My husband bought the Miata in 2013. From the beginning, we affectionately named it “the Mouse,” because it was small and gray and could vanish at lightning speed (It was however far from as quiet as one!). I loved that car, not only because it brought out the 17-year-old wanna-be race car driver in my husband, but best of all, because it had magical powers over me. Like the mother I never had, it held me and rocked me to an immediate deep sleep. Anyone who knows my sleep issues, knows how amazing that is. In 2019 in the final year of my dad’s life, every weekend my husband would fire up the Mouse, and we headed out for the weekly visit, which involved a 50 or so minute stretch of freeway. As soon as I was in the passenger seat, and the top was down, I leaned back my head, closed my eyes and poof I was deliciously out. Both directions. The Mouse made those visits bearable.
About a month ago, my husband was out running errands in the Mouse, and suddenly he had no clutch, which in this, “The City on 7 Hills”, is no joke. My husband took the poor old car to the shop, and the mechanic said it would cost a fortune to fix, and that it really did not make sense to do the repair. So, my husband found a place to give it to, that quietly made the Mouse disappear. Admittedly I was sad to see it go. They even sent us an unexpected $2,500.00 USD for it, which is not nothing. They say people die as they live. The Mouse was no exception.
We were going to try to share one car. But my husband admits a sports car makes him so happy. And I feel strongly we need to have one car that can carry additional passengers. My Prius is decidedly good for that. So good in fact, that once when I was driving somewhere in Berkeley, I stopped at a traffic light, and a small crowd of college kids piled into the back seat. “Hey what are you doing?!” I yelled, shocked and startled. They thought I was their Uber!
My husband has been looking at the new 2025 Miata’s. He seems to be picking the blue one, so we probably won’t be calling it Mouse. The Mouse broke its clutch, it was not worth repairing; I broke my clutch and it was definitely worth repairing. And out of the breach, the cracked open space in my broken bone, stuff seemed to come blowing out, like smoke, but a stronger gust, like a genie from a bottle. All this material about repair. So strange how the body holds memory. We all know that by now. But ever deeper. Did I have to break a bone to learn these more primitive lessons about rupture? It sounds so trite, so woo woo…First all this stuff about my grandmother, that I had never really thought about before. And I never had a break with her. Apparently, my mom did.
Object Constancy
A common little game that is typically played with very young children, at least in the US, is “Peek-a-Boo,” where the child’s eyes are momentarily closed and the older person surprises them when they are opened, with “peek-a-boo!” which in effect laughingly means, “I am still here!” The implication is, even though you could not see me, I was still with you! This is not nothing! It is a powerful developmental lesson, sadly missing for the child of neglect, who generally experiences the opposite, even with eyes open. The object relations people call this capacity object constancy. My husband initially thought the term was “object incontinence!” When he learned the correction, he continued to laughingly call it that. Although to me it is no joke. Quite the opposite. In fact, in my earlier years of therapy I had no object constancy at all, and truly believed I had to start the relationship anew in every single session (and for those first 6 years, I went 4 days a week). But I was convinced as soon as I was out of my therapist’s sight, I, ghostlike, ceased to exist.
Existence can be a complicated issue when one’s childhood experience is to be or feel unseen, unheard, and unimportant. I certainly always questioned whether I had a right to exist, or if I had to earn that right somehow. And if I had to earn it, well how? Or is it even possible? And somehow, nonsensically I could imagine, that although I did not and/or was not entitled to exist, somehow in spite of that, everything bad or wrong, was my fault. How on earth does that work? Well in my dysregulated little universe, I could believe both. And interestingly, even after all these years, when wildly activated by my recent injury, I obsessively begged my husband to keep telling me over and over again, “it is not your fault!” And even then, I was hard pressed to believe it.
So strange how our memory works, and especially trauma memory. I kept having momentary auditory flashbacks of little phrases my dad used to often say. He would laugh, finding himself so clever and funny: “Get your drum and beat it!” “Take a slow boat to China!” Don’t call us, we’ll call you!” Or worst of all, “I’m going to cut your water off!” (??) Clearly, I was a bother, no, worse: an annoyance, a blight, not someone who he wanted to have around. I guess I did exist that much.
Interestingly however, I had no memory of anything my grandmother ever said. No memory of her voice or accent at all, even though I spent quite a bit of time with her. She was a cool, formal, emotionally unexpressive, physically wooden and unaffectionate upper middle class intellectual Northern German woman. And actually also, quite child-like. In many ways, I mothered her, I would hug her and hold her hand, which she awkwardly but seemingly gratefully loved, and I made dresses for her, which she proudly wore and showed off about.
Both times I was in Oxford, I excitedly told everyone I met “my grandmother was one of the first women to graduate from this esteemed university!” Walking around the ancient and echoing halls, clacking in my “sensible shoes” reminiscent of hers, I thought of her as a 19 year old, a 20 year old, filled with vision and anticipation of what her life would bring, not knowing that she would be met with death, terror and destruction on a grand scale, that she would lose her husband young and spend the last 60 years of her life alone. How odd, that I had no memory of her voice or any words she said to me at all. Until the recent night when out of the triggered activation, out of the breach, the crevasse, the crack in my arm, I heard her voice, loudly, sternly, yelling at my mother “DON’T do it!! Eva, I am telling you DON”T marry that man! DON’T DO IT!” I had always known, our dad never let us forget, that she had tried to talk them out of getting married, right from the start, even on their wedding day. He had not graduated from high school; he came from poor and uneducated beginnings. We all always believed those were the reasons…Dad was bitter about it, and they had a strained relationship all her life. Suddenly that night I had a feeling, she “knew” something else.
Something happened to me that night, I began to have a whole new view of my mother. The little girl sitting alone on a train out of Germany, sent away to save her life, not knowing if she would ever see any of her family again. I had thought about that many times. But I thought of the young woman, who not that much later, met this good-looking guy with an, in some ways, similar background, and who wanted to marry her. By then she was 26. She probably thought her window was closing, who else might ever want to marry her? It was 1949. The war ended in 1945. Her trauma was fresh and unprocessed (not that it ever was). Her mother presented her with a new and freshly devastating dilemma without solution. And she made her choice. Suddenly out of the shock and pain of my cracked open bone, I had visions of her early attachment with the cold, childlike woman, the later impossible choice, and I wept a new depth of empathic tears, compassion for her.
Healing
After this late night, protracted spontaneous catharsis, I fell asleep. And in the morning, I felt different. I had always felt that the one regret of my life, was that I had never made my peace with my mother. She died so quickly, there was no time. It took a traumatic accident and somehow out of the brokenness, came an unanticipated compassion and forgiveness, one that I never thought I would achieve. It’s not my fault, it’s not her fault. The long line of women, no one’s fault. Interesting how the word for the rupture lines of an earthquake, are the fault lines. And how out of my cracked arm, came so much reconstruction, healing and growth.
Meanwhile, my arm is healing beautifully. I am so much better! And I got this. A lineage of traumatized women, and I have the privilege of climbing out of it, and with a body offering this story about healing to tell.
Today’s song: