Tag: posttraumatic stress disorder

+HOW DO I KNOW MY MOTHER WAS NUTS?

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060709

+DO I KNOW MY MOTHER WAS CRAZY?

Some part of me wants to write about this topic while another part of me wants to say, “Don’t ask me.  I don’t have a CLUE!”

Even thinking about this question causes me to feel disturbed inside.  Knowing what I knew from birth was forbidden to me by my mother.  As I begin to gain new understandings about myself I am also gaining a glimmer of new understanding about how life was for my siblings as they were raised by my mother.  It’s as if the more I learn about how they experienced life in our family the more I can understand both what was similar about our experiences and what was far different.

Sometimes these new understandings go through me like shock waves when I ‘get them’.  As the shock waves go through me they change me on so many levels that I still do not understand.  The first time I had this experience was when I learned that my siblings always knew that something was wrong with my mother and that she was nuts.  From my side of the equation, I could not understand how they knew this.

This discrepancy might seem odd to anyone else who might look from the outside and see that such a mean, hateful, unpredictable, controlling violent mother was OF COURSE nuts.  But I NEVER had this thought growing up.  Not one single time.  I didn’t because I couldn’t.

It’s a strange feeling knowing that my siblings had this massive piece of important information within their own heads while I did not.  I feel cheated, just by this one fact alone.  But if it isn’t enough just to know that to me everything that went on between my mother and I was the ‘truth’ and ‘inevitable’ and therefore correct, there’s another piece that’s even harder to know than it is to verbally admit.

I REALLY still don’t KNOW IT.  That is, to me, what the personal work of going through my mother’s letters is all about for me right now.  I find that on some deep level it is even hard for me to give myself permission to even read her letters, let alone to transcribe them and, heaven forbid, actually PUBLISH them, even online!  The words that scream themselves out inside my head as I do this work with her writings are her words, “HOW DARE YOU!”

Who do I think I am?

Well, that is the trillion dollar question, isn’t it mother.  Who is Linda?

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Working with my mother’s actual words brings me about as close physically to her presence as I can get at this point in time.  They remain as external presentations both of her having been in a body at some point in time so that she could hold a pen in her hand and stream those words across pieces of paper, and about the process of her thinking as it is reflected within her words.  Because I existed in her world as a target rather than as a person, the basic fight that goes on inside of me right now is about ‘turning the tables’ so that she now becomes my target instead of it being the way it ALWAYS was, and in many ways STILL is that even within my own mind I am still the target of her.

It’s my turn now.  On many levels that scares the pajabbers out of me.  I write about this today because I intend to move forward, not backward.  I intend to empower myself to be ever more increasingly aware of what I feel on the inside of me as I read her words.  I am going to give myself permission to insert my [Linda notes:  ] within the context of her letters as I transcribe them.

Who?  Linda?  Linda have permission to DARE assume she has any rights at all?  A right to my own opinion?  Any right to know what I know?  I feel like I have to defend myself TO my mother while I transcribe these letters.  Might that be because I never had the ability to defend myself AGAINST my mother when I needed it most?

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I have no doubt that my mother believed that she owned me like she would own a possession. She most certainly owned me as a target for any abuse of any kind that she might choose at any time to attack me with.  Right now I have hundreds of her letters and other writings here in my home.  Does that mean I now ‘possess’ and own them the way she once owned me?

Does that mean that I own some part of who she once was?  She’s dead.  She can’t even roll over in her grave because she was turned to ashes and spread over the homestead.  She isn’t here.

Or is she?  I believe that because of the kind of abuse she was able to perpetrate against me, because of the way she had nearly constant access to me, the way she controlled every aspect of my being in the world when she wanted to (even my freedom to use the bathroom, depriving me of food, of sleep, waking me from sound sleep and beating me randomly when she felt like it, depriving me of my freedom of movement by making me sit on a stool all night, stand in corners, lie in bed, even lock me in the car or in a shed when I was older, preventing me from playing, from playing or talking to my siblings, from seeing my grandmother even when I was very young, by intervening to prevent my father from ‘noticing’ I was alive, on and on and on) that she particularly formed herself so far within who I am that her thoughts have, on deep and profound levels of my being, become my thoughts.

