The Dark Side of Mildred’s Mountain series – Angel book 2 beginning with the POP!  Goes Alaska letters – chapter 14

°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°

14.  Wraith child

Here is the last part of Mildred’s Tuesday, August 6, 1957 letter (from chapter 11) as I believe she wrote it after psychotically erupting at me for something SHE saw happen that never did.  Mildred introduced at the end of her letter the people who bought and moved into the log house in front of ours sometime during the first five days we were in Alaska.  Again, she does not initially give their names, which were Janie and Scotty. 

I’ve only said “Hello” and exchanged a few brief words with my front neighbor.  She’s very attractive, slim, and smart looking.  They have a beautiful place too!!  The people that moved out told me these new people, especially the man, don’t like people and want to be left alone!  They bought the place thinking the Spoerrys [our log house landlady and her husband living in Algeria] would live here in this house who had no children and both were working SO I’ve kept my distance – until they get to know us.  (I understand how they feel too.)  (They have a 3 year old girl and a 10 month baby boy.)

No other news – school starts the day after Labor Day, at least two weeks earlier than California so it really won’t be long now.

We’re all fine, happy and healthy.  I wake up every morning excited anew over Alaska.  We love it but we were ready for it here.  There are undoubtedly people that don’t like it – I’ll send you a clipping from paper from one that didn’t.

Will close now.  Much love, Mildred, Bill and the children.

°<>°

Borderline Personality Disorder people are known to radically, and usually inexplicably to others, flip sides in relationships as they typically first idealize and then vilify them.  In spite of all the rambling descriptions Mildred wrote about these people during the year we lived in the log house as their neighbor, what she says about them a year after she moved out of the log house in her July 28, 1959 letter written to her mother is significant to me:

I stopped to see Janie yesterday for the first time since the snow melted.  Her furniture is arranged just the same.  She is just the same.  Oh, some people!!

I hear Mother’s voice of condemnation in these words.  Shame on boring stupid inferior Janie!  In my recent conversation with her Joe Anne Vanover told me that “Mildred had a great need to be superior to everyone else.”  It did not matter what the subject was, Mother was the only person who was ALWAYS right. 

In the year that passed from the time my parents moved us out of the log house at the end of their year’s lease July 31, 1958 (while, as Mildred states, Janie didn’t move or move her furniture) Mildred moved us next into a primitive rented cabin so she could “practice homesteading.” When that living soon became difficult she moved us into an apartment in Anchorage, then into a small trailer parked in Pollard’s field at the bottom of the mountain, then up to the homestead to live in a canvas Jamesway hut, and THEN back to the log house by the fall of 1959, a move she had in motion when she made the above comment about Janie.

As it turned out in the real world, shortly after Mildred made her scathing observation about Janie, she and her family did move out of their log home they had been living in for two years without ever having mentioned a word to Mildred about their plans.  Mother would not have remotely cared, anyway.  In her reality she was the only person who mattered.  This is all in illustration of how Mother obliviously lived in an inarticulated crucible where meanings were defined by her sick mind within which we were all forced to reside with her.   Her judgments against other people never alerted her to the benefits of normalcy or to the harm of her madness. 

I had no experiences that could have given me any perspective other than Mother’s.  As I make this note I think about the emptiness of my young adult mind after I left home at 18.  Because there was nothing ordinary about my life with Mother there was damage done to my development in many ways due to her inability to keep chaos out of her life.  As I mentioned in the previous chapter by the time I left home I was significantly lacking in three areas related to my inability to conceptualize (a) the passage of time, (b) the constancy of objects in space over the passage of time, and (c) a sense of self.  Under ordinary conditions I would have certainly integrated these concepts as they are basic to ordinary mainstream American life.

