Something Was Wrong - S2 Ep4: Life Isn't Always Fair

Episode Date: September 4, 2019

*Content Warning: gaslighting, domestic abuse, emotional and physical abuse, distressing themes, childhood abuse, medical trauma, factitious disorder.Music from Glad Rags album Wonder UnderSources: http://parentification-researchlab.com/ https://www.cancer.org/ 

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There's more to imagine when you listen. This podcast is intended for mature audiences and could be triggering to some. Please use discretion when listening. Dr. Lisa M. Hooper and her team at the University of Iowa Research Lab, define parentification as a type of role reversal and boundary distortion in which children or adolescents assume developmentally inappropriate levels of responsibility in their family. In the parentification phenomenon, the overarching role of the parentified youth can be described as that of caregiver, caring for others at the expense of caring for self. It is often clinically observed and empirically examined along two dimensions. Instrumental and emotional parentification.

Instrumental parentification primarily involves completing physical tasks for the family, such as taking care of relatives with serious medical conditions, grocery shopping, paying bills, or ensuring that a younger sibling attends and does well in school. Emotional parentification often involves a child or adolescent taking on the role and responsibilities of confidant, secret keeper, or emotional healer for family members. Parenthification is often observed in families where the parent or caregiver has experienced a serious medical condition or mental health disorder. Parental substance use and abuse are also common in families where parentification exists. I'm Tiffany Reese, and this is, something was wrong.

The American Cancer Society reports that approximately one in five children have serious emotional symptoms a year or more after a parent's death. A 2011 study showed that two months after losing a parent, one and four children were depressed. If the parent has a long and difficult battle with cancer, the child may have started grieving before the actual death. Sometimes, emotional symptoms can become more severe and interfere with the child or the family's Having cancer is hard, and it affects the person with cancer in each family member or loved one socially and emotionally. This is known as the psychosocial effect of having cancer. Just as there are cancer treatment teams and surgical teams, there are also teams of experts, each with different focus on mental or social health, who understand how cancer affects a family.

A psychosocial team can offer the patient and the family support during this difficult time. Psychosocial support can include mental health counseling, education, spiritual support, group support, and many other such services. Sylvia's daughter was put into therapy by her grandmother to help her process the illness and possible death of her mother. During her time in art therapy, Sylvia's daughter and her therapist made a video, pretending to have a talk show where she answered the questions of other children whose parents have cancer. Please note, in the clip you are about to hear from this DVD, the voices of the therapist and Sylvia's daughter have been changed for anonymity purposes. I'm eight years old. Okay. And who's sick in your family? My mother is sick.

Uh-huh. And do you know what her illness is? Yes, I do. It is ovarian cancer. It was first to know her ovarian, and then it traveled to her back. Oh, man. Okay. Well, the reason I asked for you to come here today because I've been getting lots of letters from kids in our community who have parents with cancer or other serious illnesses and they're having a hard time dealing with their feelings and knowing what to do and since you're an expert in this area I thought I would invite you here and maybe you could answer some of their questions do you think you could do that yeah I could do that that would be awesome okay well let me start off um this first first The first letter I got is from a boy named Roger.

And Roger's eight years old, and he wants to know what are some ways that he can express his anger. He's feeling really angry about his mom having cancer. What are some ways he can express his anger without getting into trouble? Without getting into trouble. Let me think. I think one of the best ways to do, like the best things to do is to think. to think of something happy, do something happy every, do something you enjoy every day and try

to just let that slip off so you don't just feel angry and you can just let your anger go. Oh, so do something happy so you maybe aren't feeling so angry? Yeah. Okay, okay. Do you ever get angry about your mom's illness? Yeah, I get angry when people stare at her because she's lost all her hair They just don't understand. That's why they stare because they don't understand why she's like that. They just don't know about the illness. Right, right. Okay.

Let's see here. Next, here's a girl named Sally, and Sally's seven years old. It's always harder when you're younger, I think. You think it is? The older you get a little easier. Yeah, like my brother, he doesn't understand yet. How long have you been dealing with this? How long?

Well, about, I think it happened two years ago. Two years, it's been two years since she had figured out she had the disease. Boy, that's a long time, isn't it? Yeah. Okay, well, Sally says that she gets really sad about her grandma having breast cancer, and she wants to know what she can do to feel better. Well, if she's sad, maybe she's sad, maybe she gets really sad about her grandma having breast cancer. Well, if she's sad, she's sad,

she could spend more time with her grandma and the more they spend time together, maybe she'll start feeling a little better about it and she'll start understanding a little more and just like she'll just be a little happier and not as sad. Now grandma, if she's in bed and resting a lot because she's going through all her treatments and that, what are things she could do to spend time with grandma while she's not feeling well? Well, what I do with my mom is I hop in bed with her and she likes to read. So I read with her and I sometimes do like get her water. I warm up some food or make her stuff to eat.