If in some strange yet generous way the circumstances of life not only imprisoned me in the first place but also designed that I have these letters in my possession because they contain a key to my release from the prison my mother created for me, a prison I am still in if I cannot find my own way to my own thoughts so that I CAN KNOW WHAT I KNOW because what I know is mine.  It is not my mother’s.  It is not my mother!  I am not my mother.  I am not who my mother thought I was, and it’s time for me to find a way to give myself permission to know this – from within myself in the same way that my siblings were able to know it themselves from the time they were old enough to think – MY MOTHER WAS NUTS.

I can mouth the words.  I can speak them.  I can run them through my mind.  But I do not YET know the truth of them.  My mother was crazy.

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Be sure not to miss Blog Carnival’s newest monthly edition on healing traumas and abuse, including this great article on raising a highly sensitive child!

+NEWEST MOTHER WRITINGS (060609 not filed)

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Here are some more of my mother’s letters that I finished transcribing today 060609.

These 1957 letters, written between my parents as my father was already in Alaska and mother and children waited in Los Angeles for Army orders (he worked for the Army Corp of Engineers as a civilian) that would allow us to join him there.  They present aspects of my mother’s thinking patterns PRIOR to homesteading.

These two 1960 letters were written after homesteading had begun, though we lived mostly in the Eagle River ‘log house’ while my mother carried on her nursery school.

The 1961 letters reflect the stress and turbulence of that troubled year, the year that a 5th child was added to our family.  (Please also note the previous posting of mother’s 1961 diary.)

This is a single 1962 short note from the Mother’s Day card my mother sent her mother, written on the baby’s 1st birthday..

These 1963 letters begin with our family living in the ‘log house’, moving the trailer down from the mountain to be painted, scrubbed and sold to pay for back rent, a move back to the homestead, ending with my mother driving down the Al-Can (Alaskan) Highway alone without my father in August.  Again, turbulent, chaotic, distressful times….

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Well, here’s the ‘special treat’ I discovered among the papers I am sorting my way through.  First I found one sheet of ‘random’ paper with the first half of this poem on it – transcribed it – and went on with the other letters.  Eventually I found a second piece of paper that had the end of this poem on it, and can now begin my grandmother’s pages.

Evidently this recipe for marital bliss either wasn’t or couldn’t be followed.  I find it interesting that the ‘shades of liberated women’ that both my maternal grandmother and great grandmother were, found itself into this poem regarding pay for one’s work at home for the family.  My mother’s parents divorced around 1930 (about unheard of at this time and created an embarrassing sense of shame within my mother) just after the stock market crash.  Grandfather Charles had been a successful stock broker who lost all in the fall of 1929.  After the divorce, my mother’s mother went to work and used her master’s degree in psychology, 1918, to support herself and her children.

My sister, Cindy 1953, will be sending me copies of my mother’s mother’s brief beginnings of her own autobiography that were recently discovered.  I look forward to also adding them to the grandparent pages that are dedicated to our understanding of how patterns transmit themselves through parenting practices down the generations..

+LINKS TO TODAY’S PAGES ON DISSOCIATION AND DISCLOSURE

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How some abused children grow up to be dangerous parents:

*FURTHER UNDERSTANDINGS ABOUT DISSOCIATION

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Memory retrieval of traumatic experiences can feed dissociation.

Disclosure, on the other hand, allows us to  find words to define, limit, create boundaries for, and verbally express (including being able to THINK about) our traumas.

Disclosure leads to healing through closure:

*THE ADVANTAGES OF DISCLOSURE

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+SIBLING LINKS

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**Cindy’s Letter to Mother 1994

**CINDY’S BLOG POST on Mother (060409)

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**FAMILY TIME – by Brother (1965)

**SELLING THE HOMESTEAD

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Please refer back to this section of the blog as time goes on for future writings by my siblings:

MY SIBLINGS’ COMMENT PAGES

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+INNOCENT TARGETS FOR MY MOTHER’S RAGE

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Trying to write the story of my childhood in a logical, chronological, coherent way is an almost overwhelming task.  As I’ve said before an inability to tell a coherent life story is perhaps the MAIN symptom of an insecure attachment.  This dis-ability to either live a coherent life or to tell the story of one’s own life in a coherent fashion manifests itself by degrees of damage in accordance with how insecurely attached a person is.

