goodbye Peter Pan
Comparisons aren’t healthy, until they are. With age, I’ve come to see the truth for the trickster it is, shapeshifting to avoid being caught. We need to stitch it to the source when we can, like Peter Pan’s shadow.
Like that shadow, when we bring together what we see before us and what we’ve seen behind us, we find similarities so striking as to be twins, repeats, patterns. The human brain, like other animal brains, developed pattern recognition for survival. We learned to rely on the patterns of seasons, weather, animal migration, growth of plants and their fruits and seeds. We watched the sun’s changing position above us during each day. We learned to find our way by the stars turning overhead at night.
We also learned to recognize disruption in a known pattern. Something’s up. What’s going on. We would seek to understand, and still do, because impactful information resides within the causes of disruption.
Our brains are absolute suckers for patterns. Especially familiar patterns. When we are immersed in familiar patterns, we think we know what to expect, and so our internal sentinel relaxes its guard. This is the great part about familiar patterns, when they’re healthy. When we’ve created patterns that support our safety and well-being, our sympathetic nervous system gets a break; no fight-or-flight adrenaline needed here. Our parasympathetic nervous system has no need to rush in and soothe the internal ruffled feathers. All is right with the world. Our brain gets comfortable, dozy. It drives us to work without really thinking. It eats food without noticing. It makes choices that replicate the familiar patterns without real intention or effort. We’re not questioning; we’re not observing, making notes. Because we’re no longer finding the pattern: we’re living the pattern.
All well and good – unless the pattern is unhealthy. When the familiar is unhealthy, troubling unhealthy reactions rise to meet it, to manage it. To make sense of it, somehow. Because what is familiar is what occurs over and over, routinely, even if it is toxic to our physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual health; if we have never seen any way that we can change the pattern, or if we have been taught that there is no need to change the pattern, we learn to accept the pattern.
This explains the insidiousness of bad patterns set in childhood. Children accept whatever patterns we lay down before them, around them, and these become patterns within them. They have no power to challenge the patterns we create. Especially when we teach them that there is no need to challenge the pattern. Or when we teach them they will suffer consequences if they even try.
As a kid, I secretly hated Peter Pan. Because the J.M. Barrie book had been made into an animated Disney movie in 1953, when it came to the local theater or was shown on TV or however it arrived in the middle of Iowa in the 1970’s, I got to see it. As if it was a wonderful adventure. Maybe it was, for some kids. For me, it visually represented sick patterns I was living, though I couldn’t have told you that at the time. I couldn’t yet recognize the pattern: I was living the pattern.
A girl in bed in a nightgown confronts a boy sneaking into her bedroom to find her. Her parents aren’t paying attention to her situation. She feels responsible for two younger siblings. The younger siblings idolize the boy, though he is completely self-focused and self-serving. He forces an adult role on the girl, to be mother to himself and the lost boys. Dangers menace in the boy’s world – a pirate, with a hook for one hand and a sword in the other; a crocodile, the unseen threat always following closely behind. The girl is misunderstood and mistreated repeatedly during her “adventure,” which is happening simply because she caught the boy’s attention. In the end, she must save her siblings from his world.
And still, of course, she loves him. So enmeshed was I in my own sexual abuse by my older brother that I could not examine these disturbing parallels. But did I openly hate Peter Pan? Of course not. He’s the hero of the story, the bringer of magic, the guide to eternal youth. As if even one more day in my distorted, confusing, horrific childhood would be desirable. As if his smug demands on Wendy didn’t set my teeth on edge.
I didn’t hate Peter Pan – I decided to put on a play, which should have been billed as “Peter Pan – a Psychodrama,” wherein I myself played our hero, my best friend played Wendy, and we invited our families to our Saturday matinee in her family room. My brother was not among the audience members.
But I did hate Peter Pan. To me, this hatred seemed completely irrational. For years after the play, I felt deeply conflicted about our theatrical debut. I had no idea why, reasoning that maybe I should have let my friend choose whether she wanted to be Wendy or Peter. But even then, I knew there had been no choice. The thought of playing Wendy made my stomach lurch, so much so that I would immediately make jokes about how silly the whole production had been. I assuaged my guilt by reminding her and myself that she got the choice double roll of playing Tinkerbell, as well. Plus Captain Hook. She was an entire theater company. I starred as my abuser.
