A Walk in the Flames: "Red: Love"

"We call them cool
Those hearts that have no scars to show
The ones that never do let go
And risk the tables being turned

We call them fools
Who have to dance within the flame
Who chance the sorrow and the shame
That always comes with getting burned

But you've got to be tough when consumed by desire
'Cause it's not enough just to stand outside the fire." Garth Brooks

Love, we all want it so badly. We all think of ourselves as loving people. When does love become not love any more. There is an American cultural myth that love is being nice to someone and never getting angry or upset with them. This is bull pucky as well. If you really care about someone you are going to get angry and upset when they are doing something that you see as stupid or detrimental to them or someone else whom you love. This doesn't mean that you have scream and yell about it, though often we do. It means you have to communicate to the person you love that they are doing something that you feel strongly is wrong for them to do and they have to be willing to hear you and trust you, and return that honesty.

Because of our national obsession with niceness, if some one gets upset and yells, becomes angry, it is often assumed that the upset person "has a problem" and their opinion is discounted on that basis. This is particularly true for women. Men can show much worse temper without being labeled as "bitchy" or "a shrew" all demeaning terms meant to discount your voice. Even Jesus got angry and threw his weight around in the temple when he found the moneychangers using the Lord's House for their usury!

When is anger righteous and not self-righteous? What happens when we don't speak up and allow those we love to continue on their course of destruction? Psychologists tell us the "right way" to say these things, but sometimes there just is no "right" way.

My mother's care in her declining years is my example of finding these boundaries and walking through the flame of truth to get to them. I have long been called "know-it-all" and many things that I have said and done through the years have been misinterpreted without asking me for what I truly meant. I could always see the obvious examples, but I didn't realize the extent of the problem until I stood at my mother's soon-to-be death bed and realized that her nutritional status had improved dramatically in the six weeks prior to her death. But my sister-in-law, Bunny, and sister, Bee, had been watching. I had known that the doctor who had allowed her to perforate an ulcer three years before was neglectful. Thank God I had pushed her to get an alarm she could push. It saved her life that night, and gave us that three years. That and the surgeon who went in and stopped the bleeding and patched the hole in her intestine. She was also lucky that her gall bladder had lain up against the hole, so that the bacteria and stomach acid did not get into her abdominal cavity. I was in Portland, Oregon, when that happened. I had to drop everything and come running. I did.

Because of that perforation, I thought that her weight loss was due to the smallness of the remaining stomach, and her inability to tolerate certain foods. As I watched her dwindle in the year before her death, I urged her to get supplements, talked with her about her diet almost weekly. Then about three months before the above mentioned day, she called me. Bunny's family had her car. No one had taken her to the grocery store for over ten days. My mother had grown up the daughter of a grocer. She never bought more than a week's worth of groceries in her life. I have the same problem. I told her to call them back and if they still refused, I would drive the ninety miles between us and take her to the store. I called Bee to enlist her help in changing this dynamic. Mom was asking for my help. Bee's answer was "that is just Bunny." That was all she would say. I was due to move to my hometown a month and a half later, I could take over parts of her care at that time. Why had she not said something sooner? She didn't want me to come home from my genetics residency. She wanted me to pursue my dreams--and she was willing to make it on her own so that I could do that. Bunny had said to me once that Mom needed to be in a nursing home, but Mom wasn't demented or incapable of activities of daily life, so I had brushed that aside. I realized now that Bunny had meant that she was no longer willing to help Mom with her survival. She would act only when guilt got overwhelming. Thirty five years of living near each other--all the support that Mom had given her through the years. ANGER--major ANGER--started to build. Frustration with Bee started to build.

As I looked at that lab value that indicated that Mom's malnutrition was not due to her inability to eat, but rather to the lack of groceries in the house, that ANGER started to burn. When Bunny, Bee, and Bunny's minister changed the memorial service program behind my back to indicate that the members of Bunny's church were more important than my mother's family and friends, I heard God's voice screaming in my head, "GET those blasphemers OUT OF MY CHURCH!" I knew how Jesus felt in the temple.

For three years after Mom's death, I struggled with anger, guilt, hurt, fear, denial. I was as touchy as a badger, and felt about as sociable. I tried plunging into work. I tried putting it behind me. I tried to forgive. Bee and Bunny didn't make it any easier. There was no trust between us. Nothing I tried to do resulted in any return of trust. They left the division of Mom's stuff with everyone else getting their first choices, and my first choice in Bee's garage--had my second, and third choices, things that I knew that they didn't want. My alternative first choice had gone to Bee's oldest son. Bee accused me of being mercenary. I accused her of playing games. After another three or four similar incidents around Bunny's granddaughter, I just quit talking to Bee. I needed time to sort out what I was feeling. She asked why, and when I tried to evade precision, she retorted in such a way that I interpreted it to mean, "I am SO glad that you have realized that you have such a problem."

