Disconnection Through Last Names

How many names is too many names when they connect you to nothing but air? I used to think I’ve had four last names from the time of my birth to now. I have many times said (with much conviction) that last names are meaningless. People asked me why I decided to take my husband’s last name and it was so easy to answer that I took it because I’d already gone through three last names, why not a fourth? Plus, it’s convenient to share a last name with your spouse. I would say – what’s another man’s last name to me? I am not defined by my last names.

I find myself in the peculiar position of feeling completely defined, now, by never having shared a last name with a parent who wanted me or cared about me. The only name that has ever been shared with me with love and intention, is my husband’s last name. The very one I was so flippant about taking for the convenience of it.

I begin to understand why people get attached to the provenance of their last names, and sentimental about how it connects them to others (or separates them). Today I see myself as a child in such a strange new uncomfortable and disconnected light. I always felt disconnected, unloved, and unwanted, but this came from all the abuse, neglect, and abandonment I experienced. I never thought I’d feel a new level of this by learning something new about the last names I had, and – didn’t actually have.

My first surname (assigned to me at birth) was Johansen. It’s the last name my father was using when I was born, which was his step-dad’s last name. My father ditched me when I was two and shortly afterwards also ditched his step-dad’s last name and started using his original last name on his birth certificate.

All my life I thought that once my bio-father divorced my mom that she changed my last name to her maiden name, that I shared a last name with my mom and my brother before she remarried. Even though I share a bio father with my brother; he wasn’t even born yet when our parents divorced and he was denounced by our father, so when he was born he got our mother’s last name. I believed we shared the last name Laforest until sometime in my middle childhood when I started using our step-dad’s last name. My brother never stopped using Laforest. I think he made the better decision than me.

But until recently, I didn’t remember having made any decision about this at all.

My mother recently told me that she never changed my last name to Laforest. I never shared a last name with my brother OR my mother. I was never a Laforest. He was connected to our mother by name, but not me. She told me that when she married our step-dad (when I was 5 years old) that told her I wanted the same last name as him. This makes me so deeply sad for who I was at 5 years old, so hopeful that a shared last name could deliver a real dad into my life. Apparently they indulged my wishes (casually) and started putting my step-dad’s last name on school paperwork.

However, my stepdad never adopted me and they didn’t make the name change legal. I know why that is NOW. He didn’t want a legal connection with or any responsibility for his step-children.

Until I was around 21 years old, I believed that I was legally connected to my stepdad and my sister through our last name. I believed, for 16 years, that my stepdad had adopted me as his real daughter. Then I realized that Bass was never my legal last name.

My legal last name had always been Johansen. A name that not even the man who gave it to me had been connected to legally by the time I was 2 years old.

At the time I discovered this, I had also (for the first time in my life) confronted my stepdad about abusing my brother (I wasn’t brave enough to confront him about abusing me as well – until just two months ago) and I told him that if he didn’t acknowledge the abuse and tell Zeke he was sorry, that I would sever our connection for good.

He did NOT acknowledge the abuse and I’m still unsure if he ever actually told my brother he was sorry for doing it. But I didn’t cut our relationship off. I compromised. Somehow I thought that having at least discussed this dark shared past that we could build a relationship based on love and honestly. I also didn’t want to be cut off from my little sister.

I made the bold decision that I would legally change my last name to Bass, in a gesture of great forgiveness and solidarity. I was a very old 21 year old, but I naively thought this gesture would make my dad finally accept me as his real daughter and that my sister and I would be equals and the past would heal itself and I would BELONG to people, to family.

By that time I had successfully suppressed a lot of parts of myself and one of them was that same hopeful 5 year old who wanted to share a name with her stepdad. I now realize she found ways to steer the ship of my life from the depths of myself in which I’d buried her. She found a way to rise up to be named and claimed! At the time I couldn’t really explain or account for the actions I’d taken. For so many years since then I’ve marveled at what a strange decision it was to legally change my last name to Bass as an adult right after my stepdad lied and denied abuse. Why would I change my name to his after all the abuse he’d put me and my brother through?

If you had asked me, while I was standing in line at the social security office in San Francisco (with all my paperwork in my fist) why I was changing my name to Bass, I would have told you that I never planned to get married and I’d used the name casually for so long that it made sense. I would have sworn to you that no part of me was changing my name to legally match my stepdad’s in hopes of being more real to him.

I’m beginning to suspect that the light inside my spirit that’s kept me from being swallowed whole in darkness was that same little kid I used to be, full of hope in spite of already having been sexually abused and waterboarded to stop her from crying by the time she was four years old.

