Over the river and through the woods, to our traumatic holiday memories we go. Buckle up folks, it’s gonna be a bumpy ride! We may not be able to pick our families, but we can choose whether we laugh or cry at the madness and chaos they bring to us. We’ve personally cried plenty of tears over the years, and while there may still be one or two of those tears in this episode, we’re mostly sick of crying and think maybe it’s time to bring some dark humor to holiday spirits (double entendre, anyone?). Allow us to regale you with some insane tales that may feel very familiar and relatable to those of you who grew up in dangerously dysfunctional homes. ***MASSIVE TRIGGER WARNING*** If you don’t have a strong stomach and a twisted sense of gallows humor you might want to sit this one out because this episode does include the following topics: suicide, racism, assault, domestic abuse, child abuse and neglect, substance abuse, and mental health crises. That being said, if you’re still along for the ride there are some laughs and also some touching moments to be had, and it only took us about 25 years to find them.

If you are struggling this holiday season and need some assistance, please, don’t hesitate to reach out. There are resources available that can help pull you out of both internal and external crises. Visit our website www.differenfunctional.com/mental-health-resources for an extensive list of helplines that you can call, text, or chat with today. You are worthy. You are loved. You can get through this. And you are NOT alone.

AUTUMN

0:30

Welcome to the Different Functional Podcast, where we explore the triumphs and challenges of trauma, recovery and being neurodivergent in a neurotypical world. In today's episode, we're going to be swapping hilarious tales of holiday trauma.

I am Autumn, the older sister, and so to get this episode started, I am going to share my first holiday on my own memory. And so this is the first major holiday I didn't have to be involved with my family. I gotta - and this is actually one of my favorite holiday memories of all time, which is a little sad, but it was a Thanksgiving and I was like around 18 or 19. I slept until noon. I woke up, I ate microwaved au gratin potatoes and canned vegetarian baked beans, and I worked on a term paper and I talked to no one the whole day. And that was one of the best holidays I've ever had in my whole life. But that was that's the very first memory I have of a holiday on my own.

AUTUMN

1:22

I'm glad you had that good first holiday on your own. Uh, my first holiday on my own. This is Ivy the younger sister, by the way. My first holiday on my own. Not quite so pleasant of a story. In fact, I was kind of an asshole. I don't really remember the Thanksgiving. Maybe that went off without a hitch, and I just don't recall it. But the first Christmas day that I was out on my own, I guess because I was 18 and newly emerged from all the shit that we went through growing up and freed from my family and just completely on my own and independent. I took that as an opportunity to spend most of that first year to just take out my trauma on pretty much everybody around me by being bitter and in real time.

So for my very first Christmas, I was working at the jail at the time and I didn't mind working because I didn't want to be thinking about the fact that it was Christmas. That was what I told myself. But then I went to work all day long there on the booking floor with all of my coworkers who, bless their hearts, were stuck working on Christmas when they'd rather be with their families. I just spent the entire day being a Scrooge and dragging everybody else down and talking about how Christmas is stupid, anyway. I don't know how anybody enjoys this holiday. Like, fuck this holiday, fuck your families. Fuck everything about Christmas. I hate this place. I hate this world. Everything is terrible and holiday suck. Who came up with holidays? This is a really bad idea.

Like I just spent the entire day being a dick. So I'm glad that Autumn at least had a good, peaceful first holiday on her own and that she was a decent human being. I wish that I could say I had been the same, but I have to call myself out and admit that no, no, in fact, I was not a decent human being. I was kind of a dick.

AUTUMN

3:19

A little bit of a scrooge there. I probably would have ended up the same way had I been required to interact with other humans on that holiday, which I think that's one of the key components. I was completely isolated and alone.

Now, if you come from a healthy, supportive, happy, functional family, it may seem very odd. Our first holidays on our own, especially that mine was so favorable. Well, Ivy and I came from a lot of trauma. Our family was very dysfunctional and there are a lot of us out there that did come from trauma, that did come from dysfunction. We just didn't have those hallmark holidays.

I mean, in all honesty, those of us that came from trauma or dysfunction, we probably had at best, Jerry Springer holidays and at worst we had Cops holidays. But this does not mean we don't have holiday stories and traditions. They're just not ones you'd typically want to tell in polite society.

IVY

4:13

And it also doesn't mean that we don't have holiday stories that will put a smile on your face if you have a strong stomach. Because after all, many of us who did go through a lot of trauma do use humor to help us deal and cope with the things that we've been through, because that's better than being an asshole on Christmas.

That's one of the things that I learned over the years is use humor instead. You make more friends that way and you like yourself better. So today we're taking that pain and insanity from our youth, and we're turning it into something that we can laugh about along with you. And we hope that it will help you to laugh at maybe some of your past trauma as well, and find the humor in it.

And we're including pretty much all holidays, because another common theme when you grow up with a lot of trauma and dysfunctional family, is that it all kind of tends to blur together. So we're going to be kind of sharing a mismatch over the Thanksgiving, Christmas New Year. Just that the memorable moments that fit somewhere in the range of the holiday season.

AUTUMN

5:14

And a big part of the reason we're doing this episode is because, like I said, a lot of times we don't feel like we can tell our holiday stories in polite society because we would get the look. And if you've ever over shared your trauma, you know the look. You've seen the look. And we want this to be a safe place to share your trauma, share your laughs or your sadness of the holidays. And we're hoping by opening the floor to you that you will find a safe place as well, to be able to laugh at the trauma and hopefully have a happy holiday. Despite the fact that it's the holidays.

Now when we are organizing our list of like, okay, what stories do we tell? And what do you remember? What do I remember? Once we kind of got it narrowed down, I couldn't help but want to name each of the stories and memories that we came up with. Because being autistic, well, I love organizing information. And I thought, oh, let's do some fun little names.

And so the first memory that Ivy and I are going to talk about, we have titled it The Feds Are Coming to Town. To give you an idea of where this came from - we were not actually, you know, ambushed by the fed swat team or anything, but our father was an extreme conspiracy theorist, especially toward the end, and he thought that everybody was out to get him when it came to the federal government. He would go on and on about this for hours. I believe he thought that the feds had tapped our phones. He believed that they are the ones that caused him to, I guess just not bill appropriately and note appropriately for like three years. And because of that, he went to court and got his license taken away and ended up in jail. But that was the feds fault. What all else did he blame on the feds, Ivy?

IVY

6:56

I think the bigger question is what he did not blame on the feds. Everything was either the feds fault or our mom's fault. That was the basis of his entire his entire life. Everything bad that ever happened to him was the fault of the feds or our mom. I do recall that many times - because we live near a military base, and so we would get military aircraft flying over our house, and there are so many memories that I have of being dragged out into the middle of our ten acre property in the cold and into the woods, sitting there shivering with our father as he told me things that he didn't want the feds to know, couldn’t talk about in the house.

Everything's bugged. The house and everything. And with the planes flying overhead, we're in danger. I just want you to know that I've got a stockpile of weapons. So if the feds come, I'm gonna go down fighting. I'm not just gonna put up with that. Don't you worry. I'm not gonna put up with that. I'm gonna take the feds out with me when I go. And I feel like this is just something that he just he talked about so much that for me, it has become a huge part of the holiday memories too.

Because the holidays were like one of the only times that our family was generally together in one place. And when that happens in a dysfunctional family, often there's a lot of crisis and trauma and drama that gets wrapped up in that. And so those become really memorable moments. And so all of his issues with the feds, that's something that I now in large part associate with the holidays, because the holidays were so memorable for so many reasons.

And one of those being our father's constant paranoia and the fact that sometimes when people would call to give their holiday wishes in the middle of the conversation, he would interrupt, be like, you hear that said, you hear that? I'm having a good day here!

AUTUMN

8:49

Let's just hope they didn't have the coworker that was a Super Scrooge and made them feel even worse about having to work the holidays to apparently monitor this low level psychologist in a backwoods, rural Missouri town.

Okay, so I'm not sure if this was near the holidays. To me, it felt like the holidays time frame, and this was when Ivy and I officially got kicked out of the house. I was 18 at the time and my fiancé was in the Army and he was in Korea. And he'd actually sat down and talked to my dad before he left and said, you know, I'm going to be going to Korea for a year. Can you verify the Autumn has a place to live for this year? If not, we'll go ahead and get married early in a small ceremony and I'll set her up on base and she'll be taken care of. And my dad swore up and down. It's like not an issue. I love my daughters. I'll keep them here, blah blah blah.

Well, I think it was like, what, two months, three months into that, our dad got into a car accident and he kicked us out. And I remember being in the emergency room with him and him telling the nurses, because I guess they walked in or something when he was kicking us out, saying, well, the FBI had cut my brake lines and it's not safe for you guys to be here anymore. It's not safe for you to be here because the FBI had cut my brake lines. Dude!

Do you even know what had actually happened? Because I'm pretty sure the feds did not cut his brake lines. Do you know what happened? If he even got into an accident. I mean, it's a little unclear.

IVY

I do recall around that period of time, him and our stepmother were heavily medicated most of the time. How much of those meds were even prescribed to them? I don't know. But they were heavily medicated most of the time, and there were a few times before he got into that car accident when I was in the car with him, and I was like, scared for my life because of how radically he was driving just all over the place, I think, maybe he hit a deer. But I'm also 99.9% confident he was heavily medicated at the time, so whether or not that deer was real, I'm not sure. It might also have been a figment of his imagination. Much like the FBI cutting his brake lines. But yes he use it as a perfect opportunity to kick us out of the house, because his new wife didn't like us being there.

AUTUMN

Oh, gosh, the deer and the feds are out to get us. Oh my gosh! Yeah. He didn't he didn't want us in the house. And I don't remember the exact time frame, but I felt like it was really short because everything was just going along fine. I had a job, you were in school, and I think he gave us, like a week deadline or something like that.

IVY

Yeah, that was a week. We had a whole week to pack up our shit and get out.

AUTUMN

That's what I had thought, it was one week. And of course, I was working at the time and obviously needed the money because now I needed to support myself and come up with a down payment for an apartment, because I didn't have consistent access to my fiancé at the time, and I was working all day. At the end of that week, we'd finally got an Ivy stuff all together. I had worked all day. I had been up at like six that morning, got home at like six at night, loaded up all of Ivy's stuff, and then drove from southern Missouri up into the Michigan. It was like, no Michigan Indiana area.

