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NOTE:  This post evidently has a formatting life of its own!  I can find no way to change what appears in big bold letters below.  I did not bold this part of this post, nor can I change it!

I do a lot of a different sort of thinking while I am outside spending hours digging dirt, mixing mud and laying adobe bricks in my newly forming walkway.  This morning as I think about this different sort of thinking I realize that I could probably call it ‘Jello thinking’, because that is the image that popped into my mind as I ‘looked inside my body’ to see what happens in this process.

As I have mentioned so many times before, because my body-brain had to form in the midst of ongoing and terrifying trauma, I had to change in my development and now neither my left- nor my right-brain hemispheres operate ‘normally’, nor does the corpus callosum region between them that passes back and forth information that they need to understand together.

(SEE this article for background:  McLean Researchers Document Brain Damage Linked to Child Abuse and Neglect – Release: McLean Hospital, December 14, 2000)

So it takes me much more time to put things together in my thinking, and even then I can never be assured that I end up with the same conclusions that I would have if infant-child abuse had not so changed my body-brain.  But I am left to work with the end result of these changes – who I am today – and I do the best that I can.

Which brings me back to my ‘Jello thinking’ process.  At the same time I am working my way through the transcription of my parents’ 1957 June and July letters to one another, which now includes over 60,000 words and I’m not done yet, I realize that the best thing I could ever hope for is that some day some special person finds these letters and studies them thoroughly with an attachment-informed mind toward the completion of a Doctoral thesis.

I would ask the question of any one of us who has some experience with opening a little rectangular box of Jello, who have ever boiled up water and poured the Jello’s brightly colored crystals into it, stirred them around until they dissolved, and then put the mixture into the refrigerator to cool – returning periodically to stir the mixture to make sure it solidifies without the thick gelatin coating on the top – at what point is the Jello, well, Jello?

Is it Jello in its powdered form?  Is it Jello while it is still soupy?  Or is it only ACTUALLY Jello when it is firm and ready to serve and to eat?

At the same time I would ask, “When is a thought ACTUALLY a thought?  Is it a thought only when it appears with proper grammar, complete in words within a sentence?”  Are the ‘body thoughts’ that I have without words while I am working to transcribe these letters and as I then go work with my hands in the mud ACTUALLY thoughts?  When has a thought ‘Jello-ed up’?

Even though as the daughter of these two people who lived with them for 18 years, and as a person who was nearly six years old at the time they were written, I perhaps SHOULD be able to put my finger on the pulse of what was going on between my parents these 53 years ago, I cannot do it.  I realize as I write this that I can’t ‘put my finger on the pulse’ of what was going on between them because what’s really going on is that there is a terrible gaping wound within BOTH of these people that means that they were both actually bleeding to death.  Would I look for the pulse in their letters while ignoring the fact the fact of their massive, mutual and mortal hemorrhaging?

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Because I have made an agreement with myself to simply publish the collection of my mother’s letters with their responses intact without censorship or editorial comment, I am attempting to ignore most of my reactions to their words contained in these spewing ‘love letters’ between Mother and Father.  I am saving my reactions for some future date when the letters have been completely transcribed, edited for format and published.  THEN I hope to write my version of this ‘Alaskan homesteading adventure story’ that belongs to my family.

In the meantime there are some glaring topics that appear to me right now.  They are as hard to ignore as someone else’s on-bright headlights as they drive too close to your rear bumper behind you as you drive down a dark highway in the middle of a moonless night.  Those lights are reflecting straight into your eyes, glaring from your rear-view mirror – and you have to do something about it.

Closing your eyes and driving blindly is not a good option.  Do you put on your sunglasses?  Do you flip the switch on your mirror that allows you to dim the reflection?  Do you slap the mirror so it aims the distracting and irritating brilliance anywhere else but into your eyes?  Do you slow down or pull over to the side of the highway, hoping the car behind you will pass so you can watch their red taillights disappear into the distant darkness ahead of you?  Or do you ignore the situation and keep on driving like the lights that belong to the driver behind you don’t even exist?

How much of what my body-brain knows as the truth about what was ACTUALLY going on between my parents in their lives do I pay attention to as I work to transcribe their letters?  I often imagine what readers of my parents’ letters might see in them.  Will they detect the madness?  Will they in their innocence and naivety believe that what they are reading IS ACTUALLY a love story?  Can I leave those readers alone to experience their reading without my added comments about what a totally living hell our home life truly was?

