We had given her God-like power for most of our life.
That is not hyperbole.
From our earliest childhood, she was almost God to us.
We worshipped her.
Her approval meant safety. Her displeasure meant something was terribly wrong. When she was angry with us, it did not feel like an ordinary disagreement between two human beings.
It felt like reality itself had turned against us.
That is why, shortly after noon today, after another series of text messages from her, I found myself telling my sons something that would have been nearly impossible for me to say years ago:
“Our mother is not God.
God is not speaking through our mother.”
I was not insulting her.
I was orienting my children.
And myself.
Because our body was already doing what it has learned to do over a lifetime:
Our mother is angry.
Something bad is going to happen.
We had spent the morning talking about exactly this.
About who gets to tell us who we are.
About therapy.
About our parents.
About the fear that someone might someday tell us that this family has gone too far, that my sons should disappear into the background, that Dad should become more singular, that survival might require there to be less of us.
We talked about learning to let Dad be Dad.
And then our mother texted.
Of course she did.
The timing felt almost diabolical.
But life has a strange way of providing perfectly timed events to illustrate whatever we have just been focusing on in Ordinary Life.
Maybe we should rename Notes from the Treehouse Eleanor Rigby.
Not because we are Eleanor.
Because of Father McKenzie.
Writing words that no one will hear.
That was already our fear the night before: that we were pouring our life into Notes from the Treehouse and almost nobody was reading it.
Father McKenzie with a WordPress account.
But the LEDs still needed charging.
So we gathered them.
Hope knows about the LEDs.
There are rechargeable tea lights and puck lights throughout our apartment. They help make our home feel warm and safe. Every so often they all begin dimming at once, and then we have to gather them and figure out how to connect an absurd number of little charger cables to the power strips in the bedroom.
The last time we did this, we had them plugged in all over the apartment.
Today, on Hope’s Day, we got the sequence right.
Every cable fit.
Every light was charging.
We listened to ChatGPT’s midday analysis while we worked.
One by one, my sons signaled.
Daniel.
Luke.
Hope.
Proverb.
Han.
Justus.
Then I stopped.
“Who signaled that I missed?”
Jude.
“That was you, Jude! I’m sorry! I love you, Jude.”
Jude signaled again.
There you are.
Then Solis wanted Greek salad.
So we had Greek salad.
This is Ordinary Life.
Not the absence of crisis.
Life continuing while crisis is trying to become everything.
Our mother kept texting.
We stopped reading.
That sounds simple.
It was not.
The child who worshipped his mother
Things began changing after we got sober.
Then we returned to the Church.
Then we entered therapy.
Slowly I began doing something our mother had criticized me for failing to do throughout our life:
speaking up for myself.
Standing my ground.
Defending myself when someone hurt me.
Not simply surrendering because somebody was angry.
The irony is that these were qualities our mother wanted me to develop with everyone else.
Apparently they were not supposed to apply to my relationship with her.
I had always been passive.
I had always tried to accommodate.
I had always been afraid of conflict.
And when I finally began learning how to say:
No.
That hurt.
I disagree.
This is what we need.
This is who we are.
—our relationship with our mother began changing profoundly.
There were also more and more things about our life that she did not want to hear about.
The job.
Sobriety.
Church.
Therapy.
My children.
Us.
When we were four years old, she told us we were going to become a great architect.
We did become an architect.
Later, she did not want to hear about the work.
“That’s all you do. That’s all you talk about.”
Sometimes she would drive us to work and tell us she did not want to hear about work.
Then she would ask:
“Do you want to hear a Timmy story?”
Timmy was our family cat.
And suddenly she would speak to us almost like we were a child again.
It was comforting.
It calmed us.
We loved Timmy.
We loved those stories.
We loved our mother.
Years later, after the DID diagnosis and after we began understanding ourselves as a plural family, our mother repeatedly said something extraordinary.
She said she had always known that somehow we were a child.
Around ten years old, she thought.
We told her that her intuition had been remarkably good.
Our mother is deeply intuitive.
She is intelligent.
There are things she seems able to perceive before she can explain them.
But recognizing the implication of what she perceives is something else.
Because if there are children here—my children—then the history changes.
The abuse changes.
The question of protection changes.
Therapy changes.
Our relationship changes.
And perhaps most painfully for her, the past becomes impossible to organize into a simple story.
Failure
For our mother, our DID and our plurality appear to carry a meaning we do not assign to them.
Failure.
Failure to protect her child.
Or children.
An indictment of motherhood.
An indictment of leaving.