These degrees of damage move down the scale from being slightly insecurely attached to extremely insecurely attached.  For those of us like my mother and myself, the most severe insecure attachment pattern, that of disorganized-disoriented, means that we are not even securely attached in our fundamental relationship between our self and our self.  As a result, we cannot possibly either live a coherent life or tell a coherent story of our life.  That is what the disorganization and disorientation of our insecure attachment pattern, formed into our early developing brain, did and does to us.

Our condition is a direct result and manifestation of living through traumas at a very early age that built themselves into our developing brain, body and mind.  I understood very early in my own research about the reality of my condition that what is known as ‘peritrauma’ is key and central to my understanding of a disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment pattern.  Peritrauma is what happens in the middle of the experience of a traumatic event during what the experts call the Acute Trauma stage.

I suspect that we will gain far more information about how the experience of trauma affects us when we begin to connect what the medical profession knows about how trauma affects the physical body with what the psychiatric profession knows about how it affects us psychologically.  At this point in time I find that descriptions of peritrauma are mostly contained within the Acute Trauma medial realm as it relates to the physical body as if our physical body can be separated from what happens within the brain and mind.

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I always use the online Websters dictionary to find definitions for words I require so that my findings can always be consistently tracked back to this one main source of information for the Modern English I use in my thinking.  Yet not even Websters seems to contain the word ‘peritrauma’ or ‘peri-trauma’ within its data banks.  I see this as further indication that we have not yet as a culture put the most important information about what truly creates disaster in our lives into the collective data banks of our own thinking.

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Dictionary: trau·ma   (trô‘mə, trou‘-)

n., pl. -mas or -ma·ta (-mə-tə).

  1. A serious injury or shock to the body, as from violence or an accident.
  2. An emotional wound or shock that creates substantial, lasting damage to the psychological development of a person, often leading to neurosis.
  3. An event or situation that causes great distress and disruption.

[Greek.]

traumatic trau·mat’ic (-măt‘ĭk) adj.
traumatically trau·mat’i·cal·ly adv.

From : http://www.answers.com/topic/psychological-trauma

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I discovered this link through my efforts to connect physical trauma to mental trauma.  I can think of no more of an accurate place to begin to think about the effects of peritrauma as it relates to child abuse than this one:

[PDF]  Psychology of Terrorism

File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat
pressure to define terrorist behavior in terms of psychopathology, and he clearly suggests …… peritrauma and posttrauma risk factors, are central …… Webster’s New Collegiate Dic- tionary. Springfield, MA: G & C Merriam Company. …
bourbonandlawndarts.googlepages.com/Psychology.of.Terrorism-0195172493.pdf –

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Acute trauma is the physiological stage we are in while we experience any trauma.  Acute trauma affects every possible aspect of who we are as human beings with bodies — including our brain-mind.  Peritrauma is the ongoing experience of being in an acute trauma experience as we are enduring it.  Post traumatic stages are the result of not completing the acute trauma stage adequately so that it can be ‘passed through’ rather than NOT ‘passed through’.

In my thinking, it’s that simple.  Either we experience the acute trauma stage and come out the other end having completed the trauma cycle, or we don’t.  If we do not complete the trauma cycle this means that aspects of the peritrauma we experienced AT THE CENTER of the acute trauma stage are carried within us in our bodies, brains and minds.  We have not, therefore, re-stored ourselves to the state we were in before the trauma happened.  We have not re-covered our previous state.  We have not re-membered the being that we were before the trauma occurred.

We are left fragmented within ourselves and will not be able to tell a truly coherent story — not even to ourselves — of what the experience was like for us because we are actually still in it.  When we are left with unresolved, uncompleted traumatic experiences within us — in the form of continued and ongoing peritraumatic reactions that originated during the acute trauma experience — trauma will continue to live itself through us.  We are therefore correspondingly robbed of our own ability to live our own lives free from trauma.  It owns us.  It possesses us.  And it can consume us.

