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

WARNING – THIS POST MAY TRIGGER:  Anyone with a history of sexual abuse, especially of childhood sexual abuse, may find this post extremely difficult to read.  Please take care of yourself and either don’t proceed one word farther in your reading here today, or be certain that you have the safe and secure support that you need to keep yourself safe if you CHOOSE to read further!

++++

First of all, I need to say that I do not in any way WANT to be here at this moment with my fingers on this keyboard writing the words that evidently need to be written here today.  I want to say, “This isn’t MY story!  It has nothing to do with me.  These words that want to be said, that want to be written THIS morning do not even belong to me.”

I want to run away, go outside, mix up my vinegar-water mix and pour it on my rose plants.  I want to don my dirty work clothes, put on my sunscreen, sweat band and broad rimmed straw hat and go chop the dirt away from where I know the next step has to be laid in my adobe walkway.

Yet at the same time I have to admit to myself that the story that wants to be told this morning is NOT going to go away.  It is not going to vanish.  I cannot banish this story outside of the boundaries of my yard, my house, or even out of my thoughts.  The words that must belong to this story are sticking in my mind like flies on flypaper.  The ONLY way I can stop what is growing into an inner cauldron of madness within me is to do one thing – and one thing only.  I have to write this story down.

I have very little confidence that I can tell this story right or that I can tell it well.  I think some stories don’t give a ‘rat’s ass’ about how WELL they are told.  They just demand that they be told by someone, sometime – and much too late is better than never.

All this being said, I know what I have to do next.  I have to launch into the progression of words that belong to a story that did not start with me.  Family stories.  Some family stories are easily told.  They flow along throughout the family like warm butter spreads itself across a freshly toasted piece of good bread.

Other stories, like this one, are so far beyond even being a story that its words are lodged within trauma like boulders embedded in the sides of a steep cliff’s side.  If I move even ONE SINGLE boulder from that cliff, if I begin this story with even one single world, I cannot tell what will happen next.

At the same time I believe that nothing at all is going to happen next except that I, personally, am going to be free from the talons of this story that have me grasped so firmly that I cannot get free.  I cannot move forward in time with my own thoughts, my own feelings, my own healing.  A story with claws – that’s what this one feels like.  And for some reason that I will probably not understand in my lifetime this story has found its way to ME for its telling and will not let go until I do my best to set this story – along with the words that belong to it – free.

++++

In 1989 my father began to lose his vision.  The world began to look like it was on the other side of a foggy shower door.  The result of medical examination of his condition revealed that he had a pituitary tumor that was the size of an egg.  My father did not seek any advice from his grown children who would have made certain that he got himself out of Alaska and down at least to Seattle for surgery.  He simply called us all on a Sunday evening to tell us that he was going under the knife on the morning of the next day.

My father assured us that the surgery was not going to be “any big deal.”  By the surgery was finished and my father did not then come out of intensive care ‘on time’, we all knew that something had gone terribly wrong.  After a week without any improvements, knowing my father was lying incontinent, unable to talk, not knowing who or where he was and tied to his bed, I flew from Albuquerque, New Mexico to Anchorage, Alaska to see what in the world was going on.

My father had already divorced my mother by this time, but he still financially and emotionally supported her.  My mother went even more haywire after my father’s surgery than she had ever been before.  My father had – obviously – absolutely NOTHING to give her and my mother went into a tailspin that she never pulled out from.

All I know is that during the first week after my father’s surgery the hospital and my youngest brother who lived in Anchorage were about ready to forbid my mother from entering the hospital or from ‘seeing’ my father.  One evening while I was at my father’s bedside my mother sailed into his room with words tumbling out of her mouth that I did not hear.  I ignored her, and once she saw that I was there she turned around and nearly raced from the room.

I had already ‘disowned’ my mother two years prior to this time.  This encounter with my mother was the only one I ever had after I had written that ‘disowning mother’ letter to her.  My attention was on my father.

The rest of the story that belongs to my father’s condition and what happened to him next does not belong in this story except to say that eventually the family was able to get my father out of Alaska where there were no brain trauma rehabilitation services down to Albuquerque into a new advanced facility that was able to help him improve.  What had happened to my father, primarily as a result of him not ‘bothering’ to tell the brain surgeons that he had a Factor K bleeding disorder, was that he had suffered massive brain hemorrhaging from which he could not, and did not fully recover over the remaining ten years of his life.

