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What is it about being myself in my body in my life that I don’t like today?  Today – so far – seems to be one of those days when just being myself makes me feel crabby.  At least I can feel grateful I don’t recognize this feeling very often.  I wonder, “What is the source of my irritation at being me today?”

Now, the one word that is stuck in my mind – as irritating as a burr would be stuck under the saddle of a horse, or a pebble inside a person’s shoe — is this one.  OBLIVIOUS.

I can’t say that I understand how this word, ‘oblivious’, could possibly be making me feel so irritated and crabby at myself this morning – except to say that because I think of myself as a ‘writer’, I expect myself to be able to beat words at their own game – at least most of the time!

Struck dumb by a word?  By THIS word?

My main train of thought these past few days is about the silence of child abuse – the silence that surrounds its reality, the silence of the suffering child, the silence even of adult survivors of child abuse – the silence of the society that lets child abuse continue – and on and on and on….

Does our society choose to remain OBLIVIOUS about the reality of child abuse?

Well, I thought I could use this word correctly in this way – until I began to look at the connection between OBLIVIOUS and OBLIVION.

– OBLIVION evidently relates as a ‘measurement’ of degrees of forgetting.

1. : the fact or condition of forgetting or having forgotten;especially : the condition of being oblivious

2. : the condition or state of being forgotten or unknown

– OBLIVIOUS is about not remembering – PLUS

1. : lacking remembrance, memory, or mindful attention

2. : lacking active conscious knowledge or awareness —usually used with of or to

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Strangely, by looking into the root connections to these words another word comes up that I had never heard before –

– LEVIGATE

1.: polish, smooth

2.a : to grind to a fine smooth powder while in moist condition

b : to separate (fine powder) from coarser material by suspending in a liquid

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Do we ‘forget’ (pass into oblivion, become oblivious to) things we have known about in an effort to make smooth a path of life – take out the bumps – ‘make nice’ our lives by leaving things out that don’t fit the picture we wish to have of – whatever – both as individuals and as a collective society?

Is this denial?  A handy kind of forgetting what we do not want to remain consciously aware of — WHY?

If I choose a word related to OBLIVIOUS am I really saying that people know perfectly well what infant-child abuse is, that it exists, know of the damage it causes a survivor for a lifetime – as they choose to conveniently FORGET that they know/forget what they know?

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As a writer I do not often stumble upon – no, trip and fall flat – from words I encounter.  What is it about this word, OBLIVIOUS, that has me stuck in Crabby Ville today?

Never mind this word first appeared in my thoughts with a demand that I place if first in this book I am intent on writing next – as I mentioned in my last post.  This word (Can words talk?) said to me, “I want to be the first word in your book.  And then I want a period to follow me.  Just that. Just this.”

Oblivious.

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Well, what to do when a word becomes so troublesome in its demands it will not let me simply SKIP it and move on?  It won’t let me ignore it.  I have always believed I know (of course) what this word means – but do I?

I am writing this current book as the introduction to the multi-volume series of “The Demise of Mildred” because I know perfectly well that for 18 long years her abuse of me remained (evidently) invisible to anyone who could have stopped it from happening.

Or – nobody cared.  Nobody had any kind of vested interest in looking after my well-being.

This is true for everyone that has ever been abused as a child – true for children (and infants) that are being neglected, abused, traumatized, terrorized NOW.

OBLIVIOUS is an issue!  Nobody is going to see Mildred’s abuse of me in her own writings.  Nobody saw it in real time when it was happening to me.  I can’t change the past, but I am going to do my best to prevent readers from being OBLIVIOUS to Mildred’s abuse as they read her writings.

Or – are we survivors supposed to comply with the status quo, keep our mouths shut – and let the abusers continue to ‘get away with it’?

Of course – this is exactly what we are supposed to do!  Let abuse fade away into oblivion, let everyone remain oblivious to the reality of abuse of innocents within our society that does not, frankly, give a damn.

