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Oh, what a last few days.  What a morning, that began when I woke and couldn’t sleep from 3 am onward, and began to address some important and very difficult issues.  Most of it I am not able to speak of right now publicly because it involves siblings — not yet — or perhaps not ever.  Time will tell.

I am hard at work now outside on my adobe work trying to irradiate the nasty pest Bermuda grass, and the process reminds me of how hard it can be to pull the trauma from abusive childhoods out of our life.  Probably it is impossible, not only because of the trauma-created physiological development changes, but also probably it is impossible because everything really is so interrelated and complicated.

The Bermuda runners and tendrils wrap themselves around every root of every ‘good’ plant.  Trying to get it away from the plants completely would destroy the plants I want to keep.  But I am doing my best.

One thing I can mention from a long conversation I had on the phone with my younger sister today came from somethings she described as she made clear to me the difference between the two main arms of my mother’s terrible abuse of me.

My sister uses the word ‘pariah’, or outcast (untouchable), coming into English from India around 1600 from a word that literally means ‘drummer’.  It was always members of the largest and lowest caste who drummed during ceremonies.

All but my older brother who was 14 months old when I was born were themselves born into my mother’s mad universe in which I was two things:  (1) the pariah and (2) the scapegoat (‘pharmacos’).

According to my sister’s perspective, nobody could have done a better job than my mother did — at what she did.  She completely convinced my siblings that I was not the same as they were.

I realize there are avenues for me to explore here because ‘not being the same’ as my siblings — while of course ending up to mean I was different than they were — operated more profoundly, pervasively and conclusively.  ‘Not being the same’ as my siblings was the bedrock basis and condition of my existence — and I was ‘not the same’ as my siblings in every possible way my mother could name.

On the other hand, as my sister describes it, my mother also created another arm of madness that was tied to making sure that all my siblings, my father, and my grandmother understand that my mother NEEDED me to be her scapegoat.  They knew without words from her actions and attitudes toward me that nobody could question what she did to me or said about me.

My sister also described how absolutely effective my mother’s turning me into a pariah was.  By keeping my siblings from having any kind of a relationship with me as their sibling, as a human being, as someone they could not only relate to, but appreciate, value and care about, my mother guaranteed that they would NEVER question her abuse of me and more importantly would NEVER intervene in any way — ever.

In other words, her turning me into a pariah, by removing any common ground I could have shared with my siblings as children, gave my mother everything she needed to scapegoat me — to abuse me terribly, any way she wanted to.

Another aspect my sister described this morning had to do with the biological, instinctual, genetic understanding that mother’s care for children and that without primary caregiving of basic physical needs, children cannot survive.  My mother was supremely effective at making sure there were no other possible adults in her children’s life so that all of us were completely dependent upon her.

Whatever my mother wanted was a fact, and if she wanted to, needed to abuse me, that also was an unquestionable fact.  Needing to be cared for (fed, clothed, etc.)  to stay alive overrode all other young concerns.

In other words, as I think about this all today, our family was extremely primitive.  It seems natural that my mother would gravitate toward a wilderness mountainside to play out her madness.  Nobody evolved to the point where anything could be verbalized, discussed, or willfully changed.

My sister also marvels at how, even though completely unconsciously orchestrated, my mother filled every crack, covered all ground, put together all the pieces that she could so thoroughly convince everyone, within and outside the family, that nothing out of the ordinary happened.  But for that to happen she first had to make her insane abuse of me ‘ordinary’ to my siblings, to my father, to my grandmother — and to anyone else that might possibly have noticed and/or questioned what she was doing.

My mother’s madness, although perfectly terrible, was still perfect.  That, to me, rings profoundly true and equally disturbing.

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On the other hand, the process I am going through right now is very much about whether or not I CAN write my own story — and whether or not I want to.  I don’t know yet.  If I were to look at this on a weighted scale, the weight by far is on the NO end.

If I am going to move forward with my writing, I have to change on the inside of me in ways that are both scary and unknown.  My early day thus far was a walk on the ‘blind side’ — into areas involving myself as a sibling as I begin to explore, ask questions, feel feelings about what it was like to be ME growing up as my siblings’ sibling.

That is different for me from being my mother’s abused daughter, my father’s daughter, etc.  Being my siblings’ sibling is very up close and personal — in ways I cannot yet explain.

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