The most important work we can do, individually and globally, is the healing and prevention of traumas so that we don't pass them down to future generations. This blog is a working tool to contribute to this good work.
I just spoke in length with my daughter again about my current predicament about this stage of work with myself and with my mother’s writings. I need to regain the position that she helped be obtain several weeks ago that allowed me to remain more remote and objective as I work this intimately with the words of this woman, my mother, who tortured and abused me for 18 long years.
Part of what I recognize at this moment is that I am summoning an immense amount of personal courage and determination as I pursue this work. What I am trying to do seems almost like an impossible task. I am hoping to find something good and useful, helpful, truthful and beautiful within a context of terror, trauma and unspeakable suffering.
I am believing in the GOODNESS of humans. All humans, even those who commit terrible crimes – as my mother did against me. I want to be fair, truthful, and I want to do this work with my own integrity intact – beginning to end.
I want to honor my species. I want to recognize our amazing powers of resiliency. Yet at the same time I can feel the damage within me. I cannot make that damage go away. As I work with my mother’s writing I also understand that how she was so hurt as a child damaged her, also. If it is true that there is goodness in all of us — I want to be able to recognize that goodness within my mother.
At the same time I am also looking for the damage. Where the brokenness of my mother met her goodness, a human being lived her life. I do not seek to judge her. I seek to understand.
We would all most likely report that we know the difference as human beings between life and death. Does a bug know? A dog? A cat? A plant? The planet?
Certainly a dog or a cat DOES have hope. Every time I walk near my friend’s little old (11 years and counting) Chihuahua that I am nursing back to health he makes a visible physical movement of SOME KIND toward expressing his HOPE that I will stop as I pass him and rub his tummy!
This old neurotic cat I inherited (15 and counting) races toward the bathroom every time I head in that direction and flops her thickly-furred tortoise-shell self on the floor by the toilet HOPING I will sit down there at the same time and brush her!
Was the pomegranate tree sitting in its hardened soil, dry-as-a-bone spot in my yard HOPING that I might lay my washing machine’s gray water hose in its newly created adobe circle basin and give it WATER today? Do the millions of ants scurrying around my yard HOPE to find food?
Is the state of ongoing life itself, as distinguished from the final state of death, ALWAYS about that one single thing HOPE?
If any of the cycles of being alive that we mostly take so for granted became STUCK – any ongoing life connected with the ongoing cycle itself would be threatened – and with that threat perhaps ALWAYS and most importantly goes the threat of the annihilation of HOPE.
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Our species probably continued on down our evolutionary pathway BECAUSE we had HOPE: Hope spoken, hope not spoken. Hope known consciously – or not.
A stuck cycle of trauma means to me that HOPE itself is tampered with. Perhaps for my mother finding Alaska, finding ‘her spot’ of perfect beauty and peace on that mountain WAS the literal embodiment of HOPE for her – and in her states of being aware of the experience within herself of having hope fulfilled she could be – and was – temporarily at peace.
During the rest of the time her disturbed HOPE cycle took over her (and her life). At those times HOPE was all tangled up in the nevers and always and forevers that indicated her physical body-brain had been formed in her earliest life in a trauma-filled world that so toyed with her hopes and their fulfillment that her HOPE cycle BROKE.
I woke up THIS morning to a complete cloud cover screening the hot rays of the sun. These are NOT rain clouds, but they are a hopeful sign of the approaching time of the summer rains. We are parched here. Whatever moisture remains from our winter rain has escaped deep into the earth where only the deeper tree roots and the nearly petrified, waiting frogs can find it. The rest of that moisture is captivated within the fibrous cells of the desert plants who all know exactly how to keep it!
I chose this day to finally do my piles of laundry. My washing machine is parked outside under the south eve of my house, with its 50-foot drainage hose at this moment poised exactly over the root system of my pomegranate tree. Perhaps doing laundry, as many women have historically discovered, and hanging it out on the line to dry will BRING the rains! Well, maybe NOT today I have to admit. The air is so dry if I carry a wet load of clean clothes across the yard in my arms, I swear half the dampness in them is already gone out of them into the waiting, wet-hungry air before I even reach the clothesline with them!
But perhaps because of my present laundry doing occupation I have laundry related images in my mind this morning. My thoughts are following twists and turns, swish, swish inside my skull. Sometimes they appear like clothes tumbling over one another in one of those front-window dryers!
I can let them BE that way. Or I can write something here that will take those thoughts out of their swishing, tumbling state and line them all up across this page.
Firstly, perhaps in cases where creative potential was greatest, as it might have been inside my little growing child-mother when she was young, the consequences of early neglect and maltreatment can be greatest. Perhaps within my mother there was a potential that does not even exist in most children. The more disturbed and disturbing the environment of her early developmental years became, perhaps correspondingly the consequences of damage correspondingly began to grow.
My mother used to recite a childhood saying, “There was a little girl who had a little curl right in the middle of her forehead. And when she was good she was very very good. And when she was bad she was HORRID!”
Perhaps my mother could be so devastatingly abusive (evil) because she also had an equal potential for being incredibly good! Perhaps just as she worked so hard to be so good — which demonstrated itself in her fanatical efforts to ‘do her home-work’ perfectly (cleaning, cooking, making the home cozy, etc.) — she worked equally hard at making her projected ‘evil’ better! That projected ‘evil’, of course, was ME!
Maybe if I had been a piece of laundry (like the sheet and towel in her little childhood story she wrote – see:
She could have simply thrown me into a giant washing machine and cleaned me right up! At the same time – given the nature of my mother’s mental illness – she could have ONCE AND FOR ALL cleaned up her own internal intolerable ‘badness’ (that she projected onto me)! All sweet and laundered the ‘evil’ in life could have been done up right. It could have all been banished forever and she (and her ‘loved ones’) could have lived happily ever after.
Considering what is known about the Borderline ability to SPLIT the good and the bad-evil apart from one another as a serious aspect of their mind’s altered operating patterns, happily-everaftering might just be one of the main goals of the Borderline mind — at the same time such a perfect ending is NEVER actually possible in the real world we all reside in.
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What follows next in my thinking process probably belongs to another separate post, but I am going to ignore that point and enter these words here and now.
