You’re Too Big

Picture it ….. me, a dalmatian,  a foxhound,  two cats, and a pot bellied pig …. all sitting in the recliner chair at the same time.  My animals like to lie on my lap and legs when I’m sitting or sleeping in the recliner.   Sometimes it’s okay but other times I just can’t bear the weight of the on my legs.   Sometimes them sitting on me causes me a great deal of pain, and I have to tell them to get off.   And I feel guilty when I do.  Especially at night when I’m sleeping.   The little dogs snuggle with me at night.   They are both chihuahua mixes.   And then there’s Huckleberry, my little beagle.   He’s a small beagle, just 13” at the wither,  but he’s quite a bit heavier than the little ones.  He’s also the ‘baby’ of the dog pack.  And he has that ‘woe is me’ hound dog expression down to a fine art.   He likes to snuggle with me too and many times,  because he is the baby and he’s so darn cute, I let him cuddle with me.   But there are times when I don’t want him up on the chair.    Such as at night when the little ones are up under the covers, and if my legs are already hurting and his weight is causing me more discomfort.  At these times I have to tell him to get off, and when he persists in his efforts to climb up, I hear myself telling him,  “you’re too big”,  and it flashes me back to when I was a little girl.   My Uncle Sean was bouncing us children on his knee and when it was my turn he said,  “no”,  “you’re too big”.  But I wasn’t too big.   I was small.  The only person smaller than me was my younger sister.  I remember how hurt I felt.  How rejected.   As a child the only conclusion I could come up with was that my uncle didn’t like me.  Even now as I share this story, I can feel that rejection, and the hurt.

When I tell Huckleberry to get off because he’s too big I feel guilty   He gives me that hurt hound dog look and I feel like I’m hurting his feelings.  I feel guilty for making him feel rejected.   I feel that he doesn’t understand why the little ones are allowed up on my lap (or under the covers at night) and he isn’t.   I know I’m anthropomorphizing but it’s how I feel.   Huck isn’t a lot bigger that the little ones but he is a lot heavier   I try not to utter those words and instead just tell him no.   But the words are in my head,  “you’re too big”.   And I’m instantly transported back to that day when I was a little girl being excluded from a silly game, knowing that I wasn’t too big, and wondering what was wrong with me.

What I don’t understand is why I remember that incident.  And why decades later I can still feel how hurt I was.   And how unwanted I feel today.

 

Trauma Memories

Yesterday,  February 12^th,  was the second anniversary of my fathers death.   Earlier in the week it triggered not only the memory of his last day,  but also the memory of when my mother died.   She died at home in her sleep which was a God send  for her because she was terrified of dying.   I wasn’t home that night.   We lived up at Georgian Bay at the time and I spend weekends in Burlington.  I taught classes and had flyball practice on Saturdays, and then rented space to teach classes on Sunday.   On the night that my mother died I remember being out to dinner with my flyball team on the Saturday night.  I remember feeling really nervous and shaky as if I’d experienced a terrible shock, even though it had been a fairly routine day with no surprises.   But still, I felt very uneasy.  The next morning I got a call early in the morning.  It was my father calling to tell me that my mother had died.   She had died overnight in her sleep.   I remember being shocked.   Even though she had many health issues and was not in good health  (bad heart), her death was unexpected.   I remember cancelling classes and a friend came by and took me to McDonalds to get breakfast and kill time until I was able to drive home.  My dad had told me not to drive if I was upset and to wait a few hours until the cavalry had departed our home.  Apparently if you call 911 and tell them someone had died, they send everyone.   Police.  Fire department.   Ambulance.   And the coroner, who wasn’t immediately available .   And they couldn’t move my mom until the coroner signed off on the death.   My dad didn’t want me to come home to that chaos so he told me not to drive home until the afternoon.   He wanted to be sure that everyone was gone before I got there.    That was about seventeen years ago.   I haven’t thought about that day in a long time.  But I remember that shaky uneasy feeling I had that night.   And anytime I’ve felt that sensation since, it’s felt like an omen of something terrible looming.

On the heels of the memory of my mothers passing came the memory of my dads last day.  I remember getting a phone call from the doctor saying my dad didn’t look good, and then taking Gucci to visit him that afternoon.  And the nurse telling me things didn’t look good and how they just wanted to prepare me for the worst so that it wouldn’t be a shock.   At 2am when I called to check in on him they said he was stable.  And then at 7:30am I got the call to say he’d passed.

And a week later my life fell apart, and this journey of recovery began.

 

Memories

Why are memories not just recollections?   Why do they always come with emotions?  Why do I always feel like a child?   Why can’t I look at memories like  images watched on a tv screen?    Separate the emotion , the hurt, and the suffering?   How is it possible that memories from decades ago can still inflict the emotions of those moments?   Why can’t hey just be ‘that was then’ without all of the pain and anger and sadness?   Sometime I feel like I’ll never be happy.  I don’t really know what it means to be happy.   I understand happy moments and events, but they are fleeting.  I don’t know what it means to BE happy