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Somehow I must think I would be pretentious or audacious to think of myself as a writer – but maybe I am anyway.  If so, words are the tools of a writer’s craft be one a poet or a songwriter or a writer of plays or stories true or imagined.  I am tracking a thought of mine today in between my writing for the book and this must MATTER to me because the use of one of the following words instead of the other makes – to me – a universe of difference.

Hero or victim?  Now, this must be coming from the writer-in-me (obviously, I’m writing this) who ‘says’ to me, “You were never a victim.  For all the terrible abuse your mother did to you, you were NOT a victim.  You were a hero.”

Next thought:  In order to have the LUXURY of being a victim rather than a hero one must be in a place of SAFETY rather than in one of threat, danger and harm.  The VICTIM part comes after-the-fact when there’s somebody there to CARE!  Being a victim does not happen while we are enduring alone.

That would mean that VICTIM is a word other people use to describe something from the OUTSIDE of the tragic-traumatic experience.  It is (probably) NOT a word the one who experiences the abuse ever thinks about – unless somehow someone OUTSIDE of the situation has given this hero the word and the thoughts and feelings that might go with it.

I am traveling back to before I was born in my book-writing process, and although I have made a deal with myself not to discuss what is happening with THAT writing, I wanted to let the writer-in-me have this say about these two words.

I will not be able to go back to any abuse memory from my early life, not even into the memory of a terrible beating and find myself in the midst of those traumas feeling, thinking or acting in ANY WAY like a so-called victim.  I bore what was done to me.  I endured.  I survived.  I was then and still am now A HERO!!

Now – I am safe.  I have people around me who love me and care.  But I have NO ONE, not one single person in my life who perceives me in any way as a ‘victim’.  I like that just fine!

Yet I also know that all infants and children who are being maltreated are being ‘victimized’ – but just as those actions against little ones are done by the big people, so does the word ‘victim’ belong to them.  The little ones who are suffering – and YES there is much suffering — their only choice is to a HERO.

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I have put some careful thought into deciding to write this post considering I might be breaking my own book-writing rule by doing so.  While I am in the process of answering the 19 questions my daughter is feeding to me one at a time I wanted to retain all my ‘inner information’ in reserve, in a reservoir, so that nothing that belongs in the book that is my story will be drained off into some other direction.  Now I have reached a point as I begin to write my response to Question #3 that leaves me unable to move until I DO drain something from that reservoir that I have decided does not belong to the book.

What I need to write about here is more like a log jam that is preventing me from clearing my thoughts enough to proceed with what the book needs.  So I am going to tear apart that log jam, let out what needs to go elsewhere, at the same time that I will then discover if there is anything about these thoughts that has a ‘deeper’ and relevant meaning for my truth that is going into this book.

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Yesterday as I worked in the mud to finish the east side of my adobe-project yard, and just as I finally located the exact spot where I am going to install my new umbrella clothesline so I can dismantle the long lines that are draped across my main walkways, and under which I have had to carefully duck my head each time I walk past their direction, my little just-turned-six year old neighbor girl came over to visit.

As I soaked this chosen spot with water to soften the earth enough that I could begin to dig a hole for the clothesline post this girl, I’ll call her Jay, fiddled around with the plastic sleeve that needs to be settled into the hole so the main pole can slip solidly into it.  Bright green in its pristine newness, the tubular plastic sleeve finally had to be placed into the muddy, slimy, soupy muck in the hole I was digging so I could see how much deeper I had to dig.

“Oh, no!”  Jay changed her voice, speaking for the new green sleeve-tube.  “I am all clean!  Please don’t put me in that hole and make me all dirty!  I will have to go take a shower!”

I explained to her the process I was going through to put up my new clothesline, but she remained completely immersed in her little girl world of what my mother would have called ‘make-believe’.  (A healthy child normally passes through this ‘make-believe’ stage by the age of seven.  My mother never did.  She remained in a twisted version of that stage for the rest of her life.)

“OK,” she finally spoke for the green sleeve.  “You can make me go into that dirty mud.  You can make me stay there.  But I’m never going to like it.”

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As she spoke these words another entirely different train of thought that had been working its way through my mind all day as I worked on my yard flitted again into my mind-sight.  In that image I saw Atlas holding up the world on his shoulders.  I had been thinking before my company arrived about what are called the archetypes that some believe lie underneath all that humanity can be conscious of, that govern behavior as they lie within the stream of ancient, ancient human experience and appear in our psychology.

I had been thinking earlier about the ‘hero’ archetypes in relationship to my childhood with my Borderline abusive mother.  I thought about the first book I ever encountered that finally helped me to ‘name’ what had been so wrong with my mother:

Understanding the Borderline Mother: Helping Her Children Transcend the Intense, Unpredictable, and Volatile Relationship – Paperback (July 1, 2002) by Christine Ann Lawson

This morning I pulled that same volume from my bookshelf and noticed the many sticky-note tags I placed on so many of its pages seven years ago when I read it.  I flipped through its pages and saw all the underlining I had done then, all the stars I had drawn beside certain passages, the notes I had written in the margin.  Yes, this book had been a milestone marker along my latest journey of healing, but I also know I will never bother to read that book again.

And, yes, that book does write about Borderline mothers by defining various archetypal patterns they can act out in their lives.