IVY

Yeah, it was Indiana because mom was remarried already at that time. So yeah. And I had no other choice but to go live with our mom and stepfather because I was, in fact, a minor. I was 13 years old when he kicked us out. And because I only had a week and I was not supplied with boxes or anything or any means to get boxes, I just had to shove everything I owned into garbage bags. So I had a huge pile of garbage bags that we stuck in the back of autumn's truck. I remember that it was a little pickup truck, a little S10, and we had to try to not lose all the garbage bags out of the back.

AUTUMN

Oh my god. But then that trip, because I'd worked all day, packed you up at six and then set out. That's a really long fucking journey, by the way, from southern Missouri all the way up to the north of Indiana. And we finally got, like, turning into our stepfather's trailer park. I was making that last turn. This was after I'd already got lost in, like, downtown Chicago because of some tollbooth and had to find my way out of that. And it's, I don't know, two, three, four, five in the morning. I don't remember dark as hell. I missed the turn and end up in the ditch with my rear wheels completely in the air. And I remember that as being one of the first distinct moments of just having absolutely no fucks left to give whatsoever.

We just kind of crashed. I think Ivy was asleep, and I just remember turning the car off and being like. Yep. Like there's nothing. Like there's no crisis. There was no worry. There was no anything left. I was just like, I have officially run out of all fucks at 19 years old, all fucks are now gone.

IVY

I don't know what this says about me, but I don't even remember that last part. I'm not doubting you, but I don’t remember that last part. I would not doubt that I was sleeping, but you would think that I would remember that. Although I was consumed with all of this stress and worry, because now, all of a sudden, at 13, I was being ripped away from any sort of stability I had had, which was not much, but I had a few friends. I'd spent my entire life pretty much in that small town in Missouri. All of my memories were there. All of the people that I knew were there. My sister, who was the only person I really trusted. We were being separated because I was being sent to live in Indiana, and Autumn was going to be staying in Missouri, and our stepfather was a massive asshole, and I knew I was going to be stuck living with him for an indeterminate amount of time, and I assumed it would be at least until I was 18.

And at that time I was not really on great terms with mom either. Like our relationship was pretty strained. So the entire week leading up to going there was one of the most miserable times in my life. I'm pretty sure pretty sure it was the first time that I seriously contemplated suicide seriously. Like, things suck here, but boy, are they going to suck where I'm going to. And at least here I knew what I was dealing with there. I know nothing except that my stepfather's a prick and my mom's crazy. Wonderful!

AUTUMN

Oh, and that's very accurate of that time. He was a prick, and she was pretty crazy at that time. And I actually, I felt horrible. I really did like I would have loved to do something for you, but at that point I think I was just completely shut down, like I didn't - we didn't even know at that time that what we were in was trauma at all. We hadn't even figured that out at that point. This was just life. And I'd been running, you know, pedal to the metal, full gas, constant adrenal system, flood since 12, 13 years old, all throughout my adolescence. And so by that point, I felt like The Walking Dead. You know, they talk about that thousand-yard stare that soldiers come back with. I felt like that. That's how I was living my life. The first few years on our own is what that felt like.

And so I felt really, really bad in retrospect that I didn't do anything for Ivy. But at the time I couldn't. I literally did not have the capacity to. For me, because that was the end of my childhood, it was like, here's the holiday trauma cherry on top of your entire fucking childhood.

IVY

And it was right near the holidays. I remember that, too, because it was pretty miserable being in that new house for the holidays. Being with my stepfather, who I couldn't stand, and, and Mom, who – to Mom’s mom's credit, she did try to keep her crazy in check and deal with her depression when I first got there, because she was actually genuinely happy that I was there and she had a chance to mend our relationship away from my father's influence on me. So I mean that part of it was good.

I mean, the fact of the matter is like, even though you would have loved to have done something for me, it wasn't your responsibility. We just got shit luck of the draw. Whoever dealt us our cards in life just gave us a bunch of garbage right there at the beginning, including parents and step parents who were just nightmares to deal with. I love our mom, I do. I do, I love our mom. She had a lot of amazing qualities. But for a large portion of our childhood, crazy as a loon and our father, obviously. I mean, the feds drove him crazy and that deer. That deer he may have imagined when he hit just rattled his brain around. But he was pretty messed up before that, and both of them were just absolutely terrible at picking good partners.

It's just one of those things. I kind of, as much as it sucked, I kind of viewed it as a rite of passage. Because I felt like Autumn sheltered me from so many things. I knew Autumn had gone through a lot in our family. I had seen much of what she had gone through. I knew our brother had gone through a lot. I didn't see us as much of that because he was so much older than me. But I knew he'd been through a lot, and that's why he didn't want to be around. And I got that. So I felt like by the time our father kicked us out and I was sent to live with mom, like, I felt like it was in some ways, it was like being on my own.

I was like, okay, I got to stand on my own two feet. Now I can do this. Like, I was determined that I was gonna do this, and I was like approaching it in some ways, the way people approach it, actually moving out on their own. I was like, okay, well, I don't have all of this support anymore, and I don't have any of my friends anymore. So I gotta figure out how to fight my battles on my own. I can do this. I could do it.

So I understand that you wish you could have done something for me, but there's really nothing you could have done. It was out of your hands legally, and it was our parents responsibility to be parents. It's just unfortunate that they chose not to actually be parents to any of us kids.

and I hated the times that I lived there, but I hated pretty much everything up to that time too. So I was just biding time until I could be an adult. Adulthood seemed awesome.

And even though adulthood has a lot of shitty components to it, every time I come upon rough times now I'm just like, hmm, this sucks, but not nearly as much as my childhood. Least I have some control over my own destiny, and there's not insane people making my decisions for me. The only insane person making decisions for me is me now.

AUTUMN

Oh my God. I laugh at the way you were saying. It was like almost a rite of passage, and you were explaining how, like you'd lost all your resources and you were on your own now and you didn't have support. And I do laugh because right around that same time frame, because you would have been, I think, 13 if I was 18. So around when I was 12 or 13, I remember laying on the couch having been pulled out of school. I had no support system and I was now responsible for taking care of the household. So I actually have a very distinct memory of my rite of passage and my brother being there, being like, this is life. Like having no sympathy. And sometimes I would kind of get mad in retrospect at him, like, come on, dude. But now I totally get it because I'm like, that's where I was at when I left Ivy. Like, that's just where the older sibling leaves you at. It's like, life sucks. Have fun trying to figure out how to swim, I guess, I don't know.

IVY

Yeah, I think there is a component to that. I, I do, in retrospect, feel really bad for our brother in so many ways. Like I used to really not like him. We did not get along. We have very different personalities and there was a huge age gap, and I used to have a lot of resentment towards him. The older that I get, and the more that I've been able to see our family kind of from a distance, now that I'm separated from all of that trauma by years and lots of therapy, I can look at it now and be like, yeah, you got the shit end of the stick because he had to deal with it all first.

Well, I'm not going to say he got the short end of the stick. Like we all did. Like we all got the shit end of the stick. I guess our parents were just dipping sticks and shit and then handing them out to all of us kids. Sometimes you got 3 or 4 at a time. Just a whole bouquet of shit sticks.

AUTUMN

All right, so now, to be fair, though, we pointed out some of the crazy shit that our father did. We should probably also talk a little bit about our mom. I know if you've listened to the podcast at all, Ivy and I do have a much closer loving, um, memory of our mom. Because she has passed on as opposed to our father. Because for us, it definitely did feel like our father went out of the way to isolate us. And we say this because we had a lot of dysfunction, and he was a PhD level psychologist. So it's kind of like, shouldn't he have known a little bit better? Or maybe you did. And it was kind of intentional. Whereas our mom tried to reach out and heal things.

But even if you have a parent that later on in life they apologize and they try to make amends and you can actually have a good relationship with them, that doesn't mean the insanity and the trauma didn't actually happen. And so while we do love our mom, we do need to point out that she was batshit crazy.

And that leads us into our next story, which is Hark the Herald Crazy Woman sings. And I feel like this is a great, great title for this one because this was, I believe, mom actually singing Christmas carols when she lost her shit. And Ivy knows this story better. So I'm going to turn this one over to her.

IVY

At church, our mom would often get asked to put together these music programs because music was her life, and she was an extremely gifted and talented person, had a beautiful voice, could play piano, loved music. And so she looked forward to these opportunities. She didn't get them all the time, but when they would arise, she would get very excited about it and she would put weeks and weeks of preparation into it. So she had put all of this effort into planning it, and she looked forward to so much.

But part of the problem with this particular program that she put together, it was for a social event at church. It's like a potluck in some sort of social, I think, because it was the holidays. And so people were also talking. So like the music that she put together, I think when the church leaders asked her to put the music program together, they were thinking it would be like background music, background entertainment, as it were. Mom did not seem to understand the assignment, or maybe she just figured she didn't have to follow the rules. I'm not sure either of those things could have been true for out mom.

And she was in the middle of singing a song, and people in the in the crowd, like they were sitting down at the tables with their meals and they were kind of chit chatting and stuff. And mom got so offended and she got so angry, she stopped in the middle of her song, picked up a folding chair and hurled it across the room. And she started losing her shit. She was yelling and screaming and throwing things.

It was like the crazy church lady meets WWE. But she wasn't taking anybody down. But I mean, that might, in retrospect, might have been even more funny. I'm glad she didn't, though. She might have gotten assault charges. But it was just it was so abrupt and unexpected with this social event. People were just kind of chatting.

But my mom was a wonderful person. She was extremely talented, but she needed to be the center of attention when it came to stuff like that. And so everybody was taking the attention away from her, or they were ignoring her to have conversations, and she did not deal with it well. And I just remember sitting there with Autumn and with our dad, I have no idea if our brother was there, but I was sitting there with Autumn and our father and Mom starts losing their shit. She starts throwing folding chairs, she's screaming, and I don't even know what she's saying. I mean, she may have been screaming obscenities for all I know. I wouldn't put it past her. And everybody's just staring at her in shock and nobody's attempting to approach her.

And Autumn is sitting there with, like, this horrified look on her face, like the horrified look of like what? What should I do? I should do something. I'm supposed to do something to fix this. But she didn't know what to do. And our father asshole that he could be instead of doing anything about the situation, he just sat there and leaned back in his chair and he was just smiling. He just thought it was the funniest thing, that mom was losing her shit in front of all of those people.

I don't remember what brought an end to it. I don't know if somebody immobilized her. I don't know if they just let it run its course. All I know is that, Autumn and I spent most of the rest of the day in a bathroom stall at the church, just crying on the floor. And to my knowledge, I don't know that anybody said anything to mom about it afterward because I don't remember it ever being discussed again. Maybe she got pulled back in an office to be talked to by the leaders of the church. I don't know. I don't even remember our father saying anything about it after the fact. I just remember her losing her shit and all of the nice little Mormon people just trying to go on about their business afterward like nothing had happened. Nobody knew how to deal with that situation.