You can spend time with your grandma. Sally can spend time with your grandma by just helping her and maybe doing things you guys enjoy that you guys can do together when she's in bed. Great. Thanks. I think that's going to help Sally a lot. Here's a letter from a kid named Ryan. Ryan's nine. Okay.

And he wants to know how you first felt when you found out that your mom had cancer. I was so, I think I just was so upset and I was mad and I was sat at the same time. I was upset and I was feeling like, why this happened to her? Why couldn't it happen to someone else? It was like that. Sounds like you just felt like this isn't fair. Yeah. Yeah.

And then I figured out life isn't always fair. Right, that's right. You're very wise. Thank you. So the daughter, I noticed that she doesn't look healthy. Like, her hair is very thin and not healthy. If you've ever seen a blonde person who is not healthy, their hair has a straw-like quality or even a brunette,

so their hair would be very strong. like. Her hair was very thin, very, very thin for a child. It had no luster. It had no shine. I did not think she was nutritionally very fed very well. And it kind of showed. The boy still wasn't talking very much. He could talk. He could communicate, but he did not talk often. But his sickness kind of went away. I do not remember her cooking. for the children very much. And I did not cook nutritionally great meals for them because it would be like mac and cheese

or something quick because I had to come cook for my family. There was always food in the kitchen. I believe that the children were feeding themselves a lot. I believe that the daughter took on an adult role. I believe she was a very old soul type of child anyway. I was concerned for the children. At this point, they're going to do the house swapping in. I want you to think about how many moves that is, though.

Five or six already? Yeah. I was supposed to move in with her at the house where Sylvia attempted suicide. The moving day came. I packed all my stuff in the car. And I could not get a hold of her for anything. I didn't know what else to do. I just turned around and went back home,

I think it was a couple days later that she finally got a hold of me. I was like, uh, yeah, what's up? And she said she was either going to be forced to buy her home or move, and that she was just really stressed out and kind of shut down and then didn't get a hold of me. And then I think it was like a few months after that when we finally wound up moving in together. You met Jen earlier this season. She was a co-worker of both T and Sylvia. After Jason and Sylvia separated, Jen became.

became roommates with Sylvia and her two children in Citrus Heights, California. She had told us that the cancer had spread to her back. So, you know, we would see her trying to do things like lift heavy bags of dog food and like, oh, no, you know, we did everything from bathing her dogs. We wouldn't let her carry anything heavy. I was a really clean person and I loved to clean, so I always made sure the house was picked up and vacuumed. And if she had her sheet, her bed sheets and blankets and the dryer, I would take them and put them on her bed for her and wash the dishes and make meals for everyone. The kids loved it when I cooked for them and colored with them and helped them with their homework and played like video games. Like they just

like sucked up that attention. And I think that they felt special, you know, to get some solid attention like that. They were really, really close together. And I think they kind of leaned on each other for support because their mom wasn't always there for them mentally. She was a nurse at the prison in Sacramento. It was weird because she would have these printed out like work schedules that she would put on the refrigerator. And then like on the days and time she was supposed to be at work like she would never be there. She was always at home. It was just so bizarre.

And it was just like a schedule like she could have made and printed out. herself. I don't know if she really worked at the prison or not. I don't know if that was, you know, another story she made up or if she really worked there. I don't know. But she came home one day and was like, I was at work working and one of the other nurses came up to me and told me that she knew who Jason was and that they had a relationship together. And I was like, what the? Like how? That's so bizarre. One time she said her, Boston got hit by a car and passed away, but like she never brought it into the hospital for body care or anything. The really weird one was she had this cat named Boomer, and he was this really beautiful,

friendly, long-haired orange cat, and she brought him in one day, and he was like just a sack of bones and all of his skin and fur was missing from his back. She like had said something like he had been locked in an attic and nobody knew and they just found him. It looked like he had been burned. But once the cat got at the hospital and was receiving regular care, he made a full recovery. I mean, she said she was a registered nurse, but I think there's some thought she wasn't quite a registered nurse. She was like an LVN, but she was a nanny. It wasn't very long.

I want to say it was like a month or maybe two at the most for this baby that was really sick. and had some kind of condition where her skin would sluff off. So she did bring the baby in one day, and the baby was wrapped from head to toe in, like, ace bandages. So she would tell friends of ours that I was an awful roommate. I didn't pitch in. I was gone for, like, weeks at a time, which was not true. My boyfriend lived out of town at the time about an hour away, so I would go stay the night there sometimes. But I think that she just got so used to me helping so much and like relying on that that when I wasn't there to do those things, like, you know, she got upset. I mean, my feelings were just really hurt.

Like I'm like, here I am, you know, putting in all this time and effort. And for her to go behind my back and, you know, tell our close friends that stuff that's not true, I just, I was really hurt by that. She bred bulldogs and had bulldog puppies pretty often. So she wouldn't be there and I would be there alone and she would call me up and be like, oh, hey, Jason's going to come over and hang out with the puppies. And I would just think, well, okay, but that's really weird, you know, because he was like abusive and cheated on you and now he's like coming over to the house to hang out with the dogs. It was just so bizarre.

