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I am feeling very discouraged today about my book writing. Maybe that’s a common state to enter — and hopefully to get back out of! I feel like I am at least 50 years ahead of the curve on what I know and what I want readers to ‘get’ out of my book. I feel like I’m writing it for my grandson’s grandchildren!! It’s hard to build up my own head of steam and plow on through my writing with a target audience that far away! I sure won’t be around for that readership!
Does it matter to me? Not usually. Just today.
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“When a thought of war comes, oppose it by a stronger thought of peace. A thought of hatred must be destroyed by a more powerful thought of love.” [from Paris Talks: Addresses Given by ‘Abdu’l-Baha in Paris in 1911-1912 (London: Bahai’i Publishing Trust, 1995), p. 2]
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A TRUE STORY:
This is more than a story about life and death. It is a story about the glorious powers of human physiology that can be activated during the earliest stages of infant-child development to ensure survival in the face of death: Threat of death of an individual self being responded to equally with threat of death to a body. Standing in the face of this power to examine how it can operate as the onslaught of infant and child abuse can seem unbearable.
This reaction itself comes from wisdom in the body that lets us know threat is present. Possessing the ability to consciously choose how to direct our response to threat matters. Deep inside our body we will always, except in the rarest of circumstances, choose to turn in the optimistic direction of life. Even my severely abusive mother made that turn, or she would not have survived to give birth to me. And I certainly made that same turn with every breath I took through the hell of my infancy and childhood that my mother created for me as a result of the changes that happened to her in her development that ensured her survival.
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To be fair to readers I would like you to be able to make your conscious decision about how you want to respond to this story right now. I will share with you a memory I have always retained since I was 5 ½ years old:
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I have always known in my memory that our family was in a car either going to or coming back from watching a play or a movie. Because this was a school night we must have gone to an early evening showing of this movie. I know it was not dark out though the shadows on the landscape we were driving through were long. I could see mountains in the distance, and alongside both sides of the road there were what looked like fields of grasses bending golden in the light.
I was sitting by the window in the back seat behind my father who was driving. My sister, Cindy was beside me and John sat by the other door. Little Sharon at 20 months old sat in the front between Father and Mother. I was relaxed, even feeling cozy with the family driving not very fast along the highway heading home. I felt happy. I had no thought that anything like one of Mother’s ACCIDENTS hitting me there. I was doing nothing wrong. I wasn’t making any noise. I wasn’t bothering anybody. I was simply enjoying myself very much as I played a game with myself that I had just made up.
I have always been able to shut my eyes and be in my body again in the back seat of that car seat playing this game. I played that I was magic. I carefully looked at all the details of the scenery we were passing by on my father’s side of the car. Then I slowly dropped my eye lids and slowly turned my head to look toward the other side window of the car. Then I slowly lifted my eye lids and MAGIC! There was the exact same scene again on the other side of the car as if I had the power to capture that scene when I closed my eyes and take it with me inside of me.
I was playing that I created each scene like mirror images of one another that only existed if I opened my eyes and disappeared when I had my eyes closed. Then, during one of these times of turning my head with my eyes shut back to my father’s side of the car when I opened my eyes again there was a beautiful red fox running alongside the car on the high side of the ditch just barely into the edge of grasses. The fox’s nose pointed straight ahead and its back was in a line with the thick puffy tail streaming straight along in the line behind it.
I was delighted! But I didn’t say a word about the fox to anyone. This was MY fox. Now as I played my game I made the fox disappear when I closed my eyes and turned my head to the right. When I opened my eyes the duplicate scene was there, but no fox. Then when I closed my eyes and repeated a turn to my left, opening my eyes I made that beautiful fox reappear right where I had left it. And ……then…..when…..