AUTUMN

Is anybody really prepared for like a Bibles, ladders, and chairs match in the local church? I don't think we're prepared for that. Typically, even those of us that have some trauma background and have a few years under our belt, I think we would have been thrown. And I think they were especially thrown because it's not like we were like, holy rollers, we were Mormon. Okay. And to give you an idea of how quiet it is in a Mormon church, there was a sweet little old lady, 80 year old. She used to be Baptist, converted to being Mormon. And every now and again when somebody was giving a talk about Jesus, she would go, Amen and raise her hand. And everybody thought that was so cute that she was so outspoken during church services. Okay, so Mormons are quiet people to begin with, so I can only imagine that that was that really had to have them off guard pretty badly.

And I'll say, I don't remember any of this part. Apparently I saw this coming and checked out before Ivy did. Like she cut out halfway through, but she was six years younger than me, so she still had some learning about the appropriate point at which to dissociate, I guess.

IVY

Yeah, it was quite a few years before I started dissociating. I got really good at it as I got older, but I was a slow learner, so I remember a lot of things from our childhood. Which on some level I'm thankful for because those memories do help keep me in check. Now, as an adult, when I feel myself starting to act a little too much like either of our parents, I do try to reel myself in because I do not want to be throwing folding chairs at people for any reason. I mean, unless they're attacking me, I know that I don’t want to be throwing folding chairs in anybody.

I just - it's so fascinating to me that nobody seemed to do anything about it, from my memory. Like I said, I don't remember exactly how that whole situation wrapped up. I just remember staring at our mom, being terrified of her, and then looking into our father, thinking, surely dad will do something about this. And no, he just sat back smiling because he knew that mom was making an ass of herself in front of everybody.

Which I mean, honestly, he loved that shit. Like, you could see it from the look on his face that he was very pleased with the situation that he was in, because he looked sane and Mom looked crazy in his mind. But like, as an adult, I look at that now and I think if I was one of the other people at the church, I probably would have turned to him to see if he was going to do anything about his wife, and been really creeped out by the fact that he was just sitting there and smiling. I would have been pretty creeped out by that.

And yet this this story is like one of my - I mean, it's fucked up to say - one of my favorite stories from our childhood trauma. Because it's just it's like something that you would see in a movie. It doesn't seem real. And so it's easier now, especially now, for me to laugh at the situation because I find the situation itself pretty fucking hilarious.

And I was sharing this story recently with somebody, and I got halfway through the story and I realized I probably shouldn't be telling the story to them because I'm laughing, thinking that it's funny. And this client of mine, yes, I told the client, because fuck me, I'm so prone to oversharing and I’ve known this client for a really long time, so I thought she would find it funny too. She did not find it funny. She was very disturbed by the fact that I had gone through that is a child, and it kind of brought me down too.

Because I was like, man, I just wanted to laugh about this because this shit's funny. How can you hear that story and not be amused by it? But I guess people that come from normal families where everybody behaves themselves and don’t throw folding chairs at church, I guess that's not amusing to them. I guess it's bad form and me retelling the story is bad form. I really gotta learn where the point is on sharing versus oversharing, because I misjudge those situations a lot.

AUTUMN

Hey, those people just should be grateful that you're not throwing, you know, the massage table. But again, that's the whole point of this episode is because you do get that look and you're like, oh, I overshared. But these things are funny, and we need people that can laugh with us about these types of things.

You know, the thing I do remember about that - well, it may not be that specific time - was crying on the bathroom floor with you. I feel like every time we went to church, we ended up crying on the bathroom floor. And I think, honestly, I now have an affinity for those kind of church bathrooms. You know, the church bathroom smell where it's kind of this weird cheapo air freshener in this little tile, and it's nice and clean. Because that was one of the safest places during all of that childhood. And we would sneak out during the service if you would have to go to the bathroom. And obviously I would need to help my sister go to the bathroom and we would go to the bathroom. And while everybody else is locked in the service, Ivy and I would just cry quietly on the bathroom floor. And it was so nice.

And I feel like we kept that tradition going for a long time, because after we moved out, whenever we would go to visit each other, I think well into my 20s, at least late 20s, every visit we would end up crying on the bathroom floor. It was just it was part of what we did. That was that was our bonding.

IVY

Yeah. You know, it's kind of like Pavlov's dogs or whatever because like, now whenever I cry, I tend to gravitate towards bathrooms, whether I have anybody to cry with me or not. It's just like crying is a thing that you do in the bathroom. Like, if I start crying in any situation, I if I have the means to, I'm going to go to a bathroom to do it. I don't even have to close the door. I just have to cry in the bathroom, sitting on the floor, specifically. That is the that is the only acceptable environment in which to cry. Nothing else feels right. It feels weird to cry in any other context.

AUTUMN

Yeah, sitting on the floor is an absolute must. I remember somebody recommended Orange Is the New Black to me, and in the very first scene of that, she's sitting on the toilet crying. And first off, I was like, you know, I watch TV to escape from real life. And sitting in the bathroom crying isn't escaping real life. And two, she's not doing it right. You're supposed to sit on the floor, leaning against the bathtub in order to cry, or at least the stall wall if it's a public bathroom. It's a requirement.

IVY

Yeah, I would agree that it's a requirement. It's also the smartest thing to do, because when you cry, you also produce a lot of snot and stuff. And if you're sitting on the floor leaning against the bathtub next to the toilet, then you can just throw all your snot rag directly in the toilet and like the toilet paper dispensers right there, you just bring it off the roll and infuse it with your snot and then toss it in the toilet. And then you fill it and then you flush the toilet and you start the whole process over again.

AUTUMN

Not only is it a necessity, it is the most efficient way to cry baby. That's ultimately why we did it. A little autistic Autumn, before she realized she was autistic, was like, this will be an efficient and safe place to perform this activity. That's what's going on.

Okay. All right. So we told a story about mom and we told a story about dad. So now let's tell a story about our parents as a unit, as a relationship. And this one we called All I want for Christmas is My Parents to Get Divorced.

So when we found out that our parents were going to get a divorce, which, I mean, it was great for them because that marriage was shit and toxic for everybody involved most of that marriage. That should have happened a long damn time ago. But we find out on Christmas Day. We had set up so Grandma, which is our mother's mom, so our mom's mom had come out to help cook the turkey because mom had been really depressed. She was sleeping all the time at this point. She wasn't really able to function, so grandma was coming out. She was going to help me cook the turkey.

I don't know what we're doing. We're prepping for Christmas. I had gone and got Grandma. I hadn't even seen Mom or Dad that day. This was just the plan. And autistic Autumn stuck with the plan. It's what we do. And our dad comes out in his underwear and I believe, announces that they're just going to get a divorce, that he hates our mom and it's done. And we're just left being like, okay, then.

But here's the thing, though. Mom and dad are out of the picture. Ivy is like, I don't know, young. She's 13, 14. So it's left now to me and grandma to be in charge. Well, I'm autistic. And Grandma is autistic, And it’s Christmas and we’re cooking Christmas dinner. And we were going to have Christmas dinner. So do you know what we did? We finished cooking Christmas dinner and we had Christmas dinner.

And I blame me and Grandma for that so much, because I'm pretty sure that was just 100% autism. Like, we went into shock. There was nothing left but autism. And it was rigid thinking and following the routine. And so we had Christmas dinner, and I remember Grandma and me being obsessed about the fucking turkey this whole time, too. Because we didn’t have an oven, because that broke like a decade ago and never got fixed. So we had a turkey roaster and neither Grandma nor I knew how to cook a turkey in a turkey roaster. And I remember just spending the entire day with Grandma wondering if the turkey was done or not. And I'm pretty sure we overcooked that thing into jerky, if I'm not mistaken, just to make Christmas dinner better.

AUTUMN

You know, you did overcook the turkey. I do remember the turkey. I don't remember a ton of details about, uh, what happened at the house, just like little bits and pieces there. And if you've been listening to the podcast for a while, you may have heard this story it to some degree already, because we did a episode about this way early on, not long after we had started the podcast, where we both told our side of that story, and there were actually quite a few disparities.

Because I remember us being at Grandma’s apartments. We stayed the night there. Our father called us on the phone the next morning, or we called him one way or the other to figure out when we were supposed to come out for dinner. And he told us over the phone that they were going to get a divorce. And then Grandma and Autumn sitting around and grandma's bedroom trying to figure out what to do, and ultimately decided we still had to go there for Christmas dinner. So we went there.

And like, this is such a random memory, and it's one that I have every single holiday and it has nothing to do with anything, but it cracks me up every time I think about it. Grandma wore pants. Grandma never wore pants. She only ever wore pants on the holidays like you knew it was a holiday because grandma was wearing pants. So she put on her pants and then we went out to the house. She put on her pants and a really nice sweater, and we went to the house and she and Autumn did the cooking.

I don't know what I did for most of that day. I do remember our father wandering out in his underwear. And yes, I'm sure he probably announced it again because he didn't even remember that he had told us already. After dinner was prepared - and the turkey was dry as hell, but I'm not going to blame Autumn or my grandma for that because they didn't know what they were doing. Also, Autumn was a vegetarian by that point, so it's not like she would know what to do with the turkey. - But we sat down to dinner. Mom did not sit down to dinner because my mom was passed out, probably drunk in our brother's room the entire day. We didn't see mom the entire day. Not once. Nobody went back there to see Mom. Not even Grandma. Nobody went back there. But I remember sitting there at the table and we were eating this overcooked turkey. And he is just sitting there in his underwear, going on and on and on about how much he hates our mom right in front of her own mother. Most awkward fucking Christmas ever. Just sitting there with our father in his underwear. Our mom passed out drunk somewhere, miserable, hating her life and getting a divorce. And he's just, like, going on and on and on about how much he hates his wife to his wife's mother. And, you know, to the kids, too, because that's good parenting. I approve. I bet the feds approve, too, didn't they?

AUTUMN

Oh my gosh. Yeah. And Grandma, she was oh, she was born way back, you know, so she was a teenager, young adult in the 1940s. So very much repressed emotion. We don't talk about these things on top of autism and not knowing how to talk about anything. And on top of the abuse and control that our father had over use anyways. So none of us really felt like we could say anything back. I don't think we even thought we could check on Mom.

And so here's to me, like the one up part of the story, like when we're sharing trauma. And I just, I really feel the need to be the more traumatic of the bunch, I guess, is the one up part of it. And it's like, has the trauma ever gotten so bad that your entire house just phase jumped into some sort of horror realm in a parallel universe? Because my trauma has.