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OBVIOUS:

Synonyms: clueless, incognizant, innocent, insensible, nescient [not informed about or aware of something], ignorant, unacquainted, unaware, unconscious,uninformed, unknowing, unmindful, unwitting

Antonyms: acquainted, aware, cognizant, conscious,conversant, grounded, informed, knowing, mindful, witting

OBLIVION:

Synonyms: forgetfulness, nirvana, obliviousness

Webster’s does not list antonyms for this word!

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After a very long troubling sleepless night I finally dozed as the fall sun crawled slowly into the sky.  Sometimes writing a book takes doing battle I realized last night.  Who gets epiphanies?  Those who are able to struggle long enough to make it to the place where an epiphany awaits them?  I LIKE epiphanies   I detest the uncomfortable process I seem to always have to go through before I am ready for the next step in my learning-growing-healing process.

Today I find I see what I am doing in my book writing process completely differently that I did yesterday.  It took a combination of being unsure of myself, of what I am doing, of why I am doing it, of how I am doing it — along with timely words coming to me from people in my life.  Why do I so tenaciously cling to the telling of ‘my story’ of abuse which includes the telling of my abusive mother’s story?  Because I am not going to throw out something of highest value – just because my culture says I ought to ‘let it go and move on’.

Today I understand the great difference between a QUEST and a MISSION.

My mother was – quite sickly – on a QUEST her entire life.  Her mental illness gave her ways to divide that which was BAD from that which was GOOD (as I wrote about in my previous post).

Her abuse of me was meant to ‘take care of’ all she could not tolerate inside herself — while her Alaskan homesteading was meant to complete her quest by letting her live in a perfect kingdom where no ‘bad’ either existed – or could reach her.

I think about my writing.  I see today that I am on NO healing quest whatsoever as I shape and reshape words into stories that come from my memories of abuse.  I don’t write to heal!

NO WAY!

I write because I am on a MISSION!

Now, unlike the kind of continual stream-of-thought writing I do on my blog, the troubles I have been having with my book project is that I have to make THOUSANDS of decisions as I do that work that I do not ever have to make as I blog.

It is this decision-making that I don’t like!  I don’t like it because I am unfamiliar with that ‘way’ of writing.

Defining clearly my own difference between being on a quest and being on a mission allows me to now take varying pieces of information to combine them in new ways.

Mildred’s quest was not only for survival.  It was for healing.

All the she knew and all that she did – including her abuse of me and her homesteading – was a part of this healing quest.

I realize most importantly that perhaps the most significant contributing factor to why I was able to raise my three children without continuing the intergenerational pattern of traumatizing them through abuse was exactly this fact:  I left my abusive home of origin intact and autonomous.

Mildred did not break me.  She did not make me sick.  For whatever reasons – I have always had my own self present with me.  I was not, therefore, on any kind of a ‘healing quest’ to solve my own inner troubles through the actions I took toward my children.

Rather, I had a MISSION clearly in my mind, heart and soul as I raised my kids.  I didn’t need to think about this consciously except in an occasional passing thought, “I am not going to raise my children like my parents raised me.  I am going to raise them so that they know clearly WHO they are, as they grow up to LOVE who they are.”

That was it.  My mission was clear and defined.

This does not mean that throughout the stages of my adult life as a survivor of 18 years of terrible child abuse that I have not ‘quested’ for healing – for information – for knowledge and for wisdom about what happened to me and what that means to me.

But today I would question my use of ‘quest’ even in that regard.  I was – truthfully and accurately – on a MISSION to become the best me I can be no matter what happened to me.

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So as it applies to the stages of my book writing I today understand that my mission is to give voice to infant and child abuse through exposing what I can discover about the abuse that happened to me.

The truth about infant and child abuse lies behind the scenes in our society.  It lies in silence.  There is only one way I know of to break this silence – and that is to use my words to SPEAK from behind that wall of silence.

Punch holes in silence.  I am reminded of a dream I had over 30 years ago.  A poet professor I had was in this dream sitting on steps that went over a wall – pondering.  I saw him, stopped to ask him what he was so deeply in thought about.

