Month: June 2009

+SOMETIMES, LIFE CHANGES

alchemynow3 Comments

Sometime within this next year I plan to leave Arizona.  I believe today I found where I want to move to:  Marietta, Ohio.  I don’t know anyone there.  I have no family there.  I don’t have much for resources and don’t really know how I’ll manage the move.  But I believe I will.  This feels right, although scary.  But there is much to see and do there, and from the internet (!) it looks wonderful!  I have to grieve the leaving here, and that will take some time.  But I am open and willing — so…….

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+DISSOCIATION FROM CHILD ABUSE NEVER LEAVES US

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Written October 16, 2006

I walked into a crowded yet rural gas station-café after spending 3 weeks the summer of 2006 with my friend in her cabin in the northern Minnesota woods.  I experienced instantaneous sensory and perceptual overload.  It was not a logical reaction.  I felt like I shattered, splintered and fragmented.  I was suddenly now in a different world.  I needed a different Linda to cope with it.

It was like the ongoing ME of the past weeks was ‘a state of mind’ that could not transition into this different one, and I suffered disintegration in response to the input of ‘so many possibilities’ that I confronted once I walked in the door of this public establishment.  I could not help but react in almost panic.

It was as if every potential and possible reaction that could possibly happen consumed as much of my attention as what was actually happening at the moment I entered the room, although nothing unusual was happening around me at all.  The unusual was within my own body.  I was just as aware of what could happen as I was of what was happening.  It was as if I could notice at the same time things that might demand my attention in the future even though they didn’t in the present.

It seemed that by my walking into the café I had changed ‘their world’, and I could sense far more of their reactions than these people were probably even aware of themselves.  I do not understand how I could be that aware of what the possibilities of interactions might be, even though I only directly interacted with the cashier near the door.  It was like everything got noisy, very loud, in terms of what I could sense.  I was immediately on overload and left as fast as possible.

THAT was a disorganizing experience, the kind that I believe results from a disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment disorder.  Just because we grow into adults does not make our insecure attachments disappear.  I don’t believe it’s ‘just about’ our intimate relationships.  It’s about our whole operation as a self in the world.  I never got to build a solid, safe and secure self that can move around throughout all the transitions of life in a coherent, dependable, ongoing way.

It was as if all these possibilities of complexity triggered a transitional state for me that I could not include within my mind.  I could not narrow what was coming in to me so that I could comfortably focus on the immediate reality of the ‘place’ I was in.  Transitional states of mind are normally brief, just long enough to take in new information, assess it for value and safety, and respond appropriately.  Ordinarily this happens (in innocuous situations) so fast one does not notice that these transitional spaces even exist, let alone know that one has been passed through.

I doubt others without a severe trauma background would be aware of the ‘essence of energy’ present in that small establishment I walked into – and out of.  It was almost like little ghost selves dissolved out of all those bodies and came rushing toward me and hovered around, too close for comfort, when I walked in that door.  I was certainly noticed, stranger I was in their world.

The ghosts felt to me to be curious, pushy, forward, some of them leering.  People do have life forces and energies about them, but in our culture we are not given permission to know this.  We are supposed to ignore all but the socially acceptable versions of exchange between people that we are all supposed to be trained to recognize.

Yet because my childhood was so strange, and so altered from the ‘ordinary’, I did not learn what these appropriate social exchange patterns are really all about.  And even when I try my hardest to figure them out, that never makes me the same as people whose selves formed under far more ordinary circumstances, and this constant trying is a whole lot of work

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Our culture presumes and assumes that people are contained within the boundaries of the skin of their bodies.  Yet we are always ‘sensing’ others’ information they ‘put out’, whether we want to or not.  Most do not have to pay attention to it in their usual, ongoing lives.  I suspect for those of us whose bodies were formed during extremely threatening and dangerous conditions, our sensing abilities operate in different ways and are extremely difficult to shut off.  Just because people do not ‘ordinarily’ admit that parts of others can actually ‘journey’ outside of their bodies, communicate things and be perceived does not mean it does not happen.

