E22. Adjusting to Change

Retirement can be an identity shift, especially for people who have spent their lives working in service, building community, and getting validation through being useful. 

We talk about how early abuse can echo through adulthood, retirement, and relationships. We explore what helps: talk therapy, but also nervous system regulation through movement, such as a room full of people at "dance church." From there, we move into family estrangement and how denial and conflicting memories can make survivors question themselves. 

Feel free to subscribe and share with others. You can also email us at < sadiegreenstory@gmail.com or send a voice message from any particular episode on our website http://SadieStory.Buzzsprout.com

Special Thanks to our supporters, who have made this podcast possible.

• Lucy Mathews Heegaard: Audio Engineer 
  • with music via Epidemic Sound
• Terry Gydesen: Photographer

• Polly Kellogg
• Kate Tillotson
• Dawn Charbonneau
• Jacob Wyatt
• Molly Tillotson
• Clare Dudzinski
• Julian Bowers
• Wendy Horowitz
• Maggie Kazel
• Pat Farrell
• Lynette Tabert
• Laura Jensen
• People's Farm Collective
• Deborah Copperud of "Spock Talk" podcast

Transcript

Welcome And Naming The Story

SPEAKER_01 0:03

Welcome to the Sadie Green Story about an older adult looking back on her abusive childhood. It's a conversation between Sadie and myself, Pam Colby, her longtime friend. We are exploring how early trauma can affect a lifetime. Thanks for joining us. So here we are. Sadie and I have been talking a lot about what it's like to come to the end of this podcast. Coming down the exit ramp and just feeling all the feelings about what we've been through, making it and hearing this story and trying to figure out how to tell it to you, our listeners. And I guess uh one of the biggest things we've been talking about is how Sadie's dealing with her feelings about being part of this podcast and in general where you're at in your life right now.

SPEAKER_00 1:05

What am I feeling? Well, right now I'm a little nervous, but there's been a whole gamut of feelings while doing this. And it's hard to know what's related to the podcast and connecting with that history and what is related to other things going on. But it's certainly a different time of my life. We've been working on this project for about two years. And it began shortly after I retired. And during the disillusion or divorce of my long-term relationship, I also started meeting with a great therapist. So the big feeling overall is change and adjusting to change. Learning a lot about myself and loss.

SPEAKER_01 2:03

Just to go to the piece about your

Change, Retirement, And Identity

SPEAKER_01 2:05

being retired. A lot of people I think couldn't relate to that because there's a fear of retirement of how valid am I? How does society view me? Am I invisible?

SPEAKER_00 2:19

Well, I've always been a worker and I've always prioritized my work. Much of my life has been working with vulnerable people. I worked in a shelter for homeless women and kids for twelve years. I was a city bus driver in Duluth for twelve years. And then I worked in a nonprofit here in Minneapolis where we worked with folks with mental health disabilities, physical disabilities, or both. I think a gift that I have is I can see unfairness or there's a way that people are comfortable with me. I used to do the initial assessments for bringing new clients into our organization. I would meet with them and we would develop a goal plan. So I would be the first one to meet people who had never met any of us before. And I think I was really good at that because in part I've always thought that because I have a birth defect in the middle of my face, I'm recognizable as an outsider to people who feel like outsiders. And I think there was a way that I could meet people where they are or accept people where they are.

SPEAKER_01 3:43

And people trust you.

SPEAKER_00 3:44

Yeah, it was just a gift that I innately feel like I was given. I also understand how people that are doing well do not need things to change. And usually those are the same people that have the most power to make change. Folks who have the least amount of power living on the edge, they're the ones that need the most change. And I've known that all my life. I've always known that. That's just a core reality for me.

SPEAKER_01 4:18

Can you talk more about how work has been part of your grief process or not part of your grief process?

SPEAKER_00 4:26

You do sometimes feel unmoored. You know, work gives you structure, it gives you other people. I got a lot of my validation, certainly, from work. I've also been lucky to work in settings that are very much community. And I think community is just a basic need. And that visceral connection with people I would not have met otherwise, you know, of different ages, different cultures, different life experiences. All that is a loss. And I liked my coworkers. I had a lot of respect for my coworkers. We really had a mission as being conduits between that power that we had and the people who had very little. We meet every month since I left. First we met at a coffee shop that's now evolved into a book club.