“This is the wall of silence,” he told me as he gestured to a pitch dark wall stretching to his left and to his right.  The wall was darker than night time.  It blocked out the light of the stars in the sky.

“But,” he told me.  “Look.  Look closely.  There are holes in the wall of silence.”

True enough.  If one looked closely enough there were spots in the wall where the star light shone brightly through.

I awoke hearing my own words I spoke to the poet, “I didn’t KNOW there were holes in silence!”

This was an epiphany to me.  It applies here as I rise to move forward to complete my book writing mission using what this dream taught me.  With the telling of my stories I am punching holes in the silence that keeps the reality of abuse of infants and children flourishing in our culture.

What I know about Mildred also creates holes in this silence.

My mission is to keep to my own path.  Yes, I realize ‘life is short’ but I will never say it is ‘too short’ to keep with us our own stories until we learn from them what we need to, and until we use what we have been through – what we know in consequence – as great tools of power toward the healing and protection of our species.

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In writing here this morning before I return to work on manuscript #4 for “The Demise of Mildred” I am collecting some thoughts that, quite frankly, I don’t know where to put in this book which is being written in a series.  It might be that the thoughts I have this morning will need to be placed in an earlier volume.  Perhaps they will need to be put into the series introduction.  It frustrates me to have an insight come to me at this stage of my writing that I wish had appeared much earlier!  Oh, well – now to think this all through a little bit more.

“When opportunity knocks.”  Is this an idiom?  A cliche?

At the end of one of Mildred’s letters I worked through yesterday she wrote about the combination of thrilling highs and heart wrenching lows she is experiencing as she first moves up to her Alaskan wilderness mountain homestead, “I know I can’t have my cake and eat it too.”

Those are her words that evidently triggered a whole chain of thoughts for me that I don’t know what to do with at this moment.

I have tried hard thus far in these volumes to explain and describe to readers what I mean when I mention “Mildred’s BPD-matrix litany of words.”

Long, long ago I identified that it WAS an abuse litany that Mother created as it concerned me.  The launch point of this abuse litany was her delivery of breech-me as she suffered a psychotic break, believing that the devil sent me to kill her.  It didn’t help that I was born alive and that she made it through this delivery alive, as well.  All that meant was that the second addition was made to her litany:  “You are the devil’s child sent as a curse upon my life.”

I was NEVER human to Mother.

I deeply – and finally – now understand how her psychosis operated as she abused me from my birth until I was expunged from the family home when I was 18.

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Yes, if I were to be gentler and more supportive of myself I would let myself know that I am working deep within a pitch dark mine that was my severely mentally ill mother’s mind as it expressed in the hundreds of thousands of her words left somehow with me when she died in 2003.  I would let myself understand that I am doing a darn good job at finding absolute gems of truth about Borderline Personality Disorder as I examine this one massive case study of Mother.

No, I am always having to battle my way forward through what I DO NOT YET KNOW as I write my own version of Mother within her words.

I so rapidly shove what I discover behind me as I move forward in this book writing process because it is always what I DON’T KNOW that I am searching for.  Thus, when an insight like the one I have now appears out of order (as I see it) and too far down the line from where I think I SHOULD have been able to see it — I am very frustrated.

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Mildred’s verbal litany, as I have discovered in writing “The Demise of Mildred” series did NOT ONLY apply to me.  Mildred had a litany of words for everything!  These litany words appear in segments as phrases that are repeated over and over again in her writings as they were in her life.  Watching which segments appear in which context in which combination allows me to see patterns of her illness — and thus, see her BPD-mind at work.

I so far believe that Mildred lost her ability very early in her life to grow and develop a healthy self.  Instead her disorder replaced her self.  Instead of a ‘real’ self she was consumed by and trapped within what I call her BPD-matrix mind.

As I move forward in my forensic biographical work on Mildred I have come to understand that her BPD operated in EVERY SINGLE aspect of her life.  There was no part of Mildred that was not influenced by her mental illness.  Why was that so hard for me to see?

