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SUPERMOM

The Lost Child

by Linda DeBlanco

SUPERMOM

The Lost Child

Copyright © 1988 by Linda DeBlanco

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system without written permission from the author, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.

First Printing 1988

Second Edition 2013

Third Edition 2018

Cover Design: Linda DeBlanco/Create Space

ISBN-13: 978-1481016193

DEDICATION

With love for a special child.

Forgotten for too long.

CONTENTS

Introduction

Light at Last

Becoming Supermom

Cinderella Revisited

No Hard Feelings

Princes I Have Known and Loved

Father Knows Best

Have a Sip of My Highball, Babe

My Mother Loves Me

Food, Fat and Fantasy

After the Ball Is Over

INTRODUCTION

A lifetime does not occur in one simple, flowing story. While there are many, many chapters in a lifetime there may also be particular segments that are extremely meaningful.

The idea of this book actually begun back in 1987. It was born out of the perspective of an overwhelmed and overburdened, middle aged single mother living in a man’s world. It was created by a woman who was just beginning to discover the importance of unlocking the mysteries of a traumatic childhood to achieve a new level of happiness.

The first edition of SUPERMOM: The Lost Child was written and published in 1988 when it was based on new psychological theories that appeared on the scene back in the late 1980s. You will note that there are views on such issues as women in the workplace, that were relatively new back in the ‘70s and ‘80s but are surely old hat by the time this Second Edition is being published in 2013.

SUPERMOM: The Lost Child is a story (of sorts) that relates to a particular part of the author’s life. You may say it is based on elementary schooling in pursuing happiness. Another book will be coming out by 2014 that will expand the author’s enlightenment to include dealing with family mental illness and serious drug addictions. These are challenges the author had no idea she was yet to face when this book was written.

That upcoming book will also cover in more depth an uncommon approach to co-dependency.

Since back in the ‘80s, a number of the newly introduced concepts were rather shocking and uncomfortable for many, the book was (perhaps understandably) greeted with so much resistance from the author’s friends and family that it was abandoned for over twenty years.

The stories and ideas in this book are designed to encourage the reader, if such is desired, to seek any and all available means to begin achieving peace and happiness before the final curtain falls.

There are many theories relating to what life is really all about. A favorite being that the real purpose of life is simply to live and to learn life’s important lessons. This book may just be one more valuable lesson in living life to the fullest.

LIGHT AT LAST

A strange place to find enlightenment, in a basement. But that's where it all began. I was forty-three years old on December 20, 1984 when I found myself in the basement of a substance abuse hospital in beautiful Santa Barbara.

Supermom had finally had enough.

For my first week as an inpatient, I wondered what on earth I was doing in a hospital. Me, of all people. A competent, professional woman like myself. I told myself I was there because I had a bit of a weight problem and I would learn how to beat it in the hospital, while I had a nice rest, and an escape from corporate America.

Then, after a week, enlightenment struck! Another patient who I'll call Joan was assigned to be my buddy. She was a tiny girl with a strange problem I’d never heard of called bulimia nervosa. One evening she announced, "Now we go down to the basement for a lecture about adult children of alcoholics. Gratefully relieved just to be away from home and my duties as Supermom, I would willingly go anywhere they told me to go.

So obediently strolling down to the basement, I wondered, What on earth is an adult child of an alcoholic?' A contradiction in terms, it seemed to me. But if the lecture was part of the thirty-day program, and the program cost $10,000.00, then naturally I was going, no matter what it was about. I was sure there were no alcoholics in my family but the lecture came with the package.

It was only a half-hour lecture and I was a few minutes late. Not much time to experience any great revelations, I thought.

Julie Bowden (her real name), a small, soft-spoken woman, was already in the process of describing to twenty or so other ordinary looking substance abusers about the characteristics of adult children of alcoholics.

It seemed as though I stopped breathing for the rest of the half-hour lecture. What I heard was the most perfect description of myself: controlling, out of touch with feelings, hyper vigilant, a perfectionist, lacking in trust, afraid of intimacy, all-or-none thinking and a compulsive caretaker.