I just went outside to check on the progress of my laundry’s washing in my machine and listened to the first spin cycle complete itself so that the fresh new rinse water can enter and was this fancy good soap out. Even though my thinking is running in fast spinning circles nearly as fast as the barrel inside that machine just was, I am going to try to force my left brain to order and organize in linear format what the contents of my thoughts actually are.
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According to Dr. Antonio Damasio (and I suggest a solid Google search here for ‘Damasio consciousness brainstem) growth and development of the human body-nervous system-brain builds patterns for the operation of consciousness from the beginning of our life as they follow from the brainstem itself on through the rest of our growing and developing being.
When consciousness is left out of an adult’s patterns of living all hell breaks lose – as it certainly did between my mother and me. Way down there in the brainstem, and then on through the development of the right limbic social-emotional brain with its deep ties into the main body’s information tracking and brain-delivery system, and then on up to the higher cortex of our ‘rational’ thinking and decision making brain regions — well the fact is that early infant neglect, maltreatment and abuse simply CHANGES the whole dang pathway and the operation of the resulting circuits!
I believe that connected to the early developmental changes a neglected and abuse, maltreated, traumatized infant-child experiences is a corresponding CHANGE in the way TIME and its connection to a ‘self’ in SPACE happens.
As I format and correct my mother’s manuscript right now, I will be taking very careful note of attachment disorder-related patterns in my mother’s chronicle. These segments will be copied into the files I am going to work with for my ‘analysis and interpretation’ of my mother’s chronicle in my book, “Unspeakable Madness.”
When these above mentioned changes occur, and when these changes affect the survivor’s ability to gain consciousness of ‘self’ in time and space, these patterns lay the groundwork for unbelievable infant-child abuse to occur down the road.
In my mother’s case I can see these ‘time-space’ changes within her writings as she repeatedly uses these words: ‘Always’, ‘Never,’ ‘Forever’, and ‘For the first time’.
If you read this book, Songs of the Gorilla Nation: My Journey Through Autism by Dawn Prince-Hughes, you will find a description of an autism-spectrum pattern related to the passage of time in space very similar to what I think my mother experienced — and very similar to what I experience. Prince-Hughes describes this experience for herself in relation to strong negative emotional currents in a primary relationship. She describes her sense of ‘things will always be this way’ at the same time she is describing her sense that ‘things HAVE always been this way’.
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Most simply put, because these altered time-space patterns were built in my mother’s earliest forming body-brain within a traumatic early caregiver environment, they directly impacted ME. My mother could not ‘finish the laundry’ related to her relationship with me (and hence the power of her abuse litany).
My guess is that because these changes happen all the way into the brainstem itself, a survivor’s biological clock and internal patterns and rhythms are changes as well. My mother had an altered sense of cycles in her life, and these changes directly affected how she abused me!
Everything related to me had ‘always been this way’ and would ‘always be this way’. This pattern operated in MANY ways in her life. I can see those patterns in her chronicle. There really was never a beginning, a middle or an end in my mother’s trauma-formed brain-mind. How this adaptation to early trauma helps to preserve ongoing life in the ‘evolutionarily altered brain’ that Dr. Martin Teicher and his Harvard research group describe, I do not know. It my view, these time-space changes are most likely to be seen my contemporary outsiders – if they know what they are looking FOR and AT — as patterns of dissociation.
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I will leave these thoughts on this page now and go outside to retrieve my now-clean laundry from the washer!
One load of laundry is not longer dirty. Its time in the space of the washing machine is over. These items from that load are now hanging on the clothesline where they will be completely dried in less than ten minutes. Another load of dirty clothes are in the washer now. You all know the pattern – and the ‘drill’.
A SIMPLE process of tracking something in time and space.
No so simple for a body-brain stuck in a world of unresolved trauma.
An altered sense of the passing of time is a most common and well known aspect of the peritraumatic experience of enduring trauma WHILE IT IS HAPPENING.
Unresolved trauma means that this state of peritrauma – along with its dissociation and its altered sense of the passing of time — simply remains as a permanent state.
In my mother’s trauma altered development the natural cycles of beginning, middle and end did not WORK regarding her projections onto me.
Because she could not tolerate her own internal sense of being ALWAYS bad, and because she projected that unending state of being out onto ME, I was ALSO permanently BAD and evil.
I was ALWAYS evil. I was ALWAYS bad. There was no beginning (other than in the time of my mother’s labor with me as I ‘tried’ to kill her). There was no middle and there was no end.
My mother was ALWAYS trying to FIX me. She could NEVER accomplish her goal no matter how hard she ALWAYS worked at it. As a consequence I was NEVER safe and secure. I NEVER knew when her next attack would happen or why. I NEVER knew when the attacks would end. I NEVER knew why they happened in the first place.
I cannot describe to anyone who has not experienced this kind of abuse what living in this state of perpetual threat and trauma is like. People in the immediate intimate vicinity within such an abusing family also know from the outside as witnesses what this KIND of perpetual abuse is like – because their environment is NEVER truly safe and secure, either.
Never good enough. Always bad.
When people write and think about the splitting and projection of the Borderline brain-mind, it is important to realize that the root-stem of these patterns no doubt lie in trauma-related changes that happened within the earliest developmental stages of body-brain growth for these survivors.
TRAUMA itself does not let go if it is not resolved. As I have said on this blog so many times if something useful for the survival of the individual and of the species is NOT learned from a traumatic experience the operation of the peritraumatic cycle related to time and space will just SIT there and rot — suspended in time and space — just as surely as my clothes would do if my washing machine got stuck in its cycle and nobody did anything to rescue the laundry!
NOTE: Please always go to my blog itself to read my posts – they MORPH!
I am not ‘out of the woods’ yet on what I can possibly learn from working with my mother’s writings, even though I am GREATLY RELIEVED that the transcription is completed and I will not encounter any more ‘surprises’ because I am now familiar with what is in her words. BUT, that does not mean I won’t continue to be surprised. It just means that from now on the surprises I encounter will be INSIDE OF MY OWN SELF!
For example, related to what I am going to include in this post, I am rethinking these same words I posted earlier:
Kristalyn Salters-Pedneault, PhD says about BPD that ‘splitting’ is ‘very common’ among people with this disorder. She is talking about my mother.