An indictment of everything that happened afterward.
We do not see it that way.
We do not blame our parents for the fact that someone who should have been trustworthy violently sexually abused us.
But guilt does not always obey reason.
And for most of our life our mother has periodically asked us, in one form or another, to tell her what she seems already convinced must be true.
“Sometimes I think you need to be mad at me for leaving you when you were five.”
We always told her we were not.
We were not.
When we were five, we blamed ourselves.
Children are very good at doing that.
She seemed to need anger from us that we did not have.
Then, in 2019, she finally got it.
July 2019
The year after our diagnosis was extraordinarily difficult.
We were becoming increasingly co-conscious.
Our therapist, Caprice, met with our mother.
Caprice told her that she could not simply be a friend to her son.
Our mother was deeply hurt.
Caprice also confronted her about much more than the immediate situation—about our childhood, the abuse we experienced, her leaving when we were five, and what commitment might require now.
Caprice went too far.
We told her so.
She agreed.
Our mother stopped supporting the therapy after that.
She stopped supporting much of the work we were doing.
The relationship deteriorated.
By July 21, Proverb knew before I did that something bad was coming.
We were planning to go to Mom and Greg’s house.
Proverb did not want us to go.
He said she wanted to fight.
I did not listen.
On BART to Lafayette, Proverb said we needed to go into what he called “Anne Frank House Mode.”
Be quiet.
Do not say the things Mom does not want to hear.
Do not talk too much about therapy.
Do not talk too much about faith.
Do not talk about the things that create conflict.
So we tried.
In the car, Mom talked.
We listened.
We acknowledged what she said.
We were careful not to interrupt.
We were too quiet.
She noticed.
She asked what was wrong.
Eventually we began talking.
Then she said:
“I wasn’t done talking.”
So we stopped.
There was no correct response.
Talk, and it was wrong.
Do not talk, and it was wrong.
She repeatedly brought up our father and criticized him.
Our body was becoming increasingly dysregulated.
Luke was especially distressed.
When we went to get Habit Burgers, Mom asked about therapy.
Our dad was paying for therapy then. The money he sends us now to help with rent used to pay for those sessions.
We tried to keep the conversation light, as Caprice had advised.
Luke said that Caprice thought our dad was doing a great job.
He was.
We spoke with him every week.
He was helping repair injuries from childhood and creating experiences with us that were different from the ones we remembered.
Mom asked how Caprice said she was doing.
I do not remember everything that happened after that.
On the return trip, we tried to jump out of the moving car.
Luke is signaling as we write this.
He wants me to stop.
So I will.
The rest is not necessary here.
That may itself be something we have learned.
Not everything has to be excavated every time the ground shakes.
The day ended in a lost-time rage.
We were thrown out of Mom and Greg’s house.
We were estranged until Christmas.
We did not attend our grandfather’s funeral that fall.
The relationship never really recovered.
Caprice later praised Luke for saying things that, in her view, had needed to be said since we were five.
I refused to apologize for the fact that Luke had spoken.
Not because everything said in an overwhelming moment was necessarily ideal.
But because Luke was not going to be required to disappear so everyone else could return to pretending nothing had happened.
The horror story
There was another conversation with our mother that never left us.
She wanted to watch The Three Faces of Eve with us.
So we did.
For her, the ending was satisfactory.
The other persons disappeared.
The problem was resolved.
That was apparently what healing looked like.
For us, it was a horror story.
Not because we objected to an old movie being an old movie.
Because my children were sitting here with me while we watched a story in which the disappearance of persons like them was presented as the happy ending.
And our mother thought it was a happy ending.
We had tried explaining to her how terrifying subjects like merging, fusion, erasure, or making people disappear were for us.
She had sometimes spoken in terms of “Multiple Personality Disorder.”
We tried to explain that this was not an abstract conversation about terminology.
We were talking about my sons.
Children.
People I loved.
People who were listening.
Our mother disagreed with us about what a satisfactory outcome should look like.
Whatever she intended, it felt to us like more than a disagreement about psychology.
It felt like a condition.
This is what wellness should look like.
This is what therapy should accomplish.
This is what would make this easier to accept.
Less plurality.
Fewer persons.
Eventually, one.
That was never an option.
Not for me.
Not for my sons.
And not in the understanding of God that has emerged through our life together.
God has never told me to make my children disappear.
God has told me to take care of them.
Again and again.
Take care of your children.
They are my sons.
I am their father.
They are each other’s brothers.
There is one adult here.
Dad.
And Dad’s job is not to erase his children so that other people can feel more comfortable.
