  Thorn in my side: Repressed anger was perfectly okay with me Psychologists agree that the problem with most people is repressed anger. They behave a certain way because they're repressing something. I never thought I had any repressed anger, that I was perhaps the only person in the world who was incapable of repressing anything. And I was good with that. Now this whole thing with my family has dredged up all sorts of things from my past--stuff I was long past, stuff I can't do anything about anyway, stuff I can't change.
Yeah, yeah, my parents decided to relive their youth the minute they decided I was old enough to watch my sisters, which was when I was eleven, and went off and played bingo six nights a week. Yeah, I never got to go out with my friends because I always had to take care of my sisters, yeah, I never had any money because I couldn't babysit for money, because I had to watch my sisters for free and didn't get an allowance.
Yeah, this lasted until I was eighteen. At the time it didn't seem all that bad, after all, I shuttled my sisters off to bed and stayed up and watched whatever I wanted on TV and slammed myself into bed two minutes before my parents came in the door.
I got to stay up and write and imagine and plan and pretend I was on Broadway. It was okay. But now I have one psychopathic sister and one so self-absorbed that she shoved off her pyschopathic sister's fake suicide attempt onto someone else because she couldn't be bothered. And a counselor who, in pointing out that Heidi's psychopathia is not genetic, but a by-product of failing to bond with absent parents, made me very damned angry. And it's coming out everywhere. I'm glad that my kid isn't going to go off to a life of criminal sociopathy because of anything I might genetically pass on to him, and that I am not going to someday lose my mind and start stealing social security numbers.
That is a huge relief. But it never once occurred to me that when my parents left me to care for my sisters they were five and seven years old. I turned out okay because I had a childhood with them. My sisters did not. How could these people have been so blind? All right, so not everyone who experiences a "disruption in the bonding process" during early childhood becomes a dangerous psychopath, but almost all psychopaths have had that disruption. I look at my little five year old son, and I think, 'how could they leave a five year old in the care of an eleven year old every night? ' This sweet child, how could I even consider leaving the house every single night?! I don't want to miss a moment!
So out comes the anger. And lots of it. I can barely stand to watch my parents shower my son with affection and attention they denied their own children all of a sudden. I am not jealous, I am angry. Where was all of this all those years ago? Maybe I would have had sisters like other people. Maybe Heidi could have become the lawyer she should have been and Nancy wouldn't consider taking my phone call a courtesy.
And I can't do a thing about it. I should just get over it. The fact that it's all coming out now is making me angry. The fact that I can't just put it nicely back the way one can never refold a map the right way makes me angry. Being angry at all makes me angry. I find myself angry at innocent people. At Mark because he...well, for no reason, really.
At dear Thomas because he still won't tell me why he chose to try to keep his engagement a secret from me when it was so obvious anyway. At his fiancee Nancy, who has chosen to hate me regardless of a year and a half of concentrated effort on my part to befriend her and earn her trust that I'm not sleeping with her man. At my work, who legitimately deserves it, but I've been able to control it because of the whole they-give-me-money-for-not-much-work thing.
So much anger, all at once! And all for something that didn't seem so bad in the '70s! I got the duvet cover on, by the way. I am very proud of that. And the owner of my company actually told me he liked the latest thing I wrote and I was to inform comma-less Harriet and machine-writer Robin that they were to use my copy. So there is some good to outweigh the bad. But I really still thing there's a lot to be said for repressed anger. 
