mothering – Pamela Helberg

A Return to the Interwebs. Happy New Year!

Published on December 31, 2017December 31, 2017 by genassecretsanta6 Comments

Consider this my Christmas Letter for 2017

Relaunched the website tonight. I’d taken it offline while I looked for a job. I go back and forth on this issue–should I let prospective employers see what I’ve written here or should I not? Will my writings help my career or harm it? I have no idea. But, now I have a job, so there.

I have a job! As a counselor. Good thing, since I woke up on Christmas to an email from the Federal Student Loan Servicing Company, reminding me that I was half way to the end of my Student Loan Repayment Grace Period. Yay! I won’t get thrown in debtors’ prison. Yet.

And I’ll be in private practice soon, since my job affords me time to see clients on my own as well. I will be working three, twelve hour shifts each week, so I will have a few other days in which to start building my own practice. I am very excited about both of these opportunities and couldn’t have imagined or hoped for a better outcome and transition into the mental health counseling field.

On the homefront, my 27 yo kid has moved in with me for awhile and I am completely digging having her around. It’s a chance at redemption for me. How often do we get an opportunity to have a real life “Do-Over?” I am one lucky mother.

Speaking of Mother, she has moved to a memory care facility. We reached a bit of a crisis point after Thanksgiving with a pulled tooth, a root canal, and a bottle of pain meds. Suffice it to say that her level of needed care exceeded my level of competency. She has a roommate who has a PhD in Sociology, so Mother is both duly impressed and thrilled to have someone to talk to who is at about the same stage of Alzheimer’s. They arrived within a week of one another, and both seem content (generally) with each other.

Charlie (or Chuck, as I like to call him), Mom’s shitzu, moved too, and seems quite happy to be there along with a handful of other dogs, a couple of hedgehogs, a Siamese cat, a tankful of fish, a cage of birds, and a chinchilla.

The transition to the facility was as awful and wrenching as I imagined it would be. Mom was none too happy with me that night, but I had to move her for her own safety. Who wants to have to make that sort of decision for someone? I certainly never imagined I would have to. And, I am thrilled to have my life back, my time and my home back. You can’t know what it’s like until you live it.

I spent the holidays working. Mom spent Christmas and Christmas Eve with my kids and their other mom. I am grateful for everyone’s love and caring these past few weeks, these past sixteen months. I couldn’t have done this on my own.

Happy New Year!

Pam

U is for Umbilical Cord

Published on April 25, 2014April 25, 2014 by Pam1 Comment

Visiting Mother
Our past. My future. Her womb.
Cord blood. Still tethered.

The other class I’m taking this quarter is Family of Origin Systems, or FOO for short. Here’s the course description: The purpose of this course is to facilitate the development of competencies in understanding family of origin systems theories of human development and differentiation. Particular emphasis will be placed on students examining their personal and professional development in terms of their own family history, relationships, and conflicts.

In other words, in this class we will take a close look at how our families, the ones in which we grew up, completely fucked us over and caused us to be the hot messes we currently are. I’ve done a fair amount of self-work over the years and have looked closely at my parents, our relationships, how they raised my brother and me. I’ve listened in many workshops as other people describe their upbringings, how they survived everything from drug and alcohol addicted parents, sexual abuse, beatings, to benign neglect and hostile indifference. Compared to most people, I am practically Beaver Cleaver. In many respects, my parents rivaled June and Ward.

But still. The one thing this class makes crystal clear is that none of us leave childhood unscathed. Sure, maybe my parents, like so many, “did the best they could with what they knew at the time,” but they too were products of their environments. And like their parents before them, they carried on, operating within family systems that have perpetuated all the conscious and unconscious family secrets, tragedies, coping methods, and survival mechanisms.

Take for example just two facts from my childhood: We moved to a small logging town when I was four, and my parents became Born Again not long after. These events alone generated major repercussions for my brother and me.

Our parents subscribed to the “spare the rod, spoil the child” parenting style. They raised us to believe that god knew our every move—He knew when we were naughty and nice with implications far more sinister than any Santa might have dreamed up. I grew up believing I could be struck dead (or at least turned into a pillar of salt) should I displease god.

I learned early on that if Jesus returned in The Rapture and I hadn’t caught up on asking for forgiveness for my sins, I might be Left Behind to withstand horrible trials and tribulations. Should I die with my sins unforgiven (because I’d forgotten to pray in a timely fashion), I’d go straight to hell where I would burn for all of eternity. Never mind what the church had to say about being a lesbian.

So there was that. And I’m just scratching the surface of the religious implications. Then there was life in the logging town. Like I wrote in my blog about my brother, we had a fairly idyllic and unfettered (if you don’t count god always watching) childhood. Freedom to roam was one of the many upsides growing up in a small town offered.

Inferior schools presented one major downside. I was a pretty bright kid. I scored high on tests, always tested into the advanced groups whether they were for math or reading, and I brought home stellar report cards year in and year out. But the schools we attended were full of first year teachers who were all on their way to someplace bigger and better, and I ended up attending four different high schools. By the time I realized I needed a better education, I was in college wondering why I couldn’t figure out pre-calc and why I was failing basic chemistry.

I didn’t take a foreign language (well, I took a quarter of it at the church-affiliated pseudo high school I attended most of my junior year); I stopped taking math in 10^th grade. I dropped out of biology my sophomore year and didn’t take any more science until college. Thankfully, standards for college admission were fairly low in 1981.

To be fair, my parents hadn’t been to college. They didn’t know what a college bound high-school student needed in order to be fully prepped for a higher education. Many people I grew up with didn’t go to college. Many had parents who didn’t think girls even needed to pursue anything beyond an MRS degree. So, in many respects, I count myself fortunate and very blessed. Yet, what might have transpired had we stayed in Bellevue when I was four? What sort of education might I have received there? How might things have played out differently?

