PTSD, it's all the rage.

(My goodness, here's another unpublished draft, this one from 2013, before the flood, asitwere.  I'll publish this one, too, what the hell.)

I am of the Vietnam generation, acutely aware of the damage done by that war, at home and abroad, how all of us alive and awake at that time suffered mightily from it, and from the simultaneous social and political revolution.

The revolution didn't come all at once, there were stragglers, and there were people ahead of it.  If it had been a tsunami, as horrible as that would be, it would all be over and we wouldn't have had any choice but to move on.  As it was we had to MAKE choices and for the most part didn't make good ones, not having any empirical data with which to reason things out, only a sense of get-it-together, make-a-decision, and do-it-NOW.  Snap decisions -- always my default -- really only have a fifty percent chance of being the right ones.

I was on the home front, mostly pregnant and chasing toddlers in the sixties, but that is not to say I wasn't at war.  I was a lousy mother, but that is not to say I didn't do my very best not to be.  I was a warrior pretty much alone on the battlefield, struggling with myself, covering all fronts and flanks, racing from one skirmish to the next.  Suffering pets, four sick or wounded or merely and endlessly needy children, fouled diapers, sinks and sinks and sinks full of dirty dishes, weather so cold a child's lungs would freeze if he were allowed to venture outside.  Weather so cold that each mother's miseries could not be shared with that of another -- too fucking cold to go out and find companionship, not to mention help.  The MIA husband and father: he'd come home on Friday, usually after the children were in bed, and I'd be prostrate with exhaustion and resentment, but still cranking up the panic and sleeplessness in anticipation of the MIA leaving again Sunday evening, BEFORE the children were to be put to bed.  He'd climb back into the limo, looking sad to be forced to leave his happy family, and, once safely away, breathing an enormous sigh of relief that he could do so.

I'd be back in the kitchen, just barely coping, and feeling my stomach clench with anger and panic at the prospect of another five days of battle.  Life and death, it was; driving one kid or another at breakneck speed east on Central Avenue toward the Evanston Hospital Emergency Room, while the kid spurted blood or vomit or feces or made the most grotesque whistling sounds -- in as well as out -- fighting for oxygen.

I can't list the what-if's that had me in constant panic mode; they don't matter, what matters is the state of constant hypervigilance that I lived in for years.  Whatever horror I could think of never happened, but plenty of horror did, and all I could do was suck it up, cope cope cope and try not to drink until the MIA showed up.  I still have that hypervigilance, the keynote of PTSD, and it doesn't seem to want to leave me.

On the other hand, no matter how horrible life was in those days, I mattered.  My presence and attention saved the day, and if there were nothing I could do to alleviate some crisis, well..., actually, there was always something I could do to alleviate a crisis, and I'm so smart, so capable, that I could usually fix things.  That fixing things was not -- is not, ever -- a solution to a crisis of the soul did not occur to me, and kept me isolated but admired, even envied for a very long time, long after the point where my kids could pretty much look after themselves. Afraid of not-mattering anymore, I substituted for the helpless dependent children whatever was handy, whoever seemed to need me, and even if they didn't need me, I'd try to fix them anyway.  Problem was, once they were 'fixed', they'd leave, just like the kids. That's what kids do: they stick with Mother until they get the hang of survival, then they split and do not look back (nor should they).