Any interaction I had with him was always great. He was really nice and cordial and friendly. We didn't really have conversations about her childhood, but she would always say, like, you know, her mom and dad were like horrible people and they weren't there for her when she was growing up, and that's all that I really knew. After I moved out, Sylvia got a lot sicker.

She was in a wheelchair. She wasn't really able to function, wearing diapers in bed, and needed help getting up and physically going to the bathroom. So even after I moved out, I would take shifts there, still doing laundry, cleaning, making sure they had food, things like that. I never ever saw her physically ill. I never saw her throw up. In that house, she got additional sicknesses. So she became, she said the cancer had spread to her brain. She said she was going to Stanford for surgery. She told me that she had reached out to Jason,

that she was really lonely and she missed her best friend and that maybe they couldn't be married, but maybe they could still be friends. And did I, was I mad at her for that? And I said, no, you know, you, I understand being alone. that being your safety person. And in retrospect, I don't know if she was stringing him along. I don't know if they ever stopped talking.

I don't know what he was told. I don't know quite what that relationship was. I would imagine guessing they were hooking up. I'm not sure. She told me that Jason took her to Stanford. So I go after work to check on her when she's home. So she was gone for like a day. I go to check on her.

She was in bed. Her back of her head was shaved, completely shaved, and there was a one and a half inch, one inch incision that was stitched up and looked like an incision. It looked, it was stitched up properly. I felt horrific for her. She had to have brain surgery. The cancer has spread. I can remember she had beside her bed this spaghetti strainer, like the plastic spaghetti strainers. the big ones and it was full of pill bottles like all different kinds of medications and like she would have a timer that would go up and like it's time to take the pill and she would just be taking like handfuls of medications and pills and such she didn't get out of bed a whole lot her mom came for a visit and i communicating with her mom you know on and off while her mom is here she told me that she was having seizures i remember her mom going i need to get marijuana Like, she's so sick from this chemo drug.

We need to get her marijuana. And I went on my way to work to check on her. And she was in the bedroom. And her mom was having a business meeting via the computer. So I just went in there and I was sitting with her and talking with her. And just like, I feel so terrible. Like, I just can't do this anymore. And then all of a sudden she has a freaking seizure.

And it's a grand mall. I mean, the full arching of the body. the body, the mouth, the everything. And I call her mom in and her mom's like, just roll her on her side, it's what we've been doing and she comes out of it. And her mom goes back in the living room and I'm sitting there with her and she gets up

and starts to go out of bed and walk in the kitchen. I go, what are you doing? She'll say, I need some bread pudding. And I go, you just had a seizure. She'll say, why? I go, you just had a seizure, a full seizure. Like, and she's like, and she's like, oh, I didn't know.

And I'm like, yeah, you need to get back in bed. I'll go use some bread pudding or, you know, whatever. But it was just clearly no recognition of having a seizure, no, didn't even know that she had had a seizure, which I actually have come to find out now. That's pretty common. Like, you don't even know you have a seizure. You think you passed out, but no, you had a seizure. As I was leaving to go to work, I stopped and I talked to her mom, and her mom's like,

have you looked at those medications that she's been taking? And I said, to be honest with you now, I mean, I see. the giant colander full of medications and she goes, yeah, I was looking at them the other days trying to figure out what, you know, is going on. And I noticed there are a bunch of psych meds. And I was like, hmm, like I never, I didn't look at them. And she goes, do you know who this doctor is? And she said the doctor's name. And I said, no. And she goes, well, he's a psychiatrist, but, and there's all these different meds and there's different meds from different psychiatrists. So I'm kind of confused. Like, I mean, I understand she's depressed.

you know, but I'm just kind of confused. And I go, I don't know, I just ask her to call the doctor and have them go over all the meds with you. It's probably a good idea. She was like, okay. And so at this point, the mom has to go back home, go back to Canada and work. So I make a big, giant poster board chart.

And it has, who's bringing dinner this day? Who's coming to check after work this day? People who own the house that were renting her the house, they lived in the house next door. They started helping out. So it was a married couple and they had two adult children. And the adult daughter was helping out. Here's where it all goes terribly, terribly crazy wrong.

Next time. You think you know me, you don't know me well at all. You think you know me you don't know me well at all. Something was wrong is written. recorded, edited and produced by me, Tiffany Reetz. All of the music by Gladrags. Hear their album Wonder Under on iTunes. Follow the hashtag Something Was Wrong Pod on Instagram. You can now purchase something was wrong merch at sw.w.threadless.com.

The books referenced on this show can be found linked in the show notes. If you or someone you know is being abused, please contact the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799 safe. That's 1-800-799-7233. Thank you. If you'd like to help support the show, please consider leaving a five-star review on iTunes and sharing the podcast with your family and friends.

A neighbor and garbage man and gynecologists, and record producer and ex-boyfriend. No, don't do that. Yeah, just like everyone you know. That'd be cool. Thank you all. Thank you.