Time to Change

Time to Change

4/17/2004

I am filled with demons

they are here

They grow because of my fear.

When I am afraid I freeze

and don’t move.

This allows the demons to groove

on my weakness and shitty mood.

I see they are constantly fed

by my indecision, my dread.

I don’t even know I allow

them to grow

As I see this mess I have made

I know that to be afraid

will cause them to keep on

growing.

It is time to change

this around

   “I am filled with demons, they are here”. What a great place to start. My mom wrote this poem in her sixties, just a few years before she died. It is tough stuff to read, to see how, even at that age, she was still tortured and tormented by her past, unhappy in her present, and yet, still strangely hopeful about the future. This was what I grew up with. It is one thing to read this poem in my thirties and feel sadness and compassion for a woman who is clearly, at best, very troubled, if not truly disturbed. It is another thing entirely to deal with a mother who thinks like this at the age of two, or four, or six. Imagine dealing with this kind of a mentality as a little child. How do you process it? How do you make sense of the world when the woman who is the primary care giver in your life is filled with demons? I never knew as a child that my mother was mentally ill. I thought it must be me. Or my evil step father. Or the government. How do you understand or comprehend at a young age that your mom has an undiagnosed and untreated mental problem. You don’t. You suck it up. You deal. You cry, and you hide, and you try to shield yourself from the worst of it. But you never understand. It is truly and utterly bewildering. And indelibly painful.

My mother beat me with wooden kitchen spoons when I was a very little boy. I don’t remember the shock or the pain of the beatings, just the raw terror of those moments, this mother who I loved so much chasing me around the house, smacking me with those spoons. Like some twisted surreal version of Jack and the Beanstalk come to life. I can’t remember what I did wrong. I only remember the fear it created in me. I have a young son myself now, and I can’t imagine just what he could do to make me beat him with anything. Or how devastated and confused he would be if I did. Would his loving smiles change or disappear all together? Would there always be an edge of fear in his eyes every time he looked at me?

I was six years old when I took all my mother’s wooden cooking spoons and hid them in a tiny crawl space in the back of our kitchen cabinets that only I could ferret my way into. I will never forget the look in her eyes when she asked me about the missing spoons. I could see the regret there, the sadness she suddenly felt after realizing how terrified I must have been to hide those spoons from her. That was the thing with my mom. Sometimes she was all there, and sometimes she was gone. It made things even harder for me as a little kid. You never knew what you were going to get. But at that moment of lucidity, she leaned down to me and hugged me. She promised if I gave her those spoons back she would never hit me with them again. I crawled in and got them out, and she never hit me with the spoons, or anything else, ever again. So you can pull a gun on me, or wave a knife in my face, and I am a cool customer. But threaten me with a wooden spoon? I just might piss my pants. I think I must have inherited a few of those demons myself. Thanks, mom!

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