°<>°

The hammock and the passage of time

I mark a significant memory of mine as having been formed through an experience I had in early April of 1971 when I was 19.  I accompanied a man named PJ who was the father of my unborn child and “the love of my life” to visit his friends who lived in Sausalito, California.  Feeling an outsider to these peoples’ conversation I wandered around their rambling yard where I noticed the first hammock I had ever seen stretched between the trunks of two shade trees at the edge of a garden.  It looked new and was made of white cotton cord.  I stopped to study the hammock without having any desire to climb into it.

Over the course of the next months the turbulence and chaos of my life continued to carry me through currents of great changes.  By early October of this same year (after my 20th birthday) I again traveled with PJ to his friends’ house.  Again I felt myself an outsider to their conversation and again I wandered their garden with my baby girl in my arms. 

This time when I passed the two trees the hammock was no longer whole.  I stood in amazement in front of grayed and broken shreds of rope, most of which trailed down to the ground to become entangled in yellow brittle weeds and grasses.  This was the first time in my life I became personally aware of the reality of the passage of time.  It was as if I experienced a paradigm shift that altered how I viewed life as a whole and how I felt about myself in relationship to it.

My life with Mildred gave me no sense of constancy.  I had never known anything but ongoing, perpetual and usually traumatic change that had no obvious cause and that followed no reasonable course over time.  It was not until the instant I was visually confronted by the changes that had happened to that hammock in between the times I had seen it new and whole and the next time I had seen its dismantling that I recognized that change itself occurs within the passing of a specific amount (length, period) of time.  This was the first time I understood that all change is not random.

I had been through many, many serious and difficult experiences during the months it had taken that hammock to disintegrate.  My life, run as it had always been upon accident and instinct, had never been accounted for directly within time itself until that moment.  The hammock, along with the changes that had happened to it (through exposure over six months of time to rain, sea salts in the air, wind, sunshine), brought my first conscious awakening to the momentous idea that there are some kind of mysterious consequences inherent in time passing over-through-by-around a stable object that remained constant in place so that its nature is drastically changed simply because the object exists – in time. 

At this juncture in the development of my mind I was able to finally include myself in this equation that time and change were connected to one another and that I, as an “agent” could witness how time changes things.  This is how I gained, at age 19, my first inkling of awareness that I existed as a separate and distinct self-person-body in that world of time passing and change.  After all, it was I that had also traveled through time and change to be able to capture both of those two distinct images in my mind of the perfect whole hammock and of the one that the passage of time had destroyed.

My insight, although subtle and outside the range of my thoughts, changed me in ways not unlike how the sound of an orchestra would change if an important new instrument was added into it.  Before my experience with the hammock change and the passing of time were disconnected (dissociated) from any sense I had of myself in ongoing life.  Yet even now dissociation, built into my body from my infancy through Mother’s psychotic treatment of me, remains a complicating factor in that I doubt I remember my life experiences in ordinary ways.

°<>°

A culture of one

Even as I write these words I am stretching my story of myself in my life from who and how I am now at age 61 as I write this book back through key signature moments in my young adult life as I consider how certain awakenings then were connected not only to who and how I was right before my sixth birthday in August 1957 but also reaching all the way back to being born to my psychotic mentally ill mother in the first place.  Because she had never passed through her own earliest self-development processes correctly, and because all of her difficulties deprived her of the ability to recognize me as an individual person separate from her, I was deprived of the ability to recognize my own self as a person (who existed in time) separate from Mother.

This level of damage is very difficult to articulate and describe.  Normal children with safe and secure adequate early attachment relationships with their primary caregivers have in place by the time they are one year old all the critical self-recognition information they need to continue developing that self.  Whatever experiences a growing child needs to have to be able to (seemingly) naturally and automatically gain both awareness that they are a self and then that they are a self-agent did not happen for me as the captive of the hell-half of Mother’s sick split mind. 

As author Edmund Carpenter described in his 1973 book, Eskimo Realities (Holt, Rinehart and Winston) about the Canadian arctic Eskimo culture prior to Anglo Christian contact, the passage of time, degrees of perceived permanence/impermanence of objects and constructs of self are culturally determined.  These conceptions both define their expression in language at the same time they create the underpinnings of language, itself.  I was forced to exist primarily as a member of a unique culture that was made up (created by) by psychotic Mother to be lived by only me. 