It can also be very difficult for early-traumatized people to efficiently sort out the information.  It is hard for us to truly know what is important and what is not.  We were formed to be hypervigilant about ALL information, so we get more of it, have a harder time knowing what it means, and a harder time knowing how to respond to it appropriately.

Because early traumas change the formation of the body, brain and nervous system, and because we later are supposed to slide right into an ordinary life after having experienced anything but an ordinary childhood, we are exposed yet again to forms of incompatibility between ourselves and our environment.  We are as powerless to change the bigger world we live in as adults as we were to change the far narrower one we lived in as growing children.

Some of us will always be outside of the worlds that others live in, left only to imagine what their more ‘ordinary’ perceptions of being in the world is really like.  Some of us will just never know what ‘ordinary’ is.  We can’t help that.  We were formed that way.  I was dissociated from the ordinary throughout the 18 years of my childhood.  I cannot expect those patterns to disappear now.

Some things about the way our brains, bodies and nervous systems we can work to change, but we must be realistic.  I will never be physiologically the same as I would have been if the terrible abuse had not happened to me — especially so early.  My hope is that those of us with these altered bodies will begin to dialog with one another to improve our understandings of what life is like for us — especially on the level of what we cannot change and must find ways to live with.

Just because we developed in an extra-ordinary world of trauma does not make us ‘wrong’.  We had to adapt in order to survive, and we did.  The consequences are very real.  We need to know how the world is to us, and how we are in the world.  From there we can begin to dialog better within ourselves, with one another as severe child abuse survivors, and with those who were built in, by and for a MUCH nicer world than we were.

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+LINK TO A NEW CHILDHOOD STORY PAGE

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I just added a new page to My Childhood Stories that has to do with the list my mother made and kept of all the things I had ‘ruined’ throughout my childhood that I had to pay her for after I left home:  MY MOTHER’S RIDICULOUS LIST

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+TRAUMA AND THE 30,000 EGGS: HOW MUCH CAN WE TAKE BEFORE WE ARE OVERWHELMED?

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Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) represents an error in the ongoing processes of learning useful things in one’s life.  A traumatic experience can actually contain much more information than a person can actually use as one single individual.  The potential of what a traumatic experience can teach about survival needs to be applied (learned) in order to improve adaptation within the environment just in case a similar event happens again in the future.

Particularly in today’s world where we no longer exist in a tribal culture that would allow a whole group to learn from a dangerous experience, there can be “no room in the inn” on a personal level for the whole amount of new information that might be gained about survival from an event one person has had to experience alone.  Learning is thus interfered with on the individual level, and the wholeness of that person is interfered with, as well.  The result can be that their ongoing experience of being in their life is interrupted, and we then have a post-trauma circumstance.

If the information about what is needed to survive an overwhelming trauma cannot be shared ‘in a group’, the information out-matches the needs of a single person’s waking day and sleeping night.  Unprocessed information about trauma survival just sits in line, in the cue of ongoing information processing, and can ‘jump the line’ at every possible trigger that stimulates it – like it is impatient to be completed and finished.  It WANTS to used, and be useful.  That’s the nature of ongoing life.  Traumas are supposed to teach us something important about how to get along in a world that is not always safe.

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When an infant suffers traumas that create breaks in its ongoing experiencing of life, the interruptions will most often be built into its growing brain as dissociational patterns.  Its learning and adaptation will be interfered with just as it would be for an overwhelmed adult, only much more so.  Once these ‘crisis’ response patterns are built into the brain, they will be lying in wait to be used should any future overwhelming trauma occur.

Survival through evolution has required humans to have the widest possible range of responses to traumas.  If what is known cannot prevent a trauma from occurring, or does not allow for adaptation to a trauma, new responses must be learned.

Within a safe and secure range the best of all possible genetic phenotypes will be able to manifest.  Phenotypes are what we actually SEE on the ‘surface’ of who we are based on our genetic material as our genetic expression machinery has told our genes what to do on an ongoing basis.  If too much trauma exists during the early developmental stages of our lives through abuse, neglect, deprivation, etc., the actual phenotypes we end up with can be far different than they would have been if development had happened in a safe and secure, non traumatic environment.