“Splitting is very common in people with borderline personality disorder (BPD), and it leads people with BPD to view others and themselves in “all or nothing” terms. For example, a person with BPD may view one family member as always “good” and another as always “bad.” Or, a person with BPD may see themselves as “good” one minute, but shift to seeing themselves as all “bad” or even evil the next.”
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What about those words I added bold type and underlining to?
Kristalyn is, I believe, missing an extremely important point here. My mother never SAW HERSELF as ‘good or evil’. She lacked the requisite capacity for self observation, analysis or self reflection. She could not achieve even that high a level of honesty about herself – or see herself AS REALITY SAW HER! My mother never saw the truth about herself as far as I know. She never achieved that level of conscious awareness. To her dying breath she would have promised to anyone that what she ‘did’ to me – I earned and deserved and, as she told my sister, “was nothing different than what any normal mother would have done.”
This did not stop my mother from ACTING ALL GOOD or ACTING ALL EVIL!
Very often the ‘all good mother’ was phony phony phony — and certainly my siblings could see-sense-know this (I’m not sure my father did).
The ‘all evil mother’ was MY particular mother! How special was THAT? NOT AT ALL!
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I think that Kristalyn’s words are a HUGE soft-sell in regard to severe infant-child abusing caregivers! They are a great understatement! Borderlines such as my mother was have no real ability to ‘see themselves’ in the light of reality or real reason AT ALL!
So, as I work with the two versions my mother wrote of the story I include here – one a journal entry and one a letter to her mother – I realize that I did not know THIS version of my mother at all! In fact, it is this ‘all good mother’ who, with the fewest tiny exceptions, WROTE ALL OF THESE WORDS I HAVE TRANSCRIBED and am preparing to publish!
My guess is that any unsuspecting reader of my mother’s Alaskan homesteading chronicle will probably come to adore her!
Can I adore her?
Kristalyn IS using the word ‘evil’ here in her contrast – not saying ‘good’ and ‘bad’ but rather ‘good’ and ‘evil’. She is not describing ‘projection’ which I cannot separate from the SPLITTING that Kristalyn is describing. So if I take Kristalyn’s words literally, I would say I was cursed with having a nearly all-evil mother — and I have a hard time telling myself that given this fact, I had any mother at all!
I certainly DID NOT have the mother who wrote the following words, which include these words that she wrote waiting alone with four small children in a canvas hut on the side of an Alaskan mountain without telephone, electricity, water, transportation, and barely with food for my father to come home with supplies:
“As I try to go off to sleep I hear a noise – it sounds like the tractor – urging its way up the Mountain road – Does silence have a noise – it’s so quiet I can hear my heart pounding. Silence, silence. Where is Bill? All I ask is for his safety and well being.”
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It is obvious to me that I still have a great deal of inner confusion about my feelings about my mother — and about what she did to me. I do not yet ‘understand’ and therefore I do not yet ‘know’. There is still something I need to learn and this work still has something important to teach me. These words of my mother’s didn’t come from an obviously ‘evil mother’. Talk about SWITCHING! My mother was a pro!
It’s a riddle of Bat Man story caliber, I would say! I haven’t solved it for myself. Not even close. I will be working my way through THESE aspects of my next stage of work with my mother’s writings. I ask myself why I don’t let the riddle just go and forget about it. Then I encounter an internal image of someone (a child!) being murdered over and over and over again – but being left alive – TO TELL ABOUT IT!
For now, I guess I will go ahead and post here both versions of this experience as my mother wrote about it. I am asking my daughter and sister for their input on how I might handle duplications of stories in my mother’s work. Do I publish both intact? Do I find a way to merge them? If I meld and merge, do I keep the result as a letter? As a journal entry? I am not sure about that, either.
I am also posting pictures that can help demonstrate WHERE we were. Talk about a little abused child having nowhere to run!!!! This scene – an abused child’s nightmare, an abusing ‘evil mother’s’ dream come true!
You have never known silence if you haven't been in a frozen land alone in winterThat huge beautiful mountain outlined against the sky behind our home was the one my mother named 'Pinnacle Peak'
View toward Cook Inlet, Anchorage lies behind-around the left mountain end - where my father worked
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December 29, 1959 Tuesday
*Notes: Nice day outside – but bleak inside. School has started again here on our homestead even if not in Eagle River as we took the week before Xmas for vacation – as I thought the children would enjoy getting ready for Xmas that week and would more easily settle down to school work after Xmas!
I was right. They are raring to go and eager to get back on schedule of things and so anxious to do good work and not miss their work or be behind their class when they return to school and so am I! John is busy in his Arithmetic books – both work books and school books and is learning more complicated multiplication and going on to division. It seems we never catch up with John’s work or get all done we should do – but we keep on plugging away.
Bill never came home! No water today again – and my propane gas gave out before I could even cook breakfast. The children had cold cereal for breakfast and bread and jelly. I tried to get our Coleman cook stove going but it seems to be leaking and a fire started in back of it and below. I had to throw water on it (a half a coffee pot full). Then I was going to get the fire extinguisher out – but before I used it I got the fire out by beating it out with a towel. I had a scare for a minute and made a mess of the trailer with the water but far better than fire.
I checked it and rechecked it and brought it outside to light but gas seems to be spilling out so I put it away. Now what will we do? I yearn for some coffee and think I’ll melt some snow and try to heat some on oil heater. We’re really out of food – except flour, sugar and staples. I do have potatoes and one more can of Spam if I had a stove going.
Bill HAS to come home tonight [Tuesday] – yet, he told me he would be home Monday and work Tuesday and Wednesday! This is when I don’t like to be so isolated!!
More later!
Radio says there has been a terrible storm from New Jersey, NY to Boston. Snow, winds etc. – worst since hurricane years ago I remember so well. We’re lucky here – not to have storms like that.
10:30 – We relented and I heated our last can of stew over the oil stove (heater) and by then even it tasted good. I made Kool Aid for the children from melted snow – and to bed. (Wrote Mom more this evening and will put her letter in here).
It’s now 11:30 – tomorrow we must walk OUT if Bill doesn’t come home. I just undressed and climbed into bed. Must stop running to the door thinking I hear the tractor. My usual evening things tonight hold absolutely no appeal to me. I don’t want to knit although I’ve started mittens (first time on four needles for Cindy) or read or anything. I want to know Bill is alright and to have him here – please Bill come!!