In my adult years, I made relationship choices that reflected the patterns I had lived in childhood, powerless back then to change them, punished and ridiculed for reacting to them, taught as if following a script to accept them as familiar and normal. My normal led me as a teenager to marry a husband who didn’t care enough to love me or our children – my mother’s patterns, unexamined by me, repeating in my life. Like Wendy Darling, I had chosen him simply because he appeared. Like Peter Pan, he was only concerned with his own agenda. Like Captain Hook, my mother’s relentless vendetta against me for her own misery left me to walk the plank.
My familiar normal then led to a second husband – and here the story becomes even more interesting. Because the first marriage failed, I chose someone who was everything the first partner was not. The first was close to my age, we started college together; he was intellectually superficial but easygoing, tried to be fun but was just irresponsible, plus emotionally absent, physically absent. The second husband was thirteen years older than me, had a master’s degree and a career, was intellectually brilliant – and responsible to the point of controlling, emotionally abusive, and physically menacing. He not only owned a home, he had a wife and a child. Whom he left, supposedly for me. Because of me. Because he had noticed me, and couldn’t stop thinking about me.
I had been well taught to receive attention from whomever wanted me. When Peter Pan comes in the window, you don’t chase him off the sill like he’s trespassing – you take his hand. You go with him, because he’s convincing, and sad, and you’re kind, and neglected, and it fits your patterns, which you still have not examined. Because who wants to sit and look at painful patterns?
Why should I own those patterns? I didn’t create them. Those aren’t mine.
I liked living with him. He was attentive, and I liked the attention. He thought I was so smart, so sexy, so creative. I was magic to him. He was an adventure to me. Plus he did the dishes. He cooked. He talked about philosophy, religion, politics, history. I was interested and young and impressed by his seemingly broad scope of knowledge. We had a lot of sex. He wanted to get married.
I did not want to get married. I had seen marriage and decided it was not for me. But his brilliant intellect found ways to spin reasons in the air for why we should get married. He cajoled. He convinced. I didn’t see it for what it was, at the time: he pressured, like the smoothest, friendliest salesman, to seal the deal, get what he wanted. The clincher came when he announced he’d talked to an attorney, who had said he’d have a better chance of getting custody of his son if we were married. I looked at my own sons, little boys sitting at the supper table. His son fell chronologically right between them. My daughter looked up, watching it all.
“Common law is enough,” he’d delivered his closer. At the time, I was 26. He was 39. The tan line from his previous wedding band had nearly faded. He and his lost boy needed a mother. The sexy, Madonna-whore kind of mother popular in porn and the 1950’s when he was born. So we wrote vows, and in our living room we gave each other suitably smug, arrogant rings with Sanskrit verse written around them: Om mani padme hum. All hail the jewel in the lotus. Look at us, so evolved, becoming enlightened like Buddha. We believed no one had ever had a love as rare and deep and true as ours.
I woke up the next morning after the ring ceremony absolutely furious. Enraged. I had no idea why, except that I had awakened feeling tricked. A feeling I couldn’t shake.
It started only a few months later. He needed the more reliable car to get to and from work, so he drove my car, and left me his 1980s Corolla, with the caveat that it was old and probably shouldn’t be driven too far. I drove it to take the kids hiking; he berated me. My spending became an issue, even when it was for shoes for the kids, which I bought secondhand. My amazing, fantastic poetry was now problematic, because I went to poetry readings too late at night, and was surely flirting with all the poets and would cheat on him. Getting pregnant with his baby soothed his irritable insecurity at first, giving him an opportunity to strut his sexual prowess openly; however, he was furiously jealous when a male neighbor once carried my grocery bags in from the car while I waddled up the steps, out of breath. By the time the baby was a year old, our fighting was intense and destructive.
Because my amazing, fantastic poetry was indeed problematic. It was on those notebook pages, written in pencil, that I was beginning to examine the script I had learned as a child. Vivid, twisted scenes began playing out from the past, and I took these new pages and read them into the open mic on stage like reading them into a court record. As if the power of the truth would set me free. As if that truth would not be stitched to the feet of the truth now, here in the middle of all the old patterns.
But I was out on the far end of the plank now. Once I started examining the patterns and unearthing the abuse I had wanted so desperately not to matter, I realized how much it mattered. It was here, now, the crocodile that tick-tick-ticked from the shadows.