Most mental illnesses, for example, are ‘visible’ phenotypes that might not have needed to develop if early trauma had not been present.  As soon as an early environment overwhelms an infant or young child with too much trauma, the body will interpret this as a threat-to-life situation, and use the most extreme adaptive phenotypes it can in order to cope with disaster.

The developing brain and body operates on a simple rule basis.  A safe world is run by safe rules and will bring out safe responses.  A dangerous world is run by dangerous rules and will bring out the most extreme adaptations possible – as needed.  Our phenotypes reflect how these rules are applied within our bodies.

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Too much or too little of anything can kill an organism.  Extremes push the body into an emergency, crisis response.  Trauma that reaches PTSD proportions for an individual represents a condition of too much information.  Information is only useful if it can be integrated and applied BY USING IT.  I believe it is because we so often are left without a ‘group’ or ‘tribe’ that would help us learn from the traumas that we are so at risk as individuals for becoming overwhelmed.  This appears obvious when we realize that strong safe and secure attachment relationships mediate the effects of traumas at every single age along the human lifespan continuum.

Making good use of the information that traumas present to us has to be in the direction of promoting and advancing life – for the individual, for the species.  Being a connected part of the ‘social group’ allows for a wider range of possibilities for learning from traumas while being isolated and alone narrows that range.

I think about it in terms of 30,000 eggs.  An ordinary family sized cake might require the input of 3 eggs, not 30,000.  Too many eggs would obviously ruin the cake!  Trauma eliminates the choice of deciding we don’t want so much overwhelming information.  Too bad.  Here it is.   What are we going to learn from it and how are we going to use this information for a better future?   We can’t decide NOT to try to proceed with our cake-bake-of-life with ONLY 3 eggs.  When life hands us 30,000 eggs, we better be ready and able to deal with it.

Trauma is an out-of-the-ordinary experience:  It is extra-ordinary, supra-ordinary.  So if we have to deal with 30,000 eggs, we better be a part of a very large family so that we can effectively bake a super-sized cake large enough to use the 10,000 times more information than what we could ordinarily make good use of by ourselves.  This is what community is truly all about.

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I suspect that in a perfect world no individual (family, group, etc.) would ever be given more traumatic information to deal with than what they could ordinarily use.  The more divided and isolated we are the ‘fewer eggs’ we can handle.  While being connected and safely and securely attached to others is not the only factor that leads to resilience, it is probably the most important one because we are a social species.  We did not evolve as separate beings cut-off from a whole, and our evolutionarily developed abilities to respond to trauma and to process it by learning new things when we need to, is NOT meant to happen separately, either.

Any time we try to go against the patterns that nature has given us, we are far more likely to suffer difficulties.  Healing from trauma is no different.  When the group – our family of origin – hurt us and did not protect us, and was also not there for us when we had our greatest need to depend on safe and secure attachment with dependable, available others,  we are much, much more likely to suffer from ‘too much information’, or information overload that results in a post-traumatic reaction.

Traumas happen.  Not being able to process the information contained in traumatic experience so that future responses will be better adapted responses leaves us baking the 30,000 egg cake when we can only, by ourselves, handle a 3 egg cake.  We need help.  We are made that way.

The more fragmented and insecure our connections are to others, the more at risk we are for being overwhelmed as ‘an army (or victim) of one’.  The more overwhelmed we are, the more likely we are to be fragmented (and dissociated) ourselves.  No single person was ever designed to ‘go it alone’, and certainly not infants and young children.

I say this because we cannot heal alone, either.

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+PLEASE DON’T TELL ME TO LEAVE MY ABUSE IN THE PAST – IT’S NOT POSSIBLE!

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Someone recently made this so familiar comment to me:  …”in our life somehow things do happen but we need 2 let the past be the past in our life….”