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If severe traumatic experiences happen to very young infants and children, the traumas so build themselves into the fabric and structure of the early developing brain-mind that the peritraumatic spectrum of these experiences can never be later extricated.  They instead determine how the survivor will process information about being in the world for the rest of their lives.  Dissociation, I believe, becomes the operating system of these brain-minds because the ongoing peritraumatic experience of the traumas were integrated into the brain-mind itself.

This is how a brain-mind built in, by and for a malevolent world continues to operate as it knows and is forced to always remember that the world is not only unsafe, but is also a disorganized and disorienting place to have to survive in.  It will never be able to re-member itself as having lived before in any state other than a peritraumatic one.  This kind of malevolently-formed brain, created in a severely traumatic early world, can never re-store to or re-cover back to a state it never knew in the first place.

As a result, the disorganization, disorientation, incongruity, and incoherence (and dysregulation) that is by definition a part of the peritraumatic experience during acute trauma will continue to operate through an insecure attachment system within the body and brain-mind of such a survivor for the rest of their life.  Organization, orientation, congruity and coherence, if they exist within such a brain-mind at all, will be limited to certain sections of a person’s life.  These separate sections might contain large fields of related experiences, but these fields of experience will not themselves be healthily connected to the survivor’s ongoing coherent experience of life.

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Trauma triggers create a shift in the ongoing experience of such a person’s life.  This shift is automatic and unconscious, and happens at the speed of light because the electrical communications between the cells of our bodies, including our brain-mind, happen that fast.  For severe childhood trauma survivors, both the trigger as stimulus and the automatic reaction to the trigger, directly stimulate their disorganized-disoriented dissociative core foundation of who they are in interaction with life.  We should not be surprised, therefore, that these people continue to surprise us.  If they COULD become conscious of their patterns, they would even surprise themselves.

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I want to give you a simple and seemingly innocuous example of how my mother’s self was so easily disconnected both from her self as a self and also from the reality of those around her.  My sister, Cindy, pointed this out to me after she read this part of my mother’s June 5, 1959 letter ( *1959 Alaska Letters transcribed 060309 (not filed)):

“Oh, we looked funny when we got to town – me with boots, levis etc and all of us looking – well just like homesteaders!!  I hadn’t been ‘out’ for a week and hadn’t had a real bath since then!  We took showers at the women’s dormitory on the base – and all got dressed up in summer cottons!  My, we felt good!!!

I had packed our things in a suit case but had forgotten soap, shower cap and bobby pins and comb!  I couldn’t do a thing until I had them and even refused to go to breakfast until we were cleaned up.  I went over to the shopping center on Govt Hill and he opened up the store early (he was cleaning it) and I purchased the things.  Oh, I hated to be seen that way.  Once you’re in the city it’s just like Pasadena or any city and you feel out of place not dressed up—

Anyways later I found my shower cap and wanted a refund of 39 cents on one I’d bought so returned it and I was sure he’d never recognize me BUT he did!”

As Cindy points out, my mother often described her country-woman self by using her first name, Mildred.  She described her town-woman self by using her middle name, Ann.  Were it not for the inside information that we have about the condition of my mother’s brain-mind, we could believe that these designations were merely playful.  Yet the words of her letter indicate that she honestly and genuinely was completely amazed if not shocked and stunned that an outsider who had seen ‘Mildred’ would recognize her as being the same person when she later met him as ‘Ann’.

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Her interaction with the shopkeeper was not a significantly traumatic experience for my mother, yet her experience of the interaction demonstrates a key and central aspect of her brain-mind’s organization, or more accurately, of its disorganization.  At the instant she realized that this man actually DID recognize her, some aspect of her inner disorientation affected her.  This illustrates only a tiny drop in the sea of my mother’s ongoing disorganized, disoriented, incongruous, incoherent interactions within her own life.