The emotions flared and I gave her full precision. She, of course, discounted my truth. Nothing new. She had done this for years. I had always assumed that she loved my mother and would step in if there was a major problem. She hadn't--in fact, I realized that she had known what was happening at the time of Mom's perforated ulcer. I had wanted to confront my brother at that time with his lack of respect for my mother. Bee had told me no--and I had trusted her judgment. Bunny and I had started to draw boundaries and will get along as long as Bee doesn't decide to interfere, then the whole mess blows up again.

Ten years before, when I had pulled myself out of a ten year abusive relationship with a man, I had learned to look at behaviors, not words. He had always described me as "his precious jewel" Haha! I applied that to the situation with my Montana sisters. I got five years of my mother's medical records. I found evidence of five years worth of starvation and nutritional decline. I watched Bee put her house in the country on the market a month after my mother died and move to town. Mom hated living in the country. Bee had moved there ten years before--just after Mom had her first major medical problem of old age, and when she first needed to take time off work and come live with Sis and then with me to recuperate from her surgeries. I reconsidered everything. I journalled. I went to Bible study and to church. I honored my mother's memory as best I could. Bunny and Bee participated when it would be obvious to the rest of the family if they didn't, otherwise, I was told, "I don't need to honor my mother repeatedly, and you can't blackmail me into doing so." I had suggested joining me at my church for a coffee hour in honor of Mom as a way to mend some hard feelings. Bunny, I realized had tried to communicate to me, in her own way. She had apologized on one occasion when the situation had resulted in my being hurt.

For the past five years, I have been dealing with this dilemma. I have closed and open communication a couple of times--not perfectly, but always the impetus came from me. I have on occasion been so frustrated that I made public comment about their behavior. Then this summer, when I broke down to my radiation oncologist during a session, and spilled it all, he replied, "Real sociopaths, then?"

Sociopath--my sister is a sociopath. I went home and bawled. No,I didn't want to accept that. The worse end of the spectrum lay in my memory from years of family medicine--and those who appeared to be "normal" on the outside, and didn't engage in criminal behavior floated up to the surface as well. I knew that my sister's actions made her a sociopath. My sister-in-law has her own personality issues, and can be lead. I had to let go of my dream of the two young girls who grew up to be best friends. I had to just move away from my attachment to her. The hope of her changing was a distant one. She might, and it would have to be from her own choice. I couldn't save her. I couldn't even help her--she didn't want my help. The more I tried to say "I love you" with my expectations for her behavior, the more she saw in me the need to control others. She didn't want to be my friend because then she couldn't project onto me the things that she did not want to accept about herself. I had had to divorce my family also. It had been a messy one. And I was through the anger, the hurt, and the fear--and the answer was still the same. They can be acquaintances, but not friends.

Some family members have given me space for my feelings, others want to kill the messenger, or just stay in their denial. I am someone who searches for truth and wants the truth. I have accepted half truths and lies out of love, yet when it starts to hurt too much, I look for the reality. My mother was also someone who just absorbed the hurt. When it got too much, she whined to the immediate family, but she wouldn't dig for the truth. She stayed in the illusion that if she loved enough, the other one would eventually come around to finding love in themselves. It worked with my father, not with Bee or Bunny. She died rather than accept truth. I had pulled myself up off of a chaise lounge a decade before and stated, "I will not accept death. I choose life."

Slowly, I am choosing life, first spiritually, then psychologically, and now on to physically. In all of us, we must deal with anger, hurt, and fear: one hides on top of another. We use them for defenses against the other. It is only when we plow past all that we find our truth. Then we can apply that truth to the rest of our life. My second greatest fear was that my mother didn't love me. When I faced that one, and confronted her with it, I was lucky. She did, and she could. How much harder it was to acknowledge that Bee did not and could not. She was my other half. We had been "The Girls." It still feels like an empty hole.

I have started to build a real family. I have a husband with whom I share real love, dogs and a horse who are my "kids." Friends whom I call brothers, and sisters. The younger sister I long for hasn't emerged yet. One day she will--when God is ready. Will it be Bee? I don't know. I don't dare hope. Probably not--which leaves the small opening for maybe.

To really love, you must walk through your own flames, embrace the heat, and accept the scars.