from my journal for January 8, 1997
Dana said “Drugs are no escape” and described a man he had once had to arrest— he was drunk, his body deteriorating, his emotions out of control, he obviously had not escaped the pain. I thought of my parents, and it brought home to me what Elizabeth Goudge had been trying to say in the final scene between David and Sebastian — something about the oneness of the pain of both victim and perpetrator. I saw — maybe I should say I felt or experienced since I’ve seen it before — that Mom & Dad were in awful pain, that the damage they did to me was just the outflow of that pain. I saw that they themselves had been shaped and damaged by their environment — the vulnerability of a generation who grew up under Prohibition, World War II, mother had to cope with a number of deaths and grew up in a stiff-upper-lip family. Neither of them actually had much chance of addressing and healing their pain. I think, though I always knew intellectually, that they only hurt me because they were hurt themselves, at some level it felt personal, like they looked at Jenny and thought she was a shit and treated her that way. But it wasn’t like that. Yesterday I could feel the oneness of their pain and my pain. It felt like a deeper level of forgiveness, seeing them caught in a trap as painful as the one I’ve been in. This makes it possible to accept that they damaged me without blaming them, there’s just damage, as though we were all caught in a war. Every other time I tried to stop blaming them it’s been at the cost of invalidating myself, of making it be that I wasn’t damaged and therefore all this pain I’m going through is my fault, something I do to myself out of perversity or something, defectiveness, willfulness, “wanting to be miserable.”
My ex-husband Dana worked for several years as a cop.
David and Sebastian are a bomber pilot and a concentration camp survivor in The Heart of the Family.
My father told me I “wanted to be miserable.” I didn’t believe him, but I also couldn’t seem to stop being miserable. Not until I got on medication, and found out what normal brain chemistry felt like did I realize I had been depressed my whole life. It took several more years to recognize that the depression had been caused by early trauma.