I’ll set the alarm tonight (first time I’ve set it since Bill hasn’t been here!) for 4:00 A.M. and we’ll leave here at 5:00!! – Well is that early enough?? And it will be so cold waiting for a ride at the bottom of the mountain. We are so dependent on Bill – for oil, gas, supplies –
I’d love to homestead way off – if Bill could be with us. I’d like to hunt our own meat and cache it away – get all our supplies in for the winter early – have a wood cook stove – I’d truly love it. I tease Bill and urge him to stay and try it here. He says we could never make out – but if we had our bills paid and raised perhaps sheep – those are foolish dreams. Still it could be ever so nice and right now he’d be here!!
Golly, what’s wrong with me. I’ve done so well – it’s expecting him and not having him come – and knowing he would if he could and wondering.
LATER
I just simply can’t sleep. I’m writing this by flash light – still listening – oh, how I yearn for Bill tonight. I feel so all alone.
This is really only the second time. Last time also was when I expected him and he didn’t come.
As I try to go off to sleep I hear a noise – it sounds like the tractor – urging its way up the Mountain road – Does silence have a noise – it’s so quiet I can hear my heart pounding. Silence, silence. Where is Bill? All I ask is for his safety and well being.
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December 29, 1959 Tuesday 11:00 P.M.
Dear Mother,
Last night about this time I sat here writing you a letter – listening with straining ears for the welcome sound of a tractor to tell me Bill was coming home. I waited up until 1:30 A.M. – I didn’t want to be asleep when he got here BUT he didn’t.
24 hours later and still no Bill. I listened to “Mukluk Telegraph” on KENI on my wonderful radio – a special broadcast where messages are relayed to people like me, living in the bush, but no word. So, here I sit again waiting.
It seems I’ve done a great deal of waiting since we began homesteading. I guess it’s a woman’s role all over the world – one which I am now accustomed to but like none the more for it. It’s hard to wait – especially when you don’t know and tonight I’ve gotten a little worried. Jeep trouble? – could be – but no message.
Seeing he was home over the long Holiday I would have just as soon he waited several days but we’d been out of water for two whole days again and I’d been melting snow (which is a slow process and laborious but at least I’m grateful for the snow – there was a time when we had neither snow OR water – funny how one becomes grateful for such strange things).
But it was agreed he’d come home last night and work Tuesday and Wednesday and come home again Thursday. We’re out of water and propane gas. As of today and I almost started a fire trying to get the Coleman camp stove going – I guess it leaks and I won’t try again. This morning we had shredded wheat (last of it). At noon – sandwiches (good thing I saved the bread since last Thursday) – used the last of it and after waiting until tonight at 10:30 for Bill. So we heated the last can of canned stew (ugh!!) over gas heater!!
I’ve even melted drinking water today – and yesterday gave everyone baths by building a fire in the Yukon stove and melting the big wash tub full of snow. It was to be a kind of a surprise for Bill – but he never came home.
It’s unlike Bill to cause us concern or leave us when he knows we’re out of supplies!!
Last Thursday he brought food but today is pay day and he was to bring a big order up yesterday. I almost went down yesterday – it’s been two weeks and one day since we’ve been OUT – but probably will have to walk up late at night or spend three hours on the last mile of road (how well I remember last time) so thought I’d wait until the weekend and go down and come up during day light.
Now I have no choice if Bill doesn’t come home tonight. Then we’ll have to get up at 4:00 (and just put children to bed – waiting for Bill) and go out with Thomas or Pullen. I hate to walk down alone and it’s snowing now.
We started school again here as we took vacation the week before Xmas but other schools are off now. Another reason I hate to go down.
Bill has trouble pulling the trailer up now and is going to buy a flat sled to pull supplies up behind tractor – but we walk!!
The kids are marvelous sports. Last night John stayed up and worked on the model airplane he and his Dad started Sunday. Today after school, we worked a big cross word puzzle and I showed Linda how to purl – she knits well. I gave her and Cindy a knitting set for Xmas – it has smaller needles in it and they can manage them much better. Today she completed her doll blanket she started on Xmas – just plain knitting. Cindy finds it harder but two years difference in ages.
She and Sharon played Chinese checkers – then Linda and Cindy – and so this evening passed – with a lollypop treat made by Cindy for each for Xmas and saved because they had so much sweets and so welcome tonight as a morale booster.
She made cups out of egg carton, two together and decorated and put life savers in each cup and two lollypops. Oh, such squeals of pleasure they brought forth tonight.
I made molasses cookies in Xmas shapes and enormous gingerbread boys cut and decorated in green, red and white –
All eaten!
Fruit cake devoured. Children and I made spice cookies and sugar cookies and each had a whole tray to do themselves in Xmas shapes (I think I told you) and then each decorated as they pleased. They took their prettiest and did up for Xmas presents for Daddy.
But all is gone now and mince pie, apple pie, chocolate pie I made yesterday.
Still we have little up here in way of fresh fruits, vegetables etc. and mostly canned meat. Last Thursday Bill brought up lettuce and tomatoes and oh, such a treat you can’t imagine. We haven’t had fresh milk since we’ve been here – all canned and powdered – and now we’re OUT of all but flour, sugar and oatmeal!
Well, it’s 11:30 P.M. I guess I better stop! I just keep listening and listening. Will enclose a note tomorrow to tell you what happened!
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Donned my coat etc. and thought I’d go outside to get some fresh air and listen intently. It’s really snowing now. The weatherman said ‘no snow’ but I found out weeks ago that we have our own weather here in the mountains – and it ISSNOWING here. It is lonely tonight – not a light or sign of habitation. Usually I like this but tonight I don’t. I want Bill at night – I’ll never get used to that.
I could easily stay here all day – all winter – if I thought he’d be home come night – it’s our highlight of the day. Even then – I don’t worry if I don’t expect him – Oh, I know he’s alright but —- —-
The children look so sweet and peaceful asleep. Thank God they trust me and I can make them happy up here — !!
P.S.
I keep forgetting that I haven’t written oftener. I must tell you how much your radio has meant to me – a voice – music – it means so very much to us!!!
And during Xmas the music was beautiful. We heard Dicken’s Xmas Carol and all the stories. It really made Xmas for us and I think especially for Sharon who couldn’t remember the songs from last year.