My mother happened to turn her head to look at me in the back seat of the car and happened to catch me in right in the middle of a head turn with my eyes closed. I heard her scream and opened my eyes to see her arm and hand swinging over the back of her seat and WHAM! Right across my face. Hard. She rose in her seat, turned her body right over the head of my baby sister, lunged at me and began slapping me with both of her hands very hard, screaming, “You ungrateful child! You don’t appreciate anything we do for you! Here we took you to a movie and here your father is taking us all on a nice drive home and here you are sound asleep? You decided to take a nap NOW? How dare you! You always spoil everything for everyone! I don’t know why we bother to ever try to do anything nice for you! You always spoil everything for everyone! Bill, take us home right now. I can’t stand to be in this car with this child one more minute!” My father said nothing but drove a little faster.
On and on with the screaming and shouting words and the hitting and slapping and the pounding and screaming and I tried to tell her I WASN’T sleeping! I tried to tell her about the fox and about the game I was playing a game and that’s why my eyes were shut but that only made her hit me harder and cream louder, “You are a LIAR! You are a LIAR!” along with everything else she was shouting.
From what my mother recorded in her diary entry that day more bad things happened to me at home that I don’t remember — but I can well imagine. I was also startled to read in this entry about Debby and the park and the holiday picnic planned for the next day because that is exactly what my bubble gum memory is about. (I don’t know what holiday she was talking about here. Easter was on April 21 in 1957. Maybe she meant to add these entries for April but in her ‘madness’ wrote them instead of for March.)
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Thursday, March 21, 1957
We kept Linda home – only the 2nd time in her life for lying from a movie we attended tonite. – “Westward Ho, The Wagon”. I must find some effective punishment. She accepts punishment so easily that it’s hard for it to be effective. I told her we were going to the park tomorrow for a Holiday picnic and we would take her little friend Debby. I hope it will be the beginning of a new week and start for Linda. I read the children the story of Lincoln and Washington and emphasized – telling the truth and their good virtues. She listens so carefully but goes on her own way. Well, we’ll see!
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But THIS is what matters to me. THIS is what my mother did to me. It wasn’t that she stole my childhood from me, this story above being the kind of thing that happened to me often during the 18 years I lived with my mother.
It is THIS that matters to me. These changes are what stole the life from me that I could have had in the body I SHOULD have had — WITHOUT THESE CHANGES!
SCARS THAT WON’T HEAL: THE NEUROBIOLOGY OF CHILD ABUSE
“Because childhood abuse occurs during the critical formative time when the brain is being physically sculpted by experience, the impact of severe stress can leave an indelible imprint on its structure and function. Such abuse, it seems, induces a cascade of molecular and neurobiological effects that irreversibly alter neural development.”
Today I feel pretty hopeless, I think to a large extent because I KNOW this information is already OUT THERE — and who is paying attention? WHO CARES? Is there something my book can say that can help MAKE PEOPLE CARE? Tonight — I don’t think so…….
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“When a thought of war comes, oppose it by a stronger thought of peace. A thought of hatred must be destroyed by a more powerful thought of love.” [from Paris Talks: Addresses Given by ‘Abdu’l-Baha in Paris in 1911-1912 (London: Bahai’i Publishing Trust, 1995), p. 2]
++++
This is more than a story about life and death. It is a story about the glorious powers of human physiology that can be activated during the earliest stages of infant-child development to ensure survival in the face of death: Threat of death of an individual self being responded to equally with threat of death to a body. Standing in the face of this power to examine how it can operate as the onslaught of infant and child abuse can seem unbearable.
This reaction itself comes from wisdom in the body that lets us know threat is present. Possessing the ability to consciously choose how to direct our response to threat matters. Deep inside our body we will always, except in the rarest of circumstances, choose to turn in the optimistic direction of life. Even my severely abusive mother made that turn, or she would not have survived to give birth to me. And I certainly made that same turn with every breath I took through the hell of my infancy and childhood that my mother created for me as a result of the changes that happened to her in her development that ensured her survival.
++
To be fair to readers I would like you to be able to make your conscious decision about how you want to respond to this story right now. I will share with you a memory I have always retained since I was 5 ½ years old:
++
I have always known in my memory that our family was in a car either going to or coming back from watching a play or a movie. Because this was a school night we must have gone to an early evening showing of this movie. I know it was not dark out though the shadows on the landscape we were driving through were long. I could see mountains in the distance, and alongside both sides of the road there were what looked like fields of grasses bending golden in the light.