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I believe that my mother’s deepest taproot of being-a-self-in-the-world was embedded in unresolved early peritrauma.  On this day, today, I would add Dissociative Identity Disorder to the long list of suspected diagnosis I might attach to her.  This list would, in my thinking, run the range from paranoid psychotic, to manic depressive, through Borderline Personality Disorder, some form of schizoid personality disorder and Narcissistic Personality Disorder.  She was a very dangerous ‘piece of work’.

Yet all of these patterns nicely fit within a framework of disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment.  As untrue as it might be, and as hard as it might be to accept if it IS true, I would say that just as my mother did not choose the malevolent conditions that formed her early brain-mind including her connection to her own self or her connection to the world around her, I do not believe she had the conscious ability to choose her later reactions to anyone or anything that happened in her life, either.   That includes even her reactions to a shopkeeper’s reaction to her.

She was therefore no more capable of responding appropriately to the world around her, which included her mate and children, that would be a rapid dog.  Anything about her that might have ‘appeared normal’ was simply a part of one ‘larger field of related experience’ or another.  These ‘related fields’ were glued together, organized and oriented around particular patterns and themes such as ‘looking good in public’, ‘taking care of the house’, ‘having well behaved children’, and/or ‘homesteading in Alaska’.

These ‘fields’ were only tenuously and fragily connected to the taproot of one version of her self or another that had managed to form in her early childhood and to survive into her adulthood.  These fields were not solidly and coherently either bound to one another or to her ongoing self-in-the-world.  This allowed ongoing triggers of early traumas to evaporate, on any given occasion, any semblance of ongoing order (or of reasonality) that her fragile psych might periodically be able to construct and maintain.

I imagine these fields as they might exist on floating islands, separated from one another and from the self that creates them.  They are incomplete dissociative realities, but in most cases they are the best that a survivor manage to create in their lifetime.

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Life with our mother occurred in the same active peritraumatic mine field that existed within her own self.  None of us were able to know ahead of time exactly what would trip the wire that resulted in one of her mines exploding.  Her various states of mind and states of being were dis-organized around the ongoing peritrauma that filled her.  There was no healing of these toxic-filled gaps and no way to predict their explosions or to protect ourselves from them.

What I do know is that whatever happened to my mother during her early childhood, she came out of it mad as hell, full of uncontrollable hatred and rage, mean and fighting.  In some cases, ‘hell has no fury like a scorned child’.  Unfortunately my mother’s children were targets of her madness.

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+OH, I REMEMBER THE SMELL OF THAT CLEARED EARTH

alchemynow3 Comments

It came to me today while I was again working on transcribing more of my mother’s letters that after my 1980 treatment program for alcoholism, the one that identified that I was a victim and depressed (first time news to me in my world), when I called and tried to talk to her about how she treated me in my childhood — before she became so defensive and I hung up on her and whopped and jumped for joy at my own audacity — I also had asked her if I could help her write her homesteading book.

She said to me, “That’s my book.  Bill and I were the homesteaders, not you.  I don’t want your help.  If you want to write a book, write you own.”

She never wrote hers.  I can’t write it for her, either, but I can put in the hours and hours and hours it takes to transcribe these letters.  I am emailing parts of them to my siblings, and through my one sister to her granddaughters — not about the abuse, but just about some of our childhood experiences that are interesting, that are a part of our family history and herstory.

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I still struggle with my own position in my mother’s reality, knowing it was running consistently behind the scenes and between the lines within many of her letters.  I know that in the 1959 early days of first arriving on the mountain homestead life was a special kind of good, a magical kind of good.  Hope abounded as did the thrill of this new adventure.  Life there had not had enough time to sour yet.

I also know that my mother experienced a lot of happiness if not actual bliss during those early months.  I know that some of her happiness meant I was spared trauma during that time.  I have clear memories of trying to please her.  I remember rolling up all of our sleeping bags every morning and being thanked.  I remember being a part of the family in the newness of this new life.

And yet I know the shadow of trauma was not far from me even then.  I am just blessed to not know about it specifically during those early homesteading times.  I am grateful for that.  Yet I also feel today like a page torn out of a story book, that sometimes can get stuck into the story and the rest of the time is removed and just plain missing.

