Originally Written on 9-23-08
So I had my first counseling session this afternoon. The counselor’s name is Cathy. She began the session with a flow chart of my life - basically. We will be working on it again next week to finish it up. But as she asked me simple questions about my life and the major players in it, mom step dad, boyfriend, etc, I had the biggest epiphany I have had in a long time.
The story goes like this: when I was a little kid I was riding in the car with my step-dad Bill. We were either going up to or coming home from Jerome, AZ. In the ravine along the road up the mountain are old cars 30s – 50s era old rusted out junkers. I asked Bill why those cars were there and my memory of his answer is that they drove off the side of the mountain. So they drove off just because or because they had been to the bar…
My parents used to frequent the bars of Jerome when I was a kid. Literally every single weekend of my childhood in the Verde Valley my parents were out partying at the bar. As I got older and I was home alone on Friday’s and Saturday’s I would worry that my parents drove off the cliff on their way home from Jerome. As I got older I would call the hospital and the police to see if my parents had been admitted or arrested. I was paranoid and it being the 80s they had no cell phone to call them on. I never really knew where they were and it scared me.
So fast-forward to my 20s and 30s. I am in a long term relationship with a guy I adore and he recently went on a mini vacation to meet his father’s family in California. He was only gone for 4 days and I flipped the fuck out. And by that I literally mean, I did not leave the house, I ate $60.00 worth of delivered Chinese food, chips, soda, and everything else in the refrigerator. I did not get out of bed. I cried and cried and snotted and drooled all over myself. I was so paranoid that he would die in a car accident on the freeway going to Indo. I vividly saw car accidents in my head and saw my boyfriend dead on the road. I was so paranoid that he would then die on the way home although he obviously made it there in one piece. He called me 3 or 4 times a day to check in, he was always so nice and tried to be understanding but I could not stop flipping out. How he dealt with me is unknown. If the roles were reversed I never would have come back home after the way I treated him.
But it is literally the fear of people dying in car accidents when they are away that has caused so many fights in my relationships. It is this completely ridiculous fear. I knew when Jeremie was in California that he would be alright; I knew when I was crying uncontrollably that I was being fucking asinine. I have had this same issue with my last relationship, instead of a car it was that he would be hit on his bike riding through Los Angeles. I would cry and freak out for no reason, and he would be so angry that he could not go see his friends without coming home to a drama queen.
Well, as it stands now, I will be working on this issue. It is now in the front of my mind that I have found the reason for this idiotic fear. Certainly anyone can die at any time, but that rusty car off the side of 89-A is not going to run my life anymore!
On Monday I had read a story on Metafilter. The question was, “How can parents forget the terrible things they do to their children?” There was the normal answer I would state. Of course they don’t really forget they just don’t want to own up to it. But halfway down the page was an answer that had never really crossed my mind. What if a major event in your life as a child was just something done in passing of the parent’s life? I’m sure if I ask Bill if he remembers answering my question about the cars in the ravine at the bottom of Mingus Mountain, he will not know what I was going on about. It was just some off the cuff remark that he made to a little kid asking a benign question. Just think that that comment has caused so much fucking grief in my life! It totally fucking irks me; yes, the counselor knows that one of the major things I need to work on is my anger management…
Labels: break through, car crashes, childhood fear, counseling