So we took Grandma back to her house in a little town 30 minutes away, and Ivy and I come to come back home. We get back home and it is dead quiet, and it's never dead quiet. We've got, like, a whole bunch of dogs. I mean, we're in the middle of the country. There's always bugs. Even in December, there's stuff going on. Totally quiet, totally dark. We get in. I don't know if the electricity doesn't work or we're too scared to use it, but I think we had, like, a flashlight and it just felt super dark, even with the flashlight. Like where, you know, you should be lighting the room, but it's not. And it was so fucking spooky.

Ivy and I ended up crawling on the table back to back. I ended up calling grandma, asking if we could come back. and Ivy and I just fled, Like tires squealing, kicking gravel fled back to grandma's house. And both her and I agree, like it did not feel like we were even in this reality anymore. Like there was nothing happening. It was just the amount of negativity and horror that had condensed in our house for the last decade had just culminated into a temporary phase jump. That's what it felt like to me anyways.

IVY

It did kind of feel like that. It was kind of like being in a, like a horror themed video game. That's kind of what it felt like, but unarmed and not able to find anything to defend ourselves with and not even knowing what we were going to defend ourselves against. Would it be our father? Would it be our mother? Would it be a demon of energy that they created together while they were wallowing in their own self pity and hatred for each other? Who knows, it could be anything. So yeah, I, I guess that is kind of a one up thing, I don't know.

Like, I'm sure we probably didn't morph into another reality for a while., But part of me still questions if maybe we did, because it really did feel so different. It just felt like the world was pitch black. And way too quiet and just, I don't know, hate and anger and resentment and self-loathing and self-pity were just thick in the air, like you could smell it. And you're like, breathing it in is pretty miserable.

I will say, going back to a point that Autumn was talking about earlier, where Grandma was raised in a generation where you didn't really talk about those things, and our father was so domineering in a lot of ways. So like, none of us really felt safe to even check on mom. But I will give Grandma this little bit of credit. Before we went out to the house that day, after we'd had the phone call with hour father and we were sitting in grandma's room. Grandma never cussed, ever. She was a very like rule following polite lady. She did not cuss. The only time I heard her cuss and she called our father a son of a bitch. I remember being stunned because grandma cussed.

And the funny thing is, I don't remember having any strong feeling about the fact that she called our father a son of a bitch. I just remember being stunned that grandma cussed at all, and I would have thought that part of me would have felt protective of our father, because at that time, I was totally a daddy's girl, and I did not recognize the manipulative games that he played. And so I would have expected myself to have some level of loyalty to him and want to defend him, but I didn't. I just had, like, this giddy little moment where I was like, oh crap, Grandma, said a bad word. Grandma said a bad word.

AUTUMN

I feel like swear words do have power, and apparently that power builds over time is how that works. And so when you and I use swear words, I mean, they don't have a lot of power because we're dropping them left and right. We never hold on to them long enough to let them really glow big. But I think Grandma held on to that swear word for like 70 years. So when she dropped it, like there were echo ripples of power that went out across the globe,

IVY

It certainly felt that way. It's too bad that she didn't say it while we were at the house with our father, because maybe that would have like - like there would have been so much power. It could have been like a weapon. Like an energy weapon they use an anime. And it would be just like throwing him not just across the room, , but maybe go through that wall to the outside. Just like you son of a bitch and he would have just been flying through the air and smashed outside the house. We would definitely have had a break from reality if that happened.

AUTUMN

That would be funny. And I would have probably been mildly worried about psychosis because I was already diagnosing myself out of the DSM IV, I think for at the time, by that age.

All right. So since we're talking about swearwords and offensive language, let's go ahead and move into our next story, which we have titled The Whore of Christmas. And I'm going to ruin the end of this one for you. Spoiler alert I'm the whore of Christmas. Autumn is the whore of Christmas.

So in this wonderful tale, our parents have gotten divorced. I'm like 19 or 20. My fiancé that I had mentioned earlier at that time. He's black by the way, which not a big deal to me, but it was a really big deal to my stepfather. But I wasn't really aware of that. I knew my mom kind of had issues with it, but we didn't really pursue things at that point, so I just knew it probably wasn't a good idea for my boyfriend, fiancé or whatever he was at that point to come in and have Christmas dinner with us.

So he very nicely drove my sister and I two hours away to our aunt's house, so that Ivy and I could have Christmas with our mom and our stepdad. He drops us off. We walk in the door, he drives off back home, and this is before cell phones. So there's no getting ahold of anybody now. And I think the very first thing out of our stepfather's face was what a whore I was, and how I was whoring myself out for N-word this and N-word that. And yeah, I think I just remember sleeping after. I just gave up on Christmas and gave up on everybody. And I was like, fuck all y'all, I'm done. I'm out. I don't remember anything else from the holiday.

IVY

44:33

Well, I remember a lot from the holiday personally. And bless your first husband's heart. Such a good fucking man. The entire reason that he even drove us there was because the weather was not great, and he did not want Autumn to have to drive, because he wanted to make sure that we were safe. So he drives us all that way, knowing that he's just going to be dropping us off because family and our crazy stepfather and not knowing really where things stood. And so he didn't want to rock the boat because he's a genuinely good person. And our family is crazy, so I don't think either Autumn or I would have wanted to expose him to that any more than necessary, regardless of whether racism was a factor.

But I do distinctly remember, seriously, as soon as we walked through the door, there was no hi, how are you doing? There was nothing. Our stepfather, who was in the kitchen, which was like, right by where the front door was. We walk through the front door. He comes barreling directly at Autumn, gets right in her face and starts screaming at her about how not okay it is to be with a black man, apparently. I don't even know what his issue was with it. Like we didn't know our stepfather very well at that time because the engagement between him and our mom was real short. We met him one time. Neither of us liked him. We were glad that we didn't have to be around him anymore, which also explains my later misery and knowing I was moving in with this asshole. So we were just taken completely by surprise.

And also, it's our aunt's house too. Like, what the fuck, dude, that's not even your house. Like you're in somebody else's house attacking their family because you don't agree with their life choices and you're aggressively attacking and calling them names, calling thier partner names. This wonderful man who just drove us two hours in the snow so that we could be here, and he didn't even stay because he didn't want to rock the boat and make things difficult for us. And now we're stuck. We have nowhere to go, and nobody knows how to deal with this situation, because our stepfather is just angry and irate and just a horrible human being.

So Autumn - and I know she must have blacked out on this – Autumn and I went back outside because we didn't want to be in the house with him. We didn't feel safe being in the house with him. So we went outside and I remember being outside in the snow at our aunt's house for like at least an hour, because we didn't know what else to do. We couldn't be in the house because our stepfather wouldn't stop yelling at Autumn, and he was so angry and could be kind of violent. So we just stood out there in the snow.

And like, I remember different people, like coming out of the house to talk to us. Like, at one point our brother came out and tried to talk to us and try to get us to come back inside. And then he went back inside. And then our aunt came out and tried to talk to us, to get us to come back inside. Eventually, I think our aunt and uncle made our stepfather leave, I think. Because at some point he left, and it was only after he left that we came back and it really put a damper on the holidays because like, oh, we sure don't want to be here now.

And why the fuck didn't any of you defend us right there? I'm not going to shit on him too much because it definitely took everybody by surprise. I don't think anybody saw that coming or expected that, because as far as I know, our brother didn't have any issues with Autumn's partner, and our aunt and uncle didn't have any issues with Autumn's partner. We knew it was kind of like this weird area with mom, but we kind of figured it was just like, well, she's from an older generation, so I guess that's part of it. I don't know, we just won't talk about it. We won't address it. We'll just leave it be, I guess. Let's just get through the holiday and hope it doesn't explode.

And as soon as we walk through, the door explodes. So yeah, I remember that entire day. Pretty much. I remember all the shit show that that day turned into and how awkward the whole day was. Because Merry Christmas, you have a racist in your family now. Gee, thanks, Santa. That's what I always wanted, An angry, aggressive, violent, racist asshole who's married to our mother. Now, this is not what I wanted. When I said I wanted my parents to get divorced, I didn't know you were going to replace our father with somebody just as garbage in a different way.

AUTUMN

I think that's the worst part is if you do live in that traumatic household and the parents get divorced, but they don't actually take time to heal themselves, and then they just marry new trauma. And now you get to negotiate two different kinds of new trauma. What kind of trauma is step mom going to introduce? What kind of trauma is stepdad gonna introduce? And why the hell did I waste all those years training for a different kind of trauma if now I've got these ones? It wasn't really fair. It wasn't really fair at all

IVY

No, not fair. But nothing about growing up in a traumatic home is fair. I am pissed at Santa, though he did not understand the assignment. I wanted our parents to get divorced. I did not want stepparents. That just made things worse. Santa did not deliver the gift that I wanted.

AUTUMN

Nor the gift that I wanted. And yeah, it did definitely catch us all off guard. Because like I said, at that point, I had known when to step out and dissociate, when to like, back off and be like, you're not gonna want to remember this years from now. And that's why I don't remember a whole lot of our childhood. So if I was there to remember the first part, it must have been a surprise attack on all of us, which is just –

I also realized when we're retelling this story, that if our parents got divorced and then we got kicked out of the house, but like somewhere our timeline is off. But I have no idea where because I don't know. Seriously, from ages 13 until I ended up in the Netherlands at like 20 with my first husband, is a fucking blur. Like it all just goes together. I don't know what happened during what year, I just kind of like - it would be a horrible timeline. I have no way of actually figuring out historically what happened when.

IVY

I'm not great with the years as far as like what year it was. I am somewhat better with what age I was. I'm pretty sure I was 10 or 11 when our parents got divorced, and I know I was 13. Yeah, I was 13 when our father kicked us out. So there were like a couple of years there in between. And that was during that time that we had this with our stepfather, because at that point, I was definitely not living with mom. Yeah, we were living in our father's house still.

And what, honestly, in retrospect, was surprises the hell out of me is that our father was not racist, at least not racist towards black people at least. I don't know about anybody else, but I would have expected of all people for him to have been the issue there. I am genuinely shocked that I guess he has some degree of goodness in him. Even the worst of people have some degree of goodness in them. At least he's not a racist asshole in that sense. Again, I don't I won't speak for all ethnicities. He might still be racist, but he was not racist towards black people. And he actually, to my understanding, was pretty nice to Autumn's partner. So I guess that's a good thing on his behalf. If I have to say something nice about him, he could have been more racist. That would have been worse.

