++++++++++++

It comes to me this morning as I watch the pale clouded sky begin to brighten with a new day’s light that any anger I might feel is not a problem.  My anger is a good sign, a sign that I have not given up the good fight against wrongful actions done by others that hurt me.  Along with my anger about what hurt me comes my anger at a society that truthfully does not place a high value on infants and children and people and other living beings.  We live in a sick materialistic mostly non-spiritual culture that is NOT healthy enough to care about what is truly important.

What I choose to do with and about my anger matters to me.  Recognizing that I am angry is my first step.  I was thinking about a rose thorn embedded in my right pointer finger.  I have been ignoring it since efforts to remove it have thus far failed.  This spot on my finger has turned into what I know could be called an ‘angry wound’.  (As small and inconsequential as this injury is, it at least allowed me to recognize a bigger picture.)

Survivors of human-caused abusive traumas are often left with angry wounds.  In the case of infant-child abuse, society contributes to the abuse by not caring enough to notice when it happens, not caring enough to adequately intervene, and by not caring enough as a society to provide the MEDICINE that is needed to help heal the angry wounds carried by survivors.

++

I turned to my first aid kit this morning for a home remedy salve made for me by a New Mexican sheep rancher’s wife 15 years ago.  The salve is on my finger now, held in place by a simple item known as a band aid.  It isn’t the band aid that is going to draw the infection out of my injury.  It is this stinky medicine that will both draw the infection and the thorn itself to the surface so that my finger can heal.

I am reminded that I live now in the same uncaring society that allowed those 18 years of severe abuse to happen to me in the first place.  This sick society has not changed.  This is the same society that contributed its share to the injuries from the abuse I suffered in the first place.  It is the same sick society that does not provide for trauma abuse survivors the kind of care toward healing that would be required to heal these deep angry wounds.  I – and most other survivors — are left as alone in trying to heal our deep wounds as we were left alone to survive them in the first place.

I work to turn my anger at injustice into understanding based on truth and fact.  I work to ground my reality in the bigger picture of an evolving humanity that is still a long way from its maturity.  I will bide my time in this lifetime, but I will not live long enough to see the dawning of a truly healthy, spiritual united humanity that understands under God that we are to love and care for one another and for all life as if well-being for all is what truly matters.

In the bigger picture none of us actually live in our body on this earth for very long, and when our soul’s connection with this material world is severed and when our soul then travels to the infinite other worlds of Creation, all will be held accountable to God.  I am no more an exception to this fact that my abusive mother was.  Through her sickness Mother contributed a great deal of harm.  I am grateful that I do not have her sickness.  I can choose to contribute something good.  And if part of that goodness involves anger against actions that are evil and hurt innocents, so be it.

++++++++++++

+++++++++++++++++++

Work went along smoothly on the slides once my friend came out today to help me.  We certainly did not get through all of them this time around, but at least I could stomach the job for 2 or 3 hours.

Now I will have to continue this task alone.  I feel bleak.  And I feel ANGRY as I visually take in just a little more information about what such a terribly painful childhood can look like when snippets of it are captured on film through the eye of the camera held by Mother, my abuser.

I do not grant myself permission to feel anger about what happened to me, and I never have.

A long time ago when I sought my first outside assistance for my troubles as an adult (31 years ago when I was 29), I was told that depression was ‘anger turned inward’.  I know now that was an extremely simplistic statement, but it at least is a start at recognizing that anger and sadness are linked to one another.

I see picture after picture of group shots of my siblings happy together with me left out of the picture.  I see entire rolls of film devoted to birthday celebrations for them.  I tell myself on some level that none of what happened to me MATTERS!  If it didn’t matter to anyone else, why should it matter to me?

Such a sense of unreality comes if I begin to know my own truth.  It seems much ‘better’ to try to simply accept somebody else’s version of what happened during those 18 years with a vicious mad woman for a mother.  Forget about Linda.  Forget about everything except the fact that I survived.  Isn’t that all that matters?  That all six of us siblings survived?

How nice it would have been if someone had told me anywhere along the way that the aftermath of that kind of childhood trauma would affect every single decision I made in my blindness leaving that hell of a home of origin.  EVERY decision, every thought and feeling I had about myself and about others.  How nice it would have been if someone would have told me that I was fundamentally and absolutely sculpted as a human being by that abuse.