When someone tells me something like this now, I know that they either have no clue what severe early child abuse is, they had at least one strong attachment that acted as a powerful resiliency factor in childhood even if they were abused, or they are trying to apply an inaccurate, worn out, unhelpful adage from the past to their own situation as they try to live a good life in spite of what they have been through.

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I continue to ‘fight back’ against the pressure and force that these kinds of comments create for me as they present impossible ‘as if’ fantasy solutions.  While I know these comments are meant to be ‘helpful’, they still bring out more and more of my fierce fight-for-life spirit because they do NOT fully address the situations of people like me and I am being asked to do the impossible.

The most important point I have learned in the past 5 years I have spent researching my own situation is that because the abuse I suffered started so early, was so pervasive, chronic and devastating, I do NOT have the choice to ‘let the past be the past’.  The adaptive changes that my developing brain, body, nervous system and immune system had to make in the hostile, dangerous and malevolent world of my childhood CHANGED me in permanent ways that cannot be altered.

I now know that I have very real, clear and definable disabilities within me as a result of my being so abused from the time I was born.  My disabilities are no less real or devastating than would be any other kind of serious disability.  Just because the scars of the abuse do not show on the outside, just because my body grew from that of an infant and child into an adult one, does not mean in any way that I do not have permanent, irreversible and serious consequences of that abuse within me — as I will until the day that I die.

Now I know that expecting myself to be able to ‘leave the past behind’ is at best a silly expectation, and at worst an erosive thought that corrodes my own hard-worked-for progress toward living the best life I can live IN SPITE of the damage done to me by the abuse I suffered.

We are not all alike in terms of the resiliency factors that were present for us as children.  Our experiences were not all alike in terms of the quality of attachments with caregivers within our early worlds.  Our genetics are not alike.  We cannot support one another the way we wish to if we ever believe that we simply KNOW what another person can accomplish.

I see the wordless image of a person waking in the middle of the night with their house on fire.  They grab a blanket from their bed and wrap it around themselves as they race out the door.  Just because they may have escaped the inferno within the house itself (our childhood) does not mean we are safe if our clothing and our blanket, even the skin of our body is still engulfed in flames even AFTER we get out alive.

In severe child abuse cases, we do not have the luxury of ever being able to ‘get away’ from the raging fire of destruction that our home of origin was.  We carry the burning flames right out the door with us.  Pretending that we got away unscathed, and pretending that we were not seriously damaged as a consequence of our abuse, will never give us the ability to realistically evaluate and assess what happened to us.

Pretending we are completely whole and safe once we leave our abusive childhood situations will never help us heal from the continuing woundedness within ourselves.  We need to learn as much as we can about the ‘exact nature’ of the damage so that we can be supremely realistic about what we can, as adults, expect of ourselves.  Having the specific FACTS will allow us to gain more and more conscious awareness and thus more and more POWER for good over ourselves and our lives.

Healing is not about being in a competition.  It is NOT about seeing who can forget their past traumas and ‘get on with living in the present’ the fastest.  It is not about shaming ourselves and one another because we can’t accomplish this impossible goal.  The reality is that the foundational attachment processes of being able to live as a self in the world have been damaged.  We need to know what that means, and we need to REALISTICALLY know what we can do about healing these attachment wounds as they manifest themselves in all kinds of later problems in our lives.

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As I described in yesterday’s post, my mother insanely demanded the impossible of me and then abused me for 18 years because I could not comply with her demands.  I could not let her invade and devour the essence of who I was.  Nature’s rules do not allow for this to happen.  When someone tells me to leave my abuse in my past and get on with living, they are asking me to accomplish an EQUALLY impossible task.

One can never leave their child abuse in the past if it was severe enough to change they way their entire being (and body) developed during those early critical growth windows of developmental opportunity.  Both these ‘demands’ are thus similar to me — whether it was my mother demanding that I allow her to invade and devour my soul — or whether it is a well-meaning person today who tells me to leave my childhood in the past.  Both of these demands could only be accomplished by the death of my body.  Otherwise, they are impossible.