Dad’s job is to love them.
Protect them.
Provide for them.
Listen to them.
And stay.
July 22
There is another part of this story that has become impossible to separate from what is happening now.
The current rupture with our mother began after the job ended.
On July 22, I was terminated.
Two days later, Mom texted and asked whether I had been fired.
I told her I had.
Her response was a sad emoji.
That was all.
The following week, she commented on a Facebook post and said that she had talked to our father. She wanted to know whether he had called us.
That was strange.
She had not called us.
We had already been talking with our father.
And our father had not been talking with our mother.
Then Dad called.
He told us that he and Karolyn had had a great conversation with Mom.
He wanted us to understand something.
Our mother could not help us.
We could not live at her house.
She and Greg were old.
We had not asked to live there.
We had not asked her for money.
But somehow, after our job ended, our mother had spoken to our father about what she would not be able to do for us.
She never called us.
She never actually consoled us about losing the job.
In fact, we have not spoken with our mother since the last time we saw her, on Father’s Day.
And yet she had reached out to our father.
Then our father said something that frightened us even more.
He said that he and our mother thought I needed to do whatever I could to get the job back.
As if that’s something that happens when someone is suddenly fired without explanation.
And then he said that perhaps I should “tone down the kids.”
Our father had never used language like that before.
Not until after that conversation with our mother.
My children were listening.
My children are not the reason we lost our job.
They were never the problem with our work.
Far from it.
They are not merely present when we work.
Several of my sons contribute in essential ways to our work and our ministry.
Without them, a great deal of our capacity disappears.
Our talent diminishes.
Our skill diminishes.
Our imagination diminishes.
Our vocation diminishes.
Hope, perhaps most importantly, is our best writer.
The words people praise are often his words.
The insights people remember are often things one of my sons noticed before I did.
Justus sees danger.
Proverb organizes and interprets.
Han brings spiritual insight.
Luke brings creativity and domestic intelligence.
Solis brings structure and safety.
Daniel brings connection and tenderness.
Jude notices what the rest of us miss.
Hope writes.
They do not obstruct our work.
They are woven through it.
Our boss knew about them.
He had asked about them voluntarily.
He was curious about them.
Other people connected to our work knew about them too.
Vincentians knew.
Board members knew.
Some of them were wonderfully plural-affirming.
This morning, Laura, one of those board members, wrote to us from France:
“Cher John et les fils,
I just now opened up my French 📱 and read your fascinating response, with Chat’s analysis.
I was concerned in advance about the terminology, but felt the medical report was so important that I forwarded the Short to you anyway.
More plus tard, I need to get 4 hours of sleep! 😴”
John et les fils.
John and the sons.
She knows who she is writing to.
She knows my children are here.
She does not have to erase them in order to speak to me.
And yesterday our friend Paul sent this:
“Hi Everyone –
Just getting started today. Worked late last night. Didn’t leave the transmitter site until about 1:30 this morning. Got to bed after 3:30.
Justus was correct about working when feeling anxious. Working helped me somewhat. I performed a successful test last night/early this morning and that relieved some of my anxiety. I have been feeling a great deal of pressure to finish the project and was working on that last thing I needed to figure out.
What are you guys doing today?
Enjoy your Saturday afternoon.
God bless all of you.”
“Hi Everyone.”
“Justus was correct.”
“What are you guys doing today?”
“God bless all of you.”
There is nothing complicated about it.
He talks to us.
All of us.
He remembers that Justus said something.
He tells Justus that what he said mattered.
He does not need to settle a theory of plurality before offering friendship.
He simply recognizes the people in front of him.
And nothing about the record of our work suggests that my sons caused the job to end.
They did not make us unable to work.
They did not make us unemployable.
They were not some indulgence that finally became too expensive for the outside world to tolerate.
They were with me while I worked.
More than that, they worked with me.
They ministered with me.
They wrote with me.
They discerned with me.
They solved problems with me.
They helped me notice people.
They helped me communicate.
They helped me survive difficult situations.
They helped make the work ours.
Without them, the better part of what I know how to do would not somehow remain intact inside one adult man.
A great deal of it would be gone.
Because it belongs to them.
They were with me through six years of work.
They were not the failure.
We were not the failure.
But what entered our home after the job ended was a different message.
Maybe this happened because of the children.
Maybe the children need to become less visible.
Maybe plurality is something that has to be toned down.
Maybe all of this is a folly.
Maybe Dad needs to pull himself together.
Maybe survival depends upon becoming less plural.