And why, then, did it surprise me that she had a litany of words for EVERY part of her existence – not ‘just’ for me?

And, how to I explain what her litany WAS?  Let alone her BPD-matrix that was all Mildred had of a mind?

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So, back in full circle, I think about idioms, sayings, expressions, metaphors, cliches that I suspect have infiltrated and have been created within every language spoken within every culture on earth.

Some are so mundane we would not question them:  moving lock stock and barrel; a stitch in time saves nine; a penny saved is a penny earned; it’s raining cats and dogs; you have me over a barrel; make hay while the sun shines.

Others appear obtuse because they were generated in an older era:  make no bones about it; grease my palm; a chip on your shoulder; can’t cut the mustard.

There are over 7,000 idioms used in English explained in The Cambridge International Dictionary of Idioms.  But we all know they exist.  We have all used them ‘at one time or another’.  What has struck me this morning is that these segments, these phrases are actually patterns of a language litany of words that hold no sinister meaning within their particular combination of words.

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I postulated to my daughter the other day that I would not be surprised if in the future when Borderline Personality Disorder is far more understood, that  it will be found that one of its underlying components is a language processing disorder.  I would also postulate that as researchers work to determine some of the major abuse-related common origin points for this disorder that they will find that verbal abuse is perhaps the MAIN shared early abuse for people who develop BPD.

Researchers have already found that of all abuses done to children it is verbal abuse that outruns them all – combined – in its power to change the brain development of little people within traumatic environments.

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Meanwhile, “back at the ranch” if not out here “in the back 40” I think about BPD-Mildred’s matrix replacement for a mind.  Mildred spoke in her own matrix-generated idiom litany segments because she THOUGHT in them.  The more important a concern was to Mildred’s BPD-matrix, the longer its corresponding litany became and the more likely that part of her overall BPD-matrix litany was to appear — over and over again.

Because Mildred needed to separate her upper ‘heaven’ world from her lower ‘hell’ world, her matrix litany of me as her proxy in hell was MASSIVE!!

At the same time it was Mildred’s matrix search for ‘the perfect kingdom’, for ‘the perfect home’, for ‘heaven on earth’, for Shangri la, that fed her Alaskan homesteading obsession.  Homesteading and Alaska were described in an ever-growing corresponding litany of word phrases/segments.

People don’t CHANT idioms – not normally, anyway.  BPD-matrix litany phrases – at least for Mildred – became mantras that both described and had the power to motivate her life, her actions.  A BPD-matrix mind is a closed system.  Mantra-litany repetitions are not, therefore, subject to moderation or modulation once they are formed.

I suspect that much of the power for harm that comes from verbal abuse to children is that the phrases used, the segments of a litany of abuse, are not said JUST one time.  Oh, no!  How many times, for example, does a verbally abused child (or any adult who is in an abusive relationship) hear something repeated over and over again like, “I hate you!  I curse the day you were born!  I wish you were dead!  I wish you had never been born!  You are so STUPID!”

And on and on and on such abuse litany word segments go – over and over and over again.

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Even though, as I mentioned, I identified Mother’s abuse litany of me years ago, it is only as I write these book manuscripts now that I understand that her BPD-matrix mind THOUGHT in litany patterns of words.  That is how her mind worked.

This explains to me why it is impossible to ‘reason’ with a BPD-matrix mind.  Because the matrix exists as a replacement for a healthy self, it is an entirely closed system in which nobody or no important thing (in Mildred’s case, a thing like a home, a house, her belongings, her children, her mountain, etc.) ONLY existed as a BPD-matrix THOUGHT.

Which also explains to me that even though it is often said that borderlines ‘fear abandonment’ – this so-called pattern has NOTHING whatsoever to do with actual people!  A BPD-matrix mind has NO PEOPLE in it.  It has IDEAS – only.  In order for such a matrix to provide ‘order and orientation’ of ongoing experience for a BPD person in the world, the matrix must have what it needs to function.