I was, therefore, raised isolated within a culture of one.  Even though I had contact with outsiders to my culture which included controlled contact with my siblings, my core experience was defined by Mother.  I could not have meaningful language for experiences I had never had.  The lack of experience and the corresponding dearth of words with which to conceptualize what I did not know led me eventually in my adulthood to the very late discovery of ideas that belonged to cultures other than mine, most significantly to the dominant American culture.  The difficulty for me in reverse is to find a way to communicate to people who are foreign to my “culture of one” what my life has been like.

°<>°

The ashtray and the constancy of objects over time

 After the complexity of many more changes and moves the next moment of significant enlightenment for me came about nine months after my hammock-related recognition.  I had landed in Fargo, North Dakota with my daughter who was now 18 months old.  We lived in a small rented basement apartment.  Lily, our very kind landlady, lived in the other half of the basement.  Lily cared for her ailing older brother who occupied the main floor of the house.

Over the next few months of visiting Lily in her apartment it suddenly flashed into my awareness one day as I sat having coffee in her kitchen that over this period of time Lily’s small ashtray, one of those metal topped ones with a plaid cloth bottom filled with sand, ALWAYS occupied exactly the same spot at the bottom of shelves built into the wall beside the breakfast nook table and benches when it was not in use.  Whenever I wanted to smoke a cigarette it was always to this spot I could look for the ashtray and it was always right there.  This was my moment of awakening to the idea that something could remain the same over the passage of time.

This was the first time, just as I was about to turn 20, that I had experienced any personal antidote to Mother’s judgmental concept having to do with her chaotic sense of the passage of time and the impermanence of objects in time as she expressed it in her 1959 letter speaking of Janie, “Her furniture is arranged just the same.  She is just the same.  Oh, some people!!”  In those 1959 letters Mildred stated within a week after she wrote those words that Janie and her family indeed did move out of their house, although Mildred did not offer any recognition of how they had only been living there for two years before they disappeared.  The only sense of the passage of time that existed in Mildred’s life or mattered to her was her own.

My ashtray insight struck me profoundly because up until that moment I had never comprehended that any kind of stability existed in anyone’s life, let alone that stability could FEEL good and be a good rather than bad experience.  This was the first split-second permanent shift in my thinking that just as this ashtray and all it was connected to in Lily’s life had continuity and stability over time, so also was I and my daughter experiencing stability.  However, this spat of stability only lasted four months for me and I moved again.

°<>°

The wraith and the absence of a continuous self

After the next brief three month move-in and move-out of an apartment on the north side of Fargo I next found myself sharing a small house in Minnesota with a friend and her son on the other side of the Red River by winter 1972.  One still night of falling snow I walked alone to a nearby campus and found myself circumambulating the center plaza’s sidewalks in a pattern that left behind my footprints in the sparkling empty whiteness.  I finally stood at the center of a wide circle with my bare palms lifted to the sky ahead of me as I watched snowflakes disappear into the warmth of my hands.

As I stood mesmerized by snow falling and melting on my palms through the silence four words spurted from some distant source that spoke to me only this:  “I am a wraith.”  Though I heard the words they held no meaning to me at the time.  I had no idea what a wraith was and no recollection that I had ever heard the word before.

I accepted this experience without question in the same way I had everything else I had ever gone through.  By this time at age 21 I wasn’t a lost self.  I wasn’t any self at all.  How does a person who has no sense of self at all become rescued from obscurity? 

Forty years later as I examine this word I know how accurate it was to describe me at my young adult age.  Sadly, even now I cannot say I have made a lot of progress out of the condition I was forced into through exposure to such horrific trauma during the first 18 years of my life.  No matter how I look at how I feel in the world, the following is still a far more accurate description of my reality than any other I have ever found.  I cannot argue with this word.

Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary states that the origin of this word is “unknown”; it’s first known use in Modern English was in 1513; and it’s definition is:  “1a: the exact likeness of a living person seen usually just before death as an apparition b: ghost, specter.  2: an insubstantial form or semblance:  shadow.  3: a barely visible gaseous or vaporous column.” 

The online free dictionary Wiktionary states that “wraith” is a Scottish dialectal word for “ghost, spirit.”  Some claim it has connections to Icelandic vörðr meaning “warden, guardian.”  Others suggest possible Celtic or Norse origins.  Walter W. Skeat conjectured in his 1893 book, An Etymological Dictionary of the English Language (2nd edition, Oxford: Clarendon) that “wraith” was of Scandinavian origin meaning “an apparition in the likeness of a person, supposed to be seen soon before, or soon after death.  The apparition called a wraith was supposed to be that of one’s guardian angel.” (p. 720)

(Note:  An online search using these words in combination will reveal technical aspects related to what the word “wraith” more imaginably describes:  child abuse  trauma dissociation depersonalization derealization.)

°<>°

These three experiences I have described were significant to my own quickening knowledge that I had definition and that I was actually “something else” other than a blob of body that had occupied space in time for the purpose of receiving abuse from Mother.  I have continued to suffer from a disconnected sense of myself through time.  There was no possible way my awakening to the consciousness of my own self-existence could have happened instantaneously at 18 when I left home.  I am still involved in this process and will be for the rest of my life.

°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°

Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment »

++++

 

 

++++

I just finished chapter 11 of this book.  The chapter is over 5,000 words long and is quite complex for readers who are not familiar with the story being told.  The following are thoughts that sprung into mind as I worked with the material in chapter 11 which includes a psychotic abuse incident that happened to me when I was five years old the first week after our family’s move to Alaska.

The Dark Side of Mildred’s Mountain series – Angel book 2 beginning with the POP!  Goes Alaska letters – chapter 12

°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°

12.  Spinoff Notes to Chapter 11

Hurts and Harms

I don’t think anyone who has not seen a mentally ill person switch into a rage attack mode can begin to imagine the horror even of what that person’s face looks like let alone what their voice sounds like and what violence they are capable of committing upon very, very young and small children during an active psychotic episode.  It would be tempting to describe it in terms of them being possessed by the darkest demonic forces imaginable.  But this is NOT what happened to Mother.  She suffered from a severe mental illness that was extremely dangerous to her children, most centrally to me.

While there have been times throughout the history of our species and places around the globe where children have been and are being despised, neglected and brutalized, I stand on the side of advancements of civilization that recognize children have rights and deserved to be loved, protected and adequately cared for.  I refuse to diminish my recognition of the harm done to me by Mother’s mentally ill psychotic hatred of me just because “plenty of children suffer.”  Especially in my case the contrast between the “have” children and the “have not” child (me) was so profound that it always astounds me that I had no ability to have thoughts or feelings of any kind related to my predicament until I was nearly 30 years old. 

I had never known anything different and neither had my siblings.  Even though I could not consciously notice, comprehend or articulate anything related to these patterns of Mother’s abusive bias for my siblings and against me, her continual anti-Linda mindset, attitudes, feelings and actions HURT me terribly.  Mother’s direct verbal and physical attacks on me were periodic.  Her mental sickness about me was constant.

While I condemn all physical assaults and all verbal attacks against infants and children, I also realistically differentiate levels of harm according to the degree and kind of mental illness present in an abusive parent (caregiver).  What I describe of my childhood with Mildred did not “just” come from any simple form of favoritism, dislike of my “personality,” jealousy by Mother over anyone else’s positive attention toward me, or simply from “bad parenting.”  Something much rarer and profoundly dangerous was going on.  The kind of harm a mother with Borderline Personality Disorder with an all-good all-bad psychotic split mind does, who singles out one child to be targeted as the devil’s child confined to hell, is beyond comprehension or description.