We need to rethink and think clearly what we mean when we tell ourselves and others  to ‘get over it’.  Obviously I cannot live without a body — and that body is the same one that all my traumatic abuse is built into.  It is far more useful and possible for me to find out what that MEANS and what I can learn about living well in spite of the facts.

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As long as we pretend that we can leave our abusive childhoods behind us ‘in the past’, we will at the same time be allowing all the unconscious, unrecognized, unknown difficulties that our childhoods created in our bodies and minds to run rampant – uncontrolled, unchecked, not dealt with, and UNRESOLVED – to wreck havoc with our lives, our health, our futures, our relationships, and our offspring.

Denial is NOT what we need to solve our problems!  Denial allows trauma to rule our lives and spread out around us through our actions like the contaminating, destructive, contagious virus that it is.  We have no chance of living well with our woundedness or of finding a cure for trauma unless we open our hearts, minds and eyes to the TRUTH about the damage that abuse, neglect and malicious actions causes anyone — ESPECIALLY to infants and young children.

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A much more helpful response to make to a person who is suffering from long term, lifelong changes due to having survived severe abuse from childhood — or trauma of any kind at any time — is simply to communicate that we are aware of the trauma, that we care, and that we are willing to offer ongoing encouraging (appropriate) support.  I believe it’s that simple, and that’s what building safe and secure attachment patterns at any stage of our life is all about!

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+IN MY MOTHER’S WORDS: WHY SHE HAD TO ABUSE ME

alchemynow1 Comment

I just surprising discovered in my mother’s 1957 diary her own written account of her version of reality related to one of the most long term and vicious child abuse memories of my young childhood.

I am stunned by her words, by the fact that she EVER allowed herself to write them, that this diary has survived these 52 years, that I have them in my possession, and that I found them last night.

I have done my best to describe my present day reaction to these writings, though I feel I have very nearly failed completely in my efforts to understand their true value or meaning.

I wish I knew more.  I wish I understood better, could see more clearly, and comprehend more objectively how twisted my mother was and how much I suffered as a result of her insidious, malicious mental illness.

It is a bizarre and strangely bizarre experience to actually have the words of a perpetrator in the hands of the victim.  However inadequate my efforts may be, all I can offer today is my presentation of

my mother’s version of what happened to me about the bubble gum

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+NOT AN EASY PAGE TO WRITE

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This is (follow this link) not an easy page for me to write –  through my tears and with my nose all drippy and goopy.  I do not wish to limit what I write about because of shame, or because of being too proud.  Yet at the same time it is not yet time to write about the specifics of this 9-year relationship that has brought me so much joy, multiplied ten thousand times by sadness, grief and sorrow.

It is not apologies or words in my own defense that I offer here.  I simply state what I know about what is going on right now, the same thing that has been going on for these 9 years as the inevitable ending of this relationship approaches.

Through my work to understand how my pain in the present connects directly to the pain from my childhood, I am coming to understand how vulnerable I have always been to end up loving a man such as the one I love now.  There has never been a simple cure for the harm that was caused to me by 18 years of severe abuse.  Yet I know more and more clearly what I want now.

I want peace.  Simple, pure peace.  I am not there yet.  I am not there.

For now, I can only offer this:  not an easy page for me to write

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Please access these pages on Domestic Violence and Abuse for important additional information —

From the Mayo Clinic on:  Domestic violence against women: Recognize patterns, seek help

The National Coalition Against Domestic Violence

Domestic Violence Awareness Handbook

Domestic Abuse Project

Psychological Abuse

More links to information about Psychological Abuse

The Silent Treatment

Abusive Relationships

Mental and Emotional Abuse in Relationships

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+OPENING OUR OWN HEARTS AND MINDS TO THE REALITIES OF CHILD ABUSE

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There are too many new letters being transcribed to include them all on the temporary page.  I am spending time right now working on the 1960 letters and am currently working on April and May of that year – with more to follow as they are filed within the months of 1960.

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I especially would like to recommend to readers the important comments made today on this blog by Paul M. McLaughlin.