AUTUMN

I don't think anybody's ever like he could have been more racist. That is a very out of context statement right there. And not to take that away from him, but it often felt like our father really liked my partner at the time because Mom didn't. So I don't really know if it was honestly his feelings or just more of that weird triangulation manipulation that goes on with parents in dysfunctional households. I, yeah, I don't know.

All right. So let's go ahead and move on to our next story and to a new holiday. And this one we titled My New Year's Resolution Is To Not Let Mommy Die. Ivy, I'm gonna let you start this out because you were on scene first. Because I was actually over at grandma's, having a much-earned break and not having to take care of the household where you were stuck with mom when this first started to happen.

IVY

Yeah, this is definitely one of the most traumatic moments in my life, and I am going to laugh here. I'm going to try to make it as funny as possible, but I'm also going to laugh just because, nervous laughter. This is one that I still have not fully recovered from. I don't know that I ever will. I don't even know that it's possible to.

So New Year's Eve I actually had a friend over, which was very rare, and I think the only reason I was allowed to have a have that friend over is because that friend also came from a family with a lot of trauma. The only friends we were allowed to have and have over were people that also came from families that had a lot of issues. So I had a friend over and we were playing with some puppies that one of our dogs had had, and we wanted to know something. I don't know what it was. I think we were going to ask for permission for something, and mom was the only other person there. Our brother was gone. Our father was gone, Autumn was gone. So it was just me, my friend and mom.

And so I was in a great mood. We were playing with puppies, we were watching TV, we were having a great time. And I went to go ask mom for permission for something, and mom was in the bathroom. So I went to the bathroom and mom is standing in the shower facing the shower wall like a back shower wall. She's got one hand on either end of the of the bathtub and she's swaying back and forth. So automatically I know. Okay, I don't think mom's going to be able to give me permission for whatever it is I was about to ask, because I don't think mommy's really here right now.

So as I'm standing there watching her sway and contemplating whether I should just ask for permission or do what it is that I wanted to do anyway because she probably won't notice. She falls in the bathtub, smacks her head against the faucet on the way down, and now shit has gotten very real. And I am fucking terrified.

And part of the reason I am terrified is that I don't know our address, because we lived out in the middle of nowhere. We had a mailbox, sort of, but no mail ever got delivered there. We had a post office box in another part of town. I know I need to call 911. I don't know how to tell them where I live, so I'm trying to keep my mom alive. I'm screaming for my friend to go get the phone for me, and I call Autumn, and then Autumn calls my friend's mom, and then they manage to find some way to get the EMTs out of the house.

But now, because we live so far away, I now have to make sure Mom doesn't die in the next 30 minutes or so while I'm waiting for help to arrive. And our father is inaccessible. He had a pager, but he never paid attention to it when we would call, so it's like I can't get in touch with him. I don't even know where our brother was at the time. I don't even know if he was in the state at the time. He may have already been on this mission, I'm not sure. But I'm stuck here with my mom, who I'm certain is dying. She was on something, she was already intoxicated, and now she's fallen in the bathtub and smashed her head.

And I'm struggling to keep her awake on some level. And I was fighting a losing battle there. And I'm just praying this entire time that my mom does not die. And then Autumn manages to show up and my friend's mom shows up, and the EMT’s eventually show up.

And then that's the point, maybe that was the moment that I finally started a little bit dissociating, because I don't remember what happened after that for the next few hours. I just remember later on being at Grandma's apartment and watching the ball drop. And like, even as a child, I didn't really have the words for it. As a as a child, I remember it just feeling so disjointed and like, I just - I just – My mom almost died there.

My mom almost died there. She might still. I don't even know what's going on because she was in the hospital. But I hadn't gotten news yet about whether or not she was okay. And I'm watching the ball drop on TV, and it just felt so weird to be bringing in the new year, not knowing if my mom was alive or dead.

And it was like kind of a weird moment for me too, because I also had this disjointed thought, because my mom had always talked about how when I was born, because I was such a high-risk pregnancy and things went haywire when she went into labor with me, and they had to do an emergency C-section because they lost the heartbeat. And at that time, with the with an emergency C-section, they knocked you the fuck out. So when mom went to sleep, she had no idea whether she was going to have a living baby when she woke up.

And I just remember kind of having this thought in my head, I have no idea if I'm going to have a living mother tomorrow. I don't know my mom might be dead right now, I don't know. But it's New Years. Ring in the New Year everybody on Time Square. I think I should be happy right now, but I'm not happy. Yeah, that's. That is mostly my memory of that night.

And then I felt really guilty because of course, when you're a kid, you think everything is your fault. I was certain that I had somehow, I guess, jinxed her because I was like, I don't need to ask my mom for permission. And maybe the universe thought that meant I don't need my mom. And so it’s like, okay, we'll just let her fall. She'll die now, smash her head and die. So yeah, I had a tremendous amount of guilt as well. So happy New Year. Enjoy your guilt about your mom almost dying.

AUTUMN

Oh, the twisted fun of the trauma, right? And being a kid and getting to blame all of it on yourself. And also that whole idea, like, I'd like to hope that we're changing as a society, but probably not if you're stuck in a dysfunctional family. We don't talk about it. Somebody just made an active suicide attempt in your house. You have no idea if they're alive or dead, but we're just going to continue on with life like we're continuing on with life. Like there's no discussion. I'm like, oh my God, talk to that kid, for God's sakes.

So the way I remember it was a little different because I remember getting a call from your friend's mom, not from you. And my very first thought was guilt because I was supposed to take care of mom, and I was supposed to take care of you, and I didn't even know this was happening. And so I was automatically guilty that this had happened and I didn't know about it. And I was a little upset and angry. And because I was young, and I didn't know better, initially I was angry at you that you didn't call me.

But I realized I was angry at myself because I had failed. I was supposed to protect Ivy and Mom. I took a day off and people died almost. So I mean, that's it - This right here is a really good example of where good enough complex comes from. Because if I stop being productive, if I stop being good enough, if I stop doing the magical things I need to do, people may literally die. That's a lot of weight, you know, to have as a teenager.

I couldn't drive at that point. So I'm thinking, I'm 15, maybe. Ivy's friend's mom shows up, we hightail it out there. We had to have been speeding. Love this woman. She was so wonderful to us. I walk in and this is one of the things that does make me laugh, because it is just kind of so out of place. I remember finding Ivy and her friend in like a pile of dog food and just being like, why are you in a pile of dog food?

And then I found Mom. The EMTs were already there, and we lived in a teeny tiny town in a teeny tiny county. And so these EMTs were just volunteers. They really didn't know anything beyond first aid, and they were waiting for an actual ambulance to show up. And we used to have a joke in the family, right? They were trying to get mom to take, I think it was some charcoal or something to try and get her to start vomiting up whatever she had taken, and they kept trying to get her to take it, but she was not really responsive, and she was fighting back and forth and not wanting to take it. And there was a running joke in our family because my mom was a nurse, and she kind of had an inappropriate sense of humor, and she would often say, if we didn't take the medication, she'd give it to us in an enema. And it was a joke.

And so I'm in there with Mom, really focused on her, and I'm like, Mom, you got to take this or they'll give it to you in an enema. You know, trying to get a reaction, trying to get a connection, and then having to have an argument with these EMT podunk people about No, I'm not saying we give it to her in an enema because they went into this, but we can't give this to her in an enema. We can't put charcoal up this woman's colon. This isn't a thing. And I'm like, oh my God, I'm not saying you should put charcoal at my mom's buttonhole, okay? It's a joke. You just gotta roll with me here.

And yeah, I don't remember seeing the ball drop. I do remember sitting in the hospital. I'm pretty sure it was this particular suicide attempt that I remember sitting in the hospital. I remember seeing my Mom. I love, I love my fucking brain. And I'm being so sarcastic here because I don't know about anybody else out there, but I cannot visualize things. I do not see things. I don't hold memory of how things look. To even imagine, like a red square takes all my focus. Yet my brain has just a small handful of pristine, perfect images it saved for me. And all of them are traumatic. And that is one of them is seeing my mom pretty much completely out of it. Don't know if she's going to live or die covered in charcoal because they had been making her vomit it all up and it was just all over her. That was that was a great memory.

And then, of course, I do want to add on to this, because I do feel like this goes a long way to explaining why we kind of recovered the relationship with our mother and we haven't with our father is as they're moving her out of the emergency room to get her checked in, our dad finally showed up. I don't know how they had gotten ahold of him, and he leans in and says to her, you should have tried harder. You should have tried harder to kill yourself.

So, yeah. And you know what's even more fun than all that is? When you go to church next Sunday and everybody in church knows your mom tried to kill themselves. And nobody says a damn thing about it. When you grow up in this dysfunctional family, it's not just like the family gaslights you, it's like the whole society does, because there's all these times that people know something is wrong and they keep acting like it's not. And so then you - this like 15-year-old kid, which would have made Ivy like nine. We're sitting here going, I guess nothing's wrong then. I guess sometimes people just kill themselves and rely on their small children to save them. Like this - This is what you're telling children society when you don't talk about this with them. When you don't point out, no, this is fucked up. You don't necessarily even have to fix anything. Just let the kid know it's fucked up, for God's sake.

IVY

Yeah, I do wish that there had been some adults in our in our life when we were growing up that were like, hey, I don't know how to help you, but this is legitimately fucked and I'm sorry that you're going through this. I think that's honestly one of the reasons why I ended up bonding with our aunt, who was our father's sister. And I actually lived with her for a while when I was a teenager, is because she was the only adult that I had who did acknowledge that it was all super fucked. And like, she'd been through a lot of things too, because people like our father don't just generally - they don't just develop in a vacuum. There has to be something that kind of sets the stage for them to become what they are. And so she grew up with a lot of trauma as well.

And so I really appreciated that she did openly acknowledge. Like, I'm sorry, I'm I will do everything that I can for you, but this stuff is really happening. You are not crazy. This is fucked and this should not be happening to you. So I do appreciate that because yeah. That was with all of the stuff that happened with our family in that small town and a small church community, there was no fucking way that the adults did not at least have an inkling about what was going on. And yet nobody said a thing about it, just pretended like nothing was happening.

And granted, I am glad that nobody called CPS and that we didn't get taken away because then Autumn and I would have been separated, and I have known enough people in the foster care system to know that that often ends up being very traumatic as well. Not all of the time, but for a lot of people it does. And so I could have just gone from one bad situation to another bad situation. But it would have been nice to have some adults actually openly acknowledging that what we were going through was not okay. And just giving us some validation that we weren't crazy, that what we were experiencing was not okay, it was not normal, and we should not be going through it even if there was nothing that they can do about it.