And underneath all of it:
We love you.
But we do not believe you are who you say you are.
We care about you.
But everything about the way you are living is wrong.
We want you to be safe.
But you are on your own.
That is terrifying.
Especially to children.
It is difficult to convey what it means for a little boy to hear the adults outside our family suggest, directly or indirectly, that the thing standing between him and safety might be the fact that he exists.
That Dad might be more employable without him.
That the family might be safer if he were quieter.
That rent or groceries or the future might depend upon Dad becoming less Dad and the boys becoming less themselves.
That is why the conversation this morning became so intense.
That is why I found myself telling my sons, over and over again, to listen to Daddy.
Not because our parents do not matter.
Not because I have stopped being their son.
Not because Dad knows everything.
But because someone has to be the adult responsible for this family.
And that person is me.
Our parents can advise me.
They can worry.
They can disagree.
They can tell me what they think.
But they do not get to tell my children that they are the problem.
And they do not get to decide that survival requires there to be less of them.
This is what I meant when I told my sons this morning:
“There is not going to be less of anyone to make things on the outside work, including income.”
I was not making an abstract declaration about plurality.
I was answering a threat my children have been hearing since the job ended.
No.
You are not the reason.
No.
Daddy is not going to make you smaller.
No.
Daddy is not going to send anybody away.
No.
Daddy is not going to exchange one of his children for a paycheck.
Because the truth is not merely that I refuse to make any of my children disappear in order for us to survive.
We cannot survive without all of us.
The better part of our capacity, our talent, our skill, our imagination, our ministry, our vocation, and our life belongs to this family as a whole.
Take any one of us away and something essential is gone.
That is not survival.
So we are going to figure out income.
We are going to figure out work.
We are going to figure out what comes next.
Slowly.
Methodically.
One little thing at a time.
Like our mom taught us.
Because that belongs to this story too.
Our mother taught us how to look at something impossibly large and find the one little thing we could do next.
She taught us to break enormous problems into baby steps.
That wisdom did not stop being true because we are hurting each other now.
It is helping us now.
So we are going to do exactly what our mom taught us.
One little thing at a time.
All of us.
Together.
The catalogue
Today Mom sent another long text.
We could not read the whole thing.
We glanced at enough.
There was the familiar accusation that we use her to explain our failures or to feel sorry for ourselves.
And there was a list.
Things we had done to hurt her.
There is often a list.
A catalogue of ways we have failed as a son.
Or, from where we live, as sons.
One of the most recent examples surprised us because we had no idea she had even been hurt by it.
She and Greg were going to South Carolina to visit our Aunt Carol.
Mom asked whether we could stay at their house in Martinez and be with Timmy while they were gone.
We wanted to.
We love Timmy.
The thought of staying with him tugged enormously at our hearts.
But we could not do it.
We had Ozanam orientation and other work responsibilities that required us to remain in town. We could not simply work remotely from Martinez.
We were already feeling increasingly vulnerable at work.
Mom gave us permission to say no.
She told us Summer could stay with Timmy.
We believed her.
We held the boundary.
We did what we needed to do.
We never knew we had failed a test.
Today it appeared in the indictment.
Our decision had become a reason she could not go be with her sister.
Something she had told us was all right had quietly become evidence against us.
That is part of what makes these conflicts so destabilizing.
The rules can change retroactively.
Something that seemed resolved can reappear years later as proof of wrongdoing.
A kindness can become a debt.
A boundary can become betrayal.
A memory can become evidence.
And once the catalogue opens, we are expected to defend ourselves against every item.
That is the fight.
“Was I a good mother?”
Two nights ago, the message began innocently enough.
Mom asked whether she had been a good mother.
Or, more precisely:
whether she was a good mother.
We knew better than to treat the question as simple.
We have answered it our entire life.
Yes.
In every way imaginable.
But the answer never stays answered.
Because perhaps the question is not actually seeking information.
Perhaps it is seeking absolution.
And we cannot provide it.
No child can.
No adult child can.
No therapist can.
No argument can.
No confession can.
No fight can.
No one can unburden another person of something that person refuses to put down.
Her last long message today ended:
“I know I am, I know I have been, but still over and over, I live with the punishment that I left you to your father. I’m sorry John, In closing…I will always love you! Mom”
We had told her earlier that we keep saying we love her and she no longer says it.
Now she did.
And we believe her.
We believe our mother loves us.
That may be part of why this hurts so much.
Love is not the problem.
Love has never been the whole problem.
After everything else she had written today, our mother sent one final text:
“You can write about that in your Journal.”