You’re my Xmas angel!
Love, Mildred
Later
Bill got home at 6:15 in the morning! I was going to walk out and decided to wait until tonight –
He tried Monday night and tractor wouldn’t make first hill – battled it for three hours and then went back to log house where he arrived at 4:00 A.M.
Spent all night battling hill last night – has had no sleep – ate breakfast and now is leaving again.
He’s safe!! How he keeps awake I’ll never know!!
Happy New Year
P.S. Only one month to go. [for the required residency time for proving up on the land to gain title under the requirements of the Homestead Act]
If I didn’t know my mother was the way that she was, I could read these words she wrote in 1959 so differently. I HATE it that my mother was so sick! This piece is one of my favorites of all the words she wrote. And, again — do YOU see a severe child abusing mother in these words she wrote? This, the healing power of that place, of that mountain, of that homestead — for my mother in ways I can never know — and for me as her victimized survivor.
Were such moments as this one (below) only rare ones in which my mother was lucid and perhaps ‘her self’? And yet even if she was IN one of ‘these moments’ in a split second, without warning, she often-usually exploded at me as a child – violently – I rarely saw it coming – and I never understood why.
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December 26, 1959 Saturday
*Notes: Nice clear day, colder, no snow.
Temperature had dropped today and snow was drier and crunched beneath your feet. I like it better this way and you don’t get damp and wet-cold when it is colder like this! Today I said ‘heck with fussing around the house take a Holiday’. All of us went outside. The children are so happy to be outdoors and to have Daddy home. I decided for the first time to go off on my skis alone for awhile. Such enjoyment – nice to be off awhile by myself and I wasn’t at all afraid to ski over to the embankment overlooking the creek alone. The snow was just perfect – dry and powdery for skiing. Every little way I had to stop and gaze around at the beauty all around me.
Every time I get outside here it makes me feel so silly to worry over the little daily happenings in the bit of civilization we’ve brought up to this remote spot with us. We are but tiny ants really so insignificant – perhaps if I could see OUT of our trailer and hut I could feel this all day but I feel so shut inside the place – without windows to capture the view, even in part. The view of the water of Kink Arm is ever changing as the sun sets. One moment one of the lavender splendor and the next wreathed in rose. How close I always feel to God here. Mrs. Bockstahler referred to this place as ‘Celestial Heights’ in her recent letter and it truly is a heavenly spot.
It was a new sensation and a very nice one to make the first tracks across the white stretches of unbroken white snow in our fields. Smokey following close behind so contented and happy that we two were alone on a walk. These moments are never to be forgotten.
As I got further away from our hut and the children’s voices became fainter and fainter the moose trails became more and more frequent. As I got to the bank where I could gaze down on the still-rushing unfrozen creek down into the valley spread out below and Thomas’ homestead so tiny below me and hear their sled dogs howling echo and reecho amount the hills – the tracks were very frequent and places where they had bedded down the night before were all about me. In one place the moose droppings in its trail were still steaming. I looked about me but no moose in sight. As I absorbed the stillness and beauty about me I was once again entranced and dedicated my life to our homestead forever more – such love – no, something I can’t even call love – surged from within me – such a kinship for this strange unknown land that one would expect would frighten me and upset me by its mere isolation and coldness – instead I feel such at ONE with this place – everything about it appeals to me – oh, for words to be able to fully express the way I feel.
I only wish I never had to leave it, not even to return to the log house [in Eagle River] which holds no appeal to me.
As I skied back I kept telling myself I would find a way to remain here and watch the days now grow longer – the sky grow brighter until the snows melted and spring came again to our beloved Mt. regions – how can I leave, how can I tear myself away again – and how will I ever know a moment’s rest until this beloved land is truly ours – all ours.
I skied down below the flat land and crossed the mountainous hills below our place where it’s still heavily wooded beneath our clearings and the high Mt. peaks are almost obliterated. I like the wooded regions but once again was glad that Bill chose the open valley above to live in.
I came across one spot that made me smile and chuckle aloud. Signs before me showed a moose had hurried down the Mt. – perhaps rushing from Smokey’s bark – the snow was so deep and all it looked as if the moose had slid on its stomach and the prints were far apart. What a sight that must have been!
I would like to become more familiar with the cold quiet of the Alaskan winter days and have the time and opportunity to discover the secrets of the wild life around me. Study their tracks, their habits, etc.
In some spots my foot slipped out of the skis so my leg sank to the ground beneath me – the snow came clear to my waist and it was quite a feat to get back on the skis.
I have become so unused to outdoor exercises and so unaccustomed to manipulating skis so that by the time I came out on the road I was truly quite tired – but that nice kind of tiredness that always comes from good outdoor exercise – and such a thrill to know I had not even been off our land!!
Down at the log house I remember trying to ski about and feeling rather silly as I was in view of all my neighbors and could scarcely go 100 feet without being on someone else’s property.
As I came down the road I could see the girls playing on their snow castle. Sharon came running down the road holding her big blue balloon that Santa sent and her long blue and white stocking cap askew with the long white tassels bobbing up and down – that Grandma in California had lovingly knitted for her youngest granddaughter to keep her warm on the long Alaskan winter. Such a sweet sight and it came to me that she was everything a child should be and so completely absorbed in her own activity and so content with her childish play
It sounded so good to hear Bill about the place. I wish we could all be together for this period – like other homesteaders. This place needs a man about.
Coleman lamp to fill – already dark although only 3:00 in afternoon. Baked mince pie – all came in cold and hungry – good meal – then sat down at table in hut to try out some of games in Treasure Chest of games Mrs. Eklund sent us.
Girls put on Chinese kimonos Carolyn sent and looked so cute sitting there. We played checkers and then BINGO. It was fun and even Sharon was able to do her part – calling out to Daddy the scorekeeper. I had that number – her face beaming. Being together – how very nice!!!
I have not escaped thinking about some information I posted yesterday in two different posts. Some of that information was about Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) and some was about the human psychological archetypes. I need to take a minute and tie these two batches of information together from my perspective as a survivor of terrible and long-term infant-child abuse.
Kristalyn Salters-Pedneault, PhD says about BPD that ‘splitting’ is ‘very common’ among people with this disorder. She is talking about my mother.
