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There are very few of my mother’s letters for 1964 – I guess they disappeared somewhere over the years. This is the year she found herself (at 39) pregnant with her sixth and last child.
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These three letters my grandmother wrote to my mother have been stored in the same envelope together for over 45 years. The first one was written on the day that turned out to be the great Good Friday super earthquake, the Alaskan earthquake of March 27, 1964. In this letter grandmother talks about her own professional work including her writing, and about how she was going to type-transcribe my mother’s homesteading letters for her — a job that was not done — until now, these 45+ years later by me.
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The second letter was written March 28, 1964 the day after the earthquake. Grandmother has heard nothing from us, and has no idea what is going on with the people she loves. In this day of internet, twitter and cell phones most younger people cannot understand what it might be like to not be able to instantly connect with loved ones when wanted or needed. My grandmother had no way to know if we were dead or alive when she wrote this letter.
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Again, in this third letter written on Easter Sunday after the earthquake, grandmother has still not heard from us and knows nothing. I can’t imagine how difficult that must have been for her! I know many, many other families divided by miles similarly shared my grandmother’s thoughts and feelings on this day.
In this letter grandmother writes:
“I’ll try to be good and sensible. But tell me what you want me to do from here – dear ones. I always knew I loved you heaps and heaps – but never knew how much until now!”
She says she saved her sanity while she waited for word from us by cleaning the kitchen — what do men do in place of cleaning when they are hyper-concerned, worried or just plain MAD?
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My mother hated my father’s parents, and I don’t know why. This is the letter they sent to dad and mom after the earthquake as they, too, were worried and without word of us:
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Here is my own story of the Alaskan Earthquake — the March 27, 1964 day that my first period came in the middle of —
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This link (below the scan) is to my transcription of my mother’s story of the earthquake. I am including here a scan of what she wrote about finding her children O.K. at the baby sitter’s house where she had left us before she and dad headed into Anchorage for a dinner out – which is where they were when the quake happened.
This is what I call the “perfect chink” in my mother’s borderline story of her life. It is the hole in the wall of her nearly perfect facade she presents of herself in her letters and writings.
It is reminiscent of the Medea story, a play written by Euripides and first performed in 431 B.C., about a mad woman mother, who sounds just like a severe Borderline, who killed all her children in the house with a massive butcher knife while they screamed for help. Their father and the listening public, standing outside, did nothing to stop her.
This, to me, shows the truth behind her Borderline reality lies:
I feel so heavy and so sad after writing this post today, as if the weight of 2,500 years is in my heart. What Euripides recognized and wrote about all those many, many hundreds of years ago happened to me, happened to so many people. Maybe not the literal, physical butchering, but certainly the devastation of a childhood and of a self. Yet the diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder is today overused and underused and misapplied — and today it seems that absolutely nobody even cares.
So, the victims of these Borderlines either survive or they don’t. Yet how is it that I can so clearly connect the story of my life, of my mother’s life to Euripides’ ancient story? It seems so clear to me, but this is not a battle we survivors can fight alone. It makes us heavy, sad and so incredibly tired.
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INFORMATION LINKS ON BORDERLINE PERSONALITY DISORDER:
BPD on the Internet
Learn more about how to navigate the world of BPD on the web.
The Quick List – Books on BPD to Get You Started
If you don’t have time to do the research and are overwhelmed by the shear number of choices, check out this quick list of recommended books. These can get your library started.
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THIS FROM:
Prevent Child Abuse New York Blog
|
The Future of Children: Focus on Child Abuse and Neglect
Posted: 12 Oct 2009 03:26 AM PDT
The latest issue of The Future of Children focuses on child abuse prevention. Contributors to the volume present the best available research on policies and programs designed to prevent maltreatment. They examine the gradual—and still partial—shift in the field of child maltreatment toward a “prevention perspective” and explore how insights into the risk factors for maltreatment can help target prevention efforts to the most vulnerable children and families.
They assess whether a range of specific programs, such as community-wide interventions, parenting programs, home-visiting programs, treatment programs for parents with drug and alcohol problems, and school-based educational programs on sexual abuse, can prevent maltreatment. They also explore how CPS agencies, traditionally seen as protecting maltreated children from further abuse and neglect, might take a more active role in prevention.