My father lost all his long term memory.  He could not remember his children.  He could not remember my mother.  He could not remember divorcing her.  He could not remember his career, or homesteading, or his childhood.  What my father did recover was enough of his brain to know that he was missing all of his history, and it further broke my father’s heart.

++++

After six months in the brain trauma rehabilitation hospital my father was released to my sister and her husband’s care.  They built him a large bedroom inside of their house and brought him there to tend to him.  It was this year, exactly Christmas Eve of 1991 that the rest of this story enters into this one.

Several years after this date in 1991 one of my two younger sisters, the one who had cared for my father until he was able to move into an assisted living housing arrangement, told me about the telephone call my mother had made to her on this Christmas Eve.  She also told me that Mother had told her to keep this call secret from her sisters.  Of course not long after this call both of my sisters talked to one another and found out that Mother had called both of them – told them both the same story – and told both of them that Mother said to each, “I am only telling YOU this, please do not tell your sisters.”

My mother did not include me in this dark and troubling telephone circuit BECAUSE I had cut off all contact with her.  My sisters, however, eventually did tell me about these calls.  I was completely unprepared for the information these calls contained to appear within my range of attention this week.  I had simply asked one of my sisters the other night if she had any idea what work outside of the home my mother had done during the summer of 1956.

While I was transcribing my mother and father’s June and July 1957 letters that they wrote to one another during the time my mother was still in Los Angeles and my father was In Alaska working his new job and searching for a rental we could all live in so that his family could join him, I encountered two references in my mother’s writings to this summer of 1956.

The first time it appeared as ‘that terrible summer of 1956’ with no clue what my mother was talking about.  Many letters later another reference appeared to the summer of 1956 as she mentioned that she had been working outside of the home.  I discovered no further mention of what had happened that summer to make it so ‘terrible’, so I decided to ask my sister if she remembers ever having heard anything about it.

I was NOT prepared for what she told me when I asked her this question.  The information my sister included in her answer to me brought back everything about the Christmas Eve 1991 telephone calls my mother had made to both of my sisters.

++++

Please remember the warning I posted above about the content of what follows next!

This summer of 1956 my mother evidently had taken an evening job (probably retail though none of us actually know what job it was) and left my father to care for his four children – with an age range of a small baby daughter in diapers turning one, another daughter turning three, me turning five, my brother turning six.  According to what my mother told both of my sisters on during her telephone call Christmas Eve 1991 was that during this time my father sexually molested all of his daughters.

My mother said that once she had somehow ‘found out’ (and my sisters have no memory of what she said about this discovery) my father told her that until he married my mother he ‘had never seen a girl’s private areas’, and now he was a very lucky man because he had four girls of his own he could look at and touch any time that he wanted to.

According to my mother he had told her that he had read in books that there are cultures in the world where it is the father’s responsibility to sexually initiate his daughters, and that he believed he had the right to do so himself with his daughters.

I don’t remember what details past this information my sisters told me my mother included in my mother’s telephone call twenty years ago.  What I do know is that I was not prepared to have this topic return with full force as a response to my simple question about what outside work my mother may have done on this ‘terrible summer of 1956’.

I do know that whenever it was that my sisters told me nearly twenty years ago about what my terribly distraught mother had told them in 1991 I could not process this information.  I had absolutely no way to understand any of the implications contained in my mother’s words.  The story has come back full circle now, and I had no way even now to consider any meaning related to mother’s story without talking with both of my sisters about it – again.

It is at this point that I was stuck yesterday as I spent the day digging my way down another level in my adobe walkway project.  It is at this point I am still stuck this morning as I write these words.

Both of my sisters unequivocally believe that whatever my mother’s intentions were when she called them in 1991, the story she conveyed about our father sexually molesting his daughters is not true.  Yesterday I realized that this point alone is tied to patterns of ‘false memory retrieval’.  We most often hear of victims who supposedly fabricate early abuse memories that are not true.  In this case it appears that my mother was the one who fabricated such a ‘false memory’ about her own children and their father.

