A Well Cared For Human: self-love strategies for transforming your pain into power: A Well Cared For Human, #1

A WELL CARED FOR HUMAN

SELF-LOVE STRATEGIES FOR TRANSFORMING YOUR PAIN INTO POWER

KORY M. SHRUM

TIMBERLANE PRESS

CONTENTS

An Exclusive Offer For You

A Mother’s Murder, A Daughter’s Salvation

Beating the Odds

Four Attributes of a Healthy Relationship

The Four Pillars

Self-Care: What It Is and What It Isn’t

The Most Useful Side Effect of Self-Care: Resiliency

Most Common Self-Care Barrier: I Don’t Have Time.

Pillar Breakers

False Narratives

Managing Fear

Devotion, Not Discipline

One For the Helpers

Are You Ready?

Gratitude

Endnotes

Acknowledgments

Also by Kory M. Shrum

About the Author

This book includes events that reflect the author’s present recollections of experiences over time. Some names and characteristics have been changed to protect the identity of the person, and some dialogue has been recreated for the sake of clarity.

Although every precaution has been taken in preparation of the book, the publisher and the author assume no responsibility for errors or omissions, and hereby disclaims any liability to any party for any loss, damage, or disruption caused by errors or omissions, whether such errors or omissions result from negligence, accident, or any other cause.

No part of this book shall be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage or retrieval system without prior written permission of the publisher and author, except in the case of brief quotations, embodied in reviews and articles. Thank you for supporting the author’s rights.

All rights reserved.

Copyright © 2024 by Kory M. Shrum

Editing by Toby Selwyn

ISBN: 978-1-949577-96-9

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Kory

For you.

For the you you were,

For the you you are,

For the you you are becoming.

A MOTHER’S MURDER, A DAUGHTER’S SALVATION

Triumphant stories are usually only triumphant because of their losses. Hardship always precedes the win. The low always comes before the high. Hope is lost before faith can be restored.

Otherwise, what is there to triumph over?

Most people assume my greatest loss came when my mother was murdered. And as heartbreaking as that experience was, that’s not where my story begins.

But wait—isn’t this supposed to be an inspirational book? A motivational book about how anything is possible?

Yes. That’s certainly the goal.

Then why are we talking about loss and murdered mothers?

Because I want to show you how to leverage your losses. Not only how to navigate the heartbreak and fallout of life’s challenges more easily but also how you can use the opening your loss created to transform your situation, your problems, and most importantly, yourself.

How does loss create an opening? Because it detaches us from that which we were previously bound: a person, a job, a place, a dream, a desperate desire.

We usually don’t like this detachment. Not one bit. But that doesn’t change the fact that once we are dislodged, we are now free to forge something new.

When my mother died, a door certainly slammed in my face. I had to say goodbye to a few dreams.

The dream that life would ever get better for her. The dream that things could get better between us, that it would be safe to see her more frequently, to spend more time with her. I imagined, often, the day when I was wealthy enough to buy her a house and the round-the-clock care and supervision she needed. When I’d finally have the means to get her away from her destructive family.

Fourteen years before a homicide detective called me to ask if my uncle had a history of violence against her, it was a hospital that had called to give me bad news.

There’s been an accident.

I was a student at the time, taking summer classes because I was trying to finish my graduate degree more quickly. I was also hoping to make up for the time I’d lost as a struggling undergraduate, trying to survive.

What had I been trying to survive?

The chaos of my family, certainly. My mother was diagnosed as bipolar. As a result, she was unpredictable. Her behavior was erratic and she would disappear altogether sometimes. She drank too much. Used drugs. There were her bouts in jail and the repetitious, heart-crushing news that some man had left her black and blue and bleeding on my grandmother’s doorstep once again. Or that once re-welcomed inside, my uncle had continued where the other had left off.

Apart from my mother’s self-destruction, I was also surviving the spinoff of my own traumatic childhood and all the bad habits it had created. I was too scared to get hooked on drugs and alcohol, though I’d done plenty of both. The real addiction in my teens and twenties had been codependent love affairs.

There was also the depression and anxiety so thick I would spend entire days in my bed or on the couch, forgetting to eat or drink. Or to even bathe.

Like many traumatized kids, I was also surviving the bondage of shame, half hanging myself with it on most days, a shame so lovingly nurtured by a narcissistic father until it was propagating like weeds in the garden in high July, no longer requiring any effort from him to grow.

I was surviving work stress, school stress, and little—or not so little—betrayals from so-called friends.

Not to mention all the torment of being on your own at twenty-three and having no idea what a quarterlife crisis is because you have, in fact, spent every single day of your life in crisis and you simply call this latest emergency a Tuesday.