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1958 – Old Chugiak High School – John went to elementary in this building
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*1959 – April Fool’s Day – Gray trailer with Jeep pickup parked at Pollard’s
*1959 – Dad (looks like Steve), Cindy and John on “Castle Rock” on Homestead
*1960 (ish) – Building the Second Mountain Homestead Road
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*1961 Dad and Baby David (on changing table)
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*1963 – August – Chevrolet Station Wagon and David – trip to Santa Fe, New Mexico
*1963 – October – trip back from Santa Fe – Dad at Grand Canyon
*1966 – February – Clearing Second Fields – last 5 acres
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Mentoring–from the Greek word meaning enduring-
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I am thinking this morning about my mother’s attitudes about women coupled with her own self imposed isolation. She complained about being lonely at the same time she told her mother things like what I find in her March 9, 1964 letter as I try to decipher what it is she might really have been saying here:
March 9, 1964
“P.T.A., which I never attend when up here – and I detest groups of women anyways! is putting on a play and wants me to sell ads in program so I said O.K. as couldn’t refuse.
Am supposed to go see about it – at Mauldin’s (ugh) and Thomas’ – Darn.
[ME: How could she have any friends with this attitude?]
Oh Mom, I realize this year life is so short – I am getting grey streaks – no white in my hair! What’s life all about? I don’t enjoy it the way I once did – I feel such a loss! Why?
I try so hard to get enthusiastic but I can’t.
I’m lonely for someone to talk and bubble with.
Bill works nites here and is so quiet and un-bubbly. He knows I’m different and doesn’t seem to know what to do about it. How can I tell him? I’ve tried.
[ME: Dad worked days at a professional civil engineering job, had incredibly long and difficult commutes, and worked after he got home hauling water from the creek, plowing roads, repairing the tractor, cutting and hauling firewood, running errands, transporting children back and forth to school – – – ]
David is so dear but sometimes I tire of him and Laila is a nice neighbor but Mom, I’ve seen too much of her. I wanted those classes Oh Mom, I need to be part of the world after 15 years.”
[Me: David turned three two weeks after this letter was written, and was no longer a baby. As I’ve described in my previous writings, once my mother’s children, her ‘imaginary friends’ outgrew their allowed baby-doll status, my mother had increasing difficulties in getting her needs met through them. In fact, she had another baby 11 months after this letter was written.]
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I think about how my mother’s ‘time’ was before so-called ‘women’s liberation. I think about how she was descended from a mother who was educated with her masters degree in 1918, from a grandmother who was highly self-educated and while did not work to support herself or her family, owned her own property that she ‘managed’. I also think about my mother’s mental illness as I come to understand that it permeated every aspect of her mind and of her life and limited her ability to live a happy, healthy and fulfilling life in every dimension, including friendships.
I think about how my mother did not know what a person really was, and could therefore not ever participate wholly in friendships of any kind. In this March 9, 1963 letter mother is alluding to taking a university class as if it would have provided her with her ONLY possibility for getting her social needs met. Yet these ‘classes’ were really an unknown for my mother, something she could dream and fantasize about because they were NOT a part of her reality in any other way.
Yet every time something ACTUALLY became real in my mother’s life, she suffered from disillusionment and disappointment. She was a master at fault finding with others. That was a part of her disability, of her mental illness. As long as her perceived opportunities to have her social needs met remained invisibly ‘out there’ – rather than within the very real opportunity she had to make friends and to socialize with the real people in her life – she could keep the invisible not real people in her imagination as hoped-for ‘imaginary friends’ — and evidently ‘bubbly’ ones at that.
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I had no frame of reference growing up from which to understand that my mother’s mind was sick. Looking back, it’s not only what my mother did do to me that was a problem, it was also what she did not do. One of those ‘not do’ things is that she never showed me, or any of my siblings, how to have genuine nurturing caring supportive friendships with other adults – particularly with women.
Fortunately I was able to overcome my biases about ‘hating women’ fairly early in my adulthood so that I have several long term friendships even today. But I still do suffer from something very subtle that my mother could not show me: How to find and use a mentor, particularly a female one. I’m not even sure that I could define for myself today what I think a mentor is, or what a mentor would do, or what I could gain from having one. I only know that I am missing one in my life.