SPEAKER_01 5:23

You've done jobs where you're visible to lots of people and super helpful to lots of people. And here you are looking inward. And I'm wondering how do you think that has impacted your ability to focus on yourself and see who you are without all this validation from the outside world?

SPEAKER_00 5:48

Well, time. Time is precious, and I've just never had this kind of time. I'm lucky to be really healthy, but I do have close friends who are not as healthy. So I do there are some commitments that I still maintain where I'm uh a helper, but I think that's important. I'm also spending a lot of time taking care of myself. I have an exercise routine every day, I meditate, I try and write something every day. I spend a lot more time alone and I feel things. I'm more aware of my body, I'm w more aware of how I feel. And while I talk about my grief, I also have this richness in my life. And there's a way of just appreciating people and appreciating, you know, these pink flocks that are I'm looking at right now outside my window. Life is good. You can find that by yourself, you know, alone. I did know it as a child, actually. I did know that. And that's what saved me, that world beauty, the wind and the rain and the chipmunks and the you know, what was around me. That is what comforted me.

Healing Through Body And Movement

SPEAKER_01 7:10

Can I ask you with your therapy? Because I've heard talk that talk therapy isn't always the total answer, that there's also ways of dealing with your body or alternative. I don't know, Mamie, for you it's the exercising every day and the meditation. Do you think that's true? That there's gotta be more than just talk therapy?

SPEAKER_00 7:34

Yeah, somatic therapy about the body. I've always loved to dance. Dancing has been one of my greatest pleasures. And I still do that. In fact, I go to dance church every Sunday. And I think moving your body is something that in every culture throughout time has been a type of healing. Just this movement, this back and forth, this rhythm, this drum, this it's a healing. You know, this dance church that I go to every week. It's a huge dance room, probably a hundred people, all ages, genders. There's a rule that you can't talk on the dance floor. And that really adds something because everybody's in their own world. And people do crazy things. They're on the floor, they're they do whatever they feel like as far as movement. And it's so freeing, and you don't have to worry about what people are thinking or whether there's somebody to dance with. I mean, it's not about that at all. It's just movement. Even if I don't feel like it, I go and I always feel better afterwards.

SPEAKER_01 8:47

Yeah. That's a great answer to the body needing to heal itself in different ways.

SPEAKER_00 8:54

Yeah, there's so much we don't know. Mm-hmm. And so much that maybe we're led to without knowing we're being led. I think our bodies try and heal themselves somehow. Survival. Yeah, yeah. It's a some people see it as God or a power greater than themselves that is, let it go. I'm being led. I just need to live in the moment, and it's gonna figure itself out, and I don't have to fix everything. It's a natural, our bodies are gonna help us whether we know it or not.

The Family Secret And Panic

SPEAKER_01 9:30

One of the things that we don't get to in the podcast is your relationship with your mother and father later in life. There is in the podcast you talking to your father at one point as an adult. But how did the final years, your mother's now deceased, how were the final years with her? I know you had very limited contact.

SPEAKER_00 9:55

I stopped visiting them. I visited them probably half a dozen times between the age of 21 and 40, maybe. And there was only one time that I didn't have somebody with me. And that time I had people staying in a cabin nearby, and I actually had a limit on that visit, and I exceeded that limit, and they came and pulled into the driveway. And I was that was the time I was talking to my father. He had come up to my car and I panicked. I just panicked. I must have been in my car by that time because I just barreled out. They backed out and I barreled ahead of them and they followed me until I was out of sight, and then I pulled over. And I was just panicking. And I realized later that the panic was not about protecting me or my I was protecting my family. I was protecting the secret. Others knew they had to know because they were coming to rescue me. I did not want my family to know that people cared enough to come and get me.

SPEAKER_01 11:05

This person I would assume was an outsider, maybe from Duluth, a city person.