“Splitting is very common in people with borderline personality disorder (BPD), and it leads people with BPD to view others and themselves in “all or nothing” terms. For example, a person with BPD may view one family member as always “good” and another as always “bad.” Or, a person with BPD may see themselves as “good” one minute, but shift to seeing themselves as all “bad” or even evil the next.”
“The true self-realized being uses this archetype as its main theme but is not identified with it; such a self-realized being lives in a state of consciousness as the Fair Witness or Observer, free of all archetypes.” (page 263)
he is writing about me.
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While the psychologist Carl Jung’s writing about human psychological archetypes is far too complex to describe in this post, it is enough to know that seldom does any human being escape the operation of one or more of these archetypal psychological patterns from operating in their ‘psyche’ at any given moment.
Around the time of our birth is one of ‘those times’ when archetypes are NOT playing their roles across the dramatic expression of our life. Obviously, we have to grow a body-brain before we can DO much of anything. It is during the earliest months and years of our lifetime that we grow and develop the physiological circuitry and pathways in our body-brain that we will use to express our self for the rest of our lifetime.
When Stone talks about this Fair Witness-Observer NON-archetype he is describing a state that I believe we are born into. From that point we develop our body-brain that will eventually be able to express a self along with all the complexities of life that a self is capable of.
Yet, when severe abuse like my mother did to me happens – exactly BECAUSE she had SPLITTING so entrenched within her own physiological body-brain-mind-self – I as her victim did NOT get to develop my own body-brain-mind-self as I would have done had I not been forced to grow up within such an unbelievably toxic environment.
We have all seen film footage from one story or another where someone breaks through a brick wall and finds within it human bones. Dead or alive? Yet I KNOW because I have psychologically been there that growing up with a BPD parent who has no choice but to SPLIT their entire world into insane patterns related to GOOD versus BAD results in our own psychology being sealed behind a massive brick wall.
Brick by insane brick my mother severed my own connection with myself in interaction with the world every step throughout my infant-childhood. As a result I DID NOT get to move off of my born-into condition of being at dead center without any psychological archetypes of my own! I stayed, as I described yesterday, in that place-of-psychological-origin: Being an Observer-Fair Witness which by definition MEANS there are no archetypes present.
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The Wickipedia entry for Carl Jung and archetypes lists the following:
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Jung outlined five main archetypes;
The Self, the regulating center of the psyche and facilitator of individuation
The Shadow, the opposite of the ego image, often containing qualities that the ego does not identify with but possesses nonetheless
The Anima, the feminine image in a man’s psyche; or:
The Animus, the masculine image in a woman’s psyche
The Persona, how we present to the world, usually protects the Ego from negative images (acts like a mask)
Although the number of archetypes is limitless, there are a few particularly notable, recurring archetypal images:
Yes, there ARE more, and the exist within the human psychological realm like constellations of stars in the sky. They ‘come into being’ when certain human patterns of feeling, thought and action repeat themselves TOGETHER within a psychological constellation that is recognizable enough to be named.
OR – they do not.
I bring this up today in part because I had a very bad sleepless night last night. I could not name exactly what triggered my ‘state of being’ THE ONE WHO CRIES AND DOES NOT SLEEP. Yet I also know that what was triggered resulted in me tumbling into this one of my ‘nameless identities’ that is part of what is called my Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID).
Because my mother had such control over me and my life, I was not allowed to develop ANY identity during the first years of my life. The physiological circuitry and pathways did not develop within me that would have allowed even ONE solitary LINDA to come forth. I was always, consistently and overwhelmingly the CONTAINER for my mother’s BAD split-off self.
The first step as I understand it that a human being takes from birth to becoming a self with identity is to have its FEELING states recognized by its caregivers and mirrored back to it. These early interactions BUILD the circuitry and pathways within the body-brain that allow a fully developed psychologically whole human to develop so that the human archetypal patterns of existence can go out into the world, interact, and form an individual’s life.
When that doesn’t happen, like in my case, something ELSE happens instead – and that something else has at its core the same non-archetype Fair Witness-Observer state that we are born with. I believe that if ‘experts’ took a good, long look the roots of Dissociative Identity Disorder this alternative pattern of ‘being a person’ would become clear.
How this infant-child abuse pattern leads to DID for people who ACTUALLY have separate, definable identities operating is well beyond me to understand. That is NOT my condition. I simply dissolve into a non-identity state that is primarily unnameable EMOTION like I did last night without any clear and definable identity to process it.
My part in the ‘mess’ is to find ways as soon as I can to ‘pull myself out of it’. Much of the abuse and horror of my childhood happened at night (and this is especially true because during the years we lived in Alaska ‘nighttime’ itself has a different meaning because of the extremes in daylight hour shifts). But also because my mother’s insane splitting-related abuse of me happened from the time I was born, when laying down was ALL I could do – the laying down trigger is perhaps the most ancient one I suffer from when something happens that causes me to ‘dissolve-dissociate-disorganize-disorient’.
(This state is also tied for me to the thousands upon thousands of hours of being made to lay in my bed, alone, immobilized and unable to escape or to ‘do’ anything throughout my entire childhood — but suffer and usually — not sleep.)
This is all I want to say about this today. It is not laying down time now, and there are things now that I need to do now in the daylight.
Now, would you ever say that these words sound like they were written by a severely child-abusing mother?
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December 7, 1959 Monday
*Notes: Our Family Is Never Bored!
The children spend many happy contented hours now working on various Xmas projects. Cindy has made individual baskets for each member of her beloved family made out of egg carton sections, each wrapped in aluminum foil with a pipe cleaner handle and a marshmallow (how hard they’ll be by Xmas) and a lollypop in each one. They’re secretly hidden and each day Sharon teases to see hers – it’s a constant thing to talk about, to whisper about and to be excited about for Xmas is coming.
Our Xmas books – we buy two each year — has grown to quite a collection. These are taken out during the first week of December and read each day until Xmas. This year John and Linda can very expressively read them aloud! It thrills me to see the younger two – eyes wide with wonder – listening in rapt attention to their older brother or sister read the magic words to them.
Yes, Xmas is coming.
No mention is made of money – we all know – it just isn’t there. We will do what we can but the days of borrowing money for Xmas presents that we can’t afford are over!! There will be Xmas presents though.