My page was stuck in the story at the time of our early homesteading beginnings. I got to be one of the birthday candles on the cake of our new life.  Everyone was thrilled and excited.  No other party could have been that grand.

If I was placed in my outcast scapegoat role during these times, I do not remember it, nor do I want to.  I want this happy, included time.   It remains most precious to me, no matter what happened after the party was over and the sorrows began again.

I remember my father clearing the land.  I remember crawling through tunnels and into caves the tree trunks and roots made as my father scraped the land and piled them in the sweet, damp, soft earth windrows.  I have never smelled anything else that good in my life — but I smelled it then.

I would not trade those memories for anything.  I would not even have given my suffering away willingly if that would have meant I could not be with that land.  But this is for my future stories.

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This is an example of how my mother talks about the homestead in her letters to her mother in 1959:

“We had one rainy day this week & I couldn’t let the children out all day – nothing seemed nice then – but oh, today – how I wish you were here to share it with me.

I’m writing this letter to you while sitting on the cot outside in the sun.  There’s a very slight wind & the leaves & trees are rustling & the sound of it & the creek & the river sounds [like] the waves of an ocean!

Oh Mom, I hardly dare to love this place so & love it I do.  I am in love with it – just as Bill was.  It’s Shangri-la & I must share it with you each & every summer – now Mom, if we get title this winter & we must & I’ll never rest until we do!!  THEN now, I am serious – plan your summers here!!  Or at least 1 entire month every summer – but there’s so much room here you could have a little place all your own!  Now you write & answer me!!  No fancy trailer idea – no, no, no – a small log house or a tiny 26-ft trailer like ours – because after all, you live outdoors all summer here!!

Every time I look around I wish to run & shout with glee – oh, such beauty – I’ll never want again for anything —  I’ll wait & wait & wait only this land, only this land!!!  I love it, I love it, I love it – our homestead & we’ll live here for ever & ever & ever!!

…. I sound love sick & I am!”

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I read in today’s letters as I transcribed them over and over again my mother begged her mother to come up and visit.  Over and over again, and YES it got BORING transcribing those parts.  Yet I did, and I’ll leave her words of pleading to her mother alone for now though they will probably be edited out of any later published collection.

Right now I am just plowing through these papers and recording what my eyes see.  I imagine I’m like an earthworm as it digests garbage and craps out something better than what went into it in the first place.  For there will be crap within these pages, even if I can only sense it between the lines.  But these letters are still a story of lives lived, if only from my mother’s very filtered point of view.

But we were there.  We were her children and we were there.  For good or for bad (as my mother might say in a letter), how many people actually have this kind of a record of their childhood on paper?  And how strange it seems to me to be the one doing this work, the invisible one, the one mostly torn out of the book of the ongoing fabric of my family’s life except during these early homesteading months.

The one that was frozen on her childhood bed for days and days and days, standing frozen in corners for what seemed like eternity.  The one beaten and shamed and blamed and hated is the one with the ‘pen’ now.  And I still have stories of my own to tell.  But for now, I will let the time line of my childhood unfold itself as I sort out and order these letters while time remains — both for them and for me.  (Neither of us are getting any younger.)

What remains of the stories of our childhoods?  Who holds those stories, both the visible and the invisible?  Capture them.  Write them.  Tell them.  Share them.

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In the end, is there anything left BUT the mystery of it all?

+HIDE NO LIE FROM BEFORE OUR EYES

alchemynow3 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

LOVE, LOVE.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

++

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

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

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

+LINKS TO MY MOTHER’S NEWLY TRANSCRIBED LETTERS PRE-ALASKA AND ALASKA

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Link to letter my mother wrote to my father while we stayed at my grandmother’s house prior to mother and kids joining my father in Alaska.  My mother and my grandmother were evidently NOT getting along!

*1957 Letter to Dad from Grandmother’s House

*1957 Letters Added (not filed)

Link to Alaska letters my mother wrote to her mother:

*1961 Alaskan Letters from My Mother to Grandma

Link to newly transcribed letter my mother wrote as she drove alone with little money and 4 children south to an unknown destination.

*1963 Al-Can Highway Letter (Alaskan Highway)