortunately, no one cared half a whit what I said, although my cousin did pick up on the line about Dad always being such a gracious host and spun a little tale about how he heeded his unc’s academic advice and tried to follow his moral path. He probably did; I’ve always had the impression J was a good guy. For the record, I still have that view of both him and my brother. I come from basically good paternal stock.
When it was finally Brother’s turn to take the stage, he read the eulogy Mom had written, which started with all she’d given up to marry Dad, then segued to his devotion to her, before wrapping up with their life together as her and him. Really, my heart cockles just brimmed with her display of love and affection for, ya know… her. But it was easy to let all that go, because my bro had started with, “Nobody knows why Dad stopped talking to Mom about six weeks ago. I guess when you’ve been together as long as they were—”
I barely heard the rest of his spiel because damn! I knew exactly why Dad stopped talking to Mom. He’d turned ninety-three that almost exactly six weeks earlier. And my letter—
Dear Dad,
I’m sorry I can’t be there to help celebrate your birthday.
Looking back, I realize now all the times you tried to show me your love, but I’d swallowed the Big Lie and couldn’t see the gestures for what they were. I so regret all the decades we lost.
Have a piece of cake for me. I love you.
Xxx
… had arrived on said birthday.
The approximately exact day he stopped talking to my mother.
Wow. What an amazing, mind-blowing coinkydink.
[1] Collins Dictionary, https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/snap#:~:text=If%20someone%20snaps%2C%20or%20if,from%20visiting%20him%20one%20weekend. Accessed 9/5/2023.