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I woke up this morning to a thin, wispy cloud cover that faintly dimmed the intensity of our first day of desert sunlight.  Is this the first of the high sky moisture that might lead to a timely arrival of our much-hoped for summer rains?  Oh, JOY that it might be!  But as the day follows the morning this cloud cover has vanished and again the sun bakes this earth and all life upon it.  But I have hopes!

In the process of responding to the comment at the end of my last post, +GRADUATION – ON TO THE NEXT STAGE OF PUBLISHING MY MOTHER’S WRITING, as well as in responding to the Facebook posting of the same picture of me planting in Alaska when I was 6 in the spring of 1958, I realize that I want to add something here.

As I become increasingly clear that I will be publishing my mother’s CHRONICLE about her homesteading experience I also realize that I am dividing what I KNOW ever more clearly from what my mother wrote.  Although I will by definition be leaving my analysis and interpretation out of the chronicle that is my mother’s story of events during the years her writings cover, I WILL be placing them in my version:  Unspeakable Madness.

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Now, regarding these pictures.  My mother evidently considered that what I was doing here — planting what I believe was a green bean that had been started in a cardboard milk box — into the soil that my mother had prepared alongside the log house our first  spring in Alaska DARLING ENOUGH to warrant her taking a photograph of JUST ME.

Yet there is her true DARLING, her second daughter obscured in the back of the photograph standing at the corner of the house.  My mother did something that any ‘normal’ mother could be expected to do.  She called my sister forward so she, too, could be included in a picture.

All good.

But……

I am not sure that I can think of one single event of my childhood with my mother that was EVER left alone to be remembered by me as ‘all good’.  What happened in connection with this planting, and comes to me when I just found these two photographs, is that my mother had added manure into this soil around the log house that she had gotten from our farming neighbor across Eagle River Road.

What happened in my mother’s world – that yet again (as always) removed Linda from the Darling side of the family — that amputated me from Darling-Good and left me in as always in the Demon-Bad (though she did not use the word demon until I was in high school in reference to me) side of her sick mental equation regarding her children — was that evidently SOMEHOW (and it is the SOMEHOWS of my childhood that caused me the greatest ongoing pain over the yeas as they were brought up during abuse and beatings over and over and over again) it was LINDA’S FAULT that my ‘baby’ sister, who would have been not-quite-3 at this time, ended up with severe eczema between her fingers, on her hands and her wrists that she suffered from repeatedly throughout HER childhood.

How did Linda-Me manage to make certain my mother’s DARLING curly-haired baby doll daughter suffer with this eczema?

Evidently I INTENTIONALLY LET MY BABY SISTER STICK HER HANDS into this manure-infested gardening soil my mother had prepared — and THIS is what caused my baby sister’s suffering (she is not in these pictures).

Even if I had ONLY been PUNISHED for this IMAGINED horrible infraction JUST ONE time perhaps my mother’s abuse surrounding the planting of the green bean plant would not have been added to her abuse litany that she created for me.  But it WAS added to the litany.  The ‘fact’ that I had been so irresponsible as to let my littlest sister stick her hands into this soil while somehow (the intimation always was) KNOWING that the consequences in the FUTURE would be that my baby sister would GET this eczema and suffer as a result — meant that I HATED my sister, that I wanted to be an only child, and that I evilly WANTED my sister to suffer.  I intended my sister harm!

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This is an example of UNSPEAKABLE MADNESS.  Nothing about what happened in connection with this little strip of amended gardening soil surrounding the log house BELONGED to anything my mother SAID it did.

But my mother DID associate nearly every single aspect of ME in my childhood to something that DID NOT BELONG in or to her DARLING version of the world!  As she dissociated the BAD from the GOOD, she very magnanimously and generously gave the BAD to me — and did so from the moment I was born!

It was not a darling thing that her darling baby girl had eczema.  Therefore, she simply was able to amputate this un-darlingness from her darling version of the world and move it right on over to LINDA’S side of the equation — right on over to the NOT DARLING child — ME!

What happened to my sister HAD to be my fault!  Everything that happened during my childhood that my mother could blame me for could be removed (as works any time there is a ‘scapegoat’ or ‘pharmacos’ present – imagined, of course) from my mother’s darling world, banished, vanquished — and moved over to ME.  Then I could be punished and tortured, tormented and maliciously abused for things that had NOTHING to do with me!

Planting this green bean ended up being one of those ‘things’.

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