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I have been outside working on my adobe yard project, but my mind is not on the job.  My thoughts are turning again and again in the direction of my mother, my father,  my childhood and the letters.

I have already written a post some time ago about this statement my mother made to my father in one of these June 1957 letters:

June 17, 1957

I spend every spare minute packing and sorting.  This house is so nice and well laid out for a small house.  It has many nice features that our others didn’t have.  Oh, to be able to build a house of our own and incorporate all the features.  I am going to buy some chicken wire to put across part of the back as there are so many ant hills out there.  I mentioned to you that Sharon sat on one.  Linda was to watch her in the yard and I had bought them a beach ball.  I think Sharon caught it and sat down on the hill.  She screamed! They were small red ants and each one was doubled over and seemed to have their stingers in her.  I had to actually pick them off of her.  She stopped crying when she knew I was fixing her and said over and over, “bite, bite, bite.”  I didn’t even know she knew the word “bite”.  There must have been 30!  They swelled and got all red.  They’re almost gone now.  Everytime [sic] we go out back, needless to say she hasn’t gone out alone since, she walks around looking on the ground and says “bit, bite, bite.”

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When I write about the missing silent truth in my mother’s letters, I think about this one.  While she does mention that I was supposed to watch nearly two-year-old Sharon in the yard as she describes this event, she does NOT tell my father of her violent attack on me because her baby got hurt.

Whether or not five-year-old-me was given the responsibility to watch Sharon in the yard or not I don’t know.  What I do know is that this event was added to my mother’s abuse litany for me and brought up again over and over with repeated beatings throughout the following years that proved I was irresponsible, that I could not be trusted with anything, that I hated my sister, that I resented her for being alive, that I wanted to be an only child, that I LET Sharon get bit by the red ants on purpose…..

No, mother doesn’t mention this to my father.  She didn’t share with him the rest of the story.  She simply told him her version, leaving out what she DIDN’T want to share with him.  She did this in the same way that she carefully chose to share with my father what she did in her letters (as I mentioned in my last post) about the missing card and my missing tooth.  Because my grandmother was just too close by, and because my grandmother was beginning to UN-SHARE parts of my mother’s delusions, grandmother had to go.

But what is really rolling around in my thinking as I dig dirt and shovel wet mud into my adobe forms outside is the fact that this collection of letters between my mother and father shows some of the patterns of the SHARED delusions between them in a way that is unique to the situation that allowed the letters to be created in the first place.  (Eventually the letters ended up being shared with me and now with you – but that certainly was never mother’s intention!).

SHARED relates to her statement that “We’re not ordinary people – we’re a close knit family and should never be separated!”  My mother lost her ability to share her delusional world unquestioned with her own mother different than she could when I was smaller (“Linda’s tired, she’s in her room resting, she’s in her room sleeping, she was a bad girl and I had to punish her…”).  Because the delusion had to remain intact, my grandmother was, as I wrote the other day, simply and effectively removed from the stage of our family’s ongoing life once we moved to Alaska.  From that point forward, my mother could control what my grandmother knew in her letters – the same way she did in these letters to my father.

I was also thinking that in the letters my mother wrote to her mother once we were all in Alaska, patterns of difficulties between my mother and other people outside our family begin to appear in her letters to her mother.  The only delusion that my mother could make REAL – and could hence tolerate other people’s participation in it, albeit remote participation – was our ‘homesteading’.

As far as the truth about what was going on within the walls of our home, my mother could hardly tell the neighbors or anyone at PTA meetings, “I beat my 1^st grader last night, didn’t feed her supper, made her spend the night in the dark alone on a kitchen stool because she got the white ruffs at the edge of her coat dirty.  By the way, what happened in your family’s home last night?”

Experts often talk about the isolated world abusive family’s live in.  Of course, my parents found very extreme ways to accomplish this state for ours.  But in the end, I think it may well be that the need to keep the violence and abuse going on within a home a secret is so that the SHARED delusions that feed the abuse can remain intact.

Shared, in my thinking, means joint participation.  Joint participation in my mother’s delusion about me was critical to its continued existence.  The delusion justified her martyrdom of me.  As long as nobody broke through the delusion, her treatment of me could continue unchallenged and unstopped.  This is exactly what happened.

NOTE:  In case we might be tempted to entertain any illusion or delusion of our own about how powerful delusional participation-sharing can be, we need only to think about what happened when Hitler was able to create a delusion and share it with others who were willing to participate in his delusion with him.

While I was born into my mother’s delusion and never given any option but to participate and share her delusion with her, somehow I have managed to claw my way free enough to begin to consider the delusion (and my childhood) from an outside perspective.

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