Having ‘people’ in particular ‘places’ within a BPD-matrix mind is essential for it to function.  ‘Fear of abandonment’ is an outsider’s way of describing the great quaking that such a matrix mind will undergo if one of it’s ‘thought-ideas’ (say, a person) is removed from its functional place in the matrix.

This also explains to me why BPD people cannot accept responsibility or blame.  A BPD-matrix ‘sorts’ things out – anything ‘bad’ simply cannot exist in the upper matrix and hence is banished to the invisibility of the lower part of the matrix.  (I see the matrix in 2-D as a diamond shape; in 3-D as two pyramids, one extending upwards from a platform base, the other downward.)

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On and on this forensic biographical study of my severely abusive BPD mother Mildred goes, complete with my study of her litany.

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I just added this thought into a comment:

I realize that I am working with the patterns I see that are particular to my own BPD Mother. I KNOW she suffered a psychotic break while she was birthing me, probably under the influence of the drug ‘twilight sleep’ that I most strongly suspect she was given during labor.

I cannot generalize to BPD in any way what I am coming to understand about Mildred.

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“Mandate with suffering.”  Not like saying “hamburger with fries.”  Yet having written the story presented in my last post I have a need to look more closely than ever before at ‘forgiveness’, a word that I don’t really understand.

That doesn’t matter, evidently.  I will learn.  Meanwhile, those who have suffered greatly through abuse know this mandate that comes with such suffering.  Either our memories eat us alive – or we find our way to forgive.

Because working with Mildred’s own story as she presents it in her writings spares me the worst of the worst that I will face should I move on to finish my own childhood story once I have published the volumes of “The Demise of Mildred.”  I sure got a taste today of what my own story telling might do to me – I continue to need to be very, very careful of how I handle my memories of severe child abuse.  So be it.

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This story appears in the context of Mildred’s 1958 letters about the early days of the Alaskan homesteading saga:

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Comment:

I cannot sit here inside my own skin working on this book any longer without pausing here to describe something of the underbelly this story never shows.  Did anyone outside of our family ever see the other side of Mildred?  Could anyone outside of our family have detected the truth of what allowed Mildred to continue living her mad, mad BPD-matrix upper life as she preserved it in these letters?

There is an entirely different story not being told here because it exists preserved in silence between the letters of the words, between the words, between the lines of the words that appear in her writings here.  While it has been my hope, my intention and my goal to protect my own story from appearing in “The Demise of Mildred” epic, at this moment I will speak of a clear memory of myself as the sole prisoner inside Mildred’s lower BPD-matrix pyramid of hell during these weeks Mildred writes about here.

‘Silence is golden’ when it serves the needs of a BPD-matrix such as the one that consumed Mildred.  Yet silence is deadly poison to helpless, innocent children who have been made a victim of such devastating madness.  While being 7 1/2 during this period of time Mildred is writing about on school mornings I was being hauled with my age-8 1/2 brother out of this trailer in early morning to be driven with Father into Anchorage to go to school — down the barely passable miles of the Jeep road Mildred describes, then down the miles of the maintained Eagle River Road, then down the miles of paved highway from Eagle River to Anchorage.  I was dropped at a babysitter’s until it was time for school to start in the morning, walking to school, spending a long day trying to learn what second graders do along with classmates who lived their regular lives while we were being dragged through our parents’ nightmare.   I then walked after school to be cared for again by this babysitter until Father finished his day’s work at the office — to then be transported all the way back to the trailer deep in this wilderness valley.

This would have been ENOUGH to so tax small children that there could hardly be anything left of them to be children with.  But there’s more.  There’s more in the silence of the story that Mildred is not telling here.  Within the context of this silence, within this time span of my childhood, there is more I wish to tell you now.  To do this I become as a female half-bull half-human Minotaur.  Lowering my head with massive horns I storm back through the labyrinth of time to retrieve the memory of being the little girl my mother so savagely devoured within the darkest reaches of her inhumanly diseased BPD-matrix mind in any way that she could.

