What Feels Bad Versus What IS Bad

My feelings got hurt very early in the day yesterday.

Nine times out of ten when people hurt your feelings, they don’t mean to. It’s a joke gone wrong or some tiny flex of power like two cats growling at each other. Other people can’t be expected to understand the peculiar jerry-rigging of my psyche, right?

And so it was with this stray remark. It wasn’t intended to make me feel bad.

Still. It put me in a Mood. And the Mood lingered into the afternoon.

I started thinking about my mother. Which is never a good thing.

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I’m fairly sure my mother had undiagnosed borderline personality disorder. Possibly other psychiatric diagnoses as well. She was fine and functional so long as she was able to maintain tight control over her little world. But if one little thing disrupted that control, the domino effect would precipitate a massive decompensation. At her lowest, she would lie in her bed and hallucinate, and refuse to get out of bed to pee – leaving me to change the sheets, try to cajole or bully her into eating, and do the rest of the adult/child role reversal shuffle.

This was all before I was 12, mind you.

My father walked out on us when I was three months old, so it was just my mother and me, the archetypal dyad.

From an early age, I knew my mother was crazy but I also knew that I wasn’t. My mother was incapable of seeing me as anything other than some sort of extension of herself, but I knew perfectly well that we were nothing alike, that I didn’t dream her nightmares, that if I could survive this, this childhood, that I would ultimately be okay.

One of the psychological torture techniques my mother liked most was to leave me on street corners, tell me, That’s it! I’ve had enough, you worthless piece of shit! Your father is coming for you. I’d stand on those street corners crying for hours. This was New York City in the 1960s, you understand. Nobody paid any attention to crying children on street corners.

Then three or four hours later, she’d come back for me: You’re lucky, I’ve changed my mind.

Anyway, it’s always exactly that same feeling of being abandoned on a street corner that sweeps over me whenever anyone really hurts my feelings.

A sense that I must have done something very, very awful for them to withdraw their love and approval so completely. Though honestly! I didn't have a clue what it was that I’d done.

And along with that sense, a feeling that I was very, very unsafe.

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Mood lasted until early afternoon when I went off to tutor Imane.

And realized: Hey! I don’t have problems! Imane has problems.

Boy howdy, does she.

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Imane’s living the life of Sara Crewe with a host family that’s actively cruel to her. No shit! They haven’t even given her a key to the house she’s living in. If she leaves the house, she’s forced to wait outside for hours and hours in all sorts of weather, rain, +100 heat indices, and one imagines snow once winter starts.

The host family has a daughter who’s a few years younger than Imane and who creeps up to Imane in the middle of the night clutching scissors, hissing, I’m going to cut your throat; I’m going to lacerate your face, leave long white scars, and no man is ever going to want you.

Part of the issue with the host family – I think: Imane’s English is not good, my French is not good – is that no one is paying any money for Imane’s support. Is this a common arrangement among Islamic families? That they foster one another’s offspring with no restitution? I have no idea, but however it may work in the rest of the world, it’s hard to pull off in the United States where things are expensive. The host family, thus, is resentful that Imane is putting a strain on already strained resources. Understandably resentful, I suppose.

Meanwhile, Imane’s father is putting pressure on her: Get a job. So that you can sponsor me to emigrate.

With Imane’s indifferent English, it’s unlikely that she can score a job on the books.

She has been offered a job off the books in a nearby restaurant, and later on today, Lois Lane and I are going by that restaurant – (a) to fly the colors for Imane; show that she’s not friendless; (b) to make sure some mechanism is in place whereby they will actually pay her; and (c) to make sure that no one intends to sexually abuse her since she’s such a cute young thing.

I’m afraid that there is very little else I can do for her in practical terms.

We’ve started on GED prep materials. The goal is to get prepared to take the GED early next summer, and to research college/university programs that might possibly give her a full scholarship. She’s bright! Has been picking up English very quickly, and, of course, is fluent in Arabic and French. She’s also extremely good at math.

But her life right now is very bad, and if she’s drowning – and she may well be – the hand I hold out is not strong enough to pull her back on shore.