I don’t think there would be the same kind of mutual reliance or give-and-take between a mentor and ‘mentee’ as there is between friends. I would want my mentor to be so clearly, strongly and firmly walking ahead of me in her own chosen path that she would never need me to further her own life. Yet perhaps my thinking about the matter of mentorship is all mixed up with what having a mother would have meant to me – because I never really had one.
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What a novel thought it is for me that parents should mentor their children. Certainly I am old enough now that my parents are naturally dead. But I will never NOT suffer from the deprivations from my childhood – until and unless I can truly recognize and make up for some of them.
So, at present, I simply invented a mentor. I found two beautiful black and white full page magazine pictures of Meryl Streep. I bought two $6 black frames and now have Meryl’s pictures hanging on my wall. When I have a question, I simply ask myself, “What might Meryl do? What might Meryl think? Would Meryl tolerate this?” I don’t, of course, have any real idea what the answers to my questions would REALLY be, and it doesn’t matter, because Meryl is my imaginary mentor!
It has certainly been easier for me to make real friends in my life than it has been to find a real mentor for myself. Just having Imaginary Mentor Meryl Streep in this role in my life helps me take small steps forward in my thinking toward what I believe is a more positive direction in my life, one question at a time. This might seem silly, but it helps me – and I know there’s really nothing silly about that.
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Borderline Personality From The Inside Out
My parents left me like a rudderless ship. I don’t like that feeling!
“Mentor: Someone whose hindsight can become your foresight”
My mother’s brain didn’t work right! She had no properly functioning foresight, middle sight or hindsight! She didn’t even have mindsight! So she certainly could not see me, could not see what I needed – and could not provide it.
It’s up to me to figure out what I need — and then to find ways to get those needs met, even with an imaginary mentor!
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The transcription of the 1963 letters is complete:
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The saga continues. Dr. Allan Schore writes in great detail about how patterns of rupture and repair are built into an infant’s developing brain — either under optimal conditions or under malevolent ones. Nobody can ever be completely ‘in synch’ with others all of the time. Ruptures are to be expected. It is critical that healthy patterns of repairing these ruptures get built into the new brain through safe and secure early care giver interactions.
Without healthy, safe and securely attached rupture and repair patterns, insecure attachment patterns will predominantly ‘rule’ the brain — and a person’s resulting actions. The dominant patters will be of rupture without hope of repair. Humans do not do well with that scenario, and thus adapt as they find ways to accomplish the needed repair.
I DO believe that my parents were doing the best that they could do with one another — given what they knew and what they had to work with. This letter gives us some clues about how the ‘repair after rupture’ part of their relationship worked.
*1963 – September 9 – Mother’s “repair” response letter to dad
In context:
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Please don’t rush by the active link I put up there in the post! This link leads to important insecure attachment information:
patterns of rupture and repair
This information describes how in early infant-caregiver interactions, the infant is never the one who causes the rupture. It is always the caregiver, and it is vitally important that the one who causes an infant-caregiver rupture is the one who repairs it. Once an infant can move around in the world by itself some distance from its caregiver, rupture and repair patterns already built into the brain begin to expand their affects — and these expanded patterns begin to build what we can call the
The increasing complexity of the brain-mind and nervous system are fundamentally tied into how the rupture-repair patterns were established in early infant development, and continue to be ‘directed’ by information the growing infant-child receives throughout the ‘shame reaction’ stage of early human development. As this new stage of mobilization within the wider world is safely and securely negotiated with others, what our body-brain knows about rupture and repair can be expanded to include our every more increasingly complex interactions between ourselves and other members of our social species. — see
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(This letter also posted: *1963 – September 4 – Letter from dad to mother)
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Hang onto your hat, the top’s down and we’re going for a ride……
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This letter is mother’s (to me, shocking) response to dad’s long (to me, thoughtful and honest) letter of —*1963 – September 3 – Dad’s Letter to Mother While the Rest of Us Are In New Mexico. Here is an excellent opportunity to look at the pitiful and destructive dynamics in my parents’ relationship. This is a rare letter because in it she is honest about how she felt both about her mother and my father — and neither honesty nor the truth was my mother’s strong suit in these hundreds of letters of hers I am transcribing.
