Eerie.  That is the feeling that surrounds and fills me as I sit at my computer deciphering and transcribing my mother’s letters that she wrote during the time of my childhood.  The letters came into my hands after her 2002 death.   They were in boxes, stored, moved around, and stored some more for nearly 50 years.  They are still in their original envelopes with post marks, written by my mother to her mother with the request that they be saved for the ‘Alaska homesteading book’ my mother planned to someday write — and didn’t.

There are letters here from my father to my mother as well (many are already posted on pages under MY MOTHER’S ALASKAN HOMESTEADING WRITINGS ), and more will be added as I resume my work on them.  There are also letters written by my grandmother to my mother, but I have a very hard time reading her handwriting and will probably save those to work on last.

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The following words are among the few that I have found so far that directly touch upon the source of the eeriness of my task.

In the PS at the very bottom of this letter June 15, 1957 letter (posted  in *1957 Letters Added (not filed)), these words were written by my mother to my father:

““Out of all bad comes some good” or “Everything is for a reason.”  You know, I believe this – I really do, now.  I also feel washed, cleaned & know I’ll feel more & more that way as time passes.  Darling, the mask is slipping & soon will be gone.  I feel more like the girl you married than I have in a long, long time.  I feel pity & compassion for all the neighbors left on Walnut – fussing, bickering, quarreling, jealous – I want no part of it & they are.  I told Kathy F. they’re like the tigers in black Sambo & soon will all turn to butter.

Darling, we must believe in ourselves & the power of our own conviction, even if in time we’re proven wrong.  There’s so much, so very much I would like to tell you.  but most of all is that we have a million dollars.  No wonder people are inclined to be jealous of what we have & they don’t know anything about.

LOVE, LOVE.

Love for each other, our children & trust in God & love for the good things in life.”

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These words in particular stand closest to being the true words of the woman who was my mother that I have discovered in her letters I have been working with today:

“I also feel washed, cleaned & know I’ll feel more & more that way as time passes.  Darling, the mask is slipping & soon will be gone.”

She is writing about all the people in southern California whom my mother and father counted as their dearest friends before they moved to Alaska.  Even after the move these people were referred to as their ‘California friends’.  Yet in these words as she wrote them in her letter we can see that strange twist of ‘paranoia’ and ‘delusion’ that enabled my parents to really be one another’s co-conspirators as they supported the fable that was our homesteading family.

These people she is referring to are ‘real people’.  I have no reason to believe that any of them ever abused their own children the way my mother abused me.  Nor did they create and maintain a chaotic reign of terror within their homes that caused my siblings to experience a childhood nearly as bad as my own.

If my mother, and in some strange way my father, also, as he came to increasingly participate with my mother in their strange ‘individualism’ (as she also talks about earlier in this same letter), could form a wall and a barrier between themselves and ALL other adults — they could carry on their own bizarre life and lifestyle with impunity and justification.

My mother seemed to believe that she was different from and therefore better than, anyone else she knew.  While she seems to talk at times about her Alaskan acquaintances in a ‘normal’ way, when the letters are read closely enough the daggers appear.

My mother — and my father by association with her — justified their choices and their actions by the rules that pertained only to them in their ‘special, different, unique and individualistic’ world.  They created a universe all their own, one that did not include anyone else but us.

In so many ways the move to Alaska and the chaotic persistent illusion-delusion that the mountain was our ‘home’ basically left us as homeless wanders (even though we always had some roof or another over our heads) without ties to family, friends or neighbors.  Homesteading became the impenetrable ‘blanket’ that covered our family in secrecy and seclusion, that hid the truth of what went on for us as victims within our family, that prevented anyone else from ever knowing the insanity that was our life.

Being ‘Alaskan homesteaders’ became the giant rock under which all the creeping, crawling bugs hid, festering and multiplying out of the light of day, the light of reason, or the light of accountability.  Nobody ever lifted up that rock.  Nobody ever even SAW my mother — the mother behind the mask she is referring to in this snippet from her writings.

Nobody saw her, and nobody stopped my mother.  Homesteading was her perfect cover, keeping even the truth from making its way to her.  There was nothing in our lives but change, chaos, turbulence, trouble, and stress and distress of unimaginable creation.  The homesteading facade was what the public could ‘know’ about our family, though none found us.  Within its fable every difficulty could be accounted for, justified, explained and therefore ‘understood’.

When my mother writes about how their California friends did not ‘understand’ our family’s decision to move to Alaska, nobody had to look at the fact that they could not understand Mildred, period.  While she was, herself, beyond reason, the reason was contained in participation within the fable itself.  The family and the homestead-homesteading could not be disentangled.

And for all the burdens that the ‘Alaskan adventure’ created within our family, those burdens were hiding the worst of all possible worlds, and at the center — so far out of sight that there was no hope of anyone ever finding ME — was Linda.  I appear in a few words in a few lines of a few of her letters.  (I will be highlighting those in my pages at *CONSTRUCTING TIMELINE OF MY CHILDHOOD).

What happened to me was like pressure at the core of what was wrong with my family, wrong with my mother, wrong with my father.  What happened to me was invisible.  I was invisible.  The eeriness of working with my mother’s letters comes from the fact that I am searching for the invisible within her words.  My younger brother says of my own writing that I am working on a forensic autobiography.  He is so correct.

That is what identifying the realities of the crimes of child abuse is all about.  It is about making the invisible visible.  We have to name the invisible crimes.  We have to name the invisible criminals who commit those crimes.  We have to let something appear into visibility that lies hidden behind closed doors, that lies hidden under the great stones all abusive parents use to cover up what they do to their children in private that they would never do to them in the light of public view.

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That is what my mother is describing in the above writing from her letter.  She is letting the mask slip away that she had to keep handy as she interacted with this social group of ‘friends’ before we left for Alaska, my grandmother included.  Once she was ‘out of their sight’, separated from their field of vision and their watchful eye, there was no more possible protection for her children.  The mask was no longer necessary to her, but it had been necessary for us, for me.

We must never forget how devious my mother’s kind of mental illness is — and was for us growing up with her.  Only the most trained eye, the most patient observer, the most skilled assessor of human behavior will ever be able to detect the kinds of lies families such as mine are capable of living.  Our parents were ‘lucky’ in being able to participate in one of the greatest fables of our nation, that of homesteading a frontier piece of land to make a home.

WHAT A JOKE!  What a terrible, tragic, malevolent joke.  When the ‘wool’ can be ‘pulled over’ the public’s eye all manor of insanity is left to torment innocent children and nobody even knows it’s happening.  How do we identify these lies?  They are carefully crafted, as within my family, and run from the light of day.  They take disguises and hide themselves.  We are tricked.  And some of us are tortured.