By the time I reached graduate school, at least I knew I wanted to be a writer.

I had a dream. Something to focus on besides the hurricane in my head trying to unravel me from the inside out.

I was eating.

A lot of ice cream from the Dairy Queen next door to my duplex, granted, but I was eating.

I was starting to see progress. I was just starting to relax.

Until I got this call that my mother was dying in a hospital.

There’s been an accident. She’s coming out of surgery now and we don’t know if she’ll make it. How soon can you come?

I drove like a demon to Nashville, which was about an hour away from my school. I prayed the whole way there: Please don’t let her die, please don’t let her die, please don’t, please… At the time, my relationship with God was about as healthy as my relationship with my mother, but old habits die hard.

By the time I arrived, she was out of surgery and they’d moved her to the ICU.

When I walked in, her room was dark, all the lights turned down low. Only the one behind her bed shone, backlighting her like a saint. Her bandaged head was wrapped up like a smashed thumb, beneath twenty layers of gauze.

There was a tube draining the blood away from her brain.

I looked at that tube for a long time, trying to make sense of it. I couldn’t tell if the blood was coming or going.

My mother was awake but she couldn’t speak. She couldn’t answer the typical questions like Who is the president? Do you know what month it is? Do you know who this is?

When the nurse pointed to me, my mother only smiled.

Afterward, the doctor pulled me aside.

What happened to her? I had a lot of guesses, none of them great. Maybe it was another boyfriend or girlfriend that left her like this. Maybe she’d drank too much, or had been too high and had gotten behind the wheel of a car. Or maybe she’d been perfectly sober but her dark mind had said, Drive right into that concrete barrier there, Leitha, and she had.

Sometimes my mother listened to such voices.

I remember how tired the doctor looked, the puffiness of his dark eyes. We only have what the police report says, and the eyewitness testimony, but it seems like your uncle struck her so hard in the head with something, it actually broke her skull.

I would find out later that it requires hundreds of pounds of force to break a skull. My uncle somehow accomplished this with a glass ashtray.

The doctor went on. We were able to do the surgery and repair the damage. We put a steel plate in her head. But as you can see, she’s going to need to go to a rehabilitation facility after this in order to relearn how to walk, how to talk, and regain the functionality she’s lost due to the brain injury.

I burst into tears at some point. I felt bad about that.

Tears didn’t stop me from initiating strategy mode. Before the good doctor even finished explaining the situation, I’d begun mapping a path toward resolution, seeking a viable way forward, turning the problem over in my mind like a puzzle box meant to be solved.

This incident—the phone call, the bad news, the dropping everything and rushing to her side—had triggered a long-ingrained pattern in me. What I call savior mode.

That constant fear for her safety and the crushing weight that somehow it was my responsibility to keep her safe was familiar. I’d carried that belief close to my heart since I was a little girl.

Beliefs reinforced every time I stepped between my mother and whoever her assailant was, when I hid her keys or her pills. I’d invented so many little versions of the keep Mommy safe game.

And not just her physical safety either.

I considered her emotional well-being and her happiness my responsibility too.

If I found her crying, or if I knew she was sad, I always tried to cheer her up. But it was a lot of work for a child. Given that she was bipolar, her moods were frequently unstable.

So when the doctor sat across from me in a sterile room and told me what he thought had happened and what needed to happen next, I did what I’d always done.

I left the hospital that night and immediately began rearranging my life so that I could take care of her. It didn’t matter that having my mother come and live with me didn’t make any sense, financially or otherwise.

I was compelled by my one overwhelming desire: to keep my mother safe.

I asked my roommate to move out so I could have the spare room (a terrible financial decision). I asked my professors to work with me on deadlines (how quickly I forgot my academic priorities), and I asked my job to be flexible in my scheduling (I was almost fired for this).

I tried to get friends to agree to check on her when I was at work or school, because now I had a new fear that with her brain injury she might get confused and wander out into traffic and get hit by a car. Maybe she’d even be lured by the very enticing light of the Dairy Queen sign, as I so often was.

I was trying to find a bed for her, curtains. Drawers for her clothes. When I went to the store to buy myself stuff—shampoo, conditioner, food—I started making decisions based on her preferences. Maybe she’ll like this. Oh, she’ll hate that.

I wanted her to feel welcome.

More importantly, I had plans.

Plans for how this time would be different. This time was my big chance to get my mother out of my grandmother’s house, where she’d been living with her violent brother before the accident, away from the drinking, the drugs. This would be the fresh start and new life I’d always wanted for her.

I got carried away with dreams of what our relationship could be like, if she just got better. That maybe, just maybe, this brain injury would prove to be a blessing in disguise.