This letter shows the kind of ‘switching’ that my mother would do, and shows how, even on pieces of paper with a pen as a weapon she would work herself up into a rage filled frenzy. The best thing for us children would have been — a long time prior to when this letter was written — for our parents to have chosen a place for us to live in so we could get on with some semblance of growing up while having our needs met.
We were growing up anyway. *1963 – Trip to Santa Fe – Here at Grand Canyon – mom and kids It was not OUR choice for five of us plus my mother to run over two thousand miles away from my father, or to be jammed into a tiny motel room in a strange town, to start school late in the year, to have no certainty about what was going to happen next in our lives. And as much as any of us children might have loved the homestead, it was not our biggest need to have ourselves dragged back there as pawns in my mother’s sick, distorted ‘mind games’ with my father.
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Another factor that is of course not mentioned in these letters flying back and forth between my parents is the fact that we had lost what might as well have been another member of our family — the log house. It had been sold. In order for massive ‘trauma drama’ to be enacted within a family, there must be a stage and a setting. The dynamics of my mother’s chaos worked prior to this time with three main settings: the log house in Eagle River, the homestead, and the Panoramic View Apartments in Anchorage. She had lost the log house, and that fact — like a child growing up and leaving the family — changed how mother’s, and hence our drama was to play itself out after this time.
(For background on the truth of mother’s actions during the year prior to the time this letter was written in 1963, read particularly her late summer, fall and winter letters here: *1962 – MOTHER’S LETTERS and the letters *1963 – Mother’s Letters written prior to our leaving Alaska in August of 1963)
In this September 6, 1963 letter she tells dad:
“I don’t mind if we don’t live there this winter as it isn’t our fault but I’m not the one for you if you feel we should buy a house. I can’t return under such circumstances. I simply can’t. I know I’ll yell, scream and fuss again and I won’t….Bill if we don’t live on the homestead I don’t want to live in Alaska with you.”
It seems clear to me from letters months and years prior to this that it has always been mother who orchestrated the moves off the mountain and Dad simply obliged her.
From my point of view, certainly toward the second half of this letter, mother is writing ‘crazy-talk’! She tells him,
“But I don’t, and won’t deliver ultimatums. You must feel it’s right. I can’t build my life or our children’s lives elsewhere and if I live there I must depend on you to build our home and work side by side….I’m convinced – always have been – and you’re not!!”
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Please follow this link to read
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In a letter September 5, 1963 she stated about the opposite of her letter 1 day later:
“You’ll know what you want to do after your trip – live there now or next summer. I don’t care.
I want you – I love you – and will work out our problems together.
I am absolutely lost without you!!
Write soon and often. Your ever loving wife, Mildred -”
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This September 3, 1963 letter is — of course — a private one my father wrote to my mother just after she and we kids arrived in Santa Fe, New Mexico while he stayed in Alaska and worked. It describes that immediately after they received title to 120 acres of the homestead, they mortgaged it.
This letter is telling because it describes my father’s thoughts as they parallel all the confused, “mixed up” statements my mother makes in her ongoing letters. He is her husband. He appears to participate with her in all of it. My father writes in this letter about the homestead, more than four years after they first moved onto it: “But after all the wondering, worrying, fretting, back-and-forthing, this is it! Either that’s our home or it isn’t, and now’s the time to decide.”
Reading this letter does not help me one single bit in understanding my father! That disappoints me, but it’s a fact. Their marriage was none of my business. The decisions they came up with over time directly affected all of their children, as any parental decision is likely to do. But here I feel as if I am still trying to peer though a closed door without a window to see anything about what’s really going on past it — no different now than if I was trying to understand their world when I was a child myself (though it certainly never occurred to me to think about trying to).
How does one judge ‘normal’ or ‘ordinary’? Even to me now their problems seem so strangely proportioned. They are not talking about what color to paint the house they’ve been living in for 20 years here. It seems that chaos was so ‘ordinary’ in our lives that nobody, certainly not my parents, ever noticed they were in the thick of it. Perhaps it’s like thinking that living in the center of a tornado was normal. Our family reality just WAS, without question, in part because there never was any other reality visible within our world to compare our version of life against.