I was shocked. How did she know me? And how could it be that I fit the description of an adult child of an alcoholic? I was sure there were no alcoholics in my family.

My father drank every day of his life, but he never missed a day of work because of it, and he didn't hit anyone. So he couldn't be an alcoholic, according to my pictures of alcoholics. I had a perfectly ordinary, lower middle-class childhood, in beautiful downtown Burbank, California.

Father went to work and my mother was always there when I came from school. On the weekends we went to the movies as a family. My father got drunk and yelled every few evenings, mother hid in the closet and cried, we watched Father Knows Best on television, I graduated from high school, and even had a couple of dates when I wasn't imprisoned in my room for no reason, except to keep me safe. My parents got divorced. All very normal and ordinary. I was sure, in fact, that it was because my childhood was so ordinary that I couldn't remember most of it.

Boring I told myself.

How unconscious I had been all my life. And how grateful I was, at that moment in the basement, when I realized that a world of recovery from a lifetime of disaster had just been revealed to me.

During my first week in the hospital I had been encouraged to write about what I was feeling and thinking. I had great difficulty forming complete sentences. I would leave out letters, cross and dot in the wrong places, omit whole words and leave inconsistent margins on the sides of the pages.

While my mind wanted me to believe that I was still in perfect control, the degree of underlying anxiety that I actually was experiencing was clearly visibly in my handwriting.

In the evening, after the fateful basement lecture, I wrote about what I had heard there and how I thought it related to me specifically. A remarkable thing happened. My handwriting suddenly became clear and consistent and I no longer felt I was struggling over each mark. The difference was so striking I noted my observation in the suddenly neat margin. The strange phenomenon of transformed handwriting was fascinating to me. It showed me so clearly that while my mind had continued to try to persuade me that I was superhuman, I was, in reality, not in control of something. Something inside of me that was struggling and confused. I didn't understand at the time what that something might be.

There was actually some comfort in the realization that I didn't know all there was to know about myself. It was clear to me then, that the way I saw myself and the ways I acted and functioned in life were illusions that I had invented in order to survive the overwhelming responsibilities I must deal with every day, day after day, as a Supermom.

My responsibilities were not unique. They simply included the ordinary duties of raising two children alone, earning a decent living in a man's world, paying the bills, pulling a thousand weeds, watering and mowing two lawns, maintaining and funding two shiny new cars and trying to hang on to the impossible - my girlish figure. Then there was figuring the taxes, buying the groceries, feeding the dog, the cat, the fish and the children, washing the clothes, the dishes and three bathtubs, managing the housekeeper and her husband the gardener who didn’t garden. Then in between, at appropriate intervals being a delightful, glamorous, romantic date for some fellow so I could get positive feed-back about what a remarkable woman I was for doing all that, all alone.

No big deal. The same things millions of American women were doing every day. How could I possibly be stressed? After all, I figured, we're all doing it.

How that moment of revelation in the basement began a bittersweet journey of recovery, is the subject of this book. My hope is that this story will encourage others who find themselves in similar situations to fight back by reaching out.

It is unlikely that the circumstances of life will change dramatically for the average Supermom, no matter how many books she reads.

If your children are minors, you will continue to care for and support them until they are old enough to take flight. You will probably still have to make a living, (most likely in a man's world), possibly work for overbearing people, certainly pay bills, wash dishes, gas up the car, and maybe pull the weeds.

My hope is that this book will encourage other Supermoms or Superdads to begin recovery programs and stick to them with even more tenacity and energy than we use to tackle our everyday burdens of life.

My first exposure to understanding about the traumas that children of alcoholics experience, launched me into a recovery program that has been my highest priority for almost four years. My program includes group psychotherapy, individual psychotherapy, reading, journal writing, thinking, feeling and perhaps the hardest part for children of alcoholics or children of trauma - establishing loving, intimate relationships.