An image comes into my mind about the way we might think overall about the degrees of harm done to little people by culturally assessed “ordinary” abuse all the way through a continuum to the harm done by “psychotic” abuse.  Popular belief might suggest that the level of harm done by what is considered “ordinary” child abuse can be likened to the experience of standing in a long line at a movie theater’s concession stand only to find once the counter is reached that the desired popcorn has been sold out, while the level of harm done by comprehensive psychotic child abuse could be likened to standing in line to enter a holocaust gas chamber. 

Although I do not write of sexual abuse because it is not a part of my experience, I do include it in what I say next about my response to anyone who asks the question, “How could someone do that to a child?”  If harm to an infant or child has been elevated in anyone’s mind to the level of neglect and/or abuses my answer is this:  “All abuse to children is committed because the perpetrator is mentally ill.” 

I recognize that doing to one’s children what has been done to a parent when they were a child  (the statistic is that 65% of parents who were abused do not repeat the abuse with their children although they will likely experience other kinds of complications with their parenting), periodic stress-induced out-of-control eruptions of temper against children, and even harmful parenting practices based on ignorance of developmental stages of children that prevents appropriate responses rather than hurtful ones all could be considered as being due to temporary eruptions of mental illness.  I also recognize the fact that how offspring are treated by any individual, within any family, community, culture, society, nation and species is a direct expression of degrees of health and well-being therein.  I do not recognize any excuse about why harm happens to offspring as being legitimate.  Harm happens to infants and children because we let it.

All harm done to infants and children is unfair, unjust, wrong and in the truest sense of the word, evil.  Caregivers understandably occasionally make mistakes.  Nobody on earth is perfect.  Preventing mistakes, recognizing when they happen, rectifying the harm done in any way possible and improving conditions that could lead to repetition of the mistakes are essential steps in improving conditions for infants and children.  However, in cases where there is deep underlying chronic mental illness far more attention needs to be paid to how such a mental illness affects children involved. 

In some cases, such as I would say my mother’s was children most likely need to be removed to receive adequate care elsewhere.  That our nation’s child protective services are in a pathetic shambles means that we have vast amounts of work to do before we can make the kind of progress many of our infants and children so desperately need us to make on their behalf.  Learning more about what child abuse is and how to recognize it is an important step in the right direction.

°<>°

Placing Memories

There is something very powerful and intense for me about placing memories I have carried for so long – in the case of the one that belongs right here for over 56 years – into their place in time and space within the story of my childhood.  Is this what moving toward closure feels like?  Why can’t I do this without the dread, the struggle, the effort, the work it is taking me to move forward in this book one word at a time? 

Why can’t I breeze through this?  My memories are not new to me.  In the case of this one every time it has reappeared in my thoughts it has come in exactly the same way with exactly the same details in the same order. 

While I know something now as a result of the work I have done up to this point in my writing that I did not know before, I realize that there is more for me to learn and that frightens me.  Which would be the worst part of falling through darkness?  The not knowing where bottom is or when it will be found?  Getting so close to the bottom that it can be sensed as being so close, so much closer, TOO close?  How do I stop fearing that finally stopping the fall is going to end in annihilation? 

For I do fear that so much was so wrong with Mother and so wrong with what she did to me that if I ever knew more than the infinitesimally small amount that I do about my childhood I would disintegrate.  I would disappear.  I would vanish so that no trace of me was left behind.  I fear that I might accidentally learn too much about the truth of my life, that there is a BIG BANG of discovery beyond which – if I should go that far – I will end up where I cannot return from.

Such thoughts and feelings certainly do put trepidation into my writing.  I know the writing itself teaches me things and leads to discoveries.  How much do I want to know about how Mother’s psychotic mind operated?  How can I understand what happened to me if I don’t?  How much can I allow  myself to know about what it was like for me as a small young child to be attacked by a psychotic madwoman of a mother?

How much can I trust myself that if I am still here at 61 no matter what I learn about Mother or about my traumas of my early life I will stay right here?  I am not going anywhere.  Except, temporarily, to get up from this computer yet again to walk away for a little while.