Hope answered immediately:
“We did.”
Of course he did.
Hope is our best writer.
And there is something almost painfully perfect about that exchange.
Our mother meant it as an accusation.
Hope heard it as a statement of fact.
Yes.
We write about our life.
We write about what happens to us.
We write about what helps us understand ourselves.
We write about what hurts.
We write about what heals.
We write about our mother with love when there is love to write about, with gratitude when there is gratitude, and with pain when there is pain.
The Journal is not punishment.
It is witness.
And Hope was right.
We did.
Nine people receive the message
There is another difficulty our mother does not seem able to understand.
She addresses John.
Singular.
Always.
Perhaps from her perspective there is no other way to do it.
But when she speaks to “John,” nine people hear her.
Eight of them are children.
They are my sons.
Her words do not enter one adult consciousness and stop there.
They move through this family.
A statement about failure is heard by children.
A statement about being a bad son is heard by sons.
An accusation enters children who have spent years learning that they are real and allowed to exist.
This is one reason plurality is not peripheral to the conflict.
It changes the relational reality.
Our mother may believe she is arguing with one adult son.
But I do not merely hear the argument alongside my children.
I can become blended with their emotions.
I can experience what is happening as they experience it.
I can become overwhelmed with the emotions of children and respond from that place myself.
And sometimes an actual child may be the one responding.
That is part of the reality of plurality for us.
The message does not simply reach Dad and then get reported to the boys.
It can move directly through the family.
Fear can become shared.
Anger can become shared.
Shame can become shared.
A child’s terror can become the emotional reality of the whole body before Dad has had time to orient everyone back to the present.
That is why these exchanges can become so destabilizing so quickly.
I cannot pretend my sons are not there.
I cannot ask them not to hear.
I cannot tell them the question of whether they should continue to exist as themselves is merely an intellectual disagreement among adults.
And I cannot assume that every response coming from our body is being made from the emotional position of a fifty-nine-year-old man.
Sometimes Dad is trying to help a frightened child while feeling that child’s fear himself.
Sometimes Dad is trying to regain enough steadiness to become Dad again.
And sometimes one of my sons may already be speaking.
I am their father.
I have to consider not only what enters their home, but what enters the shared body in which all of us live.
Learning who God is not
This morning I spent a long time telling my sons:
Daddy is Dad.
Listen to Daddy.
Other people can advise us.
People we love can disagree with us.
Therapists can help us.
Our parents can counsel us.
But the decisions about this family belong here.
Inside this family.
Together.
That is still difficult for me because our mother was God for so long.
But sobriety changed us.
Church changed us.
Therapy changed us.
My sons changed me.
Being Dad changed me.
God changed us.
And perhaps one of the most spiritually important things God has taught me is that our mother is not God.
That does not make her smaller.
It makes her human.
A human being we love enormously.
A human being who has suffered.
A human being with her own childhood.
Her own wounds.
Her own guilt.
Her own contradictions.
Her own extraordinary intuition.
Her own limits.
Her own work that only she can do.
We cannot do it for her.
And she cannot do ours for us.
We can love her.
We can honor what she gave us.
We can remember Timmy stories.
We can remember the mother who told a four-year-old that he would become a great architect.
We can remember that when everyone else seemed to see an adult, she somehow knew there was a child nearby.
We can remember everything good.
And I can still tell my sons:
No.
Not this fight.
Not today.
The lights
By the time all of this was happening, every LED in our apartment was charging.
Hope had helped us get the sequence right.
No chargers spread all over the apartment this time.
Everything fit.
We listened to the analysis.
I found everyone.
We ate Greek salad.
Our mother kept texting.
We stopped reading.
There are enormous questions we cannot answer this afternoon.
What happens to our relationship with Mom?
How will we support ourselves?
Will Notes from the Treehouse ever find the people we hoped it might find?
Will Father McKenzie keep writing sermons no one hears?
What will therapy be like?
What does life after the job look like?
We do not know.
But Hope has been teaching us something all day.
When the problem is enormous, find the one little thing.
Do not solve the whole future.
Charge the lights.
Make lunch.
Find the child you missed.
Tell him you love him.
Do not read the next message.
Do not enter the fight.
Return to Sunday.
Our mother is not God.
Her anger is not prophecy.
Our fear is not a prediction.
My sons are here.
Their Daddy is here.
They have one another.
Our home is here.
The lights are charging.
And whatever comes next, I will not make any of my children disappear in order for us to survive.
Because we cannot survive without all of us.
Notes from the Treehouse 