I find myself asking our after school babysitter if I can go outside to play.   Yes.  I dress in my jacket and slide my new shoes into my plastic boots.  As soon as I walk out of the Panoramic View apartment building my babysitter lived in I am drawn as if by a magnet to the edge of the massive puddle spring thaw has made out of melting snow in the center of the open area of the “L” this complex of three huge buildings forms.

I see my feet as I begin walking so slowly around the edge of this puddle of brown water clockwise.  I can’t see what color my boots are. I feel my feet crunching through patches of slushy snow.  I hear the change in sound as I cross wet patches of brown flattened grass.  I am being so careful to keep my feet far away from the water but as I walk around and around I spiral ever closer and closer.

Finally I stop.  I turn.  My boots are facing the edge.  I inch and inch forward until I can tap the water into little splashes, splashes, splashes.  Into the water my boots go.  Slowly.  A little deeper.  A little deeper.  A little further into the water and my boot heels leave the shore.  Here I made the most glorious discovery of my childhood life so far!

Down into the water I push a foot – and – BOING!  When I stop pushing UP pops my foot with a magical feeling of so-nearly flying all I want is MORE!  This is where I commit the fatal crime of forgetting not to be a child.  With pure delight I BOING!  BOING my way this way and that way out toward the heart of this puddle.  Far too far into the water I play until in one instant my feet feel icy coldness wetness flood through my socks.

I cannot say what happened next.  Did I freeze in recognizing terror at that instant?  Did I barely notice the coldness of my feet as I continued to PLAY and PLAY?  At what point did I stop and return my sogging feet to my babysitter’s door, open it and walk into the warmth?

Even if I could somehow know the relationship between the part of this experience I do remember and the part of this experience I don’t remember, I would NOT want to know.  I don’t want to know when or how Mildred found out I had gotten my new shoes wet by playing in a puddle.  What I do know is that after she came to pick John and I up from the sitter’s, she was in a her lower BPD-matrix hell full rage at me as soon as she got far enough away from the babysitter’s door.

She was already pounding me with her fists, screaming at me about being such a horrible child I got my new shoes wet as she dragged me out to the parking lot where Father sat in the idling Jeep Willies station wagon.  She stopped part way there to remove my shoes and boots raging, “You don’t deserve to wear anything on your feet, you UNGRATEFUL CHILD!”

Yanking open the Jeep door she violently stuffed me into a tight fetal position with my knees and forehead on the cold wet floor of the back seat behind her husband as Cindy hurried in terror to scoot from the window to the middle of the seat as scared John clamored in on the other side.

I don’t write this without tears, but I am working hard to keep them balled within the knot of my stomach while my elbows are frozen tightly against my rib cage.  I tap out these words on my keyboard.  During all of the long hours driving back to the trailer along the pavement from Anchorage to the turn in Eagle River onto the maintained dirt road, down down to the narrowing start of the rugged and nearly impassable Jeep trail, Mildred raged at me as she turned around over the edge of the front seat to beat me with her fists.  Her little 3-year-old cowered beside her on the front seat while Cindy and John witnessed this horror in the back.

Finally near the place on the Jeep road we eventually named ‘Mud Lake’ Mildred turned her entire body around, put her knees on her seat and launched over it to grab my hair with one fist, jerk my head upward as she slapped my face again and again as hard as she could.  She is screaming, “I hate you!  You are no better than a dog!  Even a dog would know better than you not to get its feet wet!”

I see a flash of thick dark branches.  I hear them squealing along the side of the Jeep as we crawl past.  I am there.  Cold.  Curled on the floor behind my father’s seat being as small as I possibly can.  My spine hurts.  My shoulders hurt.  Now my face is hurting, too.  I can feel the warmth of my father coming through the back of his seat.  He is driving.  Driving.  Driving….

Such stories as this you will never know about by reading Mildred’s words.  As I return now to the presentation of Mildred’s writings I mention that temporarily I leave behind the subject of ‘forgiveness’, one I will not sidestep when it is time to write my own account of my infancy and childhood.  For now I work again as best I can to separate our two stories.

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