I only realized she was even there inside me, still trying to be heard and cared for in 2017, during my first year of very intense therapy.

She’s the source of my enduring light, fight, and strength. She’s been the core source of my joy, my humor, and my survival. She’s been driving this vessel we share all along, from way down in the deep, because she is irrepressible. She kept resurfacing. I just didn’t recognize her. She was a strange force in myself that felt otherly, a person I shared my body with but didn’t know to be part of my whole. Her presence contributed to the feeling I was going crazy, of being crowded in my body with what felt like other people.

All of them me, all of the time.

She’s the hopeful and action-motivated force of nature that decided that if her stepdad never gave her his name or legal guardianship, if he never chose HER as his child, she could choose HIM and his name and that would heal the past and he would be honored and pleased to know that she was a very good girl and a really fun person to be a dad to. She was wrong, but today I find myself appreciating her childish resolve to fix what’s broken.

I’m appreciating her creative simplistic approach to fixing broken shit. Being wrong is part of how kids learn. She wasn’t allowed to be wrong back then. Today (right now, in the present moment) I see that it’s up to me to allow her to have been wrong without punishment. Strip away all of my abusers voices in my head and parent my child self the way I parented my son – with love, patience, and the odd creativity that us neurologically divergent humans need to be raised.

I’m finding out who I am all over again, in real time. So many missing pieces, so many scorched buried bones, so much skin and blood littered across the places I’ve lived as life spat me out of its carnivorous jaws. There are also delightful discoveries, happy flashes of memory, scraps of glitter and silk georgette shawls falling out of old wooden trunks on houseboats.

I had no idea last names meant anything to me. I was wrong. My final last name, the one I have now, connects me with love to my husband and our son. I’ve had it for 32 years now and it’s testament to how we can find our place in the world with people who value us even if we began life belonging to no one. Williamson is my happy ending.

I believe that I came into this world with jazz-hands and an indestructible curiosity fueled by a neuro-weird brain – and if I can put myself back together again properly, that’s how I intend to leave this world:

Shaking my jazz-hands at an audience of wildflowers and lizards, singing the only part of the lyrics I remember to “Take Me Home, Country Roads”, and telling the spiders not to breach my space bubble so we can be friends under rolling dragon clouds.

Late Winter Gardening

It’s been an endless week, one day bleeding into the next. A blur of gathering with people, sitting immobile in my big chair in pain, doom-scrolling on the sly (from my better selves), and then (finally) I got out into the garden. I’m trying to get out there more often. I’m always saying that, and the struggle is real. When I go out there I rarely want to come back in. I’m always pushing myself in ways my body tells me is stupid and mean to my future self. It’s an ongoing argument that both sides of me win. I’m in more pain today. Have spent half of it on ice. My back hurts the most, but my knee too, has been exacerbated.

But it felt SO GOOD. Everything gets quieter in this messy loud head of mine when I’m in the garden. I love how it feels to use my muscles to dig plants in – and dig other plants out. I love how it feels to pull out the sour-grass in large heavy clumps that I dump in the compost like a visual sigh of relief. I love the smell of the soil. I love removing dead growth from perennials and trees, shaping them up for the best possible spring growth season.

Even when I look around and see the chaos of what I haven’t done and may never get to, I’m still okay. Acres of sour-grass I’ll never conquer, the blood peach I have never yet truly pruned because it’s still a bit spindly… I know the way to help it get more lush is to prune it. It’s okay. It’s really okay out there with the plants. The Pink Pearl apple has developed burr knots and what looks like fire-blight. I might be able to save it by cutting all that off. Or I might be more comfortable taking it out altogether. It’s okay.

We all have to go sometime. I’m okay making these choices in my garden. I’ve had to make similar choices with my beloved animals too. Sometimes your heart breaks a little, or a lot, but I’m okay making the choices. I trust that I’m always working towards the best outcome possible for my whole ecosystem.

Gonna need to work on balancing what my body can handle (and what’s healthy for it) with what my mind needs (and what’s healthy for it). Hardest thing in the world to do when you’ve spent a lot of time in survival mode. So much longer than most (maybe any) people know. So I pushed myself yesterday because it was so good for my heart and my head.

I started pruning the Sevillano olive. We moved it so many times to find where it could thrive that I haven’t ever pruned it since we bought it. The Manzanilla is next. It’s probably some function of human hubris that makes me think I can hear the plants, but I do. I do think I can hear them, and it’s an unwritten and non-vocal language I speak.