We’d have the relationship I’d always wanted.

A safe one. A stable one. One in which she was the mother and I got to be the child.

I was already fully committed to these delusions by the time a second phone call came a few weeks later.

This one was from the rehabilitation clinic she’d been moved into after leaving the hospital. She was supposed to stay for a minimum of six weeks in the facility, relearning how to walk, how to talk. At six weeks they were going to reassess her progress and see if she needed a longer stay. By then I hoped to have my place sorted so she didn’t have to go back to my grandmother’s even for a single night.

But it had not yet been six weeks when a very distressed woman from the facility called, apologizing as if she’d accidentally set my mother on fire.

She’s gone, she said. "She had some guests, and when we went to check on her, she was gone. She took off her wrist band and slipped out against medical advice."

In a perfectly normal, perfectly calm voice, I thanked the woman for calling in.

I waited until after we said our goodbyes to panic.

I called everyone I could think of. I drove back to Nashville and checked all the places she could’ve possibly been—bars, dealers, friends. I couldn’t find her.

Do you know where she was?

Do you know where I found her finally, once the panic wore off and I began to think clearly?

You might think I’m stupid when I tell you.

After all, it would have made sense to call my grandmother’s house first. She had been living there at the time of the accident. And it’s where my uncle had caved in her skull and almost killed her weeks before.

So why hadn’t I checked there first?

Because I had believed her.

Every day that I had visited my mother in the rehabilitation clinic, I’d sat with her and made plans with her about how our lives would be once she came home with me.

We’d spent hours of each visit making these plans.

I had believed her when she’d said, Of course I don’t want to go back to Nana’s. Of course I don’t want to be in the same house with that bastard. I only stay here because I have nowhere else to go.

But now you do, I’d told her.

Now I do, she’d agreed.

Except she’d escaped the facility and returned to my grandmother’s house. She’d abandoned her treatment halfway through just to go back there. My uncle, the most violent and dangerous of my mother’s abusers, had been waiting for her, ready to offer his usual pathetic run of halfhearted apologies.

You might think that finding my mother back at my grandmother’s house just weeks after she’d almost died should’ve been enough for me to give up on my mom, but it wasn’t.

Back then I had a much higher tolerance for misery.

Now, not so much.

Instead, I drove over there and called her from the end of the driveway because I wouldn’t even go into the house. Not with him there. My uncle had assaulted me once, on the day of my grandfather’s funeral. He’d reached out to choke me, had missed and broken my sunglasses across the bridge of my nose. I ran to a neighbor’s house—they called the police, and off to jail he went.

I never set foot in my grandmother’s house again.

I do learn some lessons more quickly than others.

From the driveway, with my mother on the phone, I said, "If you still want to get out of here, if you want somewhere else to go, I’ll take you with me now. You can still come live with me. Isn’t that what you want?"

Yes, she said again. I just had nowhere else to go.

As she slid into the passenger seat with her shaved head, all sixty-four staples in the shape of a question mark visible on the side of her skull, I remembered how I’d shaved off the last of her beautiful hair in the bathroom adjacent to her little rehab suite. How she’d cried even though she was the one who’d asked me to do it.

And now here she was, bald, with that terrifying line of pinched skin, but at least she was in my car and not in that house with him.

Can we make one stop before we get on the highway? she asked.

I assumed that she needed cigarettes. She’d been a smoker all my life. She’d loved to tell the story about the only time she’d quit was when she was pregnant with me.

When you came out, the nurse asked if I wanted to breastfeed, and I said hell no! Give me a damn cigarette. But it was worth it, baby, because look at you. You’re perfect.

I stopped at the nearest gas station, and Mom went in. Only she didn’t come out with cigarettes. She came out with beer.

This was a problem.

This was a problem for so many reasons.

Did she forget about the medication she was supposed to be taking for her injured brain? Did she forget about her failing liver, thanks to the hepatitis C she’d contracted from intravenous drug use?

It wasn’t even about the promise she’d made to me at the rehab. Of course I’ll quit drinking. I haven’t even wanted a drink since I woke up from surgery. This is the fresh start I’ve prayed for.

It was the fact that I had one objective: to keep her safe.

And when my mother drank, that was impossible to do. When she drank, her behavior was unpredictable, often putting her in physically dangerous situations. When she drank, she was emotionally unstable, making it harder to soothe her.

I was wrestling with my lifelong desire to keep her safe, and here she was sitting next to me in my car with sixty-four staples punched into the side of her head, opening a beer while looking me dead in the eyes.

In this moment, I was confronted with the possibility that the person hurting my mother most in the world was herself. And how do we protect someone from themselves?

We can’t.

And I’ll say it again, louder for those of you in the back.