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This letter belonged to a private conversation between my parents. The contents of it related to decisions that of course affected all of their children. Yet, 46 years after it was written I still feel like a voyeur reading it, let alone transcribing it, let alone publishing it here on the world wide web. Obviously it survived. Obviously it somehow found its way into my house, into my hands, onto this clipboard of mine sitting here beside my computer at this moment.
But I ask myself the questions, “What is your purpose in doing this, Linda? What do you hope to learn, think you might be able to come to understand about your parents, about their thinking, about their relationship, about the way they made their decisions together — and about how they observed their lives separately and then combined their two separate selves to create a marriage and hence created THE LIFE of their children?”
Do I see in this letter, for example, any of the mental, emotional, verbal and psychological abuse I suspect — no, I KNOW — went on with my mother as perpetrator and my father as victim — during my childhood? It seems that they so shared their reality that there wasn’t a separate ‘her’ and a separate ‘him’. I could say that was ‘ordinary’, but I also know long after I left home my father divorced my mother after staying with her for more than 30 years.
Was my father such a ‘giving’ man and such a ‘giving in’ man that he simply found a way to let her push him, push at him, for all those years and he just kept moving in whatever direction the force of her force — forced him?
Reading my father’s letters leaves me feeling as if I am standing dangerously close to an erupting volcano. I am completely cloaked with soot and ashes. I see the roiling lava swiftly approaching me where I stand. Yet my feet are so fixed in place that I cannot move to safety, even if I had the thought to do so.
The air becomes so dark with smoke that I can no longer see my hands in front of my face. I hear a deafening roar, and a cracking, breaking sound. The earth begins to quake beneath my feet and I crumple to the ground and I cannot get up.
Unlike my mother in her childhood story of a city devoured by flames, I am completely alone. My only hope is that my father will love me enough to save me. He never did.
This September 3, 1963 letter shows me why he never could. It unsettles me to realize that my father was absent to me because he absolutely shared my mother’s reality. There was no ‘other dad’. Just this one. He did not exist in my world, only in hers.
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So what can I make of it when father writes this in his letter?
“I enjoy the notes and post cards the kids have sent. I love them all (the kids, I mean), and not just as a group but each one for himself and herself. It all seems so familiar, writing something like that, only difference is there’s one more now.”
I do not know! The very old, often beaten into me by my mother, thought pattern arises — “We would all be fine if it wasn’t for Linda. Linda is the cause of all the troubles in the family. She’s more trouble than all the other children put together. ‘Trouble’ should have been her middle name.”
Yes, my left intellectual brain knows now that I was my mother’s dissociated imaginary enemy. But that fact does not always comfort me. I have to reach for it — like I would have to reach for an umbrella before I wandered out into a soaking rain.
Mental illness. Illness that affects the mind. This letter is in the thick of it, and it’s an effort at this moment as I transcribe this letter not to feel sucked right back into it! Crazy. Crazy making! “Stop this train! I want to get off!”
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Letter appears in context with *1963 – Mother’s Letters
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JUST FOR YOUR INFORMATION:
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*1963 – August 18 – Letter From Dad to Grandma
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*1963 – August 19 – Letter From Dad to Mother – He’s in Alaska, we’re on way to Santa Fe, New Mexico
*1963 – August 26 – Letter from Dad to Mother –
*1963 – August 5 – Fire Damaged Copy of Patent Number 1232827 for 120 Acre Homestead
*1958 – August 26 – Mother Voted on the Alaskan Statehood Referendum
*1966 – May 3 – Letter from Eagle River Baptist Church – Mother Born Again
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This just in from:
| Prevent Child Abuse New York Blog
|
| New Medical Specialty Approved for Treating Child Abuse
Posted: 07 Oct 2009 08:31 AM PDT After nearly a decade of work, physicians have succeeded in getting the American Board of Pediatrics to offer a specialty in child abuse treatment. Supporters of the specialty said such experts are needed to teach medical students and residents about child abuse. The first exam in the specialty will be offered at sites around the country on November 16. An estimated 225 physicians are expected to take the test, which will be given on alternate years, and the first certificates will be issued by January 2010. The boards issue certificates in 37 general specialty and 94 subspecialty areas. Board certificates are held by about 85% of physicians licensed in the U.S. |
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Stop the Storm 
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