At the same time while I was out slinging mud yesterday I realized that what my sisters both said in common was that our mother was trying to destroy the love and affection that her daughters had for their father.  At this time, because of the terrible consequences of my father’s permanent brain damage that had resulted from his tumor surgery, my father was completely dependent upon my sister for his care, which meant that my mother had to now adjust to two critical attachment relationship changes.

Obviously she had now completely, absolutely and forever lost her connection to my father in whatever sustaining-Mildred role he had continued to fill even after he had divorced her.  In addition, my mother might have seen that her relationship with her ‘favorite blessed God child’ was also being threatened as my sister now assumed complete care of my father.  With her disorganized-disoriented (dissociative) insecure attachment disorder, my Mother was deteriorating quickly during this time.

But what finally came clear to me as I dug down my next level of hardened clay in my yard alteration and excavation project was that while both of my sisters knew AT THE INSTANT that our mother’s words had spewed out of her mouth (yes like toxic vomit) in 1991, that they were not true, were a wild fabrication and were a lie.  They KNEW our father well enough and had strong enough bonds of trust and affection with him that they could at the same time KNOW our mother was wrong.

Unlike my sisters, I carry doubt.  I include am stuck carrying words like ‘maybe’ and ‘perhaps’ and ‘could he have’ and ‘I wonder’ inside of me attached to this entire circumstance with Mother’s story.  I do not KNOW inside of me that her words were a fabrication and DID NOT happen.

On this level, whether my father molested his daughters or not is not what matters most to me.  What matters to me most is that my father never bothered to form any kind of an attachment relationship with me like he did to his other five children.  While my sisters will still say that the relationship they had with our father never amounted to much more than a breadcrumb trail of bonding, at least they knew with certainty that our father was not the kind of man who could have POSSIBLY done what my mother reported he had done.

This leaves me today being mad as hell at my father that he never chose, for whatever reasons, to have a relationship with me.  True, my mother made every effort to influence what my father thought about me and felt toward me, but HE did make his own choices.  It seems such an almost ironical twist concerning the facts of my childhood that it would bother me this much today that HE is responsible for having created such a nonexistent relationship with me that I cannot eliminate the doubts about his treatment of his daughters the way that my sisters easily can.

It is logical and reasonable to believe that our mother WAS trying to erode the benevolent love, affection and trust my sisters felt toward our father.  I am hit full force in consideration of this whole topic with a blatantly clear fact that I was never given the opportunity to have this ‘benevolent love, affection and trust’ toward Father than my sisters not only had (and still have even though he died 10 years ago), but have always taken for granted.

This realization about what bothers me most about the whole topic is not about the sexual abuse – real or imagined.  It is about ‘something else’ that hurt me far more than I can imagine anything he MIGHT have done to me sexually when I was a little girl could have.  He participated in Mother’s reign of terror and trauma against me – and he did not care ONE SINGLE BIT about me.  THAT is a fact, not a fantasy.

++++

Which now leads me to mention that I strongly suspect that the ‘story’ our mother told my sisters about our father is about something that PROBABLY really did happen to my mother when she was a little girl.  If my mother was molested by some male or males in her family (or outside it) when she was a little girl, the closest she ever came to knowing about this truth probably happened as a projection of her mind in the form of what she told my sisters in her 1991 telephone calls.  (I have to take my sisters’ word that our Father ‘did not do it’ and ‘could not possibly have done it’ because I have no foundation of trust within me concerning him that could possibly help me to know this ‘fact’.)

If my mother was sexually molested as a small child, which I believe she was, those experiences would have directly influenced the development of the Borderline Personality Disorder that she suffered with for the rest of her life.  That my mother included specifics of not only Father looking at his daughter’s genital area but also of touching and fondling suggests to me that my mother DID have some very real personal experience with some pedophile in her life.  Who?  When?  Where?  How?  These are all questions that nobody will EVER have the answers to.

But given the old saying, “Where’s there’s smoke there’s fire,” I do not believe that any story that is ever told within a family that contains suggestion of infant-child sexual abuse can be ignored.  Somewhere within the whole gigantic mess that was my mother’s brain-mind-life, something terrible had happened to her.  For some reason, if it is only to state this single point in my writing today, The Family Story has demanded that I write it.

Now I ask for the rest of the day today may The Family Story at least leave me in peace.    I may not have told this story right, I may not have told this story well, but at least I HAVE told it.

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