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I just want to record here how difficult it is for me to move forward in transcribing my mother’s and my father’s 1965 letters.  I would rather burn them.  I spoke with my daughter about this, and she encouraged me, saying that there is no reason to expect these letters to be any less significant or important to the work I am doing and to the story of my childhood that were any of the previous letters I have worked with.  She also suggested that this part of the work is probably especially important because it is so difficult — there must be something here and in this process that I need to know within myself.

I seem to feel something like a wild animal might who gets a foot caught in a trap and cannot escape without gnawing its own leg off.  I was 14 years old when these October through December 1965 letters were written.  I was at the age when all the following occurred, and I’m sure many others that I do not remember:

• +Age 14 – SCRUBBED IN THE TUB
• +Age 14 – MIRACLE IN THE PARKING LOT – DISSOCIATION
• *Age 14 – SILENT TREATMENT
• *Age 14 – Gardening and the Sabotage

I have for some reason I do not yet understand found it more difficult to work with correspondence between my mother and father than I do with correspondence between my mother and my grandmother.  It’s like I am faced with two realities, mine and the one that BOTH of my parents shared.  In their reality, I was all but obliterated.  When I work with their letters, that obliteration seems to threaten to swallow me whole, or to snap me up in a trap some part of me fears I can never get out of.

So, it all continues to be an experience of facing myself as I was and as I am.  It takes courage.  It takes hope, that somehow I am changing myself now for the better, and hope that something I discover — and then write about — can help someone else.  I am going in where angels fear to tread…..

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