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I am learning to watch how my brain processes all this information.  My body has very real and powerful FEELING reactions to this work I am doing.  When someone asked me last week why I continue to do this work if it is so difficult and I don’t anticipate getting anything personally helpful out of the process, I told them, “I do this work because I believe it is important for others.  I believe there is something here that will be helpful to somebody else.”

In the meantime my right brain, tied as it intimately is with the nonverbal knowledge of the history in my body of 18 years of abuse from these exact same parents – abuse that was as hidden from the world of words as it remained hidden in the words of their letters – I feel as if I am hanging onto the broken end of a still very hot live electrical high wire.  I am a sort of conduit for the truth about the reality of the damage that a severe Borderline Personality Disorder person can do in their lifetime, particularly to their children (and to their mate).

I am very grateful that I can go outside in the pure desert air, in the sunshine, among the birds and the butterflies that stop to cool their tiny, dainty feet on the newly formed wet mud bricks, and in the midst of the sounds of Mexican life that drift through the air over the dividing borderline between our two countries – and ground out the terrible intensity of the truth about what ACTUALLY happened during my childhood and during the childhood of my siblings.

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But before I go out there today to sling my mud and make my bricks there are two things I NEED to mention.  My body, my right brain, my left brain are not going to let me leave this computer screen until I say these two things:

(1)  When my mother first wrote to my father in Alaska that she was going to relinquish the rented house she was staying in as she waited in Los Angeles for him to send for us to join him, and move into her Mother’s house, my father VERY CLEARLY warned her not to do it.  While I am not going to delve into their letters at this moment to find all of the exact words that transpired between them on this topic, I will say that my mother obviously ignored everything that my father had to say on the topic and made the move anyway.

By the time my mother has given up the rented house (which she really HAD to do because there wasn’t any money available to pay the rent), and moved in with her mother, and things went as terribly as my father had told her they would, and by the time my mother writes my father her pitiful and desperate sob story about how terrible things were indeed going at her mother’s, my father simply responds back to her by saying in his July 24, 1957 letter:

“I hate your family for making things so miserable for you!  Only a few days left, why couldn’t they let you leave in peace?”

“I have the letter you wrote Sunday night, and it’s heartbreaking to read.  I can sense the way you felt, and I know what a horrible time you’ve been having.  I feel so responsible for letting you in for all this.  It seems as though I should have been able to prevent it somehow.”

He then concludes this letter with this:

“Oh Mildred I love you, love you, love you! X X X X X Hurry to me now as fast as you can darling – I love and wait only for you.

Your Adoring Husband, Bill”

He didn’t say “I told you so.”  Did he think that?  Did he even remember he’d warned her?  Did he wonder at all at her decision to ignore his warning and move in with her mother in spite of them?  Nor does he seem to have taken any kind of an objective stance so that he could question whether or not what my mother was describing ACTUALLY happened that way or not.  He doesn’t indicate that perhaps his wife caused the difficulties to erupt with her mother.  He simply unequivocally believes her and supports her in her reported version of reality.

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By body-brain put the information just presented above in (1) with this information:

(2)  I have retained intact a memory from this time period before my 6^th birthday that has never changed.  In this memory we arrive at this mountain resort cabin my mother is writing from with my beloved 14-month-older brother carefully carrying his beloved turtle, Timothy inside a Chinese food take-out container.  John was terribly worried about the affect the hot summer’s day was having on his pet.  In my memory I am walking right behind John as he enters the cabin, locates the kitchen, stands in front of the refrigerator, opens the door of the freezer as he continues to talk to Timothy.

I understood what my brother, who had just turned 7 was doing and why.  He put the little container with Timothy in it into the freezer to cool him off.

I also remember John’s horror upon discovering he had forgotten Timothy in the freezer.  In my memory I am again standing very close to John as he opens the freezer, removes the container, opens the top, and finds his beloved pet frozen inside a block of ice.  I remember his heartbroken tears.

While John has no memory 53 years later of the turtle, let alone of what happened to the turtle, I have NEVER forgotten my memory of it.  So when I read the following words last night in my mother’s July 15, 1957 Monday letter, I went into a form of ‘memory shock’.