Please visit the two comment pages he posted to:  Stop the Storm’s Contact Information Page and to the post HOW DID THE ABUSE CHANGE US?  Valuable links to his website, to the record of his work to prevent child abuse, and to his personal story are contained in his comments.

I am honored that Paul has shared the heroic story of his life as a survivor of 20 years of terrible childhood abuse with me and with my readers.  Thank you, Paul!

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I have benefited over the years from the efforts of many therapists that I was able to access on my pathway of healing.  Some of the words that I heard them tell me have returned when I have needed to remember them.  I would like to say a heartfelt “THANK YOU” to all the professionals working in a wide variety of fields to help not only prevent child abuse, but to help those of us who survived it, to heal.

After my work on the ‘writings’ yesterday I had great difficulty in sleeping last night.  It is now 9:30 at night and I am only now feeling ‘strong enough’ to approach any writing for today.

The words of two separate therapists from my past echoed in my mind today.  One of them said to me, over and over again, “Linda, always do what YOU need to do to take care of yourself.”  When I look back at the sessions I had with this woman, I remember that I had to take a tape recorder with me to record every session.  Without these recordings I could never remember one single thing we talked about together.

I didn’t understand dissociation at that time.  Nor did this therapist ‘waste’ any time explaining it to me.  We simply together found a way around the problem as it related to our sessions.  I would play the tapes over again several times between sessions, and doing so helped me to ‘grow into’ the topics we discussed.  But the single most important gift I received from this woman are the words I just mentioned.  “Always do what YOU need to do to take care of yourself.”

Those simple words contain within them a universe of healing potential.  They will never be words I will outgrow, or afford to ignore.  Today has been a day when I had to take special good care of myself.  Survivors need to learn how to do this for ourselves, always.

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The other set of words a therapist of my past told me that came into my mind today are about the process of healing itself.  She told me that this process is like a finely crocheted, beautiful doily.  What makes them attractive is the balance between tight and wide open spaces within the pattern.  She told me that when we sometimes work very hard on an ‘issue’ we are making the tight, close together, denser part of the pattern of our healing.  But we need the loose times, as well.  There are times we have to leave all of it completely alone, take a break, do whatever we need to do to give ourselves a rest from the ‘work’ itself.

I thought about these words today and am so grateful for the opportunities I have been given in the past to access quality therapy.  Each time of contact I have had with each ‘specialist’ gave me what I needed at that point in time.  Today I carry so much within me of what these people gave me – as well as the work I did for myself each step of the journey along the way.

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Reading Paul McLaughlin’s words echoed with the sadness inside of me about how hurtful ANY abuse is, but particularly the abuse of infants and young children.  I believe that we have a social taboo against truly allowing ourselves to look severe abuse of the tiniest of people straight in the eye.  No species endures if their most helpless offspring are not cared for and cherished.

While the taboos against harming infants and children exist for a wide purpose, I want to encourage all of us to build up our tolerance – like building and strengthening muscles – so that we can allow ourselves to know in our minds and in our feelings what the reality of early terrible abuse of young ones really is – that it exists, that it happens, that it has severe and lifelong consequences.

I am not suggesting that we pursue a morbid approach – just an educational one for ourselves as members of a culture that continues to need to ‘raise consciousness’ about child abuse and neglect.  Paul’s writings contribute to this denial-smashing.  True, Paul was born in 1948 and I was born in 1950, both of us in a time when public awareness and consciousness about child abuse was still in the stone ages.

But what touched me most today when I visited his website is that there were no doubt many, many, many people surrounding this boy and his twin sister who SHOULD have used common sense to intervene to protect these children.  I’m not going to be the one here to point the finger, but read his story and look at it yourself.  If we were all actors and actresses in a stage play of his childhood, what would each of us have been able to do differently from what the people actually did who were there?

Where and how in today’s world, where we each live our lives, can we apply new insights and new information so that if history ever repeats itself within the sphere of our individual influence we can do something BETTER to help a child – to help many children – that so desperately need someone to notice, pay attention, and care enough to help them?

