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I am still hard at work on the seemingly unending job of transcribing the rest of my mother’s letters.  A title for the book coming out of this collection might be:  Mildred’s Romance with Alaska:  A Homesteading Adventure in Letters.

Here is a short section from the first letter my mother wrote once she arrived in her ‘Promised Land’.  “Transported’ is the word my mother used to describe how her traveling experience felt to her.  Many people know what the experience of rapid travel over great distances to a different place feels like.

What I find so interesting, having just worked my way through the nearly 80,000 words that transpired between my parents in their letters before my mother’s arrival in Alaska is that once she arrived THERE everything seemed to change right along with the change in place, the migration, that had happened for my family.

Reading my mother’s June and July 1957 letters, and then beginning to read her August 1957 letters if I didn’t KNOW the connection I would think an entirely different person was now writing.  Yet because I was a member of this family I know that nothing had REALLY changed – not my mother, not my father, and not our closed-door family dynamics.

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August 1, 1957 Thursday – Eagle River, Alaska

Dearest Mother (Charles and Carolyn)

It’s really hard to believe I am actually in Alaska!  I feel as if I were transported here on the Magic Carpet in Grandma’s stories she told when I was a little girl.

Airplane travel is certainly wonderful – I arrived in Anchorage at 10:45 yesterday morning – a half hour before scheduled, so Bill wasn’t there to greet us.

Really, Mom it was the most thrilling, exciting thing that has ever happened to me.  The trip here was all worth it just to have flown!  I could write you pages and pages just telling you about the flight but there’s so much I have to tell you.  I am bursting with news….

The children loved it, were as calm as could be.  I am still recovering.  It was a thrill, but also quite terrifying to climb 20,000 feet.  John ‘s nose was pressed to the window every minute!  (when he wasn’t sleeping).  Oh Mom, I am so anxious now for you to experience all I have – I know you’d be a wonderful traveler.  On the Northwest Orient Flight there were two Grandmothers coming up to see their daughters who had also migrated to Alaska.  One was in her 80s and the other about your age, was joining her daughter and family for a three week vacation – camping trip.  It was their third visit a piece!!!

(bold type is mine]

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And yet I wonder if the PLACE of suburban southern California had little to offer in terms of emotional resources for my family, especially for my mother, while Alaska did have something to offer her.

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Mother wrote this on a scrap of paper on the same August first day she wrote her first letter to her mother:

Second day in Alaska

We always have wild flowers on our table, picked by anxious to please tiny hands.  What greater pleasure is there then to watch small children discovering the wonder of nature in the woods – streams to watch flow, questions to answer – where does the water come from and where does it go, will it ever dry up?

Mommy are these berries good to eat?  Will this water really freeze and will we really have snow?  Yes, darling, yes darling and isn’t it a bit of heaven for us right here in the woodland and don’t you feel closer to God here as I do?  Yes, Mommy, yes and so our life in Alaska begins.

A Bit of Heaven In the Woods –

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“Always” here is obviously a relative term because we had only been in Alaska one single full day.  Mother’s use of this word ‘always’ is like a peep-hole to me through which I can watch in her writings the changes in attitude, mood, feelings, thoughts and hopes that my mother now expresses in her letters at the same time nothing has REALLY changed at all.

Insecure attachments caused my very early neglect, abuse, maltreatment and trauma – as these experiences form and change an infant-child’s growing body-brain, often include an altered experience of time.  Those altered time perceptions are part of what attachment experts can detect through their assessment tool, the Adult Attachment Interview because it is in the telling of one’s life story that these time alterations appear as they represent the underlying incoherency that trauma creates not only in a survivor’s story, but also as that incoherency has built the survivor’s body-brain.

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When I think about dissociation, I think about these altered perceptions of time and the changes in processing information regarding a person in their own life as time passes.  The second sentence my mother wrote in her August first letter makes a direct connection back to her very early childhood when her grandmother came to live in her home with her mother after her parents had divorced and her grandfather had died.

A magic carpet ride.  Being transported in time and space.  Dissociation does this as it ‘magically’ connects experiences from the past to ongoing experience in the present moment.  This connection process is always happening for everyone, but it is for those whose infant-childhoods did not pave a smooth, continuous highway of experience — because the breaks trauma and maltreatment created in their ongoing experience of life did not allow the connections to be made in the body-brain of the survivor in a smooth and continuous way — that dissociation enters the patterns of their thinking, feeling and actions.

Both of my parents chose to create a nearly complete ‘dissociation’ between the experiences of their past in Los Angeles’ suburbia and their new life as migrants to Alaska.  The reality of suburban living that they had previously organized and oriented their lives around disappeared.  They had virtually pulled the plug on most aspects related to their lives.  All the letters following the first of August 1957 include the new organizing and orienting PLACE of Alaska.

Yet for all the opportunities that this new place offered to my parents nothing within the dynamics of our family ACTUALLY changed.  There were just a multitude of different experiences that fed the same people that brought themselves to this new and different place.  My parents created a major dissociation between their old life and their new one, but all the patterns of body-brain-mind-self dissociations that had ALWAYS been inside of the individuals who transported themselves ‘on a magic carpet’ to America’s last frontier were still there.

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As I think about what my parents DID when they moved to Alaska, no matter what their conscious intentions might have been, I realize that at the same time my parents carried their own inner woundedness right on up to Alaska with them, they were at least amputating themselves and their family from the very real pollution and toxicity of life in the Los Angeles area.

If a wound has become so infected that gangrene sets in and beings to eat up all the healthy tissue surrounding the wound (not unlike how cancer metastasizes), and if the wound itself is not healing, the best move possible is to at least address the problems the gangrene is causing so that life can at least continue on.

When my parents amputated their lives from southern California and transported themselves and their children in a migration to the purity of the north land of Alaska, they took a good step in the rupture-and-repair process that IS healing itself.  In that place, from the moment of their arrival, a new definition of identity began.  The Alaskan Lloyds were born.  This identity was soon even further clarified, solidified and defined as we ‘became’ the Alaskan Homesteading Lloyds.

Yes, we traveled a long, long way from being the Los Angeles southern California suburbanite Lloyds.  Because my mother’s Borderline illness was never identified or healed, all we really accomplished was staying alive – not healing.  But this was certainly a giant step in the right direction and I don’t even want to think what the alternative could have been had our family stayed ‘down south’.

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