SPEAKER_00 11:10

Yeah, two people in a pickup, Lindy and Ethel. What I didn't know at the time was how my body was involved. My body was so stressed, it was just, oh my God, oh my god. But otherwise, I always had someone with me. And my mother was very good at socializing and bringing out the coffee and the cookies and talking about unrelated stuff. But in her old age, my sister called me and told me she was in the hospital and in my town in Minneapolis. So I said, okay, I'm gonna go and see her after work. But then our furnace went out, and so I had to take the day off work to get the furnace fixed. And they came at noon, it was done, so I went to the hospital early, and she wasn't expecting me. And so I get to her room, and here's this elderly lady with white hair sitting up in her bed, she's filling out a uh menu sheet. And I walked in and she goes, Oh, hi, Susan. And it was like she saw me every day. It was so bizarre. So I've always avoided being direct. I think I'm gonna say something, I'm gonna ask. And then I just get terrified and I don't. But this time I said, So what happened with us? What happened between us? And she said, Oh, I think it was a little grandma's fault and a little my fault, and a little she almost said your fault, but she didn't. She stopped herself. We didn't go further. But what was bizarre about that visit is she was getting ready to go home. And so I go out, I talk to a doctor, and it's like, I'm this daughter, she's my mother, and the family is trying to figure out how to get her home. And I actually volunteered to drive her home over a hundred miles. I can't believe it. But a brother's wife said, No, I'm ready to go. I'm I'm gonna come and get her. Even after that visit, like I was on my way home, I called my sister to give her an update. Like we talked every day. Ah. Maybe we do what we maybe she wanted to feel like she had a sister. Maybe I wanted to feel like I had a sister. Maybe I wanted to feel like I had a mother.

SPEAKER_01 13:31

Yeah, it sounded like you did. And did you feel empathy for your mother at that time or no?

SPEAKER_00 13:38

It was again very removed. It was all in my head. It was emotional in that it was scary and fearful. It was this huge thing in my chest. So it was emotional that way, and then it just took over my body. But your brain doesn't your intellectual brain doesn't really work when you're in that.

SPEAKER_01 13:57

So I know your entire adult life you were pretty fearful of her or her finding you. Did you feel any of that as this old very sick woman?

SPEAKER_00 14:06

No, I didn't think that she was gonna come after me or that she was No, she seemed so normal, and uh of course she is normal. But just we just fell into this kind of role. So I still couldn't go further. I'm conflict avoidant, I always have been.

SPEAKER_01 14:22

Yeah, but you think about her, she lived her entire life with all of the went on between you and her without you know, you wonder if her and your dad ever had talks about it, or it seems like there was no confession on her part ever.

SPEAKER_00 14:39

No, it did affect her because of the change in her in those years between when I left home and when I came back to visit. And I have thought maybe the change was that I saw her as this all-powerful person before, but it felt to me that she literally looked different. She looked older, she looked and I still had that fear, of course. I'm saying two things at once here. I had this fear and yet I'm talking out of my head. Both those things were true. I could carry on a conversation.

SPEAKER_01 15:13

Yeah, they c they can be true.

SPEAKER_00 15:15

In fact, I could even carry the conversation. Right. When it was with siblings who didn't know what to do with me. Like I visited a brother once, and another brother just happened to come into the driveway and visit while I was there, not knowing I was there. And I literally stood so that he could leave at any time. And he it was about a 15-minute conversation, and he sweated his forehead, he just was sweating. I thought he's not going to introduce me to his wife and his daughters who were waiting in the van. At the last minute he did. But I carried that conversation. And I think the fact that I was normal, that I appeared normal, that I was in normal clothes, and I don't know. I don't know what it does to them. But it clearly affected him.

SPEAKER_01 16:07

I think the other thing that when we're talking about your mother and then how it affected them, besides the big secret of you, and especially those younger ones who wouldn't have any memory of it, there's also the possibility of where did she take all that anger?

SPEAKER_00 16:24

I know.

SPEAKER_01 16:25

That was rage that came at you, and then suddenly you disappear. What happens to that rage?

SPEAKER_00 16:32

Yeah, I've thought of that. So I had a uh, I don't know, a couple hours meeting with my sister in a restaurant maybe three years ago, and I think that was maybe the only time we've spent that kind of time together. She has this whole different story about my grandmother interfering, and she'll tell me things that I don't remember about taking a train and normal things. And I don't doubt that happened, but I don't remember them. So in this conversation, I liked her. I thought we both were really direct, we both really said what was on our mind. We both were ourselves. I really appreciated that. One of the things I told her was the story about the milk being force-fed milk. And she said once that she also was force-fed milk because she didn't have the refrigerator arranged efficiently. And she said, I learned how to do that. She also told me that she had a daughter who had some, oh, what was the word, some psychological problem, and she thought that was my situation also. And I said, No, that isn't true. That's not true. I remember there was a we had a conversation once, years ago, when Ross Perot was presidential candidate, and she was talking about how she supported him because he lived in a prisoner of war camp. And anybody that can survive that. And I thought in my head, like, wow. And Is this your sister? This is my sister. And I remember that conversation. I was sitting upstairs on the phone, and I had to stop it because it was so crazy-making to me about the denial and the different worlds that we were in. I lived with Molly at the time, and I remember coming down and I felt like it was living in the Twilight Zone, and she brought me back to reality. And again, it was all grandma's fault and the welfare's fault and the school's fault and my fault, of course. And none of those people were there. But she was there. Yeah. It's just crazy making.