I’ve bought at half price knitting sets – with yarn and tiny needles for two girls and a needlepoint set for one – I hope John will get his skis and Grandma will buy his boots. The girls will get a flying saucer from Santa to share and a tea set. The 5¢ and 10¢ store and ingenuity and imagination and love will make a Xmas – you just wait and see….
What is important!!
More and more every day I realize what’s really important in life!
Being together – being a family unit and being loved and loving – these are the important things.
Health – to be healthy and well and to know that the ones you love are well.
(I hope my loved ones never suffer – how terrible it would be to see them hurt or sick – how terrible to ever think they might need me – and I wouldn’t know).
How thankful I am to be here writing this and know our family is safe and together on this night –
Dearest God in heaven above, I thank you for our family and our homestead and for the opportunities we have here to create a home for our loved ones in a land such as this.
I am content tonight – tomorrow we will plan and work for our future but I intend to fully enjoy each day as it comes – to work hard but to be content to wait – material things are really of such minor importance. I feel we already have what really counts and must never lose it in hurrying and working too hard to get THINGS.
I see so many people – even up here in Alaska – doing just that, living in far too expensive houses – beyond what they can really afford to pay and working so hard to live there and meet the payments that the house as beautiful as it may be, holds no happiness for the occupants and they live separately in it.
No, no – never – we’ve had our share of money worries – no, no, no.
I’ll be content with less – Bill and I are so close now – never, never to be apart mentally and spiritually – nothing is worth that!
Our little hut and trailer mean more to me if we can be all together and happy and close here!!
The other – I pray God – we’ll be content to wait for. If we can manage fine – if not, so what!?!?
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December 8, 1959 Tuesday 10:30 P.M.
*Notes: How quiet and serene and peaceful it is. Everyone is asleep. Even our two kittens, Dixie and Pixie are curled up in Cindy’s bed. I don’t approve but haven’t the heart to move them. One is tucked under her arm with covers pulled up under it’s chin, all the world lie a toy. The second is on the foot of her bed.
The dishes are done and the trailer is tidy and neat.
Everything looks cozy and cute and serene in the light of the single kerosene lamp I am writing by.
Bill went to bed – absolutely exhausted after a 24 hour ordeal of futile attempts to return here which finally terminated in his having to walk the last mile. Even poor ‘Oliver’ our faithful tractor found this 10° to 20° below zero weather too cold!
I just went outside for a moment and it’s really cold and really beautiful. The stars are so close looking you feel as if you could pick them out of the sky and the moon is so bright that you can see all the Mountains and the valley below.
How I truly love this place – no words can aptly describe how I feel about this land we hope someday to own. It’s really an almost HOLY feeling. I know it sounds silly but it’s the way I feel. If only you could see it – you would see what a Shangri-la it is! – and what’s more we have created a home – be it ever so humble here! It’s quite a grand feeling!!
Time for bed. Good night!
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IN MEMORY OF MY BORDERLINE MOTHER:
From Kristalyn Salters-Pedneault, PhD, your Guide to Borderline Personality Disorder You may not be familiar with the term “splitting,” but it is a phenomenon that many people with BPD, and their family members, will recognize. This week, learn how to cope with splitting when it happens.
[Linda note: IMPORTANT – THIS IS WHAT MY MOTHER DID – What you just read above was from the ALL GOOD side of the split!]
What is Splitting?
Splitting is very common in people with borderline personality disorder (BPD), and it leads people with BPD to view others and themselves in “all or nothing” terms.
How to Handle Splitting
What should you do when a loved one is engaged in splitting? There isn’t always an easy answer — the best way to manage the situation will depend the nature of your relationship with your loved one, the intensity of the splitting, and the impact it is having on the family.
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Divorcing a BPD Spouse
Does BPD mean that your marriage should end in divorce? Some couples do make their BPD marriage work, but sometimes the relationship can’t be saved.
I do not understand this ‘thing’ my mother had about ‘dreams’! Is this because I have never really had one of my own? Was this ‘dream thing’ of my mother’s related to her Borderline split between what is/was real and what is/was not real? Between the ‘darling’ version of her world and ‘scary one’ as reflected in her inability to tolerate the real world with its fully integrated good and bad’?
The following is why I am NOW bending toward this as a title for the book(s) of my mother’s writings:
Mildred’s Mountain –
A City Woman’s Chronicle of Living Her Alaskan Homesteading Dream
OR should I put it this more accurate way:
Mildred’s Mountain –
A City Woman’s Chronicle of Living In Her Alaskan Homesteading Dream
I will have to think about this. Adding that little tiny word “in” into the title really IS a reflection of my ‘analysis and interpretation’ of my mother, of her life and of her homesteading venture. My use of the word ‘chronicle’ in the title (as mentioned in last night’s post) is supposed to MEAN that I am doing neither of these two actions in relation to her work – either analyzing or interpreting it!
And yet I do suspect that the way my mother’s brain-mind worked did mean that she was unable to tell the difference! Was she ‘living her dream’ or was she ‘living IN her dream’?
I do suspect the latter.
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November 24, 1959 Tuesday
*Notes: Why do we struggle so hard for our homestead on the Mountain – Here I’ve had the children out of school for going on three weeks – still no credit for living on our land – Obstacles so great – can we, will we overcome these new obstacles?
Yes, yes, yes – we must but why? What is it I hold onto so dearly – certainly not – our humble hut on the Mountain. It’s not this that I cling to so desperately.
No, no, no – it’s my dreams – still so dear, so dear, so bright and untarnished.
I remember when we first filed on our homestead – ah, how great our dreams were then – and still are –
A neighbor of ours was over two years ago when we were living at the log house and mentioned our homestead claim. I felt like a new parent with a brand new baby – beaming and proud – bring forth slides of our lovely one. But all the neighbor sees is LAND. “Aha,” she exclaims, “You’re eager to get hold of this land for speculation.”
“No, no I cry!” – but how can I explain our tender, sweet dreams to someone like this? I try but to no avail.
She puts me down as ‘land hungry.’ How hurt and angry I was – she said, “You’ll never be satisfied with 160 acres. You’ll want more and more.”
Oh how cruel – and oh, how untrue.
But yet – well, how simple if that were the case. For then I would not struggle for that land. We would never have climbed through mud, mosquitoes and carried burdens on our back. Not for land alone – land for speculation. Time and money is too dear. Our family and their comfort are too great. Would we now do what we’re doing just for land?
