#my fear being that im always gonna make things tense and shitty enough times people will get tired | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

firelord-frowny · 4 years

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a bunch of rambling about madison and his history and my writing process under the cut, woooo

So, pretty much everything I’ve ever written about Madison for the past 11 years has been very much in a ~diary~ style - more or less stream of consciousness and told in the first person, with varying tenses depending on the nature of the diary entry.

i don’t really do any sort of planning or mapping. madison’s life just kinda unfolds, and i document it for him, and it isn’t always in chronological order, his narrations aren’t always reliable, and i’m pretty much never aware of any foreshadowing or allusions or allegories as i’m writing them, even though they’re definitely present.

the bit i was just writing captured my attention bc of the things that just sort of uncovered themselves after i was writing it.

madison is 26. his mom died from breast cancer when he was nearly 19. they had a hella sad relationship for many reasons, the majority of which had to do with his mom’s failure to protect him from abuses acted out upon him by his much older brother, and their dad (who wasn’t actually madison’s biological dad). the whole truth of the matter was that the dad was a whole grown man, like 27, when he began a predatory relationship with madison’s mom, who was only around 14. his family owned the business that employed madison’s mom’s parents, and so they were kind of manipulated/extorted into allowing this creep to make off with their daughter. he moved her away, knocked her up, married her, and pretty much just kept her as a pet and was decidedly Very Bad to her.

madison didn’t grow up knowing about any of that and pretty much always viewed his mom as a stupid, selfish woman who didn’t care enough about her own children to get them away from an abusive spouse. for most of his life he tried hard to earn his mom’s love, but gave up in his mid-late teens and decided to just hate her, and make sure she knew he hated her.

then she gets ill, and pretty much from the onset, it’s clear she’s not gonna live much longer. she tries to make amends with madison - tries to apologize for things and whatnot. answers some questions that he deserved to have answered. but he wouldn’t forgive her, and stayed angry, and made sure she knew he would always be angry, and those were the circumstances she died in.

then he kinda lost his mind and went awol for a few years before resurfacing.

madison had always been one of those reckless types who doesn’t really actively try to hurt himself, but he’ll let himself get into situations where there’s an above average chance that he’ll be hurt or even end up dead. and so, that’s the lifestyle he dove into when he ran off. but shit got a bit more real than he anticipated and suddenly he realizes - wait, i’m gonna have the rest of forever to be dead, im not so sure i’m okay with not being alive so soon.

but by the time he had that change of heart, he was in way too deep in some really perilous shit and he spends the next two years fighting to keep his head above water long enough to get out of the shit he was in.

So, he finally turns up back home like a coughed up furball on his best friend’s/ex lover’s doorstep, and he confronts all the wreckage he left behind, and then also has to deal with the fact that after everyone he left behind cleaned up all that wreckage, they all thrived in his absence. they’d all been struggling in a similar manner to him before, but once he was gone, they got carreers, they reached goals, they made enjoyable lives for themselves. And he’s stuck grappling with the fact that maybe he was the one holding them all back all those years.

in the midst of all this, he’s sick. like, physically ill with Something. and he’s terrified to see a doctor because, remember, he FINALLY wants to live, genuinely wants to be ALIVE, and now he’s scared he might have a life threatening health issue, and he’s too scared to find out for sure.

and as he begins the process of unpacking all these horrible feelings that made him build such a shitty life for himself, he kinda realizes that it all goes back to his determination to Stay Angry and Stay Hurt. Like. He went out of his way to avoid any form of closure or release because I guess he kinda felt entitled to his anger.

so, slowly, he starts kinda going back through time and walking through the things and people and places that shaped the person he chose to become. he breaks into visits his childhood home. his brother died by suicide when madison was 16, and so he couldn’t confront him about a painful secret they shared, so instead he confides that secret secret in the one friend he knows might understand the impact it had on him.

his mom is dead, too, so he can’t change anything with her, but his mom’s sister still lives in boston, so he goes to visit her.

that visit is the thing i was writing about earlier today.

the aunt was about 8 years old when madison’s mom, at 14, ran off with the man she ran off with. but over the years, the sisters still managed to keep in touch, and madison’s mom told her a lot about what life was like with her husband and two sons.

so, madison hears a lot of stories from the aunt. learns for the first time that his mom was just a kid when she was basically taken captive by an abusive grown man. learns how she met his biological father, learns that she’d intended to leave her husband and move to south africa to be with madison’s real dad, and learns that she abandoned that plan in fear after her husband discovered she was pregnant and assumed the baby was his.

that ~painful secret~ between madison and his brother is the fact that the brother, 17 years madison’s senior, sexually abused him a few times. (on the final time, the dad caught them, and proceeded to abuse him as well on just one occasion, but that detail isn’t super relevant here).

at some point after the abuse, madison overheard his mom on the phone telling someone that she “hopes he doesn’t end up queer, because I think [older son] might have messed with him.”

madison discovers that the person she was talking to was his aunt.

and he’s immediately livid and heartbroken and let down to know that she didn’t try to intervene in any way.

and she’s sorry, she’s remorseful, she’s been ahsamed for years and she wants to do her part to help madison be able to live a happy, healthy life.

so, there’s a moment in madison’s internal dialogue where he’s realizing that he actually believes her when she says she’s sorry.

and then there’s this bit that kinda shook me when i read it back to myself:

If my mom hadn’t died when she died, I don’t think I would have believed Aunt Carol. I think I would have been happy to just give her the finger like I did with mom. But now I have to live with that choice, and I hate it. I’m never going to be someone whose mother didn’t die believing I would never, ever forgive her. And I think, at least, that the one silver lining in it is that the part of me that was capable of holding on to that kind of grief and contempt died with her.

So, I believe Aunt Carol. I believe she’s sorry, and that she would have done better if she’d known better, as the proverb goes.

it’s this moment where he has an opportunity to sort of vicariously fix things with his mom. he gets to experience what it might have been like if both he and his mom had been emotionally healthy enough to make better choices. He can’t actually change what happened, but he has the privilege now of knowing that he has the capacity to be someone who can forgive someone who loved him for doing something horrible to him. he gets to understand, finally, that forgiveness has shit all to do with absolving someone of their sins, and has everything to do with releasing oneself from the burden of contempt.

he figures out: yeah, he’s entitled to his anger, but he also deserves to not be angry. he has the right to stay angry at his mom for failing him so miserably, but he deserves to live without that anger.

and i just!!!!! absollutely did not actually think through any of that. like. that wasn’t my intended point of this whole scene where Madison visits his aunt. All I really meant to do was just document this event in his life, but wooooow.

Look where it took me.

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