“I drove to the town and lake this morning, poor Mother got sick after breakfast and had to go to a gas station and when we returned we found John’s turtle dead from the heat yesterday.  He broke down completely and cried and cried.  I tell you it’s been awful.”

I am still processing the confusion I feel over the conflicting accounts – mine and now my mother’s – about the death of Timothy.

First of all, she rented this mountain cabin beginning on Saturday July 13^th and I would expect that this Saturday is the day that we drove through the heat to the mountain.  If my memory was accurate, the turtle would have been placed by my brother in the freezer on the Saturday when we first arrived at the cabin.  My mother is writing on a Monday and is referring to Sunday’s heat as being the contributor to the demise of John’s beloved turtle who died according to her version of the story on Monday.

This state of inner confusion that I feel about these conflicting accounts is typical of what happens to me most of the time when I try to find my own version of reality and hold onto it in the face of my mother’s version of reality.  Working my way around and through this tiny turtle story is significantly important for me to do.

Second of all, a turtle is (DUH!) a reptile.  It cannot regulate its own body temperature.  If a turtle gets too hot, hot enough that its life is endangered it does not wait a day or two to have its fatal reaction.  It simply DIES when the overheating happens.

This is an extremely important turning point inside my own being about how my mother’s version of reality SELDOM matched the truth!  It is also an extremely important example of how subtly, thoroughly and effectively she was ALWAYS able to manipulate everyone else’s version of reality so that it matched her own.

I hold onto this FACT as if it is a life preserver thrown to me as I sink below the surface of deadly waters:  An overheated turtle does not wait to die.

Therefore, without my having to suspect MYSELF I can tell immediately within my mother’s letter that there is something fishy about her story.

This FACT helps me gain my own footing about my own memory of what happened.  For some reason, perhaps because he was a little boy, perhaps because of my mother’s continual creation of strange excitement that sucked everyone around her into her chaotic storms, perhaps because my brother was distracted by being in this foreign environment with grandmother present, and everything that was going on around him – another FACT of the matter seemed to be that John simply forgot his turtle in the freezer from late Saturday until sometime Monday.

If I give myself permission to believe my own self rather than believe my mother’s version of this story, I can learn right here, within this single, tiny, nearly insignificant (in the grand drama of our family’s life) event of the death of my brother’s turtle how expertly my mother’s created her twisted version of stories that she would tell my father.

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This is an example of the insidious way my mother controlled her family – ALL of us, including her own mother when it suited her.  (See post:  +A WORD ABOUT INSIDIOUS INFANT-CHILD ABUSE.)

I believe that there is AN EXTREMELY, CRITICALLY IMPORTANT POINT here.  This is an example of what MANY severe infant-child abuse survivors experienced when they were little.  It is an example of how difficult it is for we survivors to EVER BE ABLE TO VALIDATE OUR OWN REALITY in the face of the twisted, distorted, unbelievably destructive nature of living with ANY ABUSIVE BORDERLINE PARENT!

When people ask me why I continue this nasty work on my forensic autobiography even though it is ‘upsetting’, and I tell them there is something in this work that MATTERS to other survivors, these two examples are proof to me that I am right.

It NEVER mattered what the seed of an event ACTUALLY was, whether my mother was communicating about her terrible feelings within her relationship with her own mother or the death of the turtle that was so loved by her little son.  At the center of EVERYTHING that my mother touched was her Borderline Personality Disorder.

My mother was a MASTER manipulator of the truth.  She was a MASTER manipulator of all information about what happened within her family.  In the same way that my mother was expertly able to manipulate what my father knew about her fight with her mother or the death of John’s turtle, she also expertly manipulated what my father KNEW about me.

At the same time my father was present and KNEW about many of the terrible things my mother did to me he NEVER ONCE ‘interfered’ to stop her or to protect me in any way.  What last night’s lightning bolt of insight hit me with and triggered deep within my entire being by these two statements between my parents I am citing here today, was the realization that my father existed within my mother’s Borderline world and no other.

My father was my mother’s SAP, and everything about their relationship MEANT that exactly what happened TO ME – HAPPENED.

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Did my mother consciously KNOW and CHOOSE to distort and twist the story she told my father about the turtle?  Did she consciously KNOW and CHOOSE to distort and twist the story she told my father about ‘the fight’ she had with her mother?

