Like Dolls in a Dollhouse
My final MDMA session, Part 1 of 2.
In the month between my second and third treatments, I was busy both managing every day life and adjusting to my livelier internal landscape. I was daunted by how much was going on in my own brain. Having gotten through two major internal milestones in dosing sessions one and two, I found a clear intention to take into my third and final dosing. I was going to search for orientation. I hoped that the MDMA could let me travel all the way to why.
I spent the first two sessions healing and integrating the most frightening and broken parts of my brain. As a result, I had a head full of presence, memories and versions of myself awake and aware, but also full of questions. Why did I have the life I had managed to build and where should I go from my final treatment? I was going to try to to find out. There was almost no waiting for the work to begin in my last session. I slipped into it immediately.
As one of my therapists got me settled, I began a conversation with her that I would continue with myself. I had a friend who, like many of us that grew up in abusive environments, struggled with presence. I thought she had done a fascinating thing in the time that I knew her. All of her children had their own dog. Even in the times where she couldn't be everything they might have needed, she tried to give them unconditional love as she experienced it best. Parenting by proxy.
My parents made the garden where I felt so loved. Sometimes people cannot be who we need. Sometimes they can't even be who they want to be for themselves, let alone their children. I have not always been able to accept my parents failings but I am still partly an expression of their decisions. I found a connection to the love I had for my garden and their actions. From there I had a place to start searching as I traveled deeper into my dosing session.
Terry Pratchett has a quote in the book, "I Shall Wear Midnight." "Evil starts when you begin to treat people as things." That part of the quote by itself is pretty easy to accept. Surely he's talking about things like slavery and objectification. The full quote is much harder. '"Evil starts when you begin to treat people as things." And right now it would happen if you thought there was a thing called a father, and a thing called a mother, and a thing called a daughter, and a thing called a cottage, and told yourself that if you put them all together you had a thing called a happy family.' Have you ever noticed when people parent like they are playing with dolls in a dollhouse? Have you looked away?
I was a difficult child. According to my parents. I did things like refuse to order and eat a grand slam when we went to Denny's or pigs in a blanket when we to IHOP. I complained about wearing tights to church and curling my hair. I didn't always want to be responsible for my brothers. I often had stomach aches and didn't want to eat all the food on my plate. I talked to every random person I met on the street. I was very accident prone.
In retrospect, examining the stories people told about me, I seemed like a sensitive, social, neurodiverse kid. But relative to expectations, I was classified as difficult, a bad child. I could get a thorough beating if I complained too much about those tights. I could get yanked violently by my braids if I raised my voice too loud. I could stand in my bedroom at night, getting struck across the face as punctuation to sentences detailing a days worth of failings. My half brother helpfully let me know that this was normal. Once in Japan, when he had been caught in a lie, he had jumped out of a second story window during a beating because he realized at some point that jumping was the safer option.
My mother's parents chastised me for not being more obedient when selecting my breakfast much the same way that they would chastise me for wanting to have a wedding decades later. All of their eight children had ordered pigs in a blanket at IHOP. There was no room for me to be much of anything in my life besides a doll in a dollhouse. Why did they parent like dolls in a dollhouse? As my parents grew more and more insular and isolated, it got to the point where I hardly ever saw my grandparents, but we still wrote them letters every week. Appearances mattered after all. Dolls in a dollhouse respect their elders.
The reason life spun out of control, the day my father threatened to kill me, was so mundane as to be incomprehensible to me. Up until that last year, we had been maintaining a once a month Christian homeschool group. My parents had opted out of sending us to school. They had opted out of living around people. They had opted out of taking us to the doctor regularly. Our life being a series of ever shrinking boxes, when they announced that they weren't even going to try to make it to the Christian homeschool group that winter, I was pretty desperate. There was a ski resort an hour and a half away that offered $5 lift tickets and rentals to the homeschoolers. I wasn't trying to be difficult or defiant when I called a "neighbor" two miles away to see if they could give me a ride. I obviously didn’t keep it a secret.
My parents claimed to be like everyone else. I thought it wouldn’t be too terrible if someone else gave me a ride. People gave each other rides. When I found out I couldn't go on the field trip I went to my room to study. I was desperate but in the moment, I decided I had to get through my schoolwork faster. My parents still thought college was necessary at the time. Who knew if they would continue to think that. I failed to anticipate that just the fact of me thinking I could ask someone else for help was going to trigger the kind of hell that would follow. I failed to pay attention to the details like the noise level in the next room.
When I did make it to college, my friends innocently tried to buy a train ticket so that I could visit them over the summer. I had to deal with a very similar fall out. Threats that I wouldn't be allowed to go back to college because I had clearly dishonored my father in causing other people to think I needed anything. When my then boyfriend, now my husband, tried to help over the phone, my father threatened to shoot him if he ever saw him again.
Why did they parent like dolls in a dollhouse? My mother wanted us to be together, to have "togetherness." We ate every meal together, watched every show together, spent hour after hour, day after day constantly in each other's presence. You had to be deathly ill to opt out. My grandparents had done something similar. All the children in a row. It didn't turn out well for either of them really. But they did it because they were so afraid.
I do not parent like dolls in a dollhouse.
When my second oldest was a toddler, I got an idea of what I must have been like as a child. I had previously thought that I would get one pair of nice, flexible, high quality, gender neutral shoes for my children and they would all wear them. This lasted until the first time she saw a pair of pink sparkly shoes in the shoe store. She never would wear the brown shoes again. I will never forget the conviction of that tiny little body as she fought two giant adults to avoid wearing the shoes I had for her. My husband and I asked the question we have been asking ever since. "Do we want to die on this hill?" The answer is “no” more often than not.
I tell my teenagers that I would love it if they went and stayed out late and experienced life and didn't want to come home. They roll their eyes at me. They want to be home. All of my kids love being home. This continues to be so very perplexing to me. Just like in so many fleeting moments of surprise at our own children, we have come to realize as a matter of overall parenting that our preferences are not their morality. We have loved watching our kids develop and hold to their own personalities and beliefs. I have learned so much from them. They see the world in the present, as it is, with so much insight, snark, and compassion. Without the biases of shoulds or shouldn'ts that are no longer relevant. My husband and I still have authority and responsibility for them and their development, but I believe there's a reason Christian theology claims you should follow the children. They have a view of the world that we miss.
I wish my parents had learned from me. They didn't need to be so afraid. In their fear, they made their life a nightmare.
At the center of my trip and the center of myself, I came to a picture of my parents at their most miserable. A picture of my mother especially. Our parents inform so much of our lives. We want to look for answers from them. We feel like they should be enshrined in the center of who we are. I knew I was not my parents, so I took the picture down. I knew my parents. I forgave them. I let them go. Not an eviction or a rejection. I do not parent like dolls in a dollhouse. My parents were not simple people, and they were not simply villains in my story. I knew the worst of who my parents became but I also knew who they wanted to be. In my internal landscape, there is space for everything that they were. For my mother to read in the trees she planted, and my father to garden in the ruins of his empire. Everything they were is simply part of the tapestry of my life, my history. I have much more life to live. After taking their picture down, I went looking for my own center.