No, no, no.
We would have relinquished our claim soon after filing. But we can’t relinquish our dreams. It’s our dreams that brought us here to Alaska –made us sell our home and leave our family and friends. It’s our reason for being here and our very reason for homesteading in the first place.
When – if ever – I see that our dreams cannot and will not materialize, then and only then will I give up.
This summer there was a time when our dreams were faint. We were never together and always worried and tired – “But it is temporary.” I said. “We must always remember our dreams and make them come true.”
Our family must always be first – and our dreams for our family – they all center around our homestead and the life we have planned there.
I never want to sell that land or any part of it. It would be like selling a member of our family.
Yet, Sunday when I saw that glacial ice on our road – standing thick, slippery and full of ridges – so bad even the tractor couldn’t pass over it and we slipped and could have broken our necks.
Can it be true?
Will we ever be able to live there? – all year round or will it always be a continual battle — wearing Bill out? And making him old before his time.
The road has always been our trouble from the beginning and yet our land so peaceful and beautiful is always there beckoning us on and on and on –
It gives me great comfort this morning as my thinking moves forward along the lines established in my previous two posts and in my reply to the comment included with the first of these two posts to find pages coming up in my Google search directly connected to the words “archetype fair witness.”
I never thought about it before these last days as I finished the process of organizing and transcribing my mother’s writings that in some – still seemingly bizarre way — I WAS BORN TO BE MY MOTHER’S FAIR WITNESS.
For all the billions of moments I spent as a child during my 18 years of suffering abuse from this woman, I was at the same time being her witness.
Is that something that happens as a PART of being an abused victim? Are we at the same time we suffer the abuse being the witness to our perpetrator’s OTHER SIDE? Do we come, as a direct result, to know our perpetrator’s truest reality (in their body-brain in this lifetime)?
According to this author of this book – I might be right on track:
It would be logical and reasonable to accept that I was, along with the mountain and the homestead, an embodiment of what my mother needed for her healing.
I was the projection of ‘badness’ for my mother. I was badness personified. Hell, literally, of a place to spend one’s infant-childhood!
Yet because 99.99% of what my mother saw in me, what she blamed me for, what she ‘punished’ me for, had NOTHING whatsoever to DO WITH ME, I WAS the ‘fair witness’ of her literalized OWN suffering from inside her own SELF that she dissociated from herself and associated with me.
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“The true self-realized being uses this archetype as its main theme but is not identified with it; such a self-realized being lives in a state of consciousness as the Fair Witness or Observer, free of all archetypes.”
When, such in cases like mine, a human being is born into particularly a mother’s malevolent world of ‘disturbed psychology’, the tiny growing and developing person JUST BARELY MIGHT be able to develop its own self as a separate being from its abuser. ANYTHING and EVERYTHING else that happens to that little one belongs to the perpetrator and NOT to its own self.
This means for ME that I spent the majority of my infant-childhood NOT being my own self. For ALL of the time my mother was verbally, psychologically, spiritually, and physically abusing me I was DOING one thing: Enduring her abuse so I could survive. During ALL of THIS time, I was in that ‘non-archetypal’ place that I believe we are born into as new and innocent beings that meant I was ONLY being my mother’s ‘fair witness’.
If there had been some other pattern to my relationship with my mother that would have meant at least SOME OF THE TIME I got to be myself, then perhaps I could have moved off of that point of being at dead center as a nonbeing observer of my mother’s madness. Perhaps then I could have wondered about what was happening to me. Perhaps then I could have been envious or jealous of the treatment she showed her other ‘darling’ children. Perhaps I could have THOUGHT for myself. Perhaps I could have not only FELT the abuse but been able to associate, connect, and string together all the associations belonging to my ongoing experience of myself in my own life – abuse included.
But I couldn’t do any of that. I never got the chance to. It is only now at age 58 that I am discovering this NEW information for myself about how being such a victim of such terrible abuse happened AT THE SAME time I was my mother’s primary, intimate WITNESS-observer.
Being at that ‘place’ of what Stone is describing as ‘being without an archetype’ might be fine and good for a person who has been allowed and able to develop and individual clear and strong healthy self from the start. To ‘get back to’ that place, or to re-achieve that degree of detached non-participation in one’s life might be a goal towards so-called higher spiritual living for SOME.
But for those of us who endured and survived our infant-childhood while being the victim of our caregiver’s UNSPEAKABLE MADNESS this entire process is as reversed NOW during the times of our healing as it was reversed ‘back then’ in the times of our being so hurt and wounded.
I have to find my own choices to BE or NOT to be my mother’s Fair Witness!
As I discover this new level of deep choice, I am beginning to define my own self NOW as I needed to back there from the time I was born.
So if anyone wants to benefit from the experience of actually being able to converse in the here and now with a person who KNOWS what it is like and feels like to be a Fair Witness, talk to a severe infant-child abuse survivor.
During the time we were being overwhelmed by someone’s abuse of us, we were LIVING life as a Fair Witness-Observer being. Yes, I believe this does mean that all abuse survivors carry the double-sided injury of being not only the victim of the trauma of abuse itself, but also of being a WITNESS ABUSE survivor on the grandest of scales.
In the end, it might be that having our power of CHOICE removed from us is what hurts survivors the most. I can’t even say, “I want my power of choice back so that I can choose whether or not I want to be my mother’s Fair Witness.” I never had this choice from the first of my life. I am only seeing right now what I missed – and when I get this choice, AS I find within myself what this choice IS and how I can make it – I am moving off of this dead center of being a non-person who was the Witness-Target of my mother’s mean madness.
At the same time, these new insights are helping me to realize how FAIR I have ALWAYS been as I consider what my mother (and my father) did to me. NOW I want the conscious choice to be FAIR or NOT! I own that ability to be fair or not to be fair! It was stolen from me at the start of my lie, at the moment of my birth. So IF I say, “I want my ability to choose to be a remote-viewing observer of my mother’s abusive madness or NOT to be RETURNED to me,” I am saying that I am claiming what must be a Universal Human Right. This right was mine from within my mother’s womb! It is that far back that I have to re-turn to re-claim it!! Look out! Here I come!
Stop the Storm 
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