I do want to try to bring things back to a somewhat funny note. I never thought about it until just now. Mom making that joke all the time about I'll give it to you in an enema. Early on when Mom was younger, she worked at the Kellogg Sanitarium and Dr. Kellogg, everything was a fucking enema for him. Like that was the cure for everything. That was like a huge part of what they did as at that sanitarium was different types of enemas. It never fucking occurred to me until just now that mom making all of those jokes about I'll give it to you and in an enema, might actually have come from the fact that she worked someplace early on in her career where they literally did give enemas to people all the time, for everything, for every ailment. Just an enema for everything. Because that was totally Dr. Kellogg's thing. Enemas for everyone!

And the other thing that I wanna mention about the dog food, I don't remember being in a pile of dog food. I also, however, would not put it past child me and my friend to be in a pile of dog food. We were playing with puppies, but I also have a distinct memory with this same friend. I don't know if it was that night before everything went crazy, or if this was a different time that she came over. But I do remember once going into the laundry room and we were unsupervised and we went to the laundry room, which is where we kept all of the dog food and the dog biscuits. And I remember us eating them, in part because we were curious if they were actually good, and in part because we were hungry. We didn't know how to prepare anything for ourselves, so it would not surprise me if we were sitting in a pile of dog food. We were probably feeding it to the puppies and potentially snacking on it ourselves. I'm not really sure I don't remember. I do remember what dog food tastes like though, and it's kind of bland.

AUTUMN

Well, at least that's good to know because I have considered, with inflation potentially moving over to some sort of vegetarian dog food. So if it's bland, at least.

Now I do want to mention one other thing though, before we move on from this particular story. And I talked about the Sunday after this attempt and we were all in church and nobody was saying anything about this. And I just want to give, I guess, a shout out to my mom for being one of the bravest women I have ever seen. Because it was testimony Sunday, which in Mormon church means anybody in the congregation can get up and say anything they need to about their belief in Jesus, etc., etc.

Mom got up and owned it, and she called out everybody in that church for judging her for her suicide attempt. And that is one of the bravest acts I have ever seen. To see a woman who is such at the end of everything of her hope that she had just actively tried to take her life, to shrug that shame off and say, no, this is not my shame. This is your shame. You know we are hurting. You know we are in pain and your casting judgment at me. And so I do want to give a shout out to my mom because that takes so much bravery.

You have no idea how much guilt and shame is involved when somebody chooses suicide, let alone when somebody chooses suicide and they are unable to complete it and they're pulled back into a life they didn't want.

IVY

I wish that I had that memory because I don't remember that. I don't remember the Sunday after. I don't really remember much about the next few days after that happened. I wish that I did recall that so that I could have had something other than just the trauma of witnessing mom in that moment and trying to keep her alive, because that's mostly what I remember. That and the ball dropping. But I don't remember much about what came after. And I really wish that I did remember that.

But I would agree, even without me having that memory of mom getting up and owning it and calling everybody out. I will second what Autumn said about our mom being one of the strongest and bravest people that I knew. And she may not have looked that way to everybody because she did have that streak of crazy, and she could be a little out there and all of that. But she - at least she was always 100% fucking authentic. There was nothing about that woman that was not authentic.

And I mean, on some level, that is part of where the crazy came in to is because she was not willing to hide anything. She was not going to hide when she was struggling. She was going to act when she was angry. She may not have dealt with things in the healthiest way, but she didn't try to stuff it down and pretend like it wasn't happening. She was accountable for it. She expressed it. She called people out on that obsessive need people have to not rock the boat. That is one thing I will say for our mom: she was never afraid to rock the fucking boat because she recognized that there were times when it was needed.

And I well - I don't remember her getting up that Sunday. I do remember maybe a year or two later, another member of our church was going through a really bad situation. She was in an abusive relationship with her husband, and I can't remember if she called Mom or if one of her daughters called, but she was actively trying to commit suicide and our Mom stepped up and she talked her through what she needed to do to like, puke up the pills. She went to go help. She got the EMTs there, like she showed up for that person in our church. And she stayed consistently with them through that. And at that time, she didn't know that person super well. They ended up becoming very good friends because my mom stuck by her. She helped her in every way that she could because mom understood not only how much pain there is there when you're in that moment, but she also understood how much you fucking need support. You don't need judgment.

And I will always remember the example that my mom set when it came to that was that when people are struggling, you don't shit on them for their struggle. You do what you can to help and if you can't help and if you can't not judge, then you just get the fuck out. But you don't get to just shit on people while they're already down. And you don't get to pretend that problems aren't there when they are there. So I will always remember that about our Mom’s example.

I am very sad that she has passed and we didn't have more opportunities to build our relationship once she got in a better headspace and once I got into a better headspace. But I will always remember my mom as being brilliant and beautiful and incredibly compassionate. And yes, maybe crazy, maybe crazy as a loon, but a genuine, authentic, beautiful, strong, brave fucking person for everything that she went through. And I will always give her credit for that. And I will always give her credit for owning all of her mistakes too, because she did that as well, which is a hell of a lot more than our father has. And that's why I have all the compassion in the world for our mom, and all the love in the world for our mom. And I don't even have a time of day for our father.

AUTUMN

And I feel like this is the other reason that it gets hard to talk about your holiday stories, or your childhood trauma in, quote unquote, polite society, because it's complicated. It really is. You know, we do have the light hearted and we do have the humor, and we can laugh about the throwing chairs, even though people give us the look.

And I feel like so much of society wants to paint things as black and white. You know, your mother was abusive, so you should feel ex. Yeah, our mother was abusive and she caused a lot of trauma. And she was intelligent and compassionate and loving and creative. It's not “but she”, it was “and she”. She was crazy and loving. She was abusive and compassionate. And I feel like a lot of people don't understand that you can be all of these things.

And that's why it is so confusing for so many of us that come from traumatic households, because a lot of times we do have parents that have gone through trauma themselves and are in pain and are trying to heal, but they're not doing it fast enough to be able to maintain and raise their kids like they need to. And so it is just this complicated, complex mess of love and fear and trauma and hate and anger and joy. And I'm hoping that you are connecting with us a little bit and that you have similar stories that you can hopefully, maybe share with us once we get to that part of it.

But before we do, we have a couple more stories that we want to talk about today, and the next one is The Slowest Meal. We were all going to get together for Sunday dinner at grandma's after church. I don't know why, but that's what that's what started happening and this was the most horrifying thing. You could cut the tension with a knife. Nobody wanted to say anything. Everybody was trying to figure out who they were supposed to be because we were all dyadic interactions. You were who you were with Mom, which was not who I was with Ivy, who was not who I was with Grandma. And then all of a sudden, I was with everybody at once, and I'm like, fucking glitching out, trying to even figure out what mask to wear. And then there's all the tension of, don't say anything. We don't want anybody stabbed with a fork today.

And Ivy and I would often end up nervous laughing. I don't know why they kept sitting us across from each other. You think they would have learned. Or maybe we were the distraction in all this. We would just start nervous, laughing and end up - we spit so much food on each other. And I would love to know if there are any other trauma siblings out there. How much food have you spit on each other? Like, is this just a me and Ivy weird thing? Or is this something that you've also shared where the tension was so bad you couldn't help not spit your cake on your sibling?

IVY

Yeah, I feel like I was even worse about it than Autumn because I have a horrible habit of nervous laughing. I think there was one time we were eating this cake that was so old and like, dried out. I got a case of the giggles and not only am I like spewing cake crumbs out of my mouth. When I inhaled, I started choking. I started choking on the cake. Gross. I'm like choking, hiccuping, laughing, coughing like, all at the same time. And Autumn's like, dying of laughter too. But we're trying to do it as quietly as possible. We have just put spit much food in each other, and even now I try not to sit directly across the table from anybody because it's so in me now. If I'm sitting across the table from someone and I meet their eye, I'm going to start giggling. And if I start giggling, that first laugh will explode out of me along with any food that is currently in my mouth.

AUTUMN

You were really, really bad about that. I remember at one point you were sitting at the table eating by yourself a little bowl of like, ravioli I had microwaved you or something. And somebody was walking by and they stepped on a ketchup packet because our house was a fucking trash mess. And there was apparently ketchup packet on the floor, but their pressure ended up spewing ketchup way up onto like, the vaulted ceiling, like ten feet up. And I remember everybody was accusing Ivy of having spit ravioli at like 7 or 8 years old, like ten feet straight up in the air, because she was so known to be like the food spitter.

IVY

I don't remember it, but it's probably true. Yeah. Because it’s just that I am such a nervous laughter and it's dangerous for me and everybody else if I start nervous laughing if I have anything in my mouth because it's coming out. Gum, water, old cake, ravioli apparently. Just don't get me laughing when I have food in my mouth. I have no control over my body. I swear somebody put a muzzle on me.

AUTUMN

All right, so obviously these dinners were pretty, pretty tense. And then my brother got engaged to this - oh, she was such a sweet little thing. I have no idea what she was doing mixed up in our family. Maybe there was backstory I never heard about. Sweet little thing. The slowest fucking eater I have ever seen. And now all of us knew to eat quickly because one, most of us had been raised at some point by my grandmother, who ate like she was in the military, and somebody was going to take her food in any second. Like we would be done with meals in five, ten minutes, like full course is done. And even now, like I have trouble not inhaling my food.

But the rule was - because after dinner we would have dessert - you can't have dinner and not dessert - but nobody can have dessert until everybody is done eating. And this sweet little girl would join us at Sunday dinners, making conversation and taking a bite and chewing it 20 times, and then swallowing and making another observation and then taking another bite - Like, oh my God, 30, 40 minutes! And we're all done. We're just staring at her. I don't know, maybe nobody else was, but in my mind, I just feel like I was just staring at her, being like, can you not feel this tension? What are you doing? Are you sociopathic, trying to torture us?

IVY

I don't think she was sociopathic. I don't know for sure. I have some memories of her. Not a whole lot. I think she was just maybe genuinely clueless. Or maybe she thought the trauma didn't run as deep as it did, and she could help with small talk and try to bring the family together by keeping us trapped at the table for longer. I'm not sure.

But yeah, that was like every single meal that we had with her was just so slow. And if we were able to just get through the meal as quickly as possible, then nothing would explode. But because we'd be stuck there for so long, then people would start making passive aggressive comments here and there, and then it would start turning into fights and I would usually end up crying. And I know there was there was like one time I got into like a bickering thing with our brother and I started crying and he just kept like egging it on, and it kept going back and forth and we got really, really frustrated. I don't remember if she [Grandma] cussed or not, but I do remember her like hitting the table and standing up. And she said something which I'm guessing was probably a curse word because we all just kind of stopped in our tracks. But apparently it had even gotten too far for Grandma, and that probably would not have happened if our brother's girlfriend was not sitting there at the table, eating as slowly as she possibly could. Yes, if we'd been able to finish in five minutes, there wouldn't have been an opportunity for him and I to start arguing with each other and for me to start crying and losing my shit.