unknown 18:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:42

But she also was there. She had that adult relationship with your mother. Her mother even worked in her flower shop.

SPEAKER_00 18:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:52

And she was the one calling you when your mother was in the hospital. Oh, that's right. So there's just a way that she her brain figured out what workaround she needed to do.

SPEAKER_00 19:04

Yeah. You know, I'm so far removed now, and I've read lots of stuff about how memory can be two people at the same accident see things differently. And I think, was it really that bad? But it was that bad. I remember being naked. I remember being in it it was that bad. I remember the barrel. I remember I did not live inside. They cannot they have to know. I did not sit at the table.

SPEAKER_01 19:31

You have those records that show how what state your body was in when you were taken out of the home.

SPEAKER_00 19:37

Yeah. Yeah, but I can doubt myself. It's easy to doubt yourself when people that were there are saying something

Intimacy, Conflict, And Sexual Identity

SPEAKER_00 19:45

different.

SPEAKER_01 19:45

The other thing is for most of your adult life you've been in a relationship or different relationships. How do you think that your relationships were affected or impacted by your childhood?

SPEAKER_00 20:01

Yeah, that's a good question. And something I'm just really trying to look at now. I feel like I limited my capacity for being close. Like that song, that Bob Dylan song, A Lover for Your Life and Nothing More, what is it, bring flowers and blah, blah, blah. That was like a theme song in my head in every relationship. I really felt that's what you want, that's not me. An example would be if I'm in a relationship with somebody, living with somebody. If we were at a party or somewhere in public, I'd want to move around and talk to other people. And I'd say, We see you every day. I'm here to see other people. And I was not aware of how that affected them. And I've never really been intimate in the way of sharing my insecurities. I don't fight in relationships. If you fight with somebody, they're gonna leave you. Not that I was aware of that, but I'm sure that is part of it. That's how you get a lot of things on the table, I think. We're different. We're all different. And in order to learn those differences, you have to either really share what hurts and what you like or don't like, what you're afraid of. And I was never good at that.

SPEAKER_01 21:17

I think feeling safe enough to fight. You didn't feel safe as a kid to fight your mother, that would have been too dangerous. And your family wasn't a family of conflict. It was a family of very dominant parents and kids who obeyed, and one who was particularly being the continual. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 21:42

If I argue with somebody, they're gonna leave me. You're risking abandonment.

SPEAKER_01 21:48

It's interesting too, because you are a person who stands out on the Lake Street Bridge and the name of your two senators is above you right now. You are not some passive. Person. But conflict with in personal relationships is something that you don't go for.

SPEAKER_00 22:08

Intellectual stuff, I can do well with that. But it's the heart stuff, it's the really knowing other people who they are and who I am. I've only been in one relationship that was at all abusive. And that was when I was much younger. He threatened me and threw things at me, and once a couple people had to pull him off me. But that that ended. I lived in a community then that supported me and the people that pulled him off of me literally got him out of town. So good friends. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 22:45

And you've been in relationships with men and women.