When the familiar is unhealthy, troubling unhealthy reactions rise to meet it, to manage it. To make sense of it, somehow. I careened emotionally, driven into a mania of writing, hysterical at times, exhausted afterward. My husband was pushed to the far end of his own plank by my process. He screamed at me, hysterical himself, waking me up in the middle of the night by ripping off the bed covers and turning on the overhead light: “We’re not done! Get up and talk to me!” Other days he would offer approaches, methods, fairy tales to me who was up to her armpits in the mud and blood and horror of her own personal war. I would reject his post-rant hyper-rationalism; as if reliving my nightmares could be anything but insane, anyway. He was terrified our fighting might lead me to leave him, so he bullied me, blocking the doorway when I wanted to exit a room, grabbing my upper arms when I tried to walk out the front door and holding me against the wall, or shoving me back into the deepest recesses of the house, back into the bedroom, onto the bed. And I would not be held captive on a bed ever again.
Yet worse by far, a thousand times worse, was the incessant chipping away at my sense of self. His pattern included this death by a thousand cuts, and he was a master swordsman, making my mother look like a cartoon caricature by comparison. The man who had loved and desired me, who wanted to marry me and raise children with me, made sure to tell me in small, hardly noticeable statements that I couldn’t manage anything – not money, not grocery shopping, not cooking, not housekeeping, not a job, not a future, nothing. Then he told me I’d never be okay. He meant I was broken, my mind was broken, and he told me I’d need therapy forever. When I attempted suicide soon after, his response was that he felt bad, too, and wanted me to comfort him.
Instead, I went to counseling. That’s where I learned that domestic violence, relationship abuse, takes many forms. I learned that abusers come in all colors, all genders, all orientations, all ages. It is based in insecurity and low self-esteem, so control is a predominant issue. It starts with frustrations, disagreements about how little things are done, like grocery shopping or cooking. Maybe he always needs to choose the restaurant, just so you go somewhere good, or makes the weekend plans, often for activities he prefers, where he drives, he decides, he pays, because that’s just treating you like a lady. Abusers can be quite charming between episodes, even as relationship roles are often seriously outdated stereotypes. Victims experience gaslighting, where your words and emotions are twisted back at you in ways you never intended or expressed, causing you to question what you remember, question your reality. You are “teased” and the butt of “jokes,” being belittled even in front of friends and family, whom the abuser will alienate, attempting to drive them away so it can be just the two of you. You’ll notice you’re being used for things, money, your car, your apartment, while the abuser has plenty of logical-sounding reasons that all just happen to serve his needs. There’s a possessiveness to the abuser’s affection. You’ll find there are topics you don’t bring up, trying not to trigger an unpleasant exchange. It becomes feeling like you’re walking on eggshells, trying not to trigger anger. I learned that educated, middle class men often don’t hit with fists, so they don’t leave a mark. You have no physical evidence of anything. They hit with words, and hook you with emotional daggers to the heart. They throw furniture, like my husband, or a log on a hiking trip, even while he carried our baby girl in the backpack. But he was just frustrated.
These things he did only in front of my older children, never in front of his son when he visited. My husband never tried to get custody of his son, which was supposedly the impetus for getting married in the first place.
My three older children remember. They have their own ugly memories of that time. They know that energy when they feel it. They recognize the shadow coming through the window for what it is.
But our baby girl does not have these memories. And what’s more, when my second husband and I split up, she lived with him every other week until she started school, and then every weekend until high school. All those weeks and weeks in the summers.
Children accept whatever patterns we lay down before them, around them, and these become patterns within them. They have no power to challenge the patterns we create. Especially when we teach them that there is no need to challenge the pattern. They learn to accept the familiar as normal.
Normal…except. Except that poetry prevailed.
Poetry saved me. I. SAVED. ME. By letting myself feel all my feelings, and by noticing the quality of my life. My one and only life. By questioning what was happening, making notes, writing what was hard to say in words. And once I wrote the words, I began to sing them. I sang half brother, half lover, “I adore you, I despise you.” I left Peter Pan behind, because I grew up. I took ownership of my past, my patterns, and the patterns my parents taught me by terrible legacy and by mistake.
If I could tell her anything now, I would say: notice the disruption of your life, the life you had before. Because impactful information resides within the causes of disruption. What seems familiar is not necessarily healthy. See the patterns. The power of your own clear-eyed understanding of the truth will most certainly set you free.
And a warning: this is the adult world. No one is coming to fix this. No one is coming to save you.
You have the power to save you.
SAVE YOURSELF.
Please.