AUTUMN

I think she was only with us like a year maybe before. Like he ended up moving away or they broke up or I don't even remember exactly what all happened. But I've always been like a fast eater. But after that, I have anxiety if I cannot eat fast enough, or if I'm at a meal where people are not eating fast enough and it has taken me - I'm 40 now - and even now, if I want to eat slowly or enjoy a meal with somebody, I have to actively think about that every single bite and actively fight my anxiety to not just scarf my food down before the boom of trauma falls.

Even though I know I'm in a safe environment. I was somebody I love, but still, I am just - I'm still to this day I have so much anxiety over eating slow or slow eaters. And it was actually really funny because I also had a dog that got used to eating fast too. And my current boyfriend when I first met him, he was a slow eater. He's learning. It's good he's learning. But when we first met him, he was super slow. And my dog knew I ate fast and then he got to lick the plate. And my boyfriend did not eat fast, and me and the dog would start shaking at about 15 minutes just watching my boyfriend eat be kind of like, are you done? Are you done? Are you done? And then my dog and me are just like feeding anxiety off of each other trying to get my boyfriend to eat faster. I kind of feel bad for the man. I'm probably causing him heartburn and indigestion as he gets older.

IVY

I find it amusing that you went that direction. Whereas like me, the older that I get, the slower of an eater I am. And I think it's because it this stage in my life, even if I did have some traumatic shit going on, I'm kind of in this space now where I'm like, goddamnit, food is one of the few consistent joys that I have in my life, and I am going to enjoy my fucking meal if it kills us both. So I am appreciative that at this stage in my life, I've been able to flip something that was so horrible and tension filled and stressful and turn it into something good.

Although obviously on some level I was enjoying myself even better even back then, because even if it was nervous laughter, laughter is good for you. Laughter is good for the soul for whatever reason.

AUTUMN

It kind of makes me think of like the little rats that pressed the button for the dopamine release. Like that's what the good thing was. It was just us pressing the dopamine button to try to make it through this slow eating meal. Also, I feel like the moral of the story, even with your story, is eat faster. Everybody, please. That's. I'm just going to say that.

Okay. All right. So we've told a lot of stories today about the trauma and the crazy shit that happened. But not all holidays are always like that, right? I mean, some years you have actually kind of normal-ish holidays or like a good part of it is normal-ish. And so we figured we would kind of wrap up our storytelling with our Hallmark Christmas Story. And this is what a normal-ish Christmas would look like for us. And we actually know this because we have it on home video. We actually have a whole bunch of home videos, or at least Ivy does.

IVY

Without these home videos, I would have just honestly assumed that every holiday had been garbage. But apparently there was a period of time where the holidays were not complete, total garbage. They were mostly just mundane, but still a little bit weird and quirky. But probably not a complete shit show.

AUTUMN

I remember little bits of this because we had, I think, 1 or 2 holidays with this particular family, and we would hang out with them every now and again. But even that family was a little off. I don't want to say pedophile for sure, but I think it turned out that, like the father of the family was a sex offender. Maybe. I don't remember exactly. And then also, they used to have tons of foster kids, and I remember one of them always had trouble changing your maxi pad. And so like every 30 minutes somebody was like, did you change your maxi pad? Whatever her name was, did you change your maxi pad? Come here. Let me come look at your maxi pad. We'll see if we need to change it. So, I mean, yeah, those are normal people, right? That's a normal family, right?

IVY

The only memory I have of our family hanging out with a normal family I referenced in our Urban Legends episode. They were of a family whose kids I did the Bloody Mary thing with, which at the time scared the shit out of me. But like, now as an adult, I look back on that and I'm like, oh, wholesome. And they’re just like a regular family that didn't hate each other and fight all the time. And we, like, hung out with our family for a day. That was weird. I wonder why they did that. I bet it only happened one time for a reason, you know.

Most of the families that we hung out with had some sort of issues going on as well. And honestly, I think that's part of the reason why we were allowed to hang out with those families, because one, our family was so even before things went sideways, I think I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that both of our parents were always kind of oddball, eccentric, weird people. So Autumn and I come by those qualities honestly. We get it from both of our parents. And so we did hang out with a lot of families that were also kind of weird.

That particular family that Autumn is referencing that we spent those Christmases with, I really liked the wife in that family. She was very boisterous and funny and jovial and outgoing, and she always wanted to make everybody feel included. She was just a joy to be around. The husband, I don't know, because he had a falling out with our father years later, and our father accused him of being inappropriate with some of his patients who were minors. I don't know whether those things were true. I do know I was always very uncomfortable being around him

AUTUMN

I haven't seen that home video in years, but Ivy was telling me a little bit about it and if this was pre shit hitting the fan. I was an absolute nightmare. Not like - I was not a bad kid. I was a very good kid. Everybody loved me. But I had more energy than the Energizer bunny on fucking crack. I imagine if it was like any other home video, if I got a hold of the camera, the camera was just spinning around everywhere. I was really big into wanting to know what everybody was up to and wanting to be the center of attention. So I imagine I was a little terror in these home videos.

IVY

It's funny how we remember ourselves in that, because I always think that I was just a little shit when we were growing up, too, because I threw a temper tantrums and had meltdowns and stuff like that sometimes. But like when I watch these home videos, I just think it's cute how energetic you are, and I, I am saddened by the fact that that was, at least for a lot of years, stolen away from you. Being able to be that and like you've reclaimed some of that as an adult. But I often wonder if we had not had the family that we had, if you could have retained more of that and continued to be bubbly and just exuberant and enthusiastic about everything, because you definitely ae that in the family home videos and that particular Christmas.

Yes, you did get a hold of the camera a couple of times, and it was wildly spinning it around in circles, and it was also one of those big clunky video cameras that was probably kind of heavy for you to hold as well. You're like in everybody else's business. What’d you get? What’d you get? Oh, I want to see what you got. Oh, that's so cool. And like a lot of it's funny because a lot of the presents that I opened, you were more excited about them than I was.

Because apparently and this is honestly, on some level true to this day, I care less about the gift and more about getting to unwrap something. I like the mystery of it. Like, I enjoy that part and I was very much the same way even then, because every present that I would get, I would take so much joy in unwrapping it, and then I would just set it off to the side and be like, do you have anything else for me? Do you have anything else for me? Because I didn't actually care much about the presents. I just wanted to unwrap things to the point where I was even unwrapping some of our parents presents. I just needed to unwrap things and they were like, yeah, you can open this one. Whatever.

So yeah, you want to get more excited about my gifts. Like you were excited about your own, but then I would open up one of mine. I toss it over to the side, you pick it up and you'd be like, I mean, this is so cool. This is like an amazing present. Isn't this really awesome that you were given this by grandma? You would be so excited about it. I was not, I just wanted to unwrap more presents.

And our brother was sick. He must have a cold or something. He was laying on the couch under a comforter. He was so annoyed that they kept pointing the camera at him. And I think it's because our brother has always been very image conscious and so he's feeling like shit. He's a teenager, so of course he doesn't want the camera in his face when he's feeling like crap. And I think our father was the one that had the camera most of the time, and he just was like constantly looking over at our brother and being like, what’d you get? And our brother was so annoyed that he kept directing the camera at him, he's like, leave me alone.

Yeah. So we just I feel like that's normal family stuff. I don't really remember that. I see it in the videos. I recognize that it is a thing that happened. I don't remember it myself, and it makes me sad that I don't actually have the memories. I'm glad that I at least found the family home video so that I can have something positive to look at, because so much of our childhood was shit. But I mean, there were some good times, especially when I was very young.

I do have a memory of like at least a couple of good years where things were not so bad. They are all of those things that are in the family home videos. That's really sweet. It obviously happened. I can see that. That's me I recognize. Oh, I'm like, I recognize everybody in the family. I don't remember that at all.

AUTUMN

You know, the sad thing is though, because you're talking about how I was like so enthused and how I was like, oh, and grandma got you that and it's so awesome. And I was actually thinking about this the other day during the good years and how exuberant I was as a child and everything. And I realized, which is kind of sad, that a lot of that was honestly masking because I realized very, very young that our mom was emotionally unstable and that my grandmother had extreme anxiety, and that if I was a good girl, I could control their emotions and make them safe. And so by being the life of the party and being the cute one, and listening to everybody and being a people pleaser and being a good girl, I kept everybody even keel.

And I imagine that's also why I was getting up in your business, because I was trying to show you how to appropriately mask by saying, isn't that really awesome that grandma got it for you? I've tried to like coach you in how to appropriately mask. And it's probably a good thing that I didn't succeed too well because I like you without your mask.

But it's kind of sad. Like even during the good times, there was some like, I don't know, just shit that was happening, but I don't know if it was with the holidays or just this family. But I do remember a time where our brother was not sick and this was back when - oh God, I'm so old now - Vanilla Ice and MC hammer were just getting on the scene, and our brother and the one of the older boys from the family, they were like rapping a church hymn and stuff. It was so - It was so dorky. And I absolutely love it though, because like, you're right, it is just normal stuff.

Our brother being an adolescent, grumpy on the couch, not wanting the camera in his face. I think that's great. And you know, now that I say that though, because our brother was also rapping and being an adolescent, I kind of do appreciate our brother a little bit more for being so normal, giving us that little bit. This is what suburbia could look like.

IVY

You know, those observations are interesting to me because I it never occurred to me that you were masking, I guess because part of me wants to be able to hold on to this idea that things were good at one point. And even though I don't remember the stuff I see in my family in the video, there are some things that I do remember from that period of time where I remember not being afraid of either of our parents, where I remember feeling some level of stability, and I think it was during that period of time. So I think there's part of me that holds on to that. And it's not surprising, though, that you have a different version of that because you were older at that time and you're six years older than me. So I was really little. And when you're really little, when you have the luxury of it, you do kind of live in this fantasy world where things are, where things are good, things are happy, things are fine. I am safe, like all of those sorts of things. If you're lucky and you get even an inkling of that as a small child, you want to hold on to that.

But with Autumn a few years older than me, she had been through bad times already with our parents, or at least with our mom, like she'd been through some things already. And so it would make sense that part of her was masking to try to keep everybody even keel and try to keep things good and happy, and that I would not be cognizant of that at that time and even in retrospect, not really be cognizant in part, probably because I was younger. And so my experience of those years was different, as I'm sure our brother's experience with those years was different because each of us were at drastically different levels of maturity and development. Because there's six years between Autumn and I, there's 11 years between our brother and I.