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As always, thank you for reading – your comments are welcome and appreciated!

+LOOKING FOR MY STORY IN THE CHAOS OF MADNESS

alchemynow2 Comments

This is the link to one of the ‘article’ pieces I have found among my mother’s papers.  It was with August 1960 letters, but had no date on the paper it was written on.

My mother was certain that she was going to ‘someday’ write a book on homesteading, She specifically planned that her letters to my grandmother, written during this time were saved, and returned back to her.  Yet very, very few of the letters had any date placed on them at all.

I can estimate letter dates by the envelope postmarks, but many letters are NOT in envelopes and without dates it makes it extremely hard to know where to place the letters along the ‘timeline’ of my childhood years that I am trying to create!

My grandmother, an educated and astute woman, obviously knew of my mother’s plan because she was a participant in it.  Yet she did not make sure on her end, once she had received a letter, that she wrote at least the date the letter came into her hands if there was no clear postmark on the envelope – which happened often!

The inability to ‘tell a coherent life story’ in adulthood – or even during an abusive childhood – is a prime hallmark symptom of an insecure attachment-disordered pattern formed by ‘inadequate’ early infant and childhood interactions with caregivers.

My mother had such an insecure attachment pattern, which she GOT in her childhood from her interactions with her mother (and others).   It looks to me as I work with the writings — that went back and forth between these women for years — as if this total lack of organization or coherent ordering of all these carefully written and preserved letters about the story of homesteading, are themselves in a state that is a clear indication of the MESS that the insecure attachment patterns created in my mother’s life as well as in my own childhood.

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It is almost as if these letters, journal pages, pieces of articles my mother wrote, my grandmother’s response letters to my mother’s letters – all of them, in the tattered, confused, disorganized, often undated, never been sorted, hauled around in this box or that over thousands of miles and many, many moves, stored in assorted storage lockers for decades – are themselves all remnants of once-lived lives that were lived in a very similar fashion.  Yet they also reflect a certain value shared in common – they endured and they survived.  They are still here, as I am.

It seems to be my life’s work right now to find the stories in the stories.  I have amazing advantages that my mother and my grandmother never had in their lifetimes.  I have the very real gift of a computer, the gift of the internet, and the gift of this free blog space so generously provided by WordPress.com.   My sister gave me this computer for my writing.  My brother gave me this printer.  My children pay for my internet.  I am grateful to all of them.

My mother and grandmother cared enough about one another to write all these letters.  They cared enough to hold onto them, to keep them, to preserve them.  In the same strange way that I can never ‘blame’ my mother for her abuse of me because I understand how sick she was, I cannot ‘blame’ her for never, in her entire lifetime, being able to accomplish with them what she had hoped to do.  She could never write her own book.  She could never publish.  She could never tell her own coherent life story for the same reason she could not adequately mother her own children.

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These papers are in their own form of chaos, and within their words they tell stories of the chaos that was my childhood.  It would take an almost super human effort to actually create the coherent story now.  I would be very surprised if I can do it in my lifetime.  My process does not feel like ‘blogging’ to me.  It feel like ‘plogging’ as I spend hundreds and hundreds of tedious hours trying to find and create order out of this madness.

For every step I take I hope that if I can’t actually finish bringing this whole story together, maybe at least the work I am doing now will be picked up by another generation so it can be ‘finished’ in the future.  We are a family of writers.  Perhaps that is our curse.  Yet I feel as if all my ancestors’ words are being placed in safe keeping as I enter them into this clean white screen of my computer.  I feel honored to be able to share them with you., including this article piece that my mother wrote 49 years ago.

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+LINKS TO NEWEST ALASKA LETTERS

alchemynowLeave a comment

I am in the process of continuing to transcribe the homesteading letters my mother wrote to her mother.  Most of these will be from 1959, 1960 and 1961.  I am filing the letters in their main year pages, but thought you might wish to read them individually.  I will continue to post the new letters on this temporary page as they are transcribed.

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