++

As my friend and I worked through jumbled piles of slides today I was struck many times by the stories those slides reflect.  Can I somehow reach a platform of objectivity that will allow me to truthfully tell the stories WITHOUT my having to be engaged emotionally with their content as I write them?

And if I do experience emotions as I do this work, can I allow myself to feel angry?  I see reminders of the pampered affections and attentions given to my other siblings while I was hidden away somewhere isolated and abused.  How do I think I stood the same chance as they had/have for a happy fulfilled life given all the favoritism shown to them against all the tortured horror shown to me for 18 long years?

No, life is NOT fair.  My whole life could have been a whole lot worse — but so what?  And not only my life, but, yes, the lives of my siblings could have been a whole lot BETTER!  It is all done.  It is all in the past.  Or is it?

That abuse began the instant I was born.  It’s not like there was EVER a moment Mother’s psychotic belief in my hopeless evilness didn’t color every moment of my life in those 18 years.  If the abuse had started when I was two, even, I would not carry the traumatic changes that early stress created in my physiology that I suffer from today.

So – if it does no good to talk about ‘it’ — all we survivors from infant-childhoods in hell should just be good boys and girls and keep our mouths shut?  How is anyone going to learn a thing about what abuse feels like so that as a society we care enough to STOP IT if nobody speaks the truth?

Ignoring infant-child abuse lets it continue.  It is the mute inner silence of myself during those first 18 years and my own mute inner silence about so much of that abuse now that angers me most.  The message from our culture is that if nobody else cares about child abuse, then the victim better not dare to care, either.  We are to pretend it never happened, that it doesn’t happen, that it does not damage a survivor in critical ways for the rest of their lifespan, and that infant-child abuse doesn’t really happen NOW.

I will NOT pretend it never happened, and I will NOT pretend it isn’t happening to thousands upon thousands of infants and children today.

++

Post from earlier today:  +ON THE SLIM CHANCE I WILL FEEL BETTER

++++++++++++++++++++

++++++++++++++++

Today a friend is coming to help me with a project that needs to be done for many reasons.  This is a task that I cannot do alone, also for many reasons.  I am wondering at this moment how I will feel once this afternoon has passed and all these family history slides are sorted, titled, dated and organized.

This friend of mine is very jovial, pleasant and happy.  I hope that with his help this task that daunts me will not seem so ugly or so overwhelming.  In so many ways at this point in my life I wish all memory of the first 18 years of my life spent under the constant stress of abuse by my mother could be completely erased.  I no longer want any trace of it — not even a memory of the Alaskan homesteading experience.  I want it ALL gone!

I made it so close to completing the writing of my childhood story up to my age 10 1/2.  I completed the first rough draft.  I was totally unprepared for what happened to me as I began to edit this draft for the second – and nearly final – one.  I find I cannot do it!!

This collection of slides that lie in a disordered heap under a sheet on the table in my front room contains the visual record of the story of my childhood — minus the abuse, of course, which only appears in traces by my absence from so many photographs of my siblings.  The abuse I suffered also appears in my body language and placement in relation to the rest of my family in many pictures I do at least show up in.

In many ways I feel I got left holding the ‘bag’, and it’s a BIG one!  Being the child ‘chosen’ as the target of Mother’s insane abuse left me with nobody to share my experience with.  I still feel that way.  The numbers of children who suffer the kind of infant-child abuse I did is so small our stories are recording in books like “Sybil” and “Mommy Dearest.”

We have freak stories to tell.  And as I work to tell mine I feel again as I did as a child — absolutely alone in a reality that exists to NOBODY ELSE.

I ask God every day to show me any point at all in my proceeding forward with my writing task.  Today my friend and I will at least make progress in ordering the disorganized mess this pile of slides IS as these pictures portray the mess that is the history of the Lloyd family — especially my history.

I never chose my childhood.  I never chose my position or role in my family of origin.  In some ways I am enraged I did the suffering that allowed my siblings to get off ‘Scott free’ — other than the fact that they witnessed what was done to me — as they went right on playing (as kids SHOULD be able to do).  Other than the fact also, to be fair, that our mother was an advanced Borderline Personality Disorder mad woman which made all of our lives nuts.  But because I did the suffering for everyone else my other five siblings escaped the unnameable torture that was MY childhood.

Who cares?

++++++++++++++++