9:11am July 7, 2014

My mother has chronic bronchitis and asthma and lots of other lung issues.

She was exposed to severe amounts of second-hand smoke back when they didn’t know it could affect you that way.  When she saw doctors as an adult, they wouldn’t believe she wasn’t a smoker.  When she said her father smoked around her all the time, they said that was irrelevant.  They said, “You have the lungs of a smoker.”  She became a respiratory therapist and learned a lot about lungs and lung disease, far more than she was taught in her two year vocational degree.

Growing up around her, coughing was something that was a constant sound in our house.  She had a particular rhythm to her coughs that I grew very used to.  a-CUGH-hem, a-CUGH-hem, a-CUGH-a CUGH-a CUGH-hem.  I was a typical echolalic autistic kid, and boy did I get in trouble the one time I echolated that.  She thought I was making fun of her and told me to never do it again.  I didn’t.

On a good day, she just coughed a lot.

On a bad day, she coughed until she vomited, and vomited, and vomited, and couldn’t stop coughing, even as she was vomiting.  It was horrible, it was loud, you couldn’t help but hear it, you couldn’t help but feel what it must feel like to her.  You tried not to acknowledge it, not to embarrass her any more than she was already embarrassed.  But everyone heard it.  Now that I have bronchiectasis, I know what it’s like to cough until you puke.  I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.

You know the bully I told you about, the one who did the smug little “I think in thoughts” thing?

Well, she lived with my family for a short while.  Not while I lived there, although she’ll try to claim otherwise, because it’s in her interests to claim more connection to my life than she’s ever had.  While she lived in our house, I lived in a residential treatment facility three hours away.  Then she moved across the country with my brother, who she was dating at the time.

She was the kind of person who loved to stir up drama.  If she found a place where there was no drama, she would find ways of making drama.  And I am still furious at one of the ways in which she created drama between me and my mother while I was at the residential facility.  According to my parents, she spent her entire stay with them trying to turn everyone in the house against each other for her own amusement.  This was no different.

She told me a dramatic-sounding story.  She was good at making stories sound dramatic.  Some people have that gift.  I don’t.  It’s not a matter of eloquence.  It’s a way of handling words.  It’s a way of choosing words that elicit a certain emotional response in the listener.  A way of choosing words that draws you in, makes you feel like you’re reading a novel or watching a movie.  And that’s the way she talked about this.  I can’t do it justice, but it was something like this:

“The other night, I was up near the bathroom, and I caught your mother vomiting.  She was trying to keep it secret, she didn’t hear me outside the bathroom door.  But you know how she drinks too much, and how she denies it.  Well I caught her vomiting, and she was vomiting a lot.  You should tell your therapist about this.”

My therapist at the time was doing his level best to blame my mother for everything from my ‘infantile psychosis’ to my 'childhood schiozphrenia’, and of course jumped at the chance to hear my mother portrayed as drinking herself to the point of vomiting.  Anything that made my mother look bad was a bonus for my therapists, who were old-school psychoanalytic types, hence 'infantile psychosis’ instead of 'autism’ (even though all 'infantile psychosis’ is autism).

Anyway, as it turned out, my mother was not secretly vomiting or secretly doing anything.  She just happened to cough until she threw up, like usual.  Like always.  If I’d been at home instead of at the residential facility, I’d have heard her in the bathroom, from my bedroom across the hall, and thought nothing of it other than to feel bad for her.  It took this stranger inserting her sense of drama into our lives, to twist a chronic illness into a sign of drunkenness and unfit motherhood.  

Given that the state had been trying to take me away from my parents, this was not a innocent or neutral act on the part of this bully.  She knew what she was messing with, she just didn’t care.  So she, who herself deals with chronic illness on a daily basis and presumably knows how this would feel if done to herself, took symptoms of my mother’s chronic illness and tried to make them seem like symptoms of alcoholism. 

I can’t describe how angry this makes me.

I can’t describe how angry this person can make me in general.  She’s one of those people who always has to have the most severe problems in the room.  So if someone else has problems, she’ll find a way of downplaying them, belittling them, or even accusing them of faking.  She has to have the worst abuse history, the worst symptoms from her chronic illnesses, the worst everything.  If anyone claims to have anything similar, she’ll cut them off, interrupt, say something like “No I mean REAL problems” and then go on talking faster and more angrily about exactly why her problems are the realest of the realest problems of all.  She’s one reason I don’t trust anyone who gets competitive about illness and disability:  I’ve never seen such a person be anything but a destructive force in any community they take part in.

And she did her best, in her brief time in our family, to be a destructive force.  The family was in a lot of upheaval because of my psychiatric problems and my placement in a facility, and a lot of blame that was being shot around because of it.  She landed in my family right at that time, and the way my parents tell it, she never lost a chance to drive a wedge between any two family members she could.  Whether it took lying, exaggerating, sneaking around, or orchestrating fights between people, she would and did do whatever she could to sow discord during an already tense time.

And that included taking a totally innocent coughing fit and turning it into evidence of rampant, unchecked alcoholism.

Which, somehow… I can’t describe why.  But that one little incident sums up so much about how some kinds of bullies operate.  I’ve read other things she’s written when she tries to gossip, and it’s always the same:  She’ll put a kernel of truth in there, just enough to seem credible.  And then she’ll fill the rest in with lies.  And dramatic language about how she “caught her in the act” and such.  And people who are vulnerable to that communication style will eat it up, exactly as she wants.

Mind you, there was a lot going wrong with my family at that point in time.  And a lot that was not being talked about.  And she could probably see that.  But instead of involving herself in any constructive way towards helping our family get along better, she instead did her best to tear us apart.  She lied if she had to, she exaggerated if she had to, she’d tell “secrets” that weren’t actually secrets.  She found out about a family member’s childhood imaginary friend and spun it into a tale of “brief psychotic disorder”, which she tried to pass off as an actual diagnosis.

As far as I know, she went on to become a therapist.  This frightens me more than anything else she’s ever done.

But the part where she took my mother’s chronic illness and turned it into evidence of alcoholism is something I can’t forgive easily.  Especially given the way she was always denying the reality or severity of anyone’s chronic illness that was not her own.  This was a calculated act of malicious abuse.  And I can’t get over how fucking nasty a trick that was to pull on us, especially in the context she knew she was doing it in.

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