What I initially struggled with was the feeling that everything else in my very full life was more important and worthy of my time and attention than my recovery program. Everything else included my parents, children, job, bills and maintaining a functional household. However, if I was in a relationship with a man, that relationship would always bump the other duties of my life and become my ultimate occupation.

What I learned early on in my recovery program was that my effectiveness in all areas of my life would be greatly enhanced if I could accept the premise that taking care of myself was my highest priority in life. While taking care of myself was far from an easy concept for me to grasp, it was possibly the most important lesson of my entire life.

I learned in my therapy that I was co-dependent. What that meant to me (from what I learned back in the ‘80s) was that I was addicted to other people, just as some people are addicted to drugs and alcohol. And I placed my addiction above all else. I could not allow my children the freedom to grow and become independent because if they did, that would have left me without them, and it certainly appeared I was addicted to them.

Sometimes co-dependents appear to be overprotective and loving. And the addicted (co-dependent) person appears to be self-sacrificing and caring. There are many illusions in addictions.

Just as an inebriated person may be miserable on the inside yet appear to be very happy and jovial, a co- dependent person may appear to be very unselfish and giving. Both can be seriously addicted.

Not that the alcoholic person or co-dependent person are NOT caring and loving. But where addiction is also a major component of interactions, there are more insidious and dangerous undercurrents of dysfunctional behavior at work simultaneously. I learned in my therapy to be able to tell the difference between co-dependence and true compassion and love.

Along with my addiction to my children and other people, came the typical symptom of not taking care of myself. I always had a desperate urge to do things to make myself feel better and sometimes I did take action toward that goal. But I always felt guilty and as if I was doing something very selfish, bad and wrong.

The first thing I realized 1 had to learn was to start loving and caring for myself. It wasn't at all easy. I struggled with my instincts to discount my needs and argued with my therapists that I simply could not let my family take care of itself. I was positive they couldn't survive unless I took care of them and then, naturally I would have no time, energy or money left to take care of myself.

Try this little experiment and see if you hear co-dependence ringing in your head as I did then. Close your eyes and say to yourself: I am more important than anything else in my life. What do you hear? If you are getting any arguments about how your job should come first or your parents, children, housework, husband, boyfriend, bills or anything else besides yourself, then you may find value in this book.

On the other hand, you may be one of the 5% of our population who actually came from happy, joyous homes where the children were treated with respect, kindness and sensitivity. Perhaps your parents’ only expectations were that you grow up healthy, happy and free to be all you can be. And perhaps they were always there for you, offering their kindness and understanding and encouraging you to express your feelings. You may not have been emotionally, verbally, physically, or sexually abused as a child. Maybe there were no drinkers, womanizers, gamblers, religious fanatics, workaholics, co- dependents, or other trauma producing people in your life.

If you are happy as a lark with your relationships, family, job, children, spouse, significant others and all the roles that go with all that, you will probably find this book to be dreadfully boring.

But if, when you told yourself how important you are, some little voice in your head tried to convince you there was something more important, that prevents your being your own highest priority, then please read on.

Reading this book will not change the everyday circumstances of your life. Perhaps it will encourage you to take yourself more seriously and help you to not discount what might seem like nagging, vague, discontent. Your not so earth-shattering feelings of confusion and discomfort have identifiable beginnings that are not unlike those of millions of other children of trauma.

So often I have wondered, with a certain amount of sadness, how my life would have been different if 1 could have begun a recovery program when I was twenty. Then too, I wonder, happily, what my life would be like today or thirty years from now, had I not decided at forty-three to make my recovery my highest priority.

For me, those little nagging feelings of discontent developed into significant issues, leading to divorces, years of confusion, frustration, guilt, low self-esteem and perhaps worst of all, they distanced me from my own children.

And who am I to be writing this book? Maybe I am you. Maybe not. This is not exactly a self-help book. It is an attempt to share experiences to which others in situations similar to mine might relate. It is an effort to bring hope to other Supermoms and