I love the winter garden here in California. That I get to go out in it is such a deep blessing. The dead growth, though not as dramatic as places with deep long freezes, is still somehow breathtaking. Expired plants, having reached the end of their season, surrender to the long process of decay. At the same time, seedlings from some plants have already emerged.

Graveyards and creches nearly touching at all times. The circle of life and death in the garden is close and unguarded. Out in the garden it feels exactly as it should be. Seedlings bursting up and out into life next to the corpses of the plants that created them.

Out in the garden, I feel exactly as I should be.

Letting Go of Illusions

In the beginning of this month I started to feel a lightness in myself that I don’t know if I’ve ever felt before. A freedom just to BE, without family secrets and shadows, what can I become? I thought “I’m crawling out of the darkness at last!” and the psychic weight was lifting. And it WAS. IS. But also, the grief of losing the last scrap of that childhood wish to have a dad – that’s also real. And though it’s strange to be grieving an unfulfilled childish need that I’ve somehow held onto all the way up until I turned 55, it’s still grief. Grief doesn’t behave in a linear or logical way. The pain of being formally rejected – AGAIN – is also very hard to navigate. On the one hand, it’s the same same same as all three of my parents have always done from the beginning – rejecting me as their responsibility. I think the final rejection is the hardest because a treasured illusion is now destroyed.

And it needed to be destroyed in order for me to move forward with my life. What have I got left? Maybe 20 years, if I’m very very lucky? I wish I’d been strong enough to finish this off when I was 21, the first time I tried to slay the family silence and start living only with the reality of what was left for me. So that’s something I have to grieve as well – all the years I lost to trying to build something I knew was being built all on my side. All this energy I put into building healthier relationships with my mom and step dad were wasted on them. They had a finite amount to give me and it was never going to be different. But I have been stubborn in desiring something better and more from each of them they they had to give. I thought if I was “good enough” or “selfless enough” that they would see my value and love me as much as Tara, and maybe as much as mom also loved Zeke.

It’s almost been four years since I stopped gave up the illusion that I had a mother and now the illusion of having a dad is gone too.

What I’m trying to say to myself, here, is that cutting the illusion down and composting it is the healthiest and most positive act of self care I’ve ever done for myself in my entire life. And even so – it’s a process that involves grieving and a bucket of other emotions. So when I got really emotional the last two days and wondered where the fuck it came from – I almost forgot what I’ve just been through. That’s it’s super fresh.

I need to remember to give myself space for this emotion to roll through unexpectedly. Because it WILL. There may also be waves of real sorrow. It’s all part of the process.

The most important thing is that I have freed myself from a trap I’ve been caught in my whole life.

Weeding the Hellstrip

I frequently forget how much spending time in my garden makes me feel better about the world I live in and improves my sense of well being and hope overall. The chronic pain has eaten so deeply into my physical abilities that gardening in the last few years has been a mostly a limping limited activity. When you’re back goes out you literally can’t “power through the pain”. When your arthritic knees give out on you – it becomes dangerous to ignore it and go working in the garden anyway. Especially since the ground is uneven. So I forget the level of vigor it restores to my mental health.

This year I need to make it a priority to get out there most days even if it’s just to walk from one end of it to the other to see what’s going on. Just looking at (and talking to) the plants makes me feel better. I belong with them more than I belong in the human world. They don’t judge or lie or have an agenda other than to first survive, and then to thrive. That’s pure and it’s simple.

First survive, then thrive.

For some reason, my thoughts just skipped to the importance of editing the garden. I was in the ICU visiting my mother on Wednesday and told her about finally getting a Kalamata olive tree. I told her I now needed to get rid of the two little olives I bought last year. She said I should keep them (like Philip proposed I do) and wanted a full explanation for why I plan to give them away. It’s so weird for her to care if I keep or give a plant away. When she had her own gardens she would get rid of things she didn’t want anymore or didn’t belong in them. She was good at editing those spaces. But all the years she worked in and had opinions about MY gardens, she gasps dramatically every time I tell her I’m culling some plant or other out.

I’m a master gardener. I let a lot of chaos reign over my gardens by choice. I like things to be spilling over each other. I like a sense of abundance. But one thing I have learned is vital for a healthy garden, is editing what you plant in it. You buy plants to try them out, some thrive, some die. Some of the ones that thrive it turns out aren’t behaving the way you expected them too, maybe they’re bullying other plants – so you have to compost them or give them to a gardening friend. You make mistakes in your purchases and you adjust.

