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It turns my stomach to read this 1976 letter I wrote to my mother.  I have a hard time showing myself mercy, or accepting today how blind I remained for so many, many years.  Nobody TOLD me my childhood was abusive.  Nobody EVER asked me about my childhood or seemed to care.  I had no idea the abuse I suffered for 18 years meant anything to anybody, and it certainly had no bearing that I was aware of on who I was in 1976.

Yet at the same time the abuse was running my life and I did not know it.  I was that same confused, hurting, scared, battered, isolated, depressed and lost person I had been throughout all of my life.  I was in pieces.  I was broken.  I was mislead.  I was so very courageous as I kept putting one foot in front of the other and marched down the road of my life – from one event to the next – never stopping to look backwards at where I had come from or at what I had endured.

At least if one survives a holocaust or a prisoner of war camp or torture as an adult, they have the advantage of knowing something HAPPENED to them that was traumatic, out of the ordinary, difficult.  I had the benefit of no such insight.  Just as I never knew what my siblings did, that my mother was NUTS, I also had no idea that what she did to me was WRONG or hurtful.

I needed to know.  How I was as an ongoing participant of the lie affected my ability to parent my own children.  I was prevented from being present in my own body or in my own life.  I was prevented from being a self even though I could pretend I was one, evidently well enough that nobody else ever noticed the truth about Linda, either.

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BE sure to  check out the newest 1955 spooky doll story at the bottom of the page with the little poem about my mother and dolls – as she indoctrinates not only me at 3 ½, but my 18 month old sister, Cindy, as well.

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