Yet what I was thinking yesterday about Atlas being an unnamed hero who was left to carry the weight of the world upon his shoulders – and what combined with hearing how Jay was processing from her child’s point of view what I was processing in my adult view of putting in a clothesline pole – was that I have never seen anyone write about how the archetypes that might govern the experience of the mind of a young child are probably (they have to be!) so much different than the ones that govern adult ones.

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My mother didn’t wake up suddenly one morning in adulthood and simply ‘become’ a Borderline.  The malaise that swallowed up my mother didn’t simply one day cast its shadow over her and stay there following her around for the rest of her life.  What became of my mother long past her childhood was directly a result of malevolent experiences she had had long before she was even Jay’s age.

And here was Jay before me yesterday living out a life stage that I know is the same one in which the final throes of trying to make sense out of the universe she had been born into pushed her into what might be called a ‘pre-Borderline’ condition that was destined to eventually destroy her.

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Here I begin to reach the point in my own thoughts were the book information is intersecting the thoughts I am writing here.  I searched Google for ‘archetype women hero’ and found a page that lists what are considered to be these images especially as they are presented in ‘literature’.

From the Desk of Tami Cowden:  The Women We Want to Be – The Eight Female Archetypes

There I was yesterday arguing in my thoughts, down on my knees in the mud shoving cement into the hole to hold up the now-filthy sleeve that will hold up my new clothesline, as I concluded, “There is something WRONG with this picture.  I know there is.  There is nothing in these existing descriptions about women and archetypes that accurately describes the experience of abused children – who survive.”

There IS another kind of hero (be it female or male).  This hero does not fight battles, does not have any but one single motive:  To endure.

In more ordinary circumstances endurance is no big deal, but in the midst of horrific overwhelming traumatic circumstances ANYONE of ANY age can (hopefully) do this one main thing:  Endure.

The image I had come to me of Atlas holding up the world FELT to me to describe both what my mother did and what I did.  Only as severe early abuse and trauma survivors (ANY unresolved trauma survivors) we hold the burden of the world of trauma INSIDE our body, not on our shoulder.  The trauma builds our body-brain at the same time it builds itself into us.  We cannot put this burden down.

I found an interesting website last night in which the author describes what the name, Atlas, means:

“The name of Atlas indeed derives from the Greek radix tla meaning “to bear”, preceded by the negative affix a, meaning “not”. Hence, the name of Atlas literally means “the one unable to bear [the skies]”. Such is the reason why Atlas (and other Titans like himself) are often portrayed with weak, serpentine legs.” – Copyright ©1997-2005 Arysio Nunes dos Santos. All Rights reserved. Please click here for more information about the copyright of this page and website. – “The true history of Atlantis” by Prof Arysio Nunes dos Santos online

And from the website answers.com:

Now THIS feels accurate.  Thinking about how Jay processed her experience and about how I was processing my experience of putting in a clothesline pole in mud and cement, and thinking about how my mother processed her life of trauma that happened to her as a child, and thinking about my own self (as the book is describing) as I went through my own early traumas of abuse, I recognized that VICTIM – as a word and as an archetype – IS NOT THE RIGHT IMAGE.

‘Victim’ is a grown-up word.  It has no place in the world or vocabulary or thoughts of a child.  What infants do, what young children do is ENDURE while they bear a burden of trauma that is NOT their own.  The little ones HAVE NO CHOICE but to endure.  ‘Victim’ then becomes (to me) an arrogant, assaultive and insultive word that is a completely inaccurate word to apply to the reality of very young abuse survivors.

Early caregivers of infants and young children are supposed to buffer their offspring from adult trauma.  When this does not happen, and when those same adults are in fact harming and hurting these little ones, the young one is left in a place where nothing can change what happens to them – and they know it.  Certainly I knew it as I took my first breath.

These little ones – myself and my mother included – are left to bear the burden, endure, and survive.  That to me is a different kind of hero than the ones sorted and filtered into the descriptions of ‘hero’ I found in either of the two places I mentioned above.  Little ones live in a different world than adults do.  Jay does.  My mother did.  I did.

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Now, more than this I cannot write because I have made my attempt at clearing the log-jam in my thinking so I can move forward in writing my response to Question #3.  I will only provide a simple linking bridge to that ‘other side’ where that other writing is going on.

All the circumstances of my mother’s life intersected during the time she was in labor with me.  She suddenly, in the midst of that current-moment experience simple BROKE.  The burden she had carried all of her life became at the moment her psychosis about me was born MORE than she could bear.  How ironic to me in some ways that it was as I, her firstborn daughter was coming into the world (or even exactly as I was born and she was told ‘It’s a girl’) that my mother let go of HER burden and put it onto me.

I then became the next generation of Atlas hero.

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NOTE:  I discovered another interesting pattern in Jay’s current developmental stage of thinking yesterday.  She has watched me and helped me all the way through the work to build the adobe chicken coop and pen.  She saw these six chicks from the day I brought them home.  They are still young at one month old, and yesterday as I took her into the pen to sit with me and watch them she asked me, “When are you going to get the big chickens that will lay the eggs?  I want to see THOSE chickens!”

As hard as I tried to explain to her that these six young birds are the SAME ones that will grow up and lay the eggs she could not comprehend what I was telling her.  I tried to explain that they are like she is, and that she will grow up to be an adult.  I explained to her that every adult was once a baby and a child like she is now and that they grew up just like these young birds will.

She ABSOLUTELY did not understand what I was telling her because she COULD NOT.

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