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Excerpt from today’s letter to my 83-year-old friend, our Alaskan homesteading neighbor, who was hated by her mother from birth though never physically abused – and who spent most of her childhood hunting, trapping and hiking in the Washington wilderness with her Native American father —
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It makes me wonder how I will ever be able to tell my own childhood story. I will have to return to a place and a way of being in the world that was so unlike where I am today in ‘ordinary’ American life and thinking.
I think my dreaming last night was a part of it. How I thought (and mostly didn’t) as a child seems surreal to me today, but it was ordinary to me then. I didn’t know anything else, had no other perspective, no input from anyone.
And how I was and what I knew was so different from my siblings. Most importantly, how I was changed the way I suffered. Part of me says that I have no business even pretending I can write of myself in my childhood for others to read if I cannot remember how my world was to me back then.
It makes me wish I had written ‘the story’ when I left home at 18 – not 40 years later. And part of me is afraid if I go back to who and how I was then that I will ‘lose it’ now and not be able to ‘come back’. I heed those inner warnings. I have to be very, very careful because I was all alone THEN, and to tell ‘the story’ I have to be able to be in both places at the same time – or very closely to one another — there-then and here-now.
I would have to time-travel — At this moment I examine within myself what the purpose of this would be – what do I have to offer because of how uniquely and nearly absolutely ALONE I was as a child — in my mind-controlled thoughts and self — etc.
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I know this is getting long, but I feel ‘safe’ writing you these things. Fortunately, my children don’t know what I am talking about. Neither do my siblings. I know nobody who knows what this alone I am talking about actually is – and is like – ‘cept perhaps somehow — you — though you had your father and other family — but your creative, poetic mind can S-T-R-E-T-C-H somehow — hey, I have faith in YOU!
I began to think about the underpinnings of what might be important to others about my story if I can tell it. My daughter tells me that at times her little much-loved son wakes from a sound sleep crying alligator tears and obviously in complete despair and deep sorrow.
I put this together with a statement both of my parents made in those Mildred-pre-Alaska letters. The first one Bill wrote upon arriving in Alaska, he said, “I feel like a little lost boy.” I don’t think he would have described his state that way if he hadn’t exactly known what it felt like to be a ‘little lost boy’.
Interesting sideline – sis just found my father’s birth certificate (sadly without time of birth so can’t do astro report on him). It reports that at the time of his birth he was his mother’s 4th live birth, and there had been one dead child before him. We had never heard this, no idea of ‘the story’ behind it — but had heard all our childhood that Bill was absolutely an unwanted, unloved child. (Set him up for the storm of Mildred – that plus his father being an alcoholic).
Mildred writes in her pre-Alaska letters – she moves from the motel they were in when Bill went to AK, goes on and on about the cute little house she is moving us into, how it will be perfect to wait in, how she can make a temporary home there — and 2 weeks later as she unpacks and makes her ‘doll house’ she writes Bill that as soon as she gets the house all set up and done, all cozy, she will feel LOST — and there at 2 weeks in that house she is planning to move out 2 weeks later (which she did).
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So yesterday my mind put these two streams of thinking together — and I thought, “What if we all enter this world from birth feeling and being LOST unless someone loves us enough to take that feeling-state away from us?”
I add this into my thinking mix: Not long after my youngest girl first learned to talk she talked about things I knew she had been thinking about and experiencing from way before she had words. One of them: Every time we were in our car out driving anywhere, she was nearly inconsolable in her concern and sadness for everyone else she saw driving around because she was absolutely convinced that ALL of them were LOST.
It didn’t matter what we said to her as we tried to tell her just like we knew where our home was and could find our way back there, so too did all these other people know where their home was and could find their way back.
I was 24, didn’t ever realize she may have been talking about a much deeper and more profound sense of LOST — like the one I am contemplating now. She was three then – and knew something!!
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So what if this feeling LOST is something we are even physiologically born with – and in safe and secure, loving attachment early environments our body forms this knowledge as it grows — or in opposite cases, the opposite?
I also have thought about why now, after 10 years, ER would walk across my threshold. Because he feels lost? — And what lost people need is to feel FOUND.
I think about both my parents’ early life — neither loved, neither wanted, and in my mother’s case, severely neglected and abused — both of them had deep undercurrents of feeling LOST and never FOUND.
And in my case, I was so LOST, that when our family FOUND the mountain, I found myself there! The wilderness is just that because HUMANS have not invaded it. No matter we were the humans invading that wilderness — at the start I knew that ‘place’ of wilderness, and we MET each other, the wilderness and me. There really were no humans in my world, either — so I understood the mountain in that way — in that wilderness I FOUND myself more than I had ever done before. (Most fortunately!)
I think the same thing happened for M, who had since being a little girl FOUND herself in the woods and New England countryside (Joe Anne even talked about that re: M).
It is becoming clear to me that M’s moving was an addiction — as was her beating-abusing-terrorizing me. Then yesterday my thoughts went to maybe all addictions (and it is true that they all use the same neurochemistry built into the human body designed for human-social attachments) is just that.
When we feel LOST we grab whatever we are addicted to and it helps us feel FOUND. Then I realized yesterday if this is true, then depression would not be so much about sorrow and sadness and hopelessness as I have thought — it would be most deeply about feeling LOST and not being able to be or feel FOUND.
Then I realized that even if the experts say we have only five primal-primary emotions of happy, sad, mad, scared and disgust (a gag-reflex emotion designed by evolution to prevent us from ingesting poison) — maybe there is a sixth — LOST.
All this thinking while I am ‘taking a break’ and trying not to think at all – or write — just this to you!! But I am allowing whatever learning and changes to happen within myself that might prepare me for the writing ahead.
What if people could find it useful to identify within their self exactly what feeling LOST feels like, so they can name it, and then consciously make choices about what they do to make their self feel FOUND?
What if we all share this continuum between feeling-being LOST and feeling-being FOUND?
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I feel FOUND as an adult as a part of the human sphere more than I ever could of as a child. I fear losing this sense if I go back there to when I was a child and so LOST. Once we left my grandmother behind in LA right before my 6th birthday, I never felt FOUND again — until we FOUND the mountain.
Yet even in LA the degree of FOUND I had with my grandmother was interfered with both my Gma’s limitations (that let her ruin my mother) and my mother’s interference with Gma’s affections.
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More than anything I wish I could go back to that wilderness – and there I would FIND myself – my true, real, deepest self — which was the person I was all through my childhood. Now that I am civilized and live in civilization — I HAVE changed. Because we are members of a social species, this dichotomy has always been part of our nature. At what point do we become differentiated not only from the natural world, but also as our own self separate from others around us?
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All I know right now is that I have a commitment and obligation for the next two weeks to stand in for my friend, Sharon as she goes on vacation to be in that little office for her – and cannot afford to let myself follow my own thoughts toward my writing. The Y, used to be the YWCA, is a solid nice building in old B where they rent for $200 per month rooms – 20 of them – to low income adults. Will tell you more someday.
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fun listen:
Stop the Storm 