I was sitting by the window in the back seat behind my father who was driving. My sister, Cindy was beside me and John sat by the other door. Little Sharon at 20 months old sat in the front between Father and Mother. I was relaxed, even feeling cozy with the family driving not very fast along the highway heading home. I felt happy. I had no thought that anything like one of Mother’s ACCIDENTS hitting me there. I was doing nothing wrong. I wasn’t making any noise. I wasn’t bothering anybody. I was simply enjoying myself very much as I played a game with myself that I had just made up.
I have always been able to shut my eyes and be in my body again in the back seat of that car seat playing this game. I played that I was magic. I carefully looked at all the details of the scenery we were passing by on my father’s side of the car. Then I slowly dropped my eye lids and slowly turned my head to look toward the other side window of the car. Then I slowly lifted my eye lids and MAGIC! There was the exact same scene again on the other side of the car as if I had the power to capture that scene when I closed my eyes and take it with me inside of me.
I was playing that I created each scene like mirror images of one another that only existed if I opened my eyes and disappeared when I had my eyes closed. Then, during one of these times of turning my head with my eyes shut back to my father’s side of the car when I opened my eyes again there was a beautiful red fox running alongside the car on the high side of the ditch just barely into the edge of grasses. The fox’s nose pointed straight ahead and its back was in a line with the thick puffy tail streaming straight along in the line behind it.
I was delighted! But I didn’t say a word about the fox to anyone. This was MY fox. Now as I played my game I made the fox disappear when I closed my eyes and turned my head to the right. When I opened my eyes the duplicate scene was there, but no fox. Then when I closed my eyes and repeated a turn to my left, opening my eyes I made that beautiful fox reappear right where I had left it. And ……then…..when…..
My mother happened to turn her head to look at me in the back seat of the car and happened to catch me in right in the middle of a head turn with my eyes closed. I heard her scream and opened my eyes to see her arm and hand swinging over the back of her seat and WHAM! Right across my face. Hard. She rose in her seat, turned her body right over the head of my baby sister, lunged at me and began slapping me with both of her hands very hard, screaming, “You ungrateful child! You don’t appreciate anything we do for you! Here we took you to a movie and here your father is taking us all on a nice drive home and here you are sound asleep? You decided to take a nap NOW? How dare you! You always spoil everything for everyone! I don’t know why we bother to ever try to do anything nice for you! You always spoil everything for everyone! Bill, take us home right now. I can’t stand to be in this car with this child one more minute!” My father said nothing but drove a little faster.
On and on with the screaming and shouting words and the hitting and slapping and the pounding and screaming and I tried to tell her I WASN’T sleeping! I tried to tell her about the fox and about the game I was playing a game and that’s why my eyes were shut but that only made her hit me harder and cream louder, “You are a LIAR! You are a LIAR!” along with everything else she was shouting.
From what my mother recorded in her diary entry that day more bad things happened to me at home that I don’t remember — but I can well imagine. I was also startled to read in this entry about Debby and the park and the holiday picnic planned for the next day because that is exactly what my bubble gum memory is about. (I don’t know what holiday she was talking about here. Easter was on April 21 in 1957. Maybe she meant to add these entries for April but in her ‘madness’ wrote them instead of for March.)
°<>°<>°<>°
Thursday, March 21, 1957
We kept Linda home – only the 2nd time in her life for lying from a movie we attended tonite. – “Westward Ho, The Wagon”. I must find some effective punishment. She accepts punishment so easily that it’s hard for it to be effective. I told her we were going to the park tomorrow for a Holiday picnic and we would take her little friend Debby. I hope it will be the beginning of a new week and start for Linda. I read the children the story of Lincoln and Washington and emphasized – telling the truth and their good virtues. She listens so carefully but goes on her own way. Well, we’ll see!
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Stop the Storm 