What possible REASON might my mother have had to LIE to my father about the turtle’s death?  Was she afraid the truth would have implicated HER in some way?  Was she afraid that admitting the truth of her young son’s FORGETTING about his precious turtle in the freezer would somehow make her husband think badly of his – HER son – so that his view of HER through the actions of HER son would somehow reflect back BADLY on her?

The truth is that this entire topic is sickening.  That the underlying reality this topic addresses consumed my entire 18-year childhood (and that of my siblings) and hence changed our entire physiological development body-brain-mind-self and hence the entire quality of the lifetime of all of us, MATTERS!

It also MATTERS to me that nobody who has not lived with a severely abusive Borderline parent cannot even BEGIN to imagine what we endured and what we have survived.  Nor can these other people BEGIN to imagine how the madness of such a parent permeated everything we experienced not only when we were little, but also for the rest of our lives.

It is nearly impossible to disentangle THE TRUTH, let alone OUR TRUTH, from the all-encompassing, all-pervasive MENTAL MANIPULATIONS that accompany severe infant-child abuse by a severe Borderline parent.  To be able to actually find the truth means that we have to be able to detect the lies.

This lie-truth detection process is about as impossible to accomplish as it would be to consciously detect and then choose which air molecules we are going to breath before we inhale them.

Yet we survivors cannot give up on our task of sorting out the fiction of the lie from the truth of reality, no matter how difficult the job may be.  As I examine the forensic evidence bequeathed to me by my decade-dead parents, I am performing an effort that is beyond microscopic.

I am looking for the truth that exists in the WORDS THAT WERE NEVER WRITTEN in the same way that they WERE NEVER SPOKEN by either one of my parents (or by my grandmother than I know of).

This forensic level of work to claim MY REALITY out of the complete and total wreckage of my childhood is happening on the equivalent level that DNA forensic validation happens in today’s criminal investigations.

What I am learning that is valuable and useful to my own self-betterment and healing is that ANY TIME I experience even a shadow of a doubt, a glimmer of a glance of a doubt, a shimmer of a reflection of a doubt about how MY OWN VERSION of reality differs from the one created and presented by my mother AND BY MY FATHER – I NEED TO KNOW THAT MY VERSION IS RIGHT BECAUSE IT IS TRUE.

At this instant as I write these words I realize that THERE IS a way to make the invisible Borderline visible:  That invisible Borderline is defined by DOUBT.  Wherever, whenever, however I detect ANY DOUBT WHATSOEVER within my body as it relates to any experience I ever had with my parents, that DOUBT defines and makes visible the undefined and invisible Borderline.

Being able to recognize my feeling and even tiny SENSES of doubt allows me to bring the invisible Borderline into visible existence.  My father did not doubt my mother.  In the two examples presented here my father did not doubt my mother’s story about ‘the fight’ with her mother just as he did not doubt my mother’s story about the death of my brother’s turtle.

My father never doubted my mother’s version of ME, either.  Yesterday as I made mud and slung it around I thought about the only time in my life my father telephoned me.  That was in the winter of 1986.  He followed that call with the only visit he ever made to see me and my children.  Looking back on that visit yesterday I realized that he was as completely a representative THEN of my mother’s ‘version of Linda’ as he had been from the moment I was born.

I didn’t recognize my doubts in 1986, so I could not stand up for myself or against his version of reality with my own version of reality.  Yesterday I knew that if I had known in 1986 what I know at this moment, that visit with my father would have gone in an entirely different – and for me healing – direction.

Both of my parents’ words exist on these pieces of paper they wrote them down on over 50 years ago.  I recognize the powerful gift they provide not only to me, but to anyone who considers them in the light of the Borderline reality they represent.  Although I plan to publish their writings as they were written, I also plan to follow their publication with my OWN version of what these letters contain – because they DON’T contain anything about THE TRUTH.

My sister recently took her two grand daughters to a WWII museum in Albuquerque, New Mexico that has sanitized the exhibition by erasing ALL MENTION of the holocaust.  ALL OF IT!  I will not, in the end, be a contributor to that kind of deceptive, dangerous madness!

I will tell MY story.  What I am working up to is being able to tell MY story without any doubts within myself that MY story is how things actually happened and that my parents were, within both of their lifetimes, unredeemable liars.

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