Trauma Center

I don't know if it's the medication I'm on or being a Sober Sally or just really listening to people who care about us, me, your and my well-being, but I'm doing better with how I respond to life, thank you very much, universe. And by better I mean relative to becoming so worked up I get a kidney stone.😷

I just watched this hour long interview with Gabor Mate on Trauma and another piece of my own puzzle, but also yours, because we're all living together in this one world, fell into place.💞

The pride of the self-proclaimed? Boomer proclaimed? Greatest Generation is/was sucking it up, holding it all inside, it was The Depression, not a depression. And don't bother me, I'm having a martini. Also my mother's favourite response to childhood woes, "Well you're not exactly a widow with four young children, are you."❤

No but how am I going to get to the Olympics when I just got beat in the 75 yard dash by Marla Cameron, ffs?💔

I don't know how it came up now, something to do with my period, I'm guessing, but when I was in my teens my mother claimed to have gone into menopause when my father died.👵

This never made much sense to me, because my father died of cancer when my mother was 38, so young for menopause. Also, it's not like he was suddenly gunned down in a hail of bullets, a shock so sudden to his grieving widow that it would bring on menopause, either. I didn't think, anyway.💁

But she wouldn't have said it if it didn't happen, she wasn't shy about bodily functions. I just didn't believe her going into menopause was connected to my father's death. Why? Why didn't I believe it? Well because the notion that it did ran counter to my understanding, or rather, lack thereof, of the mind/body connection, the whole of us, and her life story. Did The Greatest Generation even have a childhood or was childhood something they only afforded their children, the much ballyhooed Boomers.😕

(Also, as was the custom of the day in our society, I was given insufficient information and so didn't have a proper appreciation of how traumatic it actually was for her.😦)

Later in life she took to mentioning her initial, perhaps wilful, misunderstanding of the diagnosis, that it was both terminal and his death quite imminent, which was corrected when a concerned nurse advised her as she made plans ignoring it, "Oh, Mrs. McLeod, your husband won't last three months."😬 

I believe it was more like six weeks, too, but I don't know that and it doesn't matter now. Those sorts of details got lost in the flurry of the time, my mother didn't like to talk about it thereafter, and no one's alive now who would know better. What does it matter, anyway, all these details that have nothing to do with who a person was or the life they lived in our world.😔

Of course she went into sudden and early menopause. She was in shock. The love of her life was dead, she had four kids under the age of ten, her homemaker-married-to-a-lawyer life was over and she went back to being a teacher, but also a single working mother determined we all stay in our middle-class life.🙋

Meanwhile, I was four. My father suddenly disappeared and my mother, well, she suddeny disappeared, too.😒

I don't mean to come across as feeling sorry for myself, or self-indulgent, although I suppose I do, because my point really is how good my life is, in spite of this traumatic event I was too young to appreciate at the time, and which my society didn't appreciate at the time, either, thanks to how it is, or maybe how it was.👪

Because it is better now, from where I sit, and I'm not sure why there's nostalgia for a time when there was so much more unfairness around and we were supposed to just suck it up and hold it all inside, it's The Depression, not a depression.😣