The editing process is part of the joy and beauty of gardening. Every landscape you work on is constantly evolving due to the climate changing, soil changes, maturing plants, diseases, infestations, and additions. It’s never boring.

I trust myself with my garden process and choices. Not that they’ll always be good or that I won’t ever change my mind, but because I understand that that’s the process and that I’m always making decisions based on my knowledge of plants, research, and vision.

It’s been raining a lot (which I LOVE) and that’s suited the situation I’ve been in trying to process and handle (my dad cutting off our relationship in response to me confronting him about the abuse). I’ve been super internal. But now the sun is out for the next few days in time for me feeling lighter from the weight of family secrets being OVER and in time to notice that the world outside is (politically, socially, culturally) darker than ever before in my lifetime.

Time to get out there and work in the garden! So much weeding needs doing. I love weeding. I was about to comment that I need to make food instead of going outside. I think I’ll go outside and weed for about 20 minutes, then cook food.

Silence Without Emptiness

Philip has gone for a bicycle ride. It’s 77 degrees with a slight breeze. It’s quiet here at Zero North. It reminds me of summer Sundays in Ashland when the whole town sounded empty and there were no friends to play with. I’d stand in my mother’s garden listening to the bees, inhaling the perfumes of different flowers, feeling a sense of desolation, like I was living in a ghost town. I later realized that everyone was in church ’til late afternoon, except for us, which is why it was so quiet and so few people were out and about.

I don’t think the sound of a town in worship is a peaceful quiet. It’s a creepy quiet, full of sequestered secrets and self loathing. The only exception being the call to prayers I heard one hot morning in Herzliya (Israel). Islamic prayers being projected across neighborhoods through speakers is an otherworldly and beautiful experience. It sounds like ancient human longing and love. I sat on the curb of the empty neighborhood smoking cigarettes and listening. That quiet was peaceful. The stillness on Sundays in Ashland was disquieting and oppressive.

Today the quiet is similar, except that it’s not distressing to me now. A few dogs are barking, a helicopter drifted overhead lazily (if such a thing is possible), the slight breeze is shuffling the leaves of the trees and grasses, and then nothing. Nothing. Until birds are chatting again. No human voices. A door opens and shuts down in the gulch below me.

This is a silent second. A damsel fly has landed on the wire cage encircling the Seckle pear. Now a child shouts at another child. The goldfinches are back at the towering fennel up on the mound. A tire crunches gravel close by. I think that’s why I was led to this specific spot in Grass Valley, so it could reshape old experiences into new and better ones. To show me how to experience stillness without a sense of scouring emptiness. I don’t have to live in fear anymore, like I did when I was a kid.

It’s still true that the quieter it is around you, the more likely you’ll hear terrifying things happen, IF they happen. And I’ve always been waiting for the bad things to happen, I’ve been hypervigilant my whole life. Vicious dog fights breaking out. Violence between humans. Children screaming with fear. The shaking grumble of an earthquake rolling towards you getting louder until it breaks open into a thunderous jolt of tectonic plates grinding against each other. The shocking sound of explosives could strip the peace away.

When there’s music, television, people talking, lots of cars, mowers, construction, children antagonizing each other playfully – all the usual noises of a busy city or household – it muffles terrifying noises such as someone bursting into sudden rage, or creeping in the bushes outside your window. It gives you a buffer when they happen, they don’t tear your heart out of your chest. You have to tease out the potential threat from other noises, you’re alerted before you’re alarmed. You have more time to decide what to do, how to react. It prevents you from freezing with panic, unable to protect yourself should you need to.

Zero North is right downtown but set off a little from the road, it’s quiet and peaceful. Most of the time I’m hanging out there with Philip and the noise of our chatter or videos we’re watching. But because there’s no steady power, I can’t have my usual ambient noise going on all day from television. The situation has stripped me of my comfort and the buffer between outside unwanted stimuli and myself.

It’s not my active plan to get comfortable with stillness and quiet because I don’t think there’s anything wrong with keeping the TV on for many hours of the day if it makes it possible to disconnect the hypervigilant part of my brain to get other things done, to think more clearly. It’s a curious thing, to experience environment prompted personal growth and healing. It’s always going to be okay (with me) to set ambient noises of my choice to be more comfortable. But maybe I’m going to get to a place where I can also choose the stillness and find comfort in it too. I would not accept a person suggesting I try to get comfortable with silence, it would show me that they think I’m weaker for not being comfortable with it. But to have my little piece of property present this opportunity to me without judgment is a remarkable surprise.

Today I felt a little sense of peace in the usually ominous quiet.

That’s brand new.