°<>°

Don’t Talk

It does not help someone like me to unravel the mysteries of what was wrong with Mother and of what my reality even from being a very young child was like – as I was unmercifully battered for doing things Mother insisted I had done that never happened anywhere at any time except within the mind of this woman who held all power over everyone in her household – when to this day I have never met a single person I can talk to about this reality.

I live in a culture where subjects considered proper for conversation seem to me to be predominantly trivial, trite and meaningless.  “Take a pill and solve your problems on your own.”  Who wants to talk about anything that matters?  Hollywood icons, sports heroes, latest fashions, new gadgets and gizmos, even stupid gossip about people qualify as appropriate subject matter for social exchange.

Don’t talk about why so many are getting drunk and getting stoned, why relationships don’t last, why 75% of our nation’s youth ages 17-24 are unfit for military duty, why a child is born into poverty every 32 seconds in our nation, why our educational system is falling apart, why multinational corporations are stealing global wealth without taxation or why our politicians are squabbling among themselves like a bunch of chickens fighting over a centipede.

I feel as though I am doing nothing more than writing a message in a bottle to be tossed three, four, five hundred years into the future.  Even then, where will the real books even be?  Is there hope mine will survive that long if I can get them into the collection of the Library of Congress?

Not one single person can I converse with about what I am considering about the demise of Mother’s mind and about what that meant to me.  Never has such a conversation happened for me in my life.  Am I prepared to accept the fact that it probably never will?

°<>°

Vendetta Against Ignorance

The psychotic look of rage upon the face and the sound of it in words as an adult attacks a child is not confined to people with a so-called diagnosable mental illness such as Mother had.  Any reader who recognizes themselves or anyone else in my words needs to STOP this behavior and get help immediately.  It is never OK to abuse infants and children for any reason – ever!  At the same time I recognize how deep-seated the problems can be in an abusive parent’s life, and how inadequate our emotional care services are.

I wrote this paragraph yesterday and was stopped dead in my writing tracks when I looked around even this community I live within and could not think of one stable, caring, competent resource person or place I could unreservedly suggest a parent or a child in need could turn to for any promise of adequate assistance.  I tried to think in broader terms for “people at large” to turn to should they need help with what troubles them in their self and in their life when it comes to meeting their needs to stop harming children.  I found nothing but empty holes where services to truly support families and children should but do not exist.

Why do I continue to wonder why no one noticed what was happening to me when I was a suffering child?  Why do I write believing anything I say will help anyone anywhere in any way?  What is it about me that believes I among billions on this earth knows anything that matters?  What hope have I always carried within me that if the truth was really known about how lovely the inner life of a child is everyone would care enough to make sure nobody ever hurt them ever?

What grownups care enough to clear the path ahead of a growing infant-child so that harmful obstacles do not cause them to trip and fall until somewhere down the road of their life they end up lying on the floor like Mother did in her later years unable to get up?

What macabre culture have we created that chooses shortsightedness over long range considerations about what leads to individual and then societal well-being?  Why do we bother to have children at all if so few even want them?  Are they possessions?  Are they carrion?

Who decides who is who and what do we want for our nation’s future?

What do we consider to be acceptable losses?  What is wrong with us as a society that we would consider the life of any child who, if they reach adulthood having suffered from avoidable harm against them in their critical stages of development will be barred from experiencing the well-being that was their birthright (see CDC ACE study pyramid) and be a candidate for being one of our acceptable losses?

I cannot write to expose the combination of factors within the family I grew up in as they created long-term horrific abuse of me as a child – that not one single person ever noticed with concern – without questioning the gamut of societal sicknesses that allowed Mother to do what she did to me for 18 years.  There is a collusion of uncaring ignorance in our society that fosters the conditions within which harm to infants and children continues to exist.  It is my personal vendetta against that ignorance that motivates me to write my truth.  I will be content if my work furthers the education of someone even if that someone is only me.

°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°<>°

Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment »

++++