SPEAKER_00 22:48

Yes, yes, men and women. My longest relationship was was with a woman. I'm not sure when I was at home or with my family, it just never would have occurred to me that there's an option of loving someone of your own gender. It just didn't occur to me. But when I was on the psych ward there was a staff person, a fellow who was gay, and I really liked him. And then I saw this guy in a phone booth. I might have been waiting, I don't know, I saw him up close and he had makeup on. And that was fascinating to me. And then when I lived with Stevie, the other person that lived with her had a girlfriend. And they would hold hands in South High. They're in high school. They're beautiful, both of them. Long hair, beautiful, straight looking. And they would hold hands. And they actually got married at the Lesbian Resource Center at the time. And they were in the house all the time. And then Stevie was trying to date men when we were with her, but she came out as a lesbian. So I had people close to me. And then when I'm old enough, I'd go to gay bars with them. And I loved it. I could dance just freely. I didn't have none of this. Somebody asking me to dance. And I loved doing that. But I still wasn't a lesbian. But then I went to Nicaragua and I was in a in this international work crew and I was with all these lesbians. And I believed that you could that gender shouldn't matter. I know it's all a continuum for everybody, but for me, I believe that it's a person and that you could have feelings for somebody regardless of their gender. I made a political choice. After my trip to Nicaragua, I I recognized, of course, for years the difference in power between men and women. And I made a decision that I was not going to give to men until there was it was equal. And so I committed myself to women. And it took me a while to really feel that desire. Or it took me a couple practices, maybe. But I can I recognize the cultures are really different. Of course, every individual within the culture is unique. And one person doesn't represent all men, of course.

SPEAKER_01 25:10

But there is something about ownership or I would have to add that that it's our generation. I find so much is in the heads of our generation. We're baby boomers. And I work in a middle school. I see my kids and I find that there's a freedom that we cannot escape in our heads for all people. All genders. Because of our conditioning.

SPEAKER_00 25:39

And when I this is a something totally different. But when you mention the gender things with younger people now, sometimes people will say something about how my situation is very unique. And in my bubble, in my white in my bubble, it might be unique in that my family discarded me. But when you think of history, when you think of slavery, when you think of what people have endured for generations, there's so many examples of people going through maybe the family rejection is somewhat unique, but not for gay people and not for now transgender people, yeah. Who are really being used as scapegoats. Such a small percent of the population elevated certain news cycles. They want to blame the whole democratic failure on transgender people or immigrants, of course. The wars. People endure incredible misery. But let's go on to something more positive.

Making The Podcast And Letting Go

SPEAKER_00 26:48

Pam, so many people have commented on how important your part of this podcast is. I wondered how you feel about having gone through this whole process.

SPEAKER_01 27:03

Well, I feel like it has been a really deep dive. I've done a lot of long-form documentaries working in video and film over the years. But this was into the deep story of Sadie. So I felt really honored to become part of this podcast story. Sometimes it got pretty dark, as many of our listeners have said, but at the same time, has been a really I think I have grown doing it. I've also had a sidelong, sad story of my brother's alcoholism going parallel. And I think that whenever you're dealing with sadness, there's always comfort in knowing you're not alone. So I think that your story has so much sadness in it, but also so much inspiration and survival, and it's very life-affirming, as hard as it is.

SPEAKER_00 28:08

I just want to say it's been very comfortable, and I've really liked working with you. I feel like we've been able to be really honest with each other, and there hasn't been hard feelings. I feel very supported. It's been a great partnership.

SPEAKER_01 28:26

I think so too. And I think one of the things I would say, because I have uh history of doing documentary films, and early on I could see that this story wasn't gonna happen unless you had total directorial. And that was a lesson for me in letting go, because in a film project, you decide who's the director or co-directors or whatever, and and they have this powerful position. But I knew right away that that wasn't gonna work on this. And I guess the thing that I've watched so much is what a strong creative mind you have. Technology is not your best friend. I have a love of technology, but you do not. And I think that has been something that has been fun to watch as you overcome the technology, and and then your creativity in editing has been very great. And of course, the other piece of the mix here is Lucy Matthews Hegard, who came on board when we were fumbling with music. Yeah, fumbling with so much and has really great skills. Audio engineer on your podcast is something you definitely need.

SPEAKER_00 29:41

Leveling sound. I know nothing about sound engineering.

SPEAKER_01 29:45

And she came to our rescue and has been so much.

SPEAKER_00 29:48

And she's been wonderful, yeah. And I want to say beyond the technical stuff, will you really bring a whole depth to this project? Insights that give it a lot of gravitas. Your contribution is really important. I've had a lot of therapy. We both have, right? I can say I've had a few years now, a couple years. I had somebody tell me recently, oh, I just love that. Pam! Every time I have a question, she'll ask it. It's like she reads my mind. You brought a lot to this project.

SPEAKER_01 30:25

Well, thank you. And I have known you so well over the years, and I know your story, and it's been a big accomplishment for you getting it all out here like this.

SPEAKER_00 30:36

So thanks for all your support and your reliable visits doing all these recordings. Okay, here we go. Till next time.