Yet it’s not just about what I know. Families are full of secrets and generational patterns. We all move forward under an ancestral burden (or so they say in FOO). What implications did grandpa’s dead brother have on our holidays? What about grandma’s drinking? How did the antagonism between grandma and her sister get mirrored in my aunts’ relationships with one another and with my parents? What about my grandfather’s upbringing made him so hard on my father, his only son? And why did my grandparents adopt my mother? What was the true story there? Did we move far away to escape these legacies? So many questions.

We have to fill out a questionnaire for class tomorrow, one that describes our roles in our family of origin—for example what sort of child was I? Was I The Rulebreaker? The Delegate (strong self-sufficient and competent)? The Companionate (a friend and peer to one of my parents)? The Rejected Kid? And, why? How did my role in my family of origin affect the choices I made later in life? The partners I chose. The roles I play now. It’s fascinating to ponder.

***

I’m not writing all of this to lay any blame on my parents. I’m writing to point out that even when we do the best we can (or the best we think we can do), we still pass on to our kids (and I’m a parent, so I have done this too) a legacy with which they, in turn, will need to grapple in order to fully realize their own hopes and dreams.

I know that my parents discussed parenting before they married. I know that they both had dreary childhoods and problematic relationships with their own parents. Together they resolved that they would do better than their parents. And in turn, I resolved the same thing when I had my kids. And, most likely, if my kids have children of their own, they too will make a similar commitment.

I sat in my FOO class and listened to my classmates tell their stories—felt the hair on my arms rise as they recounted tales of abuse, neglect, grinding poverty, drug addiction, mental illness. And I felt a sense of hope wash over me because in spite of all the various hardships, and perhaps because of them, here we all were, eager to learn, to move on. To help.

I is for Imagination

Published on April 10, 2014 by Pam6 Comments

I often say that I write non-fiction essays and memoir because I lack imagination. I’ve never been good at making stuff up, and whenever I sit down thinking I’m going to write a short story or embark on writing a novel, I get a few pages in and stop, overwhelmed by the apparently limitless options.

Taylor, my youngest daughter (she’s nearly 20 now), loved to watch SpongeBob SquarePants when she was little. She loved SpongeBob so much that we had a SpongeBob bathroom (The Little Woman painted it SpongeBob blue and yellow with hand drawn and painted replicas of Patrick and SpongeBob on the walls) complete with a SpongeBob shower curtain and SpongeBob toilet seat cover. Taylor’s bedroom was also SpongeBob yellow, and she had SpongeBob posters, blankets, pillows, sheets, Legos . . .

Of all the characters populating childhood during those years, I found SpongeBob endearing and definitely the least objectionable. He was happy, undaunted by failure, cheerful, a good friend, a hard worker, compassionate. But most of all I loved SpongeBob because he had Imagination.

That Taylor loved SpongeBob made sense, because she too had a great Imagination. I could give that kid two sticks and a small rock and she could entertain herself for hours, making up stories, creating characters, playing alone in her own world.

When Taylor was eight, the two of us went on a three-week camping adventure across Washington and Oregon. We set off without much of an agenda, except that we were going to see Grandpa in Bend, OR. Other than that, we were footloose. We started our trip by meeting some friends and floating the Yakima River. I worried a bit that T would be bored, hanging out with three adults and our friends’ high school-aged son, but she proved to be an excellent traveling companion.

As I set up camp, pitching the tent and getting the camp stove ready for dinner, she played in the hammock, creating entire worlds from just leaves and twigs. What amazed me the most, I think, is that on her own T wasn’t much of a reader. She loved for me to read to her, but she wasn’t one to sit in camp (as I would have done as a child) with her nose in a book. Instead she was engaged, making up her own stories. I so admired that quality.

We spent a lot of time at the beach on that trip, and while I went to the beach to read, T went to the beach to play, to create. Every foray was an adventure for her, a chance to create new worlds, to see everything in a new light, with new possibilities. I stopped taking my books with me because I ended up pulled into her world each time, building sand castles, searching for agates, creating new worlds.

When we had fires on the beach at night, they weren’t just for roasting marshmallows or for keeping warm. Each fire presented an opportunity to create, even fleetingly, something new—Taylor delighted in burning sticks and then running to the water to put them out, creating steam. Or, drawing in the sky with the red ember end, writing words for me to guess.

One of our stops, a little town in Northeast Oregon called Shaniko, had been a ghost town and was now just a town stuck in time for tourists to wander through. I didn’t find it particularly interesting, but I made a point of walking around with her, reading some of the historic descriptions. I think we got ice cream cones that melted rapidly in the eastern Oregon summer sunshine. I didn’t think it would hold much interest for T, but she still talks about “that town that was just full of old people.” Something there captured her imagination.

Our last stop on our adventure was Manzanita. We pitched the tent at the campground on the beach and walked the shoreline into town to have some dinner. We’d heard about the great pizza place, and found it jammed. We finally got a table, one that could easily seat more, and so when I saw two women come in who wanted to sit down, I invited them to join us.

Taylor started telling these women about our trip. She didn’t leave out a single detail. And when I thought she might run out of material, she started embellishing, sprinkling in details about my personal life, adding a few false statements, entertaining the women who joined us. No one else could get a word in. On our walk back to the campground, I thought I’d take the opportunity to discuss the difference between talking about our adventures and sharing personal and/or made up details.

She looked at me and said, “It’s just imagination, Mom.”

That’s it–just imagination. No need to be overwhelmed or caught up in the details. Find some kelp to turn into palm trees. Make the sticks talk to the leaves. Just put my stick in the fire and write in the sky.