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A Family Tragicomic
This morning my mother was moved to a rehab facility (the Shepard Center in Atlanta) to help her regain her mobility after a near-fatal heart attack and stroke.
After the horrible experience I had when I drove down to Georgia to visit for Christmas last year, I told myself I was done with her and her bullshit. No more, I said to myself.
Clearly that resolution didn’t stick.
I’ve been rereading Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel Fun Home to help process the weird and complicated feelings I have about my mother. Unlike Bechdel’s father, my mother isn’t gay. In fact, she's probably the straightest person I’ve ever met. She loves cisgender men and hates everyone else, and “everyone else” most definitely includes me.
I don’t write about my family much, at least not without the aid of a heavy lens of fiction. Since they’re all so outside the “normal” range of human experience, I learned early on that no one believes me if I tell the truth. (This story is a good example of what I’m talking about.)
I love autobio comics, and I would love to write them, but I don’t even know where to begin. Like…
I’m mildly allergic to cats. Or, you know what, I’m a normal amount of allergic to cats, which is to say that I’m not really allergic to cats at all. One or two cats don’t bother me, and I’ve spent hours in cat cafés in Japan. When I was younger, I would housesit for people who have multiple cats. I like cats.
My mother used to have two cats, at least until she took me to the house of one of her friends who had five cats. I went through a violent sneezing fit, and I asked her not to make me visit that person’s house again. My mother responded by adopting more cats. Not a few more, but two dozen more. I think that, by the time my parents divorced, we had more than thirty cats in our house.
I had the sort of reaction to this that you’d expect from someone with a mild allergy to cats. My mother used this as an excuse to take me to all sorts of medical specialists. I told every single one of them about the cats, but no one believed me. “Pet hoarding” wasn’t something that was talked about or understood during the 1990s, so why would anyone believe me? Someone eventually recommended that my mother take me to a psychiatrist, who diagnosed me, a tiny little kid, with a personality disorder and potential onset psychosis. The psychiatrist prescribed some extremely scary medication that, thankfully, my parents weren’t willing to pay for.
Everyone praised my mother for being so brave and devoting so much attention to her child. It was Munchhausen by proxy, more or less. The truly scary thing was that my family watched this happening and took away from it that there was something wrong with me. They’ve been treating me as if I’m damaged ever since. This meant that I had to be perfect at all times, since even the slightest aberration in my health and behavior was seen as me reverting to my true nature as, idk, some sort of monster.
I’m not sure how to turn any of this into a story that would make a good comic. It’s way too dark, and I’m still too angry and upset to be able to think of an interesting and clever point of entry into a structured narrative.
Also, having just left my job and moved to a different city, I resent having to pay close to two months’ rent to take care of my mother’s animals and have her house cleaned during her hospital stay.
After the horrible experience I had when I drove down to Georgia to visit for Christmas last year, I told myself I was done with her and her bullshit. No more, I said to myself.
Clearly that resolution didn’t stick.
I’ve been rereading Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel Fun Home to help process the weird and complicated feelings I have about my mother. Unlike Bechdel’s father, my mother isn’t gay. In fact, she's probably the straightest person I’ve ever met. She loves cisgender men and hates everyone else, and “everyone else” most definitely includes me.
I don’t write about my family much, at least not without the aid of a heavy lens of fiction. Since they’re all so outside the “normal” range of human experience, I learned early on that no one believes me if I tell the truth. (This story is a good example of what I’m talking about.)
I love autobio comics, and I would love to write them, but I don’t even know where to begin. Like…
I’m mildly allergic to cats. Or, you know what, I’m a normal amount of allergic to cats, which is to say that I’m not really allergic to cats at all. One or two cats don’t bother me, and I’ve spent hours in cat cafés in Japan. When I was younger, I would housesit for people who have multiple cats. I like cats.
My mother used to have two cats, at least until she took me to the house of one of her friends who had five cats. I went through a violent sneezing fit, and I asked her not to make me visit that person’s house again. My mother responded by adopting more cats. Not a few more, but two dozen more. I think that, by the time my parents divorced, we had more than thirty cats in our house.
I had the sort of reaction to this that you’d expect from someone with a mild allergy to cats. My mother used this as an excuse to take me to all sorts of medical specialists. I told every single one of them about the cats, but no one believed me. “Pet hoarding” wasn’t something that was talked about or understood during the 1990s, so why would anyone believe me? Someone eventually recommended that my mother take me to a psychiatrist, who diagnosed me, a tiny little kid, with a personality disorder and potential onset psychosis. The psychiatrist prescribed some extremely scary medication that, thankfully, my parents weren’t willing to pay for.
Everyone praised my mother for being so brave and devoting so much attention to her child. It was Munchhausen by proxy, more or less. The truly scary thing was that my family watched this happening and took away from it that there was something wrong with me. They’ve been treating me as if I’m damaged ever since. This meant that I had to be perfect at all times, since even the slightest aberration in my health and behavior was seen as me reverting to my true nature as, idk, some sort of monster.
I’m not sure how to turn any of this into a story that would make a good comic. It’s way too dark, and I’m still too angry and upset to be able to think of an interesting and clever point of entry into a structured narrative.
Also, having just left my job and moved to a different city, I resent having to pay close to two months’ rent to take care of my mother’s animals and have her house cleaned during her hospital stay.
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💕
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I just did the math and released that Alison Bechdel was 45 when she published Fun Home, so I guess these things take time.
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Holy shit. I. what. the actual. fuck. Like
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It's very nice to be an adult, but goddamn, no one tells you how to do it.