So that would make sense to me that I would have a completely different viewpoint on what I saw in those family home videos, and in some ways, more of a naive and innocent viewpoint, even though over the years I did experience some shitty things, obviously, but that there's that part of me that's still at that very young age that wants to hold on to this idea that at some point things were okay and things were safe and things were happy. Even now, knowing that part of you was masking, I still like part of me is like, I'm going to keep holding on to that because it's one of the few good things that I have, and I'm not upset or anything that you brought that up. It's just interesting to me that that wasn't a possibility that I could consider and that there is that part of me that's just like, yeah, I'm just gonna keep holding on to the fantasy world anyway, because there's part of me that needs to believe that those things were good. There were good times.

And the other thing that you had mentioned about our brother - I honestly, as I am getting older, have such a on some level, such a soft spot for our brother. And I feel so bad for him because I think all he really ever wanted, like he did want, just like a normal family. He just wanted some fucking normalcy for the love of God. He just wanted to have parents who were, you know, maybe a little bit quirky but supportive. He wanted to have close relationships with his siblings. I think he just wanted life to be normal and peaceful, and I didn't understand that very much when we were growing up. And I didn't understand it for most of my adult life either.

It hasn't really been until the last few years where I have been able to recognize where it is that our brother was coming from and what he wanted, and that what he wanted wasn't bad. The ability to stay innocent for a while longer, to just have some stability and have some happiness and some sense of security. And I think everybody wants that. It just looked different for him than it did for us or for me.

And it's kind of I feel bad for him because he really was, even though he was the most normal one of the family that made him the black sheep of the family, because our parents were all about being different, being unique, standing out, being the weirdo, being eccentric, going against the grain. Our parents were both very much in that, even in their good qualities, they were very much that. And so I think he was always at odds with our parents, and I didn't have a whole lot of, I guess, empathy for that.

Because I absorbed from our parents that being weird and unique and eccentric was like a good thing. And that's what you should strive for. And so being normal to me, it was like somewhat shameful. And even now I'm like, oh, even if I have name brand clothes, I'm going to cover up that logo or cut that tag off, because I don't want anybody knowing that I wear name brand clothes. Like, I think that's how embarrassing it is to me, because that's how our parents operate. And so I absorbed a lot of that from them.

And I didn't have a whole lot of understanding or respect for what it was that our brother wanted. And I think as I'm getting older, I can kind of find a middle ground there where I can understand both. I do tend more towards our parents philosophy on it being cool to be weird and different and eccentric and quirky, and I prefer that. But I can also see I can also see why somebody would desire to just have a normal fucking life. Because man, it would have been so much less stressful for all of us if we could have just had some fucking normalcy. So I totally get that. Why he wanted that.

AUTUMN

I think he wanted that not just for himself, but also for us. And I think that's kind of why he was always kind of that too cool for school or being extra normal was his way of trying to coach us so that we could have happier lives just the same way. I was trying to coach you into thanking Grandma and being exuberantly appreciative. I think he was trying to coach us into being normal.

And you know what you were saying earlier, though, about wanting to hold on that to that illusion. I think that kind of goes back to what I was saying earlier of it's never quite that simple. So it's not like all of our childhood wasshit. And it's not like all of our childhood was golden. I think there were good times and there were bad times. And I think during your younger childhood there were more good than bad. And unfortunately as you got older, they were more bad than good. But I do still think there were some good times that happened in there.

And before we start wrapping up, I would like to share this like one of the most happy, positive memories I have from my childhood, because I think that's something that we also don't get to share. When you come from trauma and you come from dysfunctional families, often you end up having to explain so much just to get validated and believed. You don't get the chance to share the good ones, because it's like if you share the good memories, all of a sudden the trauma didn't happen. But that's not true. There's good memories and there's bad memories. And we've talked a lot about the crazy shit that's happened. So I want to share one of the more happy, pristine things that also happened in the trauma and the chaos and the dysfunction.

And for me, it's just one little itty bitty moment and it's staring at Christmas tree lights in the dark and we turned everything off. I don't know how old I was, but it was me and Mom and Ivy, and we were just sitting around the Christmas tree, and we were watching the lights flash to different colors. And mom had these little, we call them whirligig ornaments, but they were hooked up for the old lights that produce heat and you'd hang them above it, and this little tiny thing would spin inside and everything was just quiet. And we were watching the tree and it was safe and loving and Christmassy. And I really enjoyed that moment.

IVY

Yeah, interestingly enough, I think I'm remembering the same thing because one of my best, if not my best holiday moment that I remember was not on a holiday, but it was leading up to it. And I think that's why, even on the years when I've really not liked Christmas, I still had a soft spot for the holiday decorations. Because even though Christmas itself is often a shit show like the holidays themselves, because the entire family was together and there was so much stress and unknowns and chaos that would ensue, the weeks leading up to Christmas could still be good because we did usually. I can't even remember if there was a year where we didn't decorate, but we did still decorate for Christmas, and usually those days were pretty peaceful.

And so almost all of my happy memories regarding the holidays are actually decorating. And it's usually either memories of decorating with you and Mom or decorating with you and Grandma. And I do remember there was one Christmas that we went to a tree farm, and we got a real tree and I think our brother was with us for that. And then I think he had someplace else to go afterward. But I remember as being out at the tree farm and cutting down the tree and bringing it home, and you and Mom and me, we spent the entire evening decorating the tree and the living room and everything. And then we just sat there in the living room.

I think I was laying on the floor because I think mom had let us open one Christmas present super early in. The one that I opened happened to be a new comforter for my bed. So I laid that out on the floor and I was laying on that, and you and mom were on the couch. And yeah, we were just sitting around in the dark looking at the pretty Christmas tree that we had set up. And that thought warms my heart.

Every year when I really struggle with Christmas, that's usually the memory that I go back to, because it's one of the only good ones that I have. And that and decorating grandma's apartment for Christmas, because we always helped her with that too. And I have very sweet memories of that. And I don't have good holiday memories and including our father. I have some positive memories with him in general, but none that are related to the holiday.

But I do want to mention this memory that it's not like on the holiday itself and it's not decorating, which is what most of my happy memories are, but our brother and I did not get along for most of our childhood. For most of our lives, we've had kind of a strained relationship. So I think we just don't understand each other in a lot of ways. But there was one Christmas he gave me a ride home from somewhere, and he had like a Pepsi or something, and his car, and I was super thirsty and he was like, you can have that if you want. And I asked him why he didn't want it. And he was like, well, because I'm trying to do, you know, the stuff that I was supposed to in the church and we really shouldn't be having caffeine.

And so we got into this conversation about the church's principles and rules and how important they were to him. And it inspired me at that time, because I still cared about being Mormon and I was like, I'm not going to drink caffeine either, even though I was really thirsty. Like, I was so thirsty my throat hurt. I wouldn't drink it. And like, I remember him being proud of me for choosing principles instead. And we got home and he was he like, built a fire in the fireplace at home. And we actually had a really pleasant conversation. And it's one of the only memories that I have that is genuinely good and sweet between our brother and me, where it was just the two of us and there was no conflict. It was actually one of the only times I remember feeling connected and close to him. And that was near Christmas too. So I do hold on to that one as well. I may struggle in general with the holidays, but there are very few with bright, twinkly, Christmas like kind of moments that I do hold on to and that I hold very dear to my heart.

AUTUMN

That's super sweet and awesome. And like you said earlier, I think part of it is that our brains are programmed to ping in on the negative, and it makes it easy to remember. And like I said earlier, I do think often we just don't get the space to share these positive memories because even when we do, it's missing the context of everything else. Because part of the reason it makes most of those memories so pristine and beautiful and wonderful is all of the chaos and trauma that occurred. It was a moment of calm in the storm, so to speak.

Now, all joking and humor aside, we do know that the holidays can be extremely difficult for those of us that come from dysfunctional families, especially if you have a trauma background. And so if you are struggling, you know, with Thanksgiving coming up and we're rolling into Christmas, there is help out there. There are lots and lots of crisis hotlines. We actually have a whole resource put together on our website of different crisis helplines that you can call if you find that you need help this holiday season, because we do want you all to be happy and healthy. But mostly we want you to be alive come the New Year.

And on that note, I am going to throw this over to Ivy here in a second to give our connect bits so you can find those crisis hotlines. But I also would encourage you, as we always do, to reach out with your own stories. I mean, especially if you can send us a video message or write it out. However, we do know how hard it can be to share these stories of our trauma. But sometimes we need to. We need to laugh at the pain. We need to be able to remember the good things and the bad things, and there should be a safe place to do that. And we would love to hear from you if you're willing to share those stories with us, whether they're happy, whether they're sad, whether they're neutral. We would love to hear about your holiday memories. Ivy, can you go ahead and give them all our connect bits so they can find our stuffs?

IVY

You can find us on social media. We are on Facebook as Different, Functional. We are on Instagram and TikTok as Different_Functional. Feel free to send us a DM or leave comments on our posts. Like anything. Especially if you're struggling and you need somebody to relate to. We are happy to be that sounding board for you and we would love to interact with you.

You can also email us at differentfunctional@gmail.com. If you'd like some bonus content and you're feeling generous enough to throw a few bucks our way on a monthly basis, you can find us on Patreon as Different Functional, and we also have merch on TeePublic. It is very difficult to find it searching directly on TeePublic because they are stingy bitches about who they show up in their search results. But if you would like to check out our merch, which is full of funny goodness, then you can find our TeePublic storefront by going to our website. And there on the main page there is a link that will take you directly to our TeePublic storefront. And I think that's all of the ways to reach us.

And I'm going to do a shameless plea when I do at the end of every episode. We would love you so much, even more than we love you right now, if you would leave us a five star rating, leave us a review, drop some comments, tell some people about us. If you're enjoying the podcast, please spread the words.

AUTUMN

Yes, please. Ratings. Reviews. Likes. Interactions. Comments. We want it all. We are greedy with the want of it. And we do have some really funny merchandise on our TeePublic.. I'll probably be adding a couple more designs because I've said a couple really great lines today. Um, I actually wrote them down. This sucks, but not nearly as much as my childhood and just a whole bouquet of shit sticks. So I'm planning on designing both of those, and we will hopefully have those up fairly quickly also on our TeePublic merchandise as well.

As always, we thank you all for listening. We hope you are having at least a safe holiday season. We hope you